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Pentecost

Acts 2
5 Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 7Amazed and astonished, they asked, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 9Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.’ 12All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, ‘What does this mean?’


My brother went to business school and I bought a book. He pays Ivy League tuition and I bought the Ten-Day MBA for $16.95 plus shipping. He has classes and assignments and deadlines, and I can do my entire MBA on the back deck. He will have a degree conferred by some pretentious sounding school, and I have a certificate on page 397 where I can write my name and herewith be known to gain all the rights and privileges of the “university of self taught.”

Ivy League tuition or $16.95 plus shipping? So who is the smarter business person?

Turning to the first chapter, I’m already learning about the church. There under the general heading of “marketing,” I discovered something called “product life cycle” and thought of today. Understanding where you are in your product life cycle is critical to any marketing campaign, and so I’m prepared to give you a little MBA for free, which, by the way, makes you smarter than me or MBA boy.

The first stage in the life cycle of a product is called simply “the introduction” and is characterized by the question “what is it?” This is the realm of the early adapters, the gadget guys and geeks who have something first and spend much of their time showing off and explaining what it is. I may have been the only kid in 1973 living in a home with an answering machine, which makes Dad an early adapter. I could go on, but I don’t want to put him on the spot.

The next stage is growth and the question “where can I get it?” Satellite radio and VoIP are in this category, products that are increasingly familiar but new to some. New stage is “maturity,” asking the question “which one?’’ The product is very familiar, you now feel you need one, and it becomes a question of comparing features. If you are finally ready to ditch the Brownie Hawkeye and go digital, you are in this stage.

The last stage is called “decline.” Everyone who is going to get one has one, people are generally tired of the product, most manufacturers are out of business or soon will be. The ironic thing here is that if you are the last company making VCR’s or turntables, there is money to be made on the vinyl geek or the person who hasn’t managed to find a DVD version of “Flashdance.”

And so, on the anniversary of the birth of the church, where are we on the “product life cycle?”

On Tuesday we covered the first three hundred years or so of the history of the Christian church and I think my little group would concur that Pentecost to 325 was “the introduction.” The growth stage will come this week as we look at the spread of our religion into the corners of the known world and into the places of power. The maturity stage, surprisingly enough will come on week three, around the time of the Reformation, where people were confronted with variations on a mature tradition and the fragmentation of the Christian marketplace. So that would bring us to decline, the final stage, where the vacuum tube and the rotary phone made their last stand, and where the church looks anxiously into the future and tries to maintain a little dignity.

Maybe it’s a little too obvious that I’ve spent the last 48 hours in a church meeting, me and 400 of my closest friends: trying to stay hopeful. Maybe bad air and sitting on a hard chair has altered my historiographical look at the last 2000 years, or maybe I’m just tired. Whatever it is, I think I need Peter’s help to find a way forward.

Tom Long, professor of preaching and a remarkable storyteller told us that the very section of the second chapter of Acts that we are most likely to edit out of our reading may, in fact, be the most important. The very verses that trip up even the most skilled lay reader, the frightening list of locations and civilizations that populate the story may be the very heart of the passage. Listen again:

8And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 9Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.’ 12All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, ‘What does this mean?’

This Judean mash-up makes for one of the most eclectic gatherings of seekers and pilgrims the world has ever known, covering the places near and far where trade and migration took people and brought them home again. But there hidden in the names and places is a surprize, a puzzle perhaps, that a handful of Medians had travelled though time from their long-dead civilization to attend that day to the birth of the church.

The people of the once great empire called Medes were witnesses to the fire and wind of Pentecost, people that long ago passed into what we think we know about history, a people who sadly left no texts, no inscriptions, no grammar: only a couple of chunks of cuneiform in Old Persian that might, might be a scrap of the Median language. But it might just be Old Persian.

Peter is preaching to a crowd that we learn is at least 3000 strong that day, but how can we know for sure? How can we rely on an accurate counting when the Holy Spirit is not bound by time or place, and reaches back to what was, reaches out to what is, and reaches beyond to this morning at Central, the great will be. How can we rely on the accounting that scripture gives us when all of creation, past, present and future is crying out to be saved by the transforming love of our Lord Jesus Christ?

Like all good preachers, Peter, finds the right scripture for the occasion and tries to make the meaning plain:

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.

And like all good preachers, Peter says the time is now, this Word is fulfilled in your hearing, this eternity is happening in your sight. True enough Peter, the time is now, or was then, but the time is still now, so once you started messing with the timeline of history Peter, the time become something else altogether. You welcomed long-dead civilizations into our fellowship, and they already had last days, and your last days, circa 33 were not really last days either. And Peter, Peter, you need to know that we seem to be living in the last days, at least it seems like the last days when I hear the news and when I check my portfolio.

Our dear friend Peter loved his Bible, and preached the last days, but maybe didn’t know that the 3000 who heard him that day would be unmoved by the gathered crowd that day, because, let’s face it, there wasn’t much going on anyway. And unmoved, perhaps, by the idea that these were last days, because peoples have always faced last days and the world carries on.

No, it took more than a crowd and a prophesy to move them, it too more than rushing wind to move them, as impressive as this may be. No, it took the voices of Medes to move them, it took the voices of those who were silent for 500 years to move them and convince them that God was doing a new thing here: that the message of life was for all people, that reaching back in time and reaching across the known world and reaching out to the future that they could only dream about was happening at that very moment, in Jerusalem, on the birthday of the church.

We don’t have a mature product, and we’re not a vacuum tube and we’re not a Polaroid. We are time travelling with Peter to Medes, where Jesus speaks fluent Median, and we're in the heart of Rome, where Jesus speaks to power, and here in the heart of Weston, where Jesus speaks to and through us to a neighbourhood that needs his love. We’re shiny and new, never newer, never more relevant than this birthday, the birthday of the church. Thanks be to God, amen.

posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 7:28 AM