Ac 2

I want to begin with a story you may or may not have heard. If you have heard it, then please file this in the “I’m sorry to be redundant” department.

This goes back to the time when the world lost the musical genius, Ludwig von Beethoven. A couple of days after his funeral, the town drunk is staggering around in the churchyard and falls flat on his face on Beethoven’s grave. He hears a strange sound below, and he’s terrified. So he runs into the church and calls for the priest.

The priest, understanding that this is after all, the town drunk, doesn’t take him very seriously. But he decides to humor him, and so, he accompanies him to the gravesite. The priest bends down and listens for a moment, and he also hears the sound. It seems familiar, but he can’t quite place it. So he summons the mayor.

When the mayor arrives, he too listens for a moment, and he says, “Father, I’ve identified the sound. It’s music, but it’s being played backwards. There’s the Ninth Symphony, and now the Eighth Symphony, now the Seventh, and so on. There’s no reason for fear. It’s simply Beethoven decomposing.”

So, even though the body of our friend Ludwig has decomposed—even though our bodies will experience corruption—in our scripture reading from Acts, Peter speaks of one whose body never saw corruption. The apostle backs up his case with, let’s say, some creative quoting of Psalm 16. That’s a psalm he recognizes as having some messianic overtones.

I say it’s “creative quoting” because, if you notice, the words Peter uses don’t appear that way in the psalm. That’s in part due to the fact that New Testament writers use a Greek translation.

Anyway, Peter is speaking on the day of Pentecost, which is often considered to be the birthday of the church. The disciples have been filled with the Holy Spirit, and they’re speaking in other languages. Seeing this strange sight, some of the onlookers have concluded that they must be drunk.

But Peter wants to set the story straight. He begins with a quote from the prophet Joel. He says that this is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which has been promised to everyone. “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. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy” (vv. 17-18).

By the way, about that word “prophesy”: I’m sure I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. It’s much less about predicting the future than it is about speaking the word of God regarding the present. Prophets overwhelmingly are more concerned with what’s going on right now than they are with events yet to come. After all, if we’re on the right road now, the future tends to take care of itself.

A fellow named Jesus said something like that: “strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things [food, drink, etc.] will be given to you as well. So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today” (Mt 6:33-34).

Speaking of Jesus, it’s after Peter quotes the prophet Joel that he turns his attention to him. He speaks of the one who died, but again, unlike our dear friend Ludwig, did not decompose. As he says in verse 27, quoting the psalmist, “For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your Holy One experience corruption.”

Here’s something to ponder: why is Peter so determined to stress the point that the body of Jesus didn’t experience any decay? Why is he so fixated on that? He’s told them that Jesus was killed. The Hebrew “Sheol” and the Greek “Hades” have similar meanings. They refer to the land of the dead; they speak of the grave.

Jesus was stone cold dead. He was as dead as dead can be. We’re not talking about a deep level of sleep; he didn’t lapse into a coma. And what emerged from the tomb on that first Easter morning wasn’t some reanimated zombie, crumbling apart. What did happen was that God reversed the sentence of death.

Despite their worst intentions—despite our worst intentions—God shows who is still in control.

This is something we briefly spoke about last Tuesday at the book club meeting. How do we balance God’s sovereignty and human freedom? I said, half-jokingly, that we’ve been predestined to have freedom of choice. On the face of it, that doesn’t make much sense, but I still believe it. We have to be able to hold together two apparently contradictory ideas: the sovereignty of God and human freedom. If we deny one of them, we go off balance.

Look at verse 23. Peter says that Jesus was “handed over to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God.” The definite plan and foreknowledge of God. God delivers Jesus to them, but at that point, what they do is still their own choice. We’re the same way. God—we can even think of it as life itself—is constantly asking us questions. How we choose to answer (even if we choose not to answer) is just that—a choice.

Still, before the people make their choice to crucify Jesus, Peter has made some choices of his own. Before Good Friday comes Maundy Thursday. Peter chooses to deny that he even knows Jesus: not once, not twice, but three times! Even though he knows that his Lord and friend forgives him, it surely is a compelling (and perhaps haunting?) memory he carries for the rest of his life.

