Preaching Imagination, Acts 2

I am four days away from the Acts 2 sermon at the Pepperdine Bible lectures. This one has not appeared willingly. But I'm at a place now where I'm confident that its going to show up. The sermon is now writing itself. One choice leads to another. One image builds on another and forms a circle with others, both reflecting and anticipating.

I have my text memorized. I have the first two moves in draft form. The third move is sketched. And I know the basic shape and thrust of the final move. I will end the sermon with a series of refrains that ends, "but, God raised him up." The salvation offered in the text is that God still pours out his Spirit on those who unwittingly find themselves resisting his work in the world. This was true for the devout Jews in Jerusalem. It's true for us as well.

That's where we'll end. And I hope it is a cascading moment. That the momentum of the sermon launches us into the final phrasings. It's a little like ski jumping. You don't always hit the perfect place to soar, but when you do...

But before we get there, I want to bring us back to some of the themes put in play in the earlier moves. The sermon starts with the hope of Israel. I want to end going to all the world. The sermon begins with the longing of Simeon and Anna. I want to end with our longings for more. The sermon begins with our relationship in Churches of Christ with Acts 2. I want the sermon to end with the possibility of a new relationship with Acts 2.

That's a lot of plates to spin. The risk here is to be so scattered that all the energy of the sermon spills and is dissipated. But I think I have a way into the move that will allow the pieces to fall neatly together. We'll see.

Sermon endings are the hardest part of preaching for me. I much prefer the anticipation, the building, the development. I like working in commas, not periods or exclamation points. But this sermon deserves some exclamation points.

So, if you're helping me with some good sermon mojo, pray for clarity and courage.

I want to have the sermon written by Sunday evening. I will fly to Malibu on Monday, giving me all day Tuesday to rehearse. I will write a manuscript, which is not my usual practice, and I will likely take it up to the podium with me. But I plan to have the sermon orally manuscripted, which means I've said it aloud enough that I no longer need to read it. It is another way of internalizing, of conforming, of preaching from the inside out. It's not memorizing proper. But its pretty close.

The rehearsing is so important. The more I've done this, the more I realize how important my actual voice is, how important cadence and rhythm is. And I've learned how what I hear in my head is not what others hear as I preach. I'm slower than I think. I need to think constantly about energy. And its important for me to actually preach it, not just memorize it, for me to feel the sermon, to bodily anticipate the next moves.

Which brings me to one last observation. Preaching, at least for me, is a full contact sport. That is, I'm realizing how physical my preaching is. Even beyond the fact that I don't stand behind the podium (although I'm not a pacer), there is a sense in which preaching starts in your toes and involves concentrated effort, a projection of yourself for 25-30 minutes (the typical length of a lectureship sermon). And I am now 50. And while I don't think I have one foot in the grave, I know that I'm no longer the person I once was. And in particular, I have a benign essential tremor that used to only show up in my hands, but now I can feel throughout my body, especially when I'm coursing with adrenaline. And I will be coursing with adrenaline. And when its bad, my voice has a tremor and gets thin and reedy. And all of that robs me of a feeling of power, or projection, or connection, or incarnation, or something. And so, I'm anxious about that.

Thanks for those of you who have traveled through this preparation with me. I am taking several conversation partners with me into this moment.

Preaching Imagination, Acts 2

Here are today's reflections. This is the theological heart of the sermon, the next move. These are impressions, not yet sermon words, though many of these impressions will make the final cut. I'm interested in what they inspire in you, where they send you, what images and impressions they evoke.

God raised Israel's messiah from the dead. This that you see and hear is the work of God, the result of raising this Jesus from the dead, seating him at the right hand of God in glory and handing over to him the kingdom. God has made Israel's messiah, Lord of all, giving him the authority to pour out the Spirit, the effective power of the Kingdom of God.

This that you see and hear is God's keeping his promise to Abraham, that through Abraham all the nations of the earth will be blessed. It's what Mary and Zechariah sang about under the influence of the Holy Spirit,

he has shown mercy promised to our ancestors, and has remembered his holy covenant, the oath he swore to our ancestor Abraham.

