It was 50 days since Jesus had broken bread with them the night he was betrayed. 50 days. It’s a long time. It’s enough time for events to be filtered into categories of interesting and not-so-interesting. there had been some spectacular events.

Jesus had been arrested and tried before two courts. He had been stripped, beaten, mocked and tortured. Peter had denied that he knew Jesus, the others had run away in shame. Some of them saw Jesus be crucified.

Their Jesus, their powerful saviour : full of wisdom and the very love of God. The man they saw walk on water, the man they saw make thousands of loaves of bread from a few, the man they heard such incredible spiritual insights from : the summary of the laws of God, the opening of the way for all people. They saw him, their hope in something better and bigger than this life, their hope that there was such a thing as freedom., they saw this man Jesus, who the believed to be the very son of God, crucified a criminals death, buried in a borrowed tomb.

They had felt let down, confused and really quite angry like they had been taken in by a spectacular hoax. They were disillusioned with God and with miracles. They thought Jesus was just another charlatan.

Then there was the empty tomb discovered by some women who went to embalm the body. The various sightings of Jesus, and then finally at night while they were all cowering together, biding time for the whole episode to be forgotten by everyone around them, and Jesus suddenly appeared to them. The doors were still bolted shut!

They hung out with Jesus for another few weeks and gained a new kind of respect, no that’s too soft a word, though I don’t know a word that would capture what they felt. What do you feel when you see someone risen from 2 days dead? They were absolutely blown away and their fervour for following this man was magnified hundredfold.

Suddenly the miracles stopped being trickery and became miracles again. Suddenly all the stuff he said took on new authority. Suddenly everything made sense. This was it. This was the beginning of a new world order : God had at last said enough is enough, the time for his reign was now. The Romans would be kicked out, the Jews would be seen as God’s chosen people once again…except…

It’s kind of weird how this next thing happened. The 11 disciples were together with Jesus and one of them asked what everyone was thinking. “When will you restore the kingdom to Israel?” it was a theo-political question : a bit of God, but a lot of politics. Just like when they had spent 400 years crying out to God for freedom from Egyptian oppression, they were crying out to God to free them from this roman rule. Low political self-esteem is always bad for people. They wanted their identity back.

Jesus replied that the time was a mystery and he deflected the question onto another task. He had just spent 37 days with them talking about the kingdom of Heaven and still they thought it was a kingdom with geo-physical boundaries, still they thought it was getting their land back and things returning to how it was when David ruled.

He basically looked at them and said, “you’re still thinking too small. Israel, is loved by God, but no more or less than anyone else. Stay here and wait because something incredible is going to happen. The kingdom is at hand, but obviously not how you think. It’s bigger than that.

“Do you remember when I said to you that John baptised with water, but you will be baptised with the holy spirit? Just you wait. Because when this happens, you will tell everyone in the world about me : there is the kingdom : those who believe!”

and then he ascended into heaven.

Now let’s break into groups and talk about what that might look like.

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Ascension is weird. No two ways about it. I don’t know how it happened, but there are only two other accounts of this happening in the bible. The great old testament prophet Elijah, who was taken to heaven in a chariot in a whirlwind and Enoch who tradition has it, never died : genesis says that he was no more. But here is the key to this : it’s not a focal point. When he was writing Acts, Luke was purposeful in not majoring on this peculiar event. There isn’t a lot of effort put into describing what it looked like simply because the main point he is getting across is that the group of 120 were going to be baptised in the Holy Spirit and take the Good News to all the world. And this is actually the whole point of this book. Blessed to be a blessing.

Now thankfully there were a couple of angels standing by to help them out. The disciples were getting neck aches peering into the sky : I imagine much like you would watch a space shuttle launch, waiting until you couldn’t see it any more. The two angels brought the disciples back to earth. “what you’ve just seen will be repeated. As Jesus left he will return. Don’t keep looking up there. There’s more work to do. Move beyond the miracle and get on with the task at hand.”

