Thy Word, and Thy Church

October 25, 2015

Acts 2:37-47

We set out this fall to wrestle with some “difficult passages” from scripture. So we’ve taken on the “clobber passages” that have been used to hit GLBTQ folks over the head with. We’ve taken on the most egregiously patriarchal passages long used to keep women “in their place.” We’ve looked at the violence of God alongside the call to make peace.

This brief text from the end of the Pentecost story hardly seems to fit in that list. After all, this is a nice little story of Peter preaching the gospel, people responding, and the young church growing dramatically. It seems innocuous at worst, and, at the other end of the scale, a comforting and beautiful passage to read on a Sunday when we’ve welcomed new members to the congregation and will conduct some business of the church a bit later.

What could be “difficult” about this text?

As in most things, it all depends upon one’s perspective.

If you are satisfied with “the way things are” in the world, then there’s not much challenge in this text. That is to say, if you read this anecdote from the early days of the church as the beginning of a steady and unending arc of the church triumphant in the world – as the beginning of the Christian part of the kingdom of God on earth, as the reign of justice and of peace – well then there’s nothing but comfort to be found in a story that concludes, “day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.”

But if, on the other hand, you look around yourself and see a world stumbling in the darkness of injustice, beneath the weight of oppression, and the sword of violence, then this is a troubling text – if for no other reason than it means that there are still countless numbers needing to be saved.

I don’t mean to be a Debbie Downer here, but the news of the day in this or any other week, tends more toward the broken than the whole, more toward the dis-eased than toward the at-ease, more toward despair than toward shalom.

Such an observation does not negate beauty nor dismiss joy. Indeed, such an observation underscores just how precious beauty and joy are, and reminds us of the importance of gratitude in response to beauty and joy.

However, gratitude cannot be the end of our faithful response to the world. So long as the social order is unjust, gratitude in response to moments of joy and instances of beauty is but the beginning of a faithful life.

If that is true, then these words from Acts come as a prophetic challenge to the community of faith. This story challenges us, in part, because its own context would have been such a challenge. The author of the Luke-Acts drama sets this story as the response to Pentecost – the gift of the Spirit just a short while after the crucifixion of Jesus.

Put yourself in Peter’s shoes: the one you love, the one whose life has become your model, the one you fervently believe has come to save your people, has been brutally executed by the very powers you believed he would overthrow somehow. It is abundantly clear that those same powers have it in for you, as well. It would make all the sense in the world for you and your surviving friends and family members to sink into a silent depression, to huddle in despair, to hide in fear. It would make only slightly less sense for you to lash out in anger and violence, to attack those who put your savior to death, to continue madly in the circle of revenge until its momentum draws everyone into a spiral of death.

Perhaps it was a dawning recognition of that spiral or, more simply, the logical fear of near certain death, that led Peter and the disciples away from any suicidal attack on the Romans; but what they did instead took no less courage.

Indeed, it was the most unexpected turn, and thus took incredible courage. Peter’s speech was not expected by the powers that be, who likely anticipated either yet another violent uprising from the occupied territories or, they would have hoped, the quiescence of the defeated and despairing. Nor was it expected by the occupied people, who likely anticipated the exact same options as the occupiers. After all, they’d all been doing this same dance for generations.

Peter’s speech interrupts the dance. It disrupts the ceaseless turn of the cycle. And it resounds even now, if we let it, as a dramatic wake up call to the community of faith.

Peter stands in the midst of the crowd, quotes the prophet Joel, and proclaims

 “In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
   and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
   and your old men shall dream dreams. 
¹⁸ Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
   in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
     and they shall prophesy.” 

Then he tells them the story of Jesus, which is the story of a news so good that it demands a response. “Sisters and brothers, God loves the whole world such that not even the violence of an unjust occupying empire can crucify and bury that love. Indeed, God’s love cannot be bound by the grave. The empty tomb testifies to this good news; and our lives beyond this rising up testify to the love of God.” Peter preaches!

So what?

Isn’t that kind of what the people say? At least, that is, if so what also implies so what now? “Brothers, what should we do?” the crowd asks in Acts.

“Wake up,” Peter responds.

Oh, to be sure, the language is a bit more Biblical than that:  repent! That likely strikes some of us as a little off-putting. But, at its heart, repent means first: wake up! Take a good look around you with eyes wide open and a new frame of reference, and you will see things that need to be changed.

If you still wonder why this is a difficult word, I suggest you ask any addict. Waking up to an honest assessment of the way things are is incredibly difficult. We live in, participate in, and are marked by a culture of addiction. Some of those addictions are clear and obvious – drugs, alcohol, compulsions – and we have treatment groups for those.

Others are harder to grasp, but no less real in the grasp they have on our lives. We are addicted to affluence, to appearance, to achievement, to individualism at all cost, to power, to violence, to consumption.

“Wake up!” Peter preaches to us.

This is and always has been the two-fold call to the church: be wide awake, and call others to awaken. The church is the holy alarm clock calling the world to wake up, pay attention, and make right was has gone so wrong.

This is the difficult word for us because we are the church. Peter’s great Pentecost sermon is remarkable for its inclusivity. “The Spirit of God will be poured out on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions, your old men dream dreams – even the captives – men and women – will be inspired.”

In other words, the entire community of faith is called to wake up and speak out – to name the present time for what it is, to speak the truth in love, to tell the story of God’s amazing grace and boundless love with our very lives. This is how God transforms the world – in and through the lives and testimonies of the faithful.

Walter Brueggemann puts it like this: “the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus – and the church’s ongoing teaching of that cluster of events – constitutes an act of immense imagination that intends to subvert all settled social arrangements and power structures.”[1]

The church in North America benefits greatly from these settled social arrangements and power structures. They bring us such security and comfort, and there is not much harder than awakening from the cocoon of security and comfort. It is our deepest addiction.

But God is calling the church to live wide awake to a present reality in which so many of God’s children have so little in the way of comfort and even less in the way of security. Moreover, God is calling the church to awaken the world to this present reality. And, finally, God is calling the church to proclaim through our lives and our words the coming reality of a future otherwise – a future of God’s imagining where shalom is the song on each child’s lips, justice is the work of each one’s hands, and love is the rhythm of every beating heart.

It’s not a call nor a calling that can be confined to sanctuaries on Sunday mornings, but rather, a holy invocation that rings out every morning everywhere that the faithful live out the beautiful, joyous, incredibly creative word of the Lord. May it be so for us, the church at Clarendon. Amen.

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[1] Walter Brueggemann, Disruptive Grace (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2011) 297.