Analog Church 03: Pentecost

This week's reading is Acts two, one through thirteen.

When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place, and suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting, and divided tongues as a fire appeared to them and rested on each of them, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and to get began to speak languages, or began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.

Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven, and at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one was hearing them speak in his own language, and they were amazed and astonished, saying, Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?

And how is it that we hear each of us in his own native language, Parthians and Medes and Alamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Dugia, and Cappadocia, Pontius and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Livia belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians.

We hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God, and all were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, What does this mean?

But others, mocking, said, They are filled with new wine.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Good morning.

Welcome to church this morning.

My name is James Rathman, I'm the lead pastor here.

We uh have two ways to get to neck to get connected here at Redemption Church Denver.

We gather large and we gather small.

If you're wondering what our large group gathering is, you're already at it.

So fear no more.

You know half of what we do here.

Our small group gatherings take place in people's homes throughout the week.

We call them redemption groups.

And you can sign up to be a part of one of those downstairs in the lobby at the welcome table.

So there'll be someone there with an RC uh logo on their t-shirt and carrying an iPad in a white case, and they'll hand you that, and then you'll fill in your information, and you'll be signed up for a redemption group.

So it's just that simple.

Uh also coming up in the next couple of weeks, something I want to put on your radar.

Uh October 14th, we're going to be doing a fundraiser for uh we're partnering with the folks that we buy coffee from.

So have you had our coffee downstairs?

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

What do you think?

Yeah.

Big fans.

I'm a big fan as well.

So we uh are partnered with uh they're a local company, they're called Queen City Collective Coffee.

And the reason collective is in there is because they uh partner directly with the farmers who grow the beans in several different nations around the world.

And their goal is to really build relationships with them such that our buying their coffee really benefits the people who are growing it.

And so uh the uh women who grow the Rwandan coffee that we sometimes serve here came to them and said, you know, one of the things that would really benefit our community is building a community center.

We think that's one of the things that would be of most benefit to us.

And so they came to them with the plans.

This is a relationship that they want to continue for a long time, and we want to continue with them by investing in these local communities.

And so we uh uh decided to partner with Queen City Collective Coffee, QCC, and uh uh fundraise for this community center.

So that's one of the outreaches we want to accomplish as a church.

So October 14th, stick around after the service, we will be doing a cupping of the Rwandan coffee, and you'll have opportunities to donate.

Um okay.

Let's pray.

Then we'll get into the text for the day.

Father, we don't stand a chance of understanding and comprehending your word if your spirit doesn't move in us.

Lord, we need you to apply these words to our hearts in a way that makes sense for us today and helps us see your glory moving into the world in places that we otherwise would have looked over it.

Lord, and brings courage where we often live out of fear.

Father, I pray that your spirit would move today in a like manner to the way that it moved as we read in Pentecost, that we might be filled with it and that barriers might be broken by your spirit.

Father, we lift this up in Jesus' name.

So, we are in the midst of a series entitled Analog Church, and the point is that we're looking at the first four chapters of the book of Acts, which uh chronologically moves through the development of the early church.

So we're seeing the early church form.

And the reason that we're looking at that as a kind of analog for our church today, so we're so we're seeing how they did things, and we're seeing, okay, by analogy, how does that apply to the way we should be operating as a church today?

What we're pursuing is the same sort of day one clarity that the early church had.

How do we have that same type of clarity of mission and clarity of purpose in our lives as individuals today, as well as us as a church, as a local church body here in Denver, Colorado?

What does the early church have to say for how we should be operating today?

How can we live?

Can we live with that same sort of day one clarity that they had?

Today's passage is when a sort of depth charge goes off in the early church and starts this incredible explosive movement.

What we see today is the chur the the apostles have been gathered together and they finally receive the Holy Spirit in a very dramatic fashion, like tongues of fire floating down on people's heads, which is a something you typically remember when that happens.

Um man, that just made me link a thing.

So this is one of my favorite quotes that I've ever heard.

Uh, so I'm just gonna share it.

This is unrelated to anything that we're doing.

If that frustrates you, you probably won't like it here.

So the uh this is just an outrageous quote.

So there's this like category of uh Catholic priests that like specialize in exorcisms.

I don't know about all that, I don't know about all that.

All right, but I read a quote from one of them in Time magazine that said, uh, the first time I heard a demon growl was like the first time I smelled margarita pizza.

You just don't forget that.

And I thought, that is the most Italian thing that I have ever heard.

A Catholic priest comparing a demon growl to margarita pizza.

Anyway, that's just a completely unrelated.

So you don't forget tongues of fire coming down on your head.

It's just something that you don't you don't soon forget.

And it launches the church.

So when I was uh my sophomore and junior year at CU Boulder, I took these classes, uh, the end of my sophomore semester and the beginning of my junior semester, and it was uh basically like an entry-level humanities introduction.

