“The Real Miracle of Pentecost” (Acts 2:42-47)

I wonder how many people had their TV sets switched on yesterday morning at 5 o’clock. That’s when the CBC coverage of the royal wedding began and for the next five hours I can only imagine that millions of viewers were glued to their screens, trying to catch a glimpse of this or that celebrity among the six hundred who were invited to the event.

Long before it took place, countless hours of television time had already gone into the anticipation of the wedding—and for the publicists it was all big money. While the costs of the wedding are estimated to top $36 million, it was expected to generate over $860 million in revenue. If it is anything to go by, memorabilia sales alone for the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton seven years ago amounted to more than $380 million.

By this time you may already have been asking yourself, “What is this preacher fellow getting at—and what does all of this business about royal weddings have to do with the Bible anyway?” Well, for Christians today is the anniversary of another big event, when three thousand souls were added to the fledgling group of Jesus’ followers who had come together that morning to pray.

Little could they have imagined when they gathered in the upper room that they would be swept off their feet (spiritually if not physically) by a “rushing mighty wind”, touched by fire, and speaking in languages never before heard from their lips! So completely strange was what happened to them that it is little wonder that it all began to attract a crowd of people who were no less amazed and perplexed than they were. “We hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!”

So today, while the rest of the world is recovering from the royal wedding or preparing for Game Five in the playoffs between Vegas and the Jets, we Christians quietly celebrate the Feast of Pentecost. And quite rightly our attention is fixed on the miraculous events that occurred that morning: the mysterious whistling of the wind, the flames of fire that divided and settled on each of the believers, and the praises of God in all the varied languages of the known world.

It was a remarkable event—and I don’t know how many times I have preached on it over the past forty-plus years. Yet this year as I began my preparations, it dawned upon me that my attention has always been focused on the events in the opening verses of Acts, chapter 2. At the same time it began to occur to me that maybe what Luke wrote in the closing verses of that same chapter has even more to teach us about the real meaning of Pentecost and about the work that the Holy Spirit yearns to do in you and in me. So allow me to read them to you.

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

Devotion

There are three aspects of this brief summary of the first days of the church I would like us to focus on. The first of them can be summarized by the word “devotion”. Luke begins, “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.”

My Greek lexicon tells me that those words “devoted themselves” can be translated in a whole variety of ways: “persist in”, “attach oneself to”, “be faithful to”, “be busily engaged in”, “hold fast to”, “persevere in”, “spend much time in”. By now probably you get the idea. Those first believers were not prepared to allow anything to stand in the way of learning from the apostles or from coming together regularly for fellowship, worship and prayer.

Early in my own walk with Christ many years ago, my pastor encouraged me to begin memorizing Scripture. The first verses I ever committed to memory were Psalm 119:9 and 11, and I quote them as I learned them in the old King James Version:

Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?
By taking heed thereto according to thy word…
Thy word have I hid in mine heart,
that I might not sin against thee.

It seems to me that those early believers did exactly what Psalm 119 counsels us to do: they were taking God’s word to heart with an unshakeable commitment to the apostles’ teaching. Now of course they had no New Testament and they wouldn’t for a couple of generations. But they had the apostles themselves and they spent time learning from them, drinking in their words—and we’re not just talking about a weekly twenty-minute sermon or even a forty-minute one. Acts 20 tells us of an evening when the apostle Paul went on talking till midnight—to the point where one young man drifted into sleep and fell out the window!

But the point was that they could never hear enough. Like the two companions who met with Jesus along the road to Emmaus on that first resurrection day, I can only imagine that their hearts burned within them as they learned from the apostles and opened the Scriptures together.

Some years ago we had the privilege of hosting Ernest Gordon, who had been held captive in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Burma along what was known as the railway of death. Although he was not a believer at the time, he and some of his men began reading the New Testament together. It did not take long before they found that they could not put it down, for they had the amazing experience that the same Jesus whom they found on its pages was there among them.

Yet much of this seems so far from the experience of the church in our part of the world today. A recent study revealed that only forty-five percent of those who regularly attend church read the Bible more than once a week. Almost twenty percent say they never read the Bible—and that is about the same percentage as those who read it on a daily basis. [1] That seems a far cry from our early forebears who lived in the shadow of Pentecost, who could not get enough the apostles’ teaching. Would that the Holy Spirit would stir the same thirst in us today!