This is God guaranteeing the world's future through Israel's messiah. Through Jesus, who pours the Spirit out on the 12, on Peter and James and John--and Mathhias, the freshly minted apostle, completer of the 12, the newest representative of the new Israel.

Jesus, pouring out the Spirit in Jerusalem, the city of David, Zion, God's holy mountain--not in Rome or Alexandria or Abilene or Searcy. Jerusalem. (more here)

And this has happened in the presence of devout Jews--devout Jews from every nation under heaven. Parthians, Medes, Elamites, oh my! God has placed devout Jews, people like Simeon and Anna in every corner of the globe, so that through Israel and the announcement of Israel's messiah, every nation on earth will be blessed.

This is God keeping this improbable story alive. This is God keeping faithfulness, breathing life in a story left for dead, raising it up, bringing it back to life, time and time again.

And here in a decisive way, in a way that leaves no doubt. In Israel's worst moment, putting to death God's annointed, the one attested by God through signs, deeds, wonders, in this lowest moment, God's greatest affirmation. He raised Israel's messiah from the dead and enthroned him forever, securing once and for all Israel's central role in the promise of God for all the world. Once and for all consoling Israel, redeeming Jerusalem, and through this, saving all nations.

This is the day that Simeon and Anna longed for, a line drawn by the Holy Spirit directly from their hearts to Pentecost. This is God's emphatic "yes" to all human longing for more, for fuller, for poured out, for extravagant mercy, for life without the threat of death, for the great and glorious day of the Lord.

Preaching Imagination, Acts 2

So, here are the rough, initial stabs at the opening of a sermon. There are places where the language needs to be fuller, where I am still looking for images. Maybe you can help.

Recite the text.

The word of the Lord.

And as far as words of the Lord go, not too shabby. If texts are mountains, this is a Himalaya no matter how you measure it. And fortunately for us, this is one of our texts. It’s the text, after all, that we list on our birth certificate in Churches of Christ. It says on the cornerstone, “This building erected 1954, this church established 33 AD.” Acts 2. It’s our text. We are, proudly and for good reason, Acts 2 Christians.

I saw you mouthing the words when we got to verse 38. Brothers, what shall we do. Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized”…and some other stuff…"and 3,000 were added that day to the church.”

So great. Doesn’t that make you want more? Create some longing for a day like that, for some Pentecost? Gotta get me some Pentecost.

Repent and be baptized. These words are so central to this chapter. What else is there to do in the wake of the appearing of the great and glorious day of the Lord? Repent. Which is different than, “Be your best self now!” This is “turn!” A new world has arrived, one spinning in a different direction that the world afforded us by other Lords. There’s simply no way to continue in the same direction and welcome this new world. Repent.

And make no mistake about it, the appearing of a new world is what this day is all about. These men aren’t drunk. This is God’s word through the prophet Joel come to life. The great and glorious day of the Lord. The pouring out of power from on high—the same power that raised Jesus from the dead poured out on sons and daughters, young and old, slaves both male and female (in case you missed it). And with it a new dispensation of speech. A day when the gospel becomes the universal language of the whole world, when everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

And this day has lived in the hearts of some for a long time. Lived in their hearts like an ache. Like a key change. Like … (help me here)

People like Simeon, whose old, watery eyes were looking for the consolation of Israel. It was revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would see God’s anointed one—the one who would end their long humiliation at the hands of other powers, and bring Israel back to the center of God’s redemptive purposes for all nations. Listen to him. You can hear the weight of his longing, “My eyes have seen your salvation! A light for revelation to the Gentiles, and glory to your people Israel.”

Or Simeon’s counterpart Anna. A prophet, Luke calls her, of great age, living in the temple, praising God and preaching to anyone who will listen about the redemption of Jerusalem. 84 years of anticipation for the day when Jerusalem would rise above every hill and become the mountain of the Lord’s instruction for the nations. Her eyes creased with the wrinkles of a life spent fasting and praying night and day out of a hunger to sing with full throat, “Zion, o glorious Zion!”

Simeon and Anna, filled with the Holy Spirit, living, breathing billboards for the future, forerunners of Pentecost, a prophesying son and daughter, harbingers of a new day, desire set deep in their hearts for more, for more—a new day bursting with all the promise of God.

