The Day the Church Became the Church (Acts 2:1-21)

There were three great Jewish festivals to which every Jew who lived within 20 miles of Jerusalem was bound to journey to Jerusalem to attend. They were Passover, Pentecost, and the Feast of Tabernacles. Pentecost is a Greek word meaning “the fiftieth,” but the Jews never called this festival by that name. To them, it was the harvest festival of Shavuot, which commemorates God giving the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai, according to tradition, fifty days after the Exodus. Another Jewish name for it was the Feast of Weeks, because it came a week of weeks--7 times 7-- after Passover. It revolved around giving thanks for the first fruits of the harvest, which were cereal grains. One of the votive offerings specified for expressing gratitude to God in the temple was two loaves of bread.
A harvest festival in late May or early June? Yes, this was the time of harvesting winter wheat, which was planted in the autumn and harvested in the early spring. It is an accepted farming practice even today in some parts of our own country to plant winter wheat in the autumn, harvest it in May and follow that with the planting of another crop, such as soybeans, to be harvested in the autumn.
Among Christians, Pentecost commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles and other followers of Jesus as described in the New Testament Acts of the Apostles during these Jewish "fiftieth day" celebrations in Jerusalem. For this reason, Pentecost is sometimes described as the "Birthday of the Church.”
I.
Traveling conditions were good at this time of year and there were large crowds of people in Jerusalem. If the infant church, which at this point existed only in the hearts and minds of a handful of people, were ever going to break out, this was a propitious time for it.
We may never know exactly what happened at this Pentecost festival so long ago, but we do know that it was a supremely great day.
The text is not that clear. Luke, who wrote the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, was writing about things he did not witness, but which were told to him. They may well have been told to him by Paul, whose physician and traveling companion Luke became, but Paul was not there either.
Fire and wind figure largely in the account, and both of these are often used in the Bible as symbols of the presence of the Holy Spirit of God. It is interesting to note that in both the Old Testament and the New, the Hebrew and Greek words we translate as spirit literally mean wind.
But whatever happened that day, the Spirit began to be understood by the church as God in every age revealing God’s truth and will…empowering the church…making people bold and courageous and determined to tell the world how God had acted in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
This was the day the church began to be the church…the day when the power of the Spirit flooded through a handful of believers and they stopped being a furtive little band, hiding out and meeting in secrecy and fear…and became a world-changing force.
This was the day when the light of the Gospel was no longer discussed in secret around a tiny lamp in a room with the shutters closed, and the gospel light was first held aloft as a blazing torch to light up the whole world.
II.
On that day, people began to hear what the little band of believers was saying. And if they did not believe it, they at least wondered about it.
Apparently, there was some speaking in tongues, which we call glossolalia, and which in my opinion is totally meaningless jabbering by people whose emotions have overcome their intellects. Paul did not like this at all, remember, and said in I Corinthians that if a stranger came into such a gathering, he might think he had arrived in a company of madmen. This seems to fit the scene here in the Book of Acts. And to someone unacquainted with this phenomenon, it might have seemed to be drunken babbling. Some thought so.
It really would not have been necessary to speak anything except Greek or Aramaic to the crowed. Nearly everybody in the Mediterranean world spoke Greek. And since this event probably took place in the outer precincts of the temple, and since the text describes the onlookers as devout men, that is Jews and God-fearing non-Jews, they would all have spoken Aramaic, the everyday dialect of the Jews.
But no matter--on that day, people began to hear and to know that something new was loose in the world. For the first time in their lives, diverse people began to hear the word of God in a way that struck home to their hearts. And it did so because it so plainly, so evidently, had so much meaning to those people who were telling it. They could not be ignored, because of their conviction and courage, and because they so obviously cared that other people learn what they had learned. They cared. Read the rest of this chapter of Acts and you will see how their caring caused the church to begin growing immediately and rapidly.
And the people were amazed and wondered about these Christians, the text says. And it goes on to have them saying they hear these Christians telling in their own tongues the mighty works of God. How is that people are going to hear the Good News in their own tongues today? They will hear it through the deeds of the Christian church. They will hear it through the compassion of believers.
I thought again of the saying of Mahatma Ghandi that for millions of the world’s hungry people, the only form in which God dare appear is bread. And I thought again of the one who said, “Feed my sheep.”
III.
This was the day the church started to be the church. And the people were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?”
People may well ask this question today about much of the language used by some segments of Christianity today. At the south entrance to Lake Arrowhead, where Janell and I live, sits a Baptist church that this week had the question on its prominent sign marquee, “Are you washed in the blood?” Can you imagine that? There are very few people in the world today who do not experience that kind of language as a complete turn-off of anything else a church may have to say. But let us remember that it was not so many decades ago that Presbyterians sang from their hymn book one that said, “There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Emmanuel’s veins; and sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.” Indeed.
Many people hear nothing they want to hear from churches. They have heard from some churches and from some Christians what they believe they will hear from all churches and Christians: messages of judgment and condemnation and censoriousness. They will not stand still to listen to our words.
But they will observe our deeds. They will observe our deeds. And they will ask, “What does this mean?” And they will decide, perhaps, that those Presbyterians are not like some of the others, those who say things people don’t understand and who just talk a good game.
IV.
Dear hearts and gentle people, I know you to be a kind and compassionate company of Christ. There is great love in this little church. It is that love that slowly brings others into this fellowship and that will make an already powerful little church into a larger and more powerful force for God and for good. Your love can change the world. Let us pray constantly that the Spirit will lead us to show to the world, not the dry bones of dead preachments, but a lively, loving fellowship.
The day of Pentecost, in the year that saw the culmination of Jesus’ earthly ministry, is rightly considered the birthday of the Christian church. Until that day, the believers Jesus left behind were nothing more than a frightened, confused, dispirited, doubtful little band of people who were quite literally hiding out for fear of arrest.
But the living, acting Spirit of the God who was explained in Jesus of Nazareth took them over and they became a living, breathing, courageous church. They stopped doubting the power of God--and the rest is history. They changed the world.
On March 12 every year, we celebrate the anniversary of the chartering of Faith Presbyterian Church. We have not exactly sung “Happy Birthday, dear Church” on those occasions, although last year we did have a 20th anniversary party. Birthday parties are fun, but I don’t think that this church was born on March 12, 1989. I don’t even think it was born on the day that a handful of you gathered to pray together for the first time in someone’s home.
I believe that Faith Presbyterian Church was born in the mind of the God who stands outside of time, and that in God’s own due time, you were called together by the Holy Spirit to play a specific part in working out God’s purposes in Cherokee County, Georgia, USA, and to play a general part in working out God’s purposes in the world through the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), a part of the universal church.
Let us continue to commemorate the anniversaries of the chartering of Faith Presbyterian Church while remembering that it existed in the eternal mind of God for ages before those who signed the charter were even born. But let us at the same time see those birthdays in the light of Pentecost, when a little band of people perhaps no bigger than this little congregation proceeded, step by step, to change the world.
Let our vision for this church match God’s vision for it. Let us remember the words of Daniel Burnham, who said, “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work…. Remember that our (children and grandchildren) are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.”
God makes no small plans and God has no small plans for Faith Presbyterian Church. Dear hearts and gentle people, let us make no small plans for God--or for his church.

{Sermon preached by Chuck Swann, Faith Presbyterian Church, May 23, 2010}