Awe

Those first believers showed a devotion to the apostles’ teaching. But Luke also tells us in verse 43 that “everyone was filled with awe”. Again, if you read that verse in the old King James Version, it would sound like this: “And fear came upon every soul.” The word in the original in fact is phobos. We find it in words like “claustrophobia”, the fear of small spaces, “acrophobia”, the fear of heights, and “arachnophobia”, the fear of spiders.

There was a German philosopher of a century ago called Rudolf Otto, who came up with the phrase mysterium tremendum—the sense of something so mysterious that it causes you to tremble. This, he said, is what happens to us when we come into the presence of the living God.

We see it in Moses as he tended his flocks in the wilderness and approached that strange bush that burned but was not consumed. The book of Exodus tells us that when Moses began to realize in whose presence he stood, “he hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God” (Exodus 3:6). Or think of Isaiah in the temple, as he gazed at the six-winged seraphs and heard their cry, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty…” and felt the stone floor shuddering beneath him. “Woe to me!” was all he could think to utter, “For I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty” (Isaiah 6:3-4).

Or we can turn to the New Testament, to the story of the centurion who came to Jesus on behalf of his servant. “Lord,” he said to him, “I do not deserve you to come under my roof…” (Matthew 8:5-9) Think too of the occasion when Peter and his companions had just hauled in an enormous load of fish because Jesus had told them to let down their nets in spite of there being no fish. He fell down before Jesus and wailed, “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:1-10)

Our forebears in the faith had that same sense of awe as they gathered to learn from the apostles, to break bread and to pray together. The letter to Hebrews tells us,

You have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. (Hebrews 12:22-24)

How we need to ask God to inspire in us that same sense of awe—each time we gather to take time to come before him consciously and deliberately and ask him to open our hearts afresh to the unfathomable mystery of his love and power. I have no doubt that we would know more of the Holy Spirit’s presence if we did.

Community

A devotion to the apostles’ teaching, awe in the presence of the living God—and a third characteristic of those first Christians I would like to emphasize comes in a word for which there is really no adequate English equivalent. It is the word koinonia. Most often it is rendered “fellowship” as we see it in this morning’s passage. But if you think of fellowship (as I suspect most of us do) as what happens over a cup of coffee after the worship service, then we have fallen woefully short of what the New Testament means when it uses the word koinonia.

What it really means is having something in common on a profound level—and Luke gives us a picture of how that works out in practical terms in those last verses of Acts 2. Let me read them to you once again:

All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts…

Now for us who have been immersed from infancy in the independent-minded, freedom-loving principles western society, that is a strange and even frightening picture. It may relieve you to know I am not advocating that we seek to replicate detail for detail all the practices of the early church.

What I am saying is that there was a genuine sense of caring and sharing among those first believers that you would not have found outside the church. I remember some years ago a pastor friend telling me of a member of his church who was part of a small group that met for Bible study and prayer. The man happened to work for a tobacco company. Over time he became convinced that as a Christian he could not in good conscience continue to do this and he shared it with the group. To his surprise, they all agreed that if he felt that this was the direction in which God was leading him, they would give him any financial support he might need in order to make the change—and they ended up caring for him and his family for the better part of a year until he found a new job.

Those people knew the meaning of the word koinonia. It was our Lord Jesus himself who said, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35). And so I don’t believe it was by coincidence that Luke concludes the day of Pentecost with these words: “And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.”

As we look back on the mighty, rushing wind and on the tongues of fire that came upon those first believers, may we pray not for them to happen again, but for what they led to: to a wholehearted devotion to the apostles’ teaching, to a life-changing awe as we gather in the presence of the living God, and to a sense of community that is costly and real. In a word, may the Holy Spirit lead us to being the authentic body of Jesus in the world today.

---

[1]     Ed Stetzer, “The Epidemic of Bible Illiteracy in Our Churches”, Christianity Today, July 2015

“Servants and Saints” (Philippians 1:1-11)

Paul was several months into his second missionary journey. It was an expedition that had begun rather roughly. Initially Paul had intended to travel with his friend and supporter Barnabas. However, Barnabas wanted to bring along his nephew Mark and this became a point of contention between the two. Mark had not done well on the previous journey and had left midway through. As a result Paul regarded him as more of a liability than an asset. Barnabas, always true to his name, which means “son of encouragement”, was of the opposite opinion, which eventually led to the two splitting up. It was not a happy parting of ways.