Uh I was studying philosophy and I was like, is there any way to make my major more vague?

Maybe I'll try humanities generally.

And so I tried that, and there was uh uh one professor in this sort of two-semester introductory class.

His name was Anthony Aberaji.

Uh, he was he was uh one of those professors who was just very cool.

He was like an Indiana Jones type of cool professor.

And we walked through uh Greek mythology and ancient Greek writings like the Odyssey and moved all the way through uh into medieval writing and then into Enlightenment and modernism and postmodernism.

And so we tracked through following in a literature class, an art class, and a music class, following all of these things sort of throughout time for the past 2,000 years.

And it was one of my favorite experiences ever.

And uh what kept happening to me over and over again through that experience was I would see, oh, this is a uh, I would read something and be like, that's why I think that.

We'd read Homer's The Odyssey, and it's like, oh, that's why I think men should be as I think men should be.

It's because there's this ancient document that has informed the culture that I'm a part of for 2,000 years that was written to instruct men on what men should act like in a society.

Why do I think that?

Well, look at this text that I am built on.

Or we look at these enlightenment values like liberty of thought, freedom of self-expression.

Not everyone for all time has thought those were good things.

I do think those are good things.

Why?

Because they're built into the culture that I'm a part of.

In many ways, I kept finding I'm indistinguishable from the culture that I'm a part of.

And so it became one of my favorite things to see was uh when I'd read something and it and the light bulb would go off and be like, oh, that's why I think like that.

And all of a sudden it'd start to find some sort of context for myself in the world.

It was a thrilling experience.

And so I went to the professor, and I uh sat down in one of those big professor leather chairs during office hours, and I was like, I have this idea for a thesis.

I'm realizing that all that we're learning in this class is explaining aspects of the culture that we're a part of.

And I think that you can trace through history the reasons that we think the things we think now.

And he was like, Yeah.

That's like the whole point of the class.

This is not like a thesis.

This is not a new idea.

And so it was sort of like if someone came up to me after a sermon and was like, I think you want us to believe in Jesus, I'd be like, Yeah, but I didn't feel like I like snuck that in.

Uh so here's what I didn't realize at that time.

It's that I realized that I was a part of this culture that informed so much of the things that I just took for granted.

And what I didn't see at the time was that there's there's this depth charge that went off beneath this culture that I'm a part of.

And that depth charge that went off, it informs all the best thinking that has been done about our culture.

It informs all the best insights that we have.

It it informs the reason we trust the scientific method.

It informs the reason we believe there ought to be human rights and that there's dignity of the individual.

It it informs the reason that we think that there can be power in sacrifice, even when it looks like a loss.

And what we're looking at today is that depth charge.

Now, depth charge is a phrase that I'm borrowing because I heard it this past week from a historian named Tom Holland, which is also the name of the kid who plays Spider-Man, but they're different.

Uh Tom Holland, the historian, uh, has spent his life studying ancient Greek and Rome, and so he's written a lot of popular books describing these different cultures and societies as they existed.

And so he sort of has this same way of thinking as I did as, well, I'm really just a product of the Greeks and the Romans.

I'm really a product in my thinking of this old culture.

But then something started to go off.

So here's what he said.

Look at two quotes of his.

He says, when he's studying ancient Greek and Greece and Rome, he says, this is a really terrifyingly alien world.

And the more you look at it, the more you realize it was really built on systematic exploitation.

The entire economy founded on slave labor.

The sexual economy is founded on the absolute right of free Roman males to have sex with anyone that they want in any way that they'd like.

And in almost every way, this is a world that is unspeakably cruel to our way of thinking.

And so this worried me more and more.

And I was thinking, I'm clearly not, as I'd vaguely imagined, an heir of the Greeks and Romans.

And I began to realize that actually, in almost every way, I'm Christian.

And I began to realize Paul, Saint Paul, the Apostle Paul, who, although in many ways he seems much less familiar a figure than Cicero, a kind of urbane man with property problems, in almost every way, this very small amount of writing, which he's just referring to, the seven Pauline letters in the Old Testament, was almost everything that explains the modern world.

This is an atheist, contemporary, academic historian who's writing this.

He's saying, I'm looking into ancient Greek and Roman culture, and I thought that that's where I'd find my heritage, and then he sees just how deeply cruel of an environment it is, and he thinks, well, then where did I come from?

What has really shaped my way of thinking?

And he says, I realized in almost every way I'm a Christian.

He's not, in maybe the most important way.

Not maybe.

In definitely the most important way, he's not, but he's saying culturally, I'm really informed mostly by Christianity.

He says this.

He says, I think if we're talking about Paul, I think of him as a kind of depth charge, deep beneath the foundations of the classical world.

And it's not anything that you particularly notice if you're in Corinth or Alexandria, but then it starts rippling outwards.