It’s hard to let your dreams go. Even miraculously, there still some processing to take place. We are all drawn to the familiar. We don’t want to be left in a lurch. And here is Jesus telling them to wait : no time frame, it could be years, it could be days or hours, but they were told to wait. It’s a bit perplexing as to why they had to wait.

But note that this question is not asked. Note that there was no hassle with the waiting. What did they do? They devoted themselves to prayer. There were 120 men and women in a room in Jerusalem who were devoted to prayer. What were they praying for? Why were they praying? The first church, without the baptism of the holy spirit, devoted praying. They say you should start out as you mean to continue. And they did.

Pentecost. Originally a day celebrated 50 days after the Passover night. A time to be thankful for God’s provision by offering the first fruits of the harvest on the third day and then on the 50th day, Pentecost, offer bread made from the harvest. In the first century it had become a time for gathering together many of the Jews who had spread out all around the Mediterranean basin. It was a time of cultural identity and unity. A gathering of the diverse and spread out into one location to celebrate God’s goodness and provision. What better day to receive the holy spirit : the divine leveller who makes all who believe in Jesus equal. No class, no race, not even gender distinctions, all people are regarded as equal in the light of God’s love. Diversity brought together and unified.

So they are in this room, praying their hearts out. Break into your groups again and describe what you see happening in this text. Acts 2:1-4.

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So the holy spirit came and brought a gift of speaking other languages to the gathered believers. It was a sign. A symbol of the good news of Jesus being understood by all peoples. Those who had gathered from all these different regions heard their native languages being spoken. And they were amazed because they were being spoken by fishermen : uneducated sorts. They wondered how this could be? A crowd gathered of curious onlookers who were looking on at this mass of 120 people jabbering away in different languages. A number were saying they looked like they were a bunch of drunkards.

It was quite spectacular. But the miracle wasn’t the point. Move beyond the miracle and we discover it all in Peter’s famous speech on the day of Pentecost. Peter had overheard one of the crowd sneering “drunken louts, would shut up and go home…” and so he gathered the eleven other disciples (they’d just added someone to replace Judas who had killed himself) and addressed the crowd,

“Stop and listen! Stop and listen! Everyone, stop and listen” he said in much the same way a youth pastor might try and quieten a youth group to give instructions.

The crowd finally stopped.

“these people aren’t drunk. It’s only 9.00 am in the morning. Think again. This is bigger and better than anything you’ve ever thought. You’re prayers have been answered. Freedom is within reach. The kingdom of Heaven is here … now! It’s like what the prophet Joel said in the Bible.

“He says that :

In the final days, the spirit of God is going to be poured out upon everyone. Not just the jews, but everyone. Your sons and daughters will say things that speak right from the heart of God. Your young men will see visions and your old men will have dreams : all sourced from the heart of God and for the benefit of the community of believers.

“No-one is exempt. Not even those that the world calls second class citizens. Yes, they too will tell us things from the heart of God. There will be signs everywhere you look : some of it will be catastrophic in appearance. All will go dark, the moon will change colour, because the coming of the lord is a magnificent and glorious day. Nature will tremble!

Then everyone who calls on the name of God, who cries out to him from the depths of their heart, they will be saved!

“you Israelites who are here. Listen to me. What good can come out of Nazareth you might say? I tell you, the most incredible good you can ever know. Jesus : a man who carried the approval of God as he performed great deeds of power : you all saw them. This Jesus, divinely appointed according to God’s plan. And you, yes you, you killed him by crucifying him as though he were a roman criminal.

And God rose him from the death because though you killed him, you need to know that not even death, that absolute and fearful end to our life, that all fear to some extent because it is so certain, so inevitable, not even death could hold him in it’s power.

“Remember what king David said in one of the songs he wrote?

“the lord is before me and beside me. Supporting me so that I will not waver from the right path. And so I was satisfied and content, I sang out because it was so good : and even more than that, I now live in hope of something greater than this mortal existence.