Off they went in their separate directions, with Paul reaching as far as Lystra in southern Turkey. His original plan had been to go into what is now western Turkey. We don’t know exactly how it happened, but we are told that the Holy Spirit somehow forbade them to travel in that direction. So Paul decided that they would go to northern Turkey instead. Yet again the Holy Spirit directed them not to. So they journeyed around to the seaport of Troas on the extreme western tip of Turkey to wait there for further guidance. It seemed that nothing was going right.

However, that night Paul was awakened by a vision. There in front of him stood a man from Macedonia (now northeastern Greece on the north coast of the Aegean Sea). He was standing on the shore and pleading across the sea, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” That was all Paul needed. They boarded the next ship west and with a brief stop along the way landed at Neapolis on the coast, and then journeyed the ten miles inland to Philippi.

In his account in Acts Luke describes Philippi as a leading city of the district. Philippi was located on a remarkably fertile plain and had been a center for the mining of gold and silver as far back as the Phoenicians. By New Testament times these mineral resources had been largely depleted. But Philippi still enjoyed great importance because of its strategic location, situated in a valley on the main road that connected Europe with Asia. In the previous century its already mixed population had been swelled by a settlement of Italian colonists. And so living side by side were three distinct cultural groups: Romans, Greeks and Asians. Such was the city in which Paul arrived in the year 52 ad, for his first evangelistic venture on European soil.

In spite of its ethnic diversity, there were not enough Jews in Philippi to form a synagogue. And so Paul had to abandon his usual strategy of going first to the synagogue to share the message of Christ. He did hear word, however, of a group of Jews who would gather outside the city gate by the river for prayer on the Sabbath. There he encountered a woman named Lydia who was a dealer in purple cloth. She had been a convert to Judaism and listened with eagerness to everything that Paul had to share. She quickly put her faith in Christ and soon she and her whole household were baptized.

Lydia’s positive response was followed by a negative experience, this time with a slave girl from whom Paul had cast out an evil spirit. Her owners, who had been making a healthy profit from her fortune-telling powers, dragged Paul and Silas before the magistrates, who had them flogged and thrown into jail. That night, as the two of them were singing hymn and praying to God, there was an earthquake so violent that it shook the foundations of the prison, threw open its doors and unfastened the inmates’ chains. When the jailer arrived at the scene he assumed the prisoners had escaped. Just as he was about to commit suicide, he heard Paul shout, “Don’t harm yourself—we’re all here and accounted for.” When jailer had regained his composure, he brought them out from the rubble and then he asked, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” Without knowing it, he had given Paul just the opportunity he had been waiting for. Ever the evangelist, Paul jumped on it and replied, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved, you and your whole household.” And so that very night he and his family became a part of the fledgling colony of believers in Philippi.

The next morning, to their embarrassment, the magistrates discovered that they had acted entirely out of line in their treatment of Paul and Silas, since the two were Roman citizens. They apologized to them and asked them to leave town. And this they did after taking a final opportunity to share some words of encouragement with the newly founded church that had begun to meet in Lydia’s home.

It was not until five years later that Paul had another opportunity to visit Philippi. Throughout those years and the years that followed, there continued a warm relationship between the apostle and the church, not least in their ongoing support of Paul and the mission of the church through their prayers and generous gifts. This, then, was the community of believers whom Paul addressed as we open his letter to the Philippians this morning.

Paul’s Gratitude

Paul’s letter begins—and it is suffused throughout—with the theme of gratitude. From the very outset we hear Paul expressing it. “I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you.” Paul couldn’t be more emphatic, could he? “Every time I remember you.” “Constantly praying with joy.” “In every one of my prayers for all of you.” What was Paul so grateful for? The word in our NRSV Bibles is “sharing”. In other contemporary English versions it is translated “partnership”; and in older translations you will find it is “fellowship”. In actual fact, the term Paul uses is that wonderful word koinonía. It is a multi-faceted word and each of those English translations—sharing, partnership, fellowship—gives us an insight into what it means.