The Preaching Imagination, Acts 2...

I've had the assignment on preaching from Acts 2, May 7, for about six months now. It's been hard to resist some sermon momentum. The first reading of the text introduced a set of images that immediately suggested a sermon. I've learned to admit these initial impressions, not suppress them. But I've also learned to question where they come from. These particular images centered on the relationship that Churches of Christ have had with Acts 2 through the years. It's a strong set of images and this still might be the way the sermon goes.

But it was obvious. And it was generated by a relationship outside the text, not so much from a dwelling in the text itself. So, I've been looking for other compelling images, other ways in.

This is important in relation to Acts 2 precisely because this text is familiar. There's not a person in Churches of Christ who can't quote Acts 2:38. And while this verse is huge in the scope of Peter's sermon, the larger setting is and rich and full and thinly interpreted in my opinion. I need something to jar listeners into a new reading.

So, I've been scrubbing the text to see what might fall loose. And I've been reading others who have read deeply as well. And today a new way in appeared.

It came while reading the quotation from Joel in Peter's sermon--a text I've read hundreds of times. But the question the apostles ask Jesus at the beginning of Acts has been framing my overall reading of this text in increasing measure. "Is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?" I am increasingly convinced that this is a crucial question in the narrative flow of Acts.

So, when I got to "your sons and daughters shall prophecy," two things hit me at once. Simeon and Anna are prophets, male and female. And they were looking for the "consolation of Israel" and the "redemption of Jerusalem" respectively. They are people of the Holy Spirit, living faithfully in expectation of the fulfillment of the promises made by God to Israel. They prefigure the Pentecost event. The same Spirit inspiring a specific hope in them is poured out by the risen Jesus on Pentecost.

Now, I know this might not sound like a lot. But suddenly my imagination started popping in two directions. First, it began to emerge like a golden thread from other familiar texts in Luke-Acts. Second, the significance of Simeon and Anna in light of Acts 2 for the self-understanding of the church today was immediately relevant and specific. I could identify Simeon and Annas. And I could tie them to the allusion that the twelve standing before the crowd were Galileans.

This may prove to be nothing but background to my sermon. But it might very well be a new way in. A surprise that brings the meaning of the event into different focus. This may prove to be only feeding that part of me that likes to be unique. But we'll see. I have time to play with it. Let's see where it goes.

The Preaching Imagination, Acts 2...

One of the ticklish issues in NT interpretation is how to account for the relationship between Israel and the church. Witness the charge of anti-semitism leveled, rightly from my perspective, against Mel Gibson's take on the death of Jesus. The Jews crucified Jesus, according to this version of things, and God has rejected them.

Acts 2 is one of those dicey places regarding the relationship between Israel and the church. Peter addresses a Jewish audience in his big sermon, and the punchline of the sermon is pretty severe--"Let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified." Texts like this have led many to see the church as a replacement for Israel. That Acts can't wait to get out of Jerusalem and Judea so that the real action among the Gentiles--the future of the story--can commence.

A more careful reading of Acts, however, works in just the opposite direction. Luke is very concerned with the restoration of the "kingdom to Israel" (1:6). Jacob Jervell's very important work on Luke-Acts, Luke and the People of God, shows that the reports of mass conversions take place among Jews and God-fearers. The success of the Word does not occur apart from Jews, but precisely through them. There are no stories of mass conversions among Gentiles anywhere in Acts (Cornelius is described as a God-fearer). This is not a historical statement for Luke, but a theological one. God is being faithful to his promise that all nations will be blessed through the promise made to Abraham.

While the house of Israel crucified Jesus, God's covenant faithfulness is seen in the pouring out of the Holy Spirit on the very people who killed--this one God has made both Messiah and Lord. There is no visible Kingdom of God, which includes Gentiles, apart from the restoration of the kingdom of Israel. Here the prophetic continuity of Jesus and the twelve with Israel's prophets of old becomes a very important part of Luke's theological portrait.

This corrective reading of Acts is worth time in a sermon, and is certainly a big part of the scene at Pentecost, marked by the listing of all the nations represented in the crowd gathered by the sound made by the pouring out of the Spirit. Still, there are other arcs out of this text that beg for development in the sermon. The task, how can I set up the interrelationship of text and sermon so that this is plain without this becoming the focal point of the sermon?

