A Pentecost Harvest—Lectionary Reflection for Easter 3A (Acts 2)

Acts 2:14, 36-41 New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition

¹⁴ But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Fellow Jews and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say.

³⁶ “Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.”

³⁷ Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, “Brothers, what should we do?” ³⁸ Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. ³⁹ For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.” ⁴⁰ And he testified with many other arguments and exhorted them, saying, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” ⁴¹ So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added.

*******

                As we continue our journey through Eastertide, the first reading again takes us to the Book of Acts. More specifically, we continue with the aftermath of the coming of the Holy Spirit with power on the followers of Jesus who had been holding up in the upper room. In the previous reading for Easter 2A, we heard Peter proclaim the good news. With this reading, the sermon has come to an end and it’s time for the altar call. Having been convicted by Peter’s message, which concluded with the declaration that the one the people had crucified God had made Lord and Messiah, the people want to know what they can do so they can rectify the situation.

           Now, before we go any further, I need to acknowledge the problem present in Peter’s declaration. With two millennia of anti-Jewish sentiment present within the Christian movement, we must be careful not to blame Jews for the death of Jesus. Remember that it was the Roman government that crucified Jesus, with collaboration from a small group of Jewish leaders who were beholden to the Roman government.

             The key point here is that Peter makes it clear that the one who had been crucified on Good Friday had been raised by God, such that God had made him Lord and Messiah. Peter interprets the resurrection as God’s vindication of Jesus and his messianic mission. The people (might we include ourselves here, I would) might have rejected Jesus and his mission, but in the resurrection, God had set things right. When the people hear this message, they pose a question to Peter and his companions: “What must we do?”

            When we turn to verse 38, we hear Peter’s answer to that question. It’s an answer that folks from my tradition should have memorized as it has stood at the forefront of our message since the early 1800s. That answer is this: “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” That seems simple enough. First, repent of your sins, and get baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, then your sins will be forgiven, and you’ll receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.  One of the founders of the movement of which I am a member—the Stone Campbell Movement, which includes the Disciples of Christ (my denomination)—took that message to heart and developed a clear evangelistic message. Walter Scott, one of Alexander Campbell’s colleagues in the early Disciples movement, devised a formula that he took on the road. He called it the “Five-fingered Exercise.” As the story goes, when Scott went into a new community, he would find a few children playing, teach them the five points of the plan of salvation, pointing to each finger, starting with belief, and moving on to repentance, followed by baptism (immersion of course), which led to the reception of forgiveness, and the gift of the Holy Spirit. If you want to receive salvation, what you need to do is believe the message, repent of your sins, get baptized (by immersion, of course) to seal the commitment, and then God will faithfully honor that commitment by forgiving a person’s sins, along with gifting the Holy Spirit. While this may seem rather transactional, its appeal was its simplicity. For many on the frontier who didn’t know if they were counted among the elect, this message gave them simple confirmation that if they followed these steps then they could have an assurance of salvation. So, if you’ve repented and been baptized, then you can be assured that God has forgiven you and given you the Holy Spirit. Now, it is easy for us to use this verse as a formula, a sort of “Four Spiritual Laws,” as Walter Scott and others in my tradition did, but if we follow the story through Acts, we discover that the Spirit might come before confession and baptism (Acts 10) or the Spirit might wait for an Apostolic blessing (Acts 8).

          Now Peter isn’t finished. In verse 39, Peter makes it clear that this promise applies to everyone. It applies both to those near and those far away. That word could include those present in Jerusalem listening to the sermon, as well as those from later generations. It could apply to Jews (near) and Gentiles (those far away). As Beverly Gaventa notes, “although Peter says nothing specific about the ‘far away’ including Gentiles, this claim anticipates the extent of that promise to ‘ends of the earth’ (1:8)” [Gaventa, Acts, p. 80]. Even then Peter isn’t finished because he tells the crowd to save themselves from this corrupt generation (vs. 40).

           Apparently, Peter had preached an effective sermon, since according to Luke, three thousand responded by being baptized and added to the fledgling church that day. That’s a pretty good harvest since the church hadn’t done any prep work. Neither did they hire out a stadium or do any advertising. Thus, overnight the church grew from around 150 to over 3,000. From Luke’s narrative, the respondents came from all over the Jewish diaspora (vs. 41).

            If we dive deeper into this portion of the Pentecost story, we might ask what this call to repent involves. Ron Allen suggests that “to repent is to turn away from the old age (Acts 2:40), and to turn toward God and the coming of the realm.” In other words, this is an eschatological message. This call to turn away from the world and to God’s realm is then confirmed by baptism (immersion). This act of being baptized “assures people that God has forgiven their sins.” When Luke speaks here of sin, he sees sin being “complicity with the old age; forgiveness, means that one is no longer determined by that age.” As for baptism, it serves to initiate a person into the realm of God. [Acts of the Apostles, p. 36.] We can think here in terms of experiences of conversion that involve a change in a person’s orientation in life. With this change of orientation, old loyalties, and allegiances are traded for new ones. So, to speak of conversion here we’re talking about much more than joining a church. Remember that at this point, the audience is likely entirely Jewish. They’re not being asked to abandon Judaism for Christianity, which at this point would not yet exist. Instead, we should think more in terms of orienting our lives to the realm of God. When we think here of the realm, we would be wise to think in terms of an inaugurated eschatology. That is, the realm of God is already present, but is also coming. We still inhabit the old age, but in taking this step of repenting and being baptized, the past is washed away (sins forgiven) so that we might enter the new age that is defined by our confession of faith in Christ.

                The message has been preached and the harvest has been taken in. Thus, we sing:

Just as I am, thy love unknown

has broken every barrier down;

now to be thine, yea thine alone,

O Lamb of God, I come; I come!

                                —Charlotte Elliot

                                (Glory to God, 442, vs. 4)