Each Sunday you are accustomed to hearing me invite you out for a few minutes of fellowship in the Gathering Space. This morning we will have an opportunity for some slightly more extended fellowship in the congregational brunch. But neither of those things, important as they may be to the life of our church, even begins to compare what is wrapped up inside the word koinonía. At its heart, it has to do with holding something in common. Yet it is far more than that. Koinonía has been an essential part of the dna of the church since its first beginnings on the day of Pentecost. Most of us are familiar with the way Luke describes it in the opening chapters of Acts:

All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved. (Acts 2:44-47)

The depth of fellowship that Luke portrays is something that we rarely see in the church today. Indeed it was so intense that it could appear almost frightening to us individualistic, low-key, independent-minded twenty-first century westerners.

Paul is quite specific about what he means when he uses the word. It is not just a matter of having a good time together or enjoying one another’s company (although I want to emphasize that both of those things are a part of it). It is a fellowship in the gospel. Our fellowship has its roots in the good news of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. But what Paul was writing about was more than just an acknowledgement of certain truths. It was a fellowship of living under the gospel and living out the gospel in daily life, of seeking to live together for Jesus in the everyday world—worshiping together, praying together, laughing together, suffering together, weeping together.

Paul’s Confidence

Aside from his gratitude, the second thing we hear Paul expressing is confidence. This is encouraging to hear in this day and age when there is a great deal of pessimism about the church, at least in this part of the world. Each successive poll informs us how our numbers are declining. In our own denomination there is not only a reduction in numbers, but also a reduction in faith. Our leadership by and large seem more eager to throw in their lot with the latest trends of the day than to adhere to the faith once delivered to the saints.

Some years ago I remember hearing this parody of the old hymn “Onward, Christian soldiers”—and I fear it may be truer now than it was then.

Backward, Christian soldiers, fleeing from the fight,
With the cross of Jesus, nearly out of sight!
Christ our royal Master, stands against the foe,
But forward into battle, we are loath to go.

Like a mighty tortoise, moves the Church of God;
Brothers, we are treading, where we’ve often trod.
We are much divided, many bodies we,
Having different doctrines, not much charity.

Yet in spite of the dark clouds that hang over western Christendom, I believe that we can and ought to share Paul’s optimism. For his confidence was not in numbers or budgets or programs. Nor was it in the accuracy of their doctrine or the power of their witness. No, it was in none of that, but in God’s faithfulness and the Holy Spirit’s work in their hearts and lives.

Scottish theologian T.F. Torrance once told this little story, which illustrates well what I believe Paul was saying. He wrote,

Many years ago … I was teaching my little girl to walk. I can still feel her tiny fingers gripping my hand as tightly as she could. She did not rely upon her feeble grasp of my hand but upon my strong grasp of her hand which enfolded her grasp of mine within it. That is surely how God’s faithfulness actualized in Jesus Christ laid hold of our weak and faltering faith and holds it securely in his hand.[1]

Paul’s confidence in the church derived from his confidence in the God of the church—and so should ours, and in Jesus’ promise that even the gates of hell will not prevail against it.

Paul’s Prayer

Paul’s gratitude for these Christian folk and his confidence in God’s good purposes for them naturally led him to do a third thing: to pray for the young church. What does he pray for? First on the list is love—agapé, that biblical brand of love, which we find supremely exemplified for us in the cross of Christ. And again, if you weren’t here four weeks ago, let me repeat (perhaps for the final time) what I believe is the best definition of it, from Bishop Stephen Neill: “the steady direction of the will towards another’s lasting good”.

The second thing Paul prays for among the Philippians is insight—and it seems to me that these two qualities are complementary, right-brained and left-brained if you will, affective and cognitive. If the Christian community is to thrive, it needs both. It needs the warmth of Christian love, of mutual affection in Christ, of hearts that are tender and caring towards others. At the same time it needs wisdom, that clear understanding of the gospel that enables us to navigate the complexities and contradictions of everyday life in the world.

Then we must add what Paul calls “the harvest of righteousness”. And here I believe what he is getting at is lives that are qualitatively different from what is generally experienced in the rest of the world—men and women and children who truly are the salt and light that Jesus calls us to be, making a positive difference, bringing God’s goodness, Christ’s kingdom, to bear in our relationships with the people and the world around us.

As we leave the church in Philippi this morning, let us take a moment to look around at our own church with a spirit of gratitude for the fellowship that is ours in Christ and a desire to deepen and enrich it. Let us look to the future with confidence that God is far from finished with us. And let us look to God the Holy Spirit inspire in us those essential qualities of love, wisdom and righteousness.

---

[1]     The Mediation of Christ, page 83