Preaching Imagination, Acts 2

Here's what I'm hoping for. I've got a Pepperdine Bible Lectureship sermon five weeks out on Acts 2. I've been dwelling in this text for the better part of three months. I'm trying to let the text form me, work on me. So, I'm trying to live in its rhythms. I'm memorizing it. Speaking it out loud. Praying with it. I'm trying to let it interrupt me.

I want to let you look over my shoulder some as I do this work. I'm hoping even that things you see will fund my preaching imagination, or that you can push what I'm seeing even deeper. I know this assumes a readership, or people who might be interested in more than just my latest thought structured by a Dylan song. But for the handful of you that might be out there, here we go.

Today, two things strike me. And they are related. This is a Holy Spirit text, not so much the Acts of the Apostles, but the Acts of the Holy Spirit. And the coming of the promised Spirit comes in Acts 2 with a violent wind and divided tongues of fire. This is striking language to me. And it goes with Peter's use of Joel as he begins his sermon.

Joel is not a happy book. All kinds of catastrophic things happen in Joel. The day of the Lord is not a company picnic. Joel's vision is that the world has to be leveled before a new one, a world created by the outpouring of the Spirit can happen. Peter's sermon, in essence, says that we are living in the hinge of that moment--the death of one world, the emergence of another. This is why repentance is a necessary component of the new world. And the Holy Spirit, the power for a new world. And baptism for the forgiveness of sins, a recognition of our complicity in the old arrangement of things. This constitutes the response of an eschatological people convinced that an old world is being blown to bits, and a new world is emerging.

It takes a violent wind and tongues of fire to overcome a world divided by old and young, Jew and Gentile, male and female. It takes a violent wind to uproot business as usual to create a new human family that encompasses "every nation under the heavens." There are too many places in the world given to us by principalities and powers to divide us, to make us many. It takes a violent wind to disrupt business as usual, to level the playing field, so that a new family can emerge.

This is one of our texts. Not so much the Joel part, but certainly the be baptized part. It's, therefore, a text that we have neatly tucked into our way of seeing things. It's comfortable. It's more like a gentle breeze than a mighty wind. I think the sermon has to recover some of the violence of this text. I'm hoping that the question of the crowd, "Brothers, what should we do?" can be the question of the listeners. And for that to be the case, it must first become my question.

I have placed myself on Peter's side in the sermon. In my imagination, I stand with him. I need to place myself in the path of the violent wind. Come, O Holy Spirit.

Dylan on a Sunday

I've been working a lot on Acts 2 lately for a presentation I will be making in May. Acts 2 is familiar territory for a member of Churches of Christ, especially verse 38, "Repent and be baptized..." and some other stuff. What we typically skim over to get to verse 38 is the apocalyptic/eschatological language.

For instance, Peter's sermon begins with a long quotation from the book of Joel. Great stuff there, particularly the stuff about the Spirit being poured out on all flesh, and men and women, young and old prophesying. What we typically skim over is the "blood, fire, and smokey mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord's great and glorious day." Joel is not a sunshine prophet. The new beginning comes out of the ruins of an old world. It is no wonder in this regard that the Spirit's coming in Acts 2 is in the "rush of a violent wind." Hope cannot be built on the foundation of the way things already are. A new day requires a leveling of the old. It requires crisis, risk, the end of an old order so that the new one might emerge.

Much has been made of the various phases of Dylan's career. There was the early, folk/social protest phase. There was his Christian phase. And now whatever name you give to his most recent cd's. But there is one thing that holds all these phases together for me. It's Dylan's view of hope. Or, maybe better put, his apocalyptic view of the world. For Dylan, the old world is always at the brink of collapse for the sake of an emerging new possibility. And his primary source for this imagery is Scripture.

It's very prominent in the early stuff. In songs like All Along the Watchtower, biblical images are mined to describe the crisis of the old world and the possibility of the new. The Times They are a Changin' could have come straight out of Luke-Acts.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

Or notice the old/new in The Groom's Still Waitin'.

West of the Jordan, east of the Rock of Gibraltar,
I see the burning of the stage,
Curtain risin' on a new age,
See the groom still waitin' at the altar.