Later in his address, in verse 36 he flatly states, “Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.” He chooses to make a statement, not of human defiance, but of holy defiance. And what’s the result of that choice?

We read that “he testified with many other arguments and exhorted them, saying, ‘Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.’ So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added. They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (vv. 40-42).

God isn’t the only one who can reverse the death sentence. As God’s people, we’re called to do the same thing.

I’ve often thought of the early church, and the way the church should be today, as counter-cultural. Mary Jo Leddy, director of Romero House in Toronto (a group that works with refugees), has suggested an alternative. Thinking of the church as “counter-cultural” seems to reject everything around us. It seems to ignore where Christ is active in our culture—where Christ is active in our society. Instead, she suggests that the church should be a “parallel culture.”[1]

Influential in her thinking is the example of Václav Havel, who was president of the Czech Republic after the Cold War. His writings landed him plenty of time in the communist prisons. He has said that during the 70s and 80s, it seemed like the system would never change.

According to Havel, it really seemed like “an iron curtain, a system that dominated every aspect of people’s lives. It wasn’t just ‘out there,’ it was also ‘within’—within their heads, within their hearts, within their spirits. It looked like it would never change, even though it was a system based on a lie. The lie was quite simply, ‘You’ll be happy if you have enough things.’”[2] Remember, these weren’t capitalists; they were communists!

Anyway, he says that the Czechs, and people in other countries, began setting up what he called “parallel cultures.” They had their own study groups, music groups; they wrote novels and poetry. They were places where they could meet together and speak the truth.

Havel says, “Over time, the truth became stronger and stronger, and at a certain point, people began to walk in the streets and to say to the system, ‘We don’t believe you anymore.’ And the system fell. It fell, not because of the power of Western nuclear equipment, but because the people said within the system, ‘We don’t believe you anymore.’”[3]

I think that says a lot about the fragility of any human system. When people stop believing it, it begins to crumble.

Friends, in so many different ways, we live in a culture—in a system—of death. I’m not just talking about the death we export to other countries. Right here at home, death is alive in the way we deal with each other. When we automatically assume that we’ve got somebody all figured out, without an open mind or bothering to ask them what they mean by something, then we’re dealing in death. It’s the death of connection; it’s the death of meaningful relationship.

As the church, we are called to say, “This dead body hasn’t decomposed. This corpse hasn’t seen corruption. It’s ripe for resurrection!” That’s the parallel culture of life in the Spirit.

Mary Jo Leddy says, “This is how power was experienced in the upper room [on the day of Pentecost]. People gathered; they talked, and they prayed…And then there was power between them. It was not a power that any one person possessed. They were possessed by the power of God, because they were in-relation to God as a community. And then they went forth with great power.”[4]

As I draw to a close, I want to end on a personal note. This coming Thursday will mark the five year anniversary of my father’s death. His health had been declining for several years, following the onset of congestive heart failure. I flew down to Nashville on the day he passed away. My brother-in-law met me at the airport, and he took me directly to the hospital. I guess my dad willed himself to stay conscious until I arrived. We said our final goodbyes, and he fell asleep. He stopped breathing soon after.

My dad was never what you would call a talkative man. I don’t recall any really long conversations between us. I’m not certain about this, but I imagine he never was quite sure what to make of me as a son! I suppose I wasn’t the easiest person to figure out! It was only when both of us welcomed Christ into our lives that our relationship truly came alive. One might say, “We reversed the sentence of death.”

That is the power of the Spirit. That is the power of the parallel culture we as the church are called to embody. That is the power that enables us to joyfully say, along with the apostle Peter, “This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses” (v. 32).

[1] Mary Jo Leddy, “The Church as Parallel Culture,” The Gospel and Our Culture 11:2 (June 1999).

[2] Leddy, 1.

[3] Leddy, 2.

[4] Leddy, 4.