“You won’t just let me rot in the ground. You have let me know the important things about life, and you will fulfil me when your presence surrounds me forever.”

“Do you remember David writing that? did he not die? Did he not rot? Isn’t his grave still a place we can visit and be confident his bones are still there?

“But he knew because he was a prophet that God would have one of his ancestors be put on the throne. And as a prophet he saw that this ancestor would rise from the grave : You won’t just let me rot in the ground.

“Let me tell you something. This Jesus, God raised from the grave. You gave up on him, left him for dead. But we saw the living Jesus in the flesh. Because of this favour that God bestowed on him, his Spirit poured onto Jesus, we have now had the same spirit poured onto us : this is what you see!

So, let the entire Jewish community, know for sure and without a doubt that God has made Jesus both Lord and Messiah. That’s right. This Jesus that you left for dead and did not believe, he is the one who will save us.”

And the crowd hushed. No-one seemed to care that Peter hadn’t used the correct hermeneutical method with his scripture references. No-one seemed to care that his argument just didn’t quite make sense. But instead, that stood there unified by a crime. If this peter fellow was right, and he was quite convincing, then they’d just tortured their saviour. They knew that it was a Jewish thing that had happened. They knew that it was a thing that while they weren’t there, they would’ve done the same. They as a community had tortured their saviour, and if I was the saviour, I’d be pretty mad about that.

The silence lingered and people started to shake their heads for they felt so ashamed of what they’d done. “what do we do? What do we do now?”

Peter looked around the crowd and it was quite a crowd too. He saw that they were distressed and they reminded him of a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Aimless, wanderers through this theology of life.

“you are on a road that leads nowhere except away from God’s heart. Cry out to Jesus. Stop. Turn around and face him again. Be baptised as a symbol of your commitment to Jesus, that you have been reclaimed by him. Your sins will be forgiven, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

And about three thousand people were baptised and added to the community of believers that day : the day the church was born.

Now they experienced some pretty whacky things to get to that point. The spirit brought about some crazy events and the temptation is to get caught up in these things. but the reality is that these things are not central to what characterised the body of believers. They will know we are Christians not by our signs and wonders but by our love for one another. Move beyond the miracles.

We aren’t a community that sees many signs and wonders. Miracles aren’t performed here on a daily basis. And I don’t think that this means we are less spiritual. We are actually a church that demonstrates enormous amounts of love and care for each other. We have hope that people are worth investing time into, that they can be restored to God, that our and their lives will be better for being connected with Jesus the author of life. We come here, because we are grateful for God’s interference in our lives, no matter how small or large that might be. We come here because we hope to connect with God and with each other. We are a community of hope who are blessed to be a blessing. All of the programming is a waste of time if it doesn’t bless the community around us in some way. that blessing could (and should by all accounts) be worked out by the change in our lives as we live out there. The miracle of God’s love for us should point people to God. our programmes grow us and make us stronger and deeper Christians, so that the world might be blessed through us.

We don’t wait for a certain level of maturity before we are a blessing to this world. Remember that 50 days before peter gave his speech he betrayed Jesus. how mature was he? His speech was empowered by the holy spirit and the grace of God. He spoke because he had been blessed. He didn’t defend himself or his claims, he offered a better way. Reconcile yourself to God.

The miracles were a prompting, but I suspect that Peter spoke more from his new found hope that was reinforced by the gracious and loving restoration that Jesus put him through only a month earlier. Jesus forgave him for denying him three times on the night he was crucified. Jesus loved him unconditionally and Peter knew that. And he experienced that hope and took it to this level here.

With the new hope that the early church had came a new responsibility. Their hope was that they were made right with God. Their responsibility was to share this with others around them.

Our hope is that we are made right with God, our responsibility is that we share this with those around us : and it’s got far more to do with what we do than we probably would like to think.