From the Christian era, there is much to choose from along these lines. It is little wonder that Dylan found Christian community with a Vineyard community given their eschatology. He found a world ready made for his version of hope.

Ring them bells, ye heathen
From the city that dreams,
Ring them bells from the sanctuaries
Cross the valleys and streams,
For they're deep and they're wide
And the world's on its side
And time is running backwards
And so is the bride.

This apocalyptic language is also present in his later music. One of my favorite Dylan songs is Summer Days which I'm convinced carries echoes from the book of Jeremiah. The song describes an age of opulence that cannot possibly be sustained. Their singing songs to the king as if summer will last forever. But this is a world coming to an end. The end/beginning is also found in songs like the Levee's Gonna Break and Thunder on the Mountain.

Thunder on the mountain, fires on the moon
There's a ruckus in the alley and the sun will be here soon
Today's the day, gonna grab my trombone and blow
Well, there's hot stuff here and it's everywhere I go

Thunder on the mountain heavy as can be
Mean old twister bearing down on me
All the ladies of Washington scrambling to get out of town
Looks like something bad gonna happen, better roll your airplane down

Gonna make a lot of money, gonna go up north
I'll plant and I'll harvest what the earth brings forth
The hammer's on the table, the pitchfork's on the shelf
For the love of God, you ought to take pity on yourself

Dylan's songs, regardless of the vintage, are full of smoke, thunder, fire, and rising water. The world as it is currently ordered cannot last and its destruction leaves open the possibility for something truly new. The real value of language like this is that it refuses the status quo. It imagines that something new can truly come into human experience, something that reverses the tables or threatens the current arrangements of power for the sake of those who suffer now. This language, in Scripture, is not used to foster resignation, waiting around for heaven. But it is designed to encourage hopeful engagement with the world for the sake of the new and emerging day of salvation.

A Violent Wind

It was one of those moments. I was yelling at the TV. Not so much in anger as frustration. It was the second Bush-Kerry debate and the question to each concerned the role of faith in their life as a political leader. Dubya went first and talked about his faith as a deeply internal thing. It's what gave him peace in the midst of the trials of being president. It's what I expected.

Kerry went next and talked about his life-long relationship with the Catholic church. And in very similar ways, he talked about his faith as a private, inner thing, something that gave him inner strength and conviction.

I wanted a very different answer from each of them.

Not that I should be surprised. For most of us faith is primarily an internal thing, something that gives us inner strength. In my dissertation research, I am conducting interviews with members from various congregations. One of the interview questions is "As you understand it, how is the Holy Spirit related to salvation?" Every single answer to this point--every single one of them--has something to do with inner peace or strength. Salvation and the Holy Spirit, it appears is my own private possession.

Again, this is not surprising. When you read a book like Charles Taylor's, Sources of the Self, you get sense of just how much Western society has been dominated by notions of a buffered self--or the person as a completely self-contained entity. The personal is the primary horizon of interpretation for most Westerners. We are hard wired philosophically to think of reality as consisting of subjects and objects with self-defining essences and characteristics. A world of subjects and objects becomes also a world of fact/value or public/private splits. And on those splits, faith gets placed on the values and private side of the ledgers. Bush and Kerry were well within the mainstream of Western/American spirituality.

But this is not the only way it has to be. Nancy and I are dwelling in Acts 2 these days. I was struck the other day by the NRSV's translation of the coming of the Spirit as a "violent wind." When the Spirit comes, representing a new age in which the rich will be brought low and the poor raised up, the wind isn't just soothing and peaceful. It is also violent, disruptive, disturbing, commotion causing.

I wanted Bush or Kerry, one of them, to say faith is what keeps me up at night. It's what won't give me rest, keeps me stirred up. It's not my safe-haven from the world, it's what keeps driving me into the world. It's what won't let me rest with my wealth in a world of hunger. It's what is causing me to want me to see the world new each day. It's a violent wind.

I often have people tell me that they know a personal decision they have made is a "God-thing" because they have such peace about it. That might be right. But in a world where we have made such peace with the way things are, it might be a sign of just the opposite. God is just as likely to be in the option that gives no peace.