Acts 2:1-21 The Redemption of Babel
Acts 2:1-6—The Spirit Acts of Pentecost
1-The day of Pentecost these folk have gathered together for,
is the celebration of the giving of the first five books of Moses. That’s why
people from all over the known world were gathered in Jerusalem.
3-There is a symbolism that sometimes gets missed when reading
about the tongues of fire—they are a prophetic image: words, voices, mouths,
set apart to speak of holy things. Think of Isaiah’s call, lips touched with sacred
coals, or God putting words into Jeremiah’s mouth, or Ezekiel being told to “eat
scroll!”
4-It is worth remembering that the Bible is multiple books, and
therefore things that seem similar aren’t always the same. Case in point, this “speaking
in tongues” is an act of human communication—the point is that people who speak
different languages are all able to hear the good news, Jesus is Lord. This is
different than the “speaking in tongues” Paul confronts in 1st
Corinthians, that was not human communication, but “angelic communication.”
Some scholars name this as a pagan practice—think the oracle of Delphi—that’s
why Paul disparages the practice. At Pentecost we see a widening of the sharing
of the Gospel, in Corinth it was an act of non-communication/confused
communication.
5-Again, Pentecost is a big festival, you have Jews coming
to Jerusalem from all over. A good audience to tell “The Messiah came, Rome, in
collusion with the Temple Authorities, killed him, and he rose from the dead vindicating
his identity, and is still Lord!”
Acts 2:7-11—Hearing Good News in Your Vernacular
7-Maybe I’m showing my Wyoming/Dakotas roots here, but I
hear “They’re Galileans” as the equivalent of “These are bumpkins!”
8-So, just repeating, Pentecost is about translation—communicating
the Gospel to people who would otherwise not hear it. These days we have a lot
of Christians who claim to be “Pentecostal” or “Apostolic” and read this
chapter as justification for everything from semi-audible mumbles expressing
the inexpressible to shouting nonsense words on account of peer pressure to
fortune telling—that’s not what’s going on at Pentecost—again might be what’s
going on at Corinth, but not Acts 2; Pentecost is about proclaiming “Jesus is
Lord” in ways that a diversity of people understand.
10-It is worth noting that, while Judaism is not as a rule a
proselytizing religion, there were still non-Jews who were attached to the
faith. Non-Jews came to Judaism for a whole variety of reasons, everything from
“marrying in” to embracing the logic of monotheism to admiring the ethics of
the faith. So, when Proselytes are mentioned that’s probably who they’re
talking about.
Acts 2:12-15—A variety of responses to the Holy Spirit
12-13-From the start of Luke’s Gospel (look at Mary compared
with Zechariah, for example) it consistently describes people encountering God
at work as Perplexed/Pondering, or Disbelieving.
15-I find this line intentionally funny, again these “bumpkins”
can’t imagine a situation where someone would not be sober at 9am.
Acts 2:16-21—The Message
17-In the last days—at the point where God is intervening in
history and we’re moving from one era to another era.
Sons/Daughters, Young/Old—all these dichotomies are ways of
saying everyone! When God does a new thing, everyone will participate! No barriers
to proclaiming what God is up to in the world! No barriers to the Holy Spirit
and the good news “Jesus is Lord!”
19-20-This description echoes the plagues in Egypt—it is
that kind of liberation we’re talking about!
Day of the Lord—Much like the phrase the last days, this is pointing
to a time/the time when God is making all things right. By citing Joel,
Peter/Luke is telling the crowd that Jesus’ life death and resurrection, as
well as the proclamation of the Church, is how God is making all things new! A
resurrected world to meet the resurrected Messiah!
My working definition of Demographic Shift—A significant
change in a population structure over time.
What’s Acts have to do with Demographic Shift?
-A diversity of the Jewish diaspora is present in Jerusalem,
is gathered in.
-Who constitutes the people doing God’s new thing, shifts.
Everyone who calls upon the Lord is the new boundary marker.
-If we were to continue beyond chapter 2 of Acts and read
the whole of Acts, a pattern emerges; the Church continually runs into the Holy
Spirit working with “strange” people. The population structure of the people of
God changed rather rapidly in the book of Acts.
3 Stories to think about Demographic Shift:
-Imagine a church, let’s call it St. Elsewhere, founded in the
late 40s or early 50s. The founding Pastor looks through the newspaper every
Friday for the notices of new residents. Every time a German sounding name pops
up, he goes by and says hi to the new people. They flock to the church, pretty
soon they invite their neighbors, both German and not. Next thing you know St.
Elsewhere is a staple of the community—the demographics of the congregation and
the demographics of the town overlap. Fast forward to 2010, the congregation hasn’t
changed much demographically, it still has a German-American core and is mainly
white. The surrounding city, however, is now 40% non-white. St. Elsewhere calls
a new Pastor who stumbles upon an idea, evangelizing to the Guyanese population
of the town will yield similar results to the founding Pastor’s evangelism to
German Americans. The Guyanese people are incredibly diverse, their heritages
running the gamut from European to African, Indigenous to Indian. As such, the
congregation begins to look more like the neighborhood, and that diversity is attractive.
-Consider these demographic statistics:
1950-87% of Americans were
European. 2010-64% were European.
1950-0.2% of Americans were Asian,
in 2010-5% were Asian.
1950-5% of Americans were Latino,
in 2010-16% were Latino.
-Or, moving from race to income, think about the shifting
economic realities the church faces:
Between 1950 and 2010—10% of
Americans have gone from being economically middle class to being economically lower
class.
Challenges:
-Lutheranism can be seen as a Northern European immigrant
club, instead of a dynamic faith tradition.
-Sometimes we as a church have a hard time discerning
between the faithfulness of reflecting the neighborhood of which we are a part,
and trying to be diverse because it is hip.
-Lutheranism tends to draw from the “Middle Class” who tend
to have disposable time and money, but that’s shifted. This leads to scarcity
of both volunteers and donations.
Possibility:
-Maybe a tightening of the belts will help us to become more
creative.
For example: Lutheran Seminaries have looked at how non-Lutherans do their
candidacy, having realized we were making some middle-upper class assumptions
that were excluding poor people. For example, having to move 5 times in a 4-year
period isn’t something everyone can afford to do, so poorer candidates drop out
at a higher rate than middle class and rich ones do. Likewise, requiring a
candidate to drop all other licensures to show a commitment to the candidacy
process might have made sense at one point, but when candidates are being asked
to find a second vocation after seminary, still being a licensed psychologist
or keeping up with your CDL license would have been helpful.
-Maybe we’ll be able to see Lutheranism as a faith
tradition, not an ethnic club. We have the promise of Grace and the challenge
of the Theology of the Cross, that is more than enough for a faith to unpack,
without functioning as an Elks club for Swedes or Danes.
-Alternatively, we can shift that ethnic club thing a few
degrees, and expand out and celebrate the broad swatch of peoples who are found
by Jesus through the Lutheran tradition. Crown a St. Lucia, certainly, also
make pelican pendants on the day Lutheranism came to Guyana, hold an
Octoberfest, and also do a big Churchwide fun run in November to honor
Lutherans of Ethiopian heritage.
-As the last suggestion intimates, maybe we can start to
notice how many Lutherans are coming to America, much like Northern Europeans
did after the Second World War—Ethiopians, Tanzanians, Namibians, Malagasy, and
Indonesians, all waiting to be invited, waiting to be welcomed just like we welcomed
Lutherans 80 years ago.
So, even as Demographic Shift brings with it many challenges, I hope we can respond by becoming an authentically diverse church!
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