Paul sets out ripple effects of revolution throughout Western history.

What he doesn't go back to is that we're what we see happen through Paul, through these seven little letters that this atheist historian is saying rippled throughout Western history to a greater degree than any other form of writing.

What we see happen through Paul, of this depth charge that goes off, in Acts we see happen in Paul.

That there's a total change of him by the Holy Spirit entering into him.

And that change is the one that had previously impacted the community that he would become a part of, which is the early Christian church.

And today, at Pentecost, we see that depth charge happen in the world.

We see that depth charge go off in the church, which informs all of Western culture for the until now.

It describes who we are, the best parts of ourselves can be traced back to this.

So I I do that in large part to sort of tickle the ears of hopefully the non-Christians that are joining us this morning.

That you might see, you know, in order to understand myself and the ethical assumptions that I just take for granted, I need to do a deep look at Christianity.

And for the Christians among us to learn and see what is this depth charge that really took place, could that happen in our church and in our lives today?

Or is that sort of a one-time deal?

Okay, so we're going to look at the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

And we're just going to look at two things.

Pentecost, what happened, and then what does it mean?

We're going to go over what happened, look at two Old Testament sort of uh counterpoints to what happened, and then we're going to go over what does this mean for us as a church today.

So we'll start off.

Acts 2, 1 to 4.

When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place, and suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.

And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

So, where are we so far in the story?

Right before this happens.

Jesus ascended into heaven, right before he ascended, he tells the apostles, You will be my witnesses, starting here in Jerusalem, and then into Judea, and then Samaria, and then all the way to the ends of the earth.

But you can't go until you're empowered by my Holy Spirit.

There's this great promise that I'm sending you, this agent of empowerment, this helper that you need, who is the very Spirit of God Himself that might dwell in us, so that we might have this immediate access to God.

And it's that spirit's empowerment that the apostles are gathered together waiting for.

Last week we saw how there was one missing, and so they rolled some dice and got a new one.

And this week we see that when they are gathered together, the spirit finally falls.

They recognize the historical moment that they were in, that they couldn't move without the spirit.

And so they are awaiting the empowerment of the spirit, which comes at Pentecost.

So what we see first is that suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind.

And it says like a mighty rushing wind, which means that this is a metaphor.

It wasn't a mighty rushing wind, but it was this sound that if you had to compare it to something, it would be like a mighty wind that fills the whole room.

And what we see is that God, through using an event like that, he's starting to sort of conjure their memory.

Because in what he's conjuring their memory of is when the Israelites were gathered before Mount Sinai, and a sound like a rushing wind surrounded them.

And they were made a covenant with God.

And at that time, at that covenant, it was uh, well, I'm getting ahead of myself.

The wind.

Next, there was tongues of fire.

Wind conjures memories of Sinai.

Next, there are tongues of fire.

Tongues of fire land on the heads of those gathered.

They receive the Holy Spirit, and the tongues were obviously symbolic of some sort of language that they were empowered to have because they begin speaking outside of their native languages and in ways that every foreigner who was gathered there was able to understand.

So immediately these tongues of fire empower them directly towards the mission that Jesus had promised them.

They immediately equip them to be able to spread the gospel cross-culturally.

That's what we see happen when the tongues of fire land.

So Pentecost is an interesting day.

It's called Pentacost, Penta is 50, and that's because it takes place 50 days after the Day of Atonement.

And it was one of the uh Jewish feasts that was described in Levitical law.

Uh so wait 50 days after the Day of Atonement, and then you have this feast, the day of Pentecost.

And uh it represented two things.

It represented a celebration of the grain harvest.

So once the grain harvest is brought in, then you have this celebration.

And likewise it began to represent the receiving of the law by the Jewish people at Mount Sinai.

Because they had come to believe that 50 days after the Exodus, they received the law at Mount Sinai.

So celebrating 50 days after the atonement is an appropriate time to celebrate the reception of the law.

And you can see that it's appropriate that God chooses this particular celebration to send his spirit.

Because there are so many parallels between the events of Pentecost and the events of Mount Sinai, when the Jewish people received the Ten Commandments after moving through the flood with Charlton Heston.

So here's what we see in Exodus, Exodus 19, 16 to 19.

On the morning of the third day, there were thunders and lightnings and a thick cloud on the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast, so that all the people in the camp trembled.

Then Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God, and they took their stand at the foot of the mountain.

People gathered together.

Now Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the Lord had descended on it in fire.

The smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled greatly.

And as the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder, Moses spoke, and God answered him in thunder.

There's some similarities and there's some dissimilarities.

See, God's presence on the mountain at Mount Sinai, it cultivates this incredible fear.

And it doesn't drive the people towards a speaking and a proclaiming the good works of God.

Instead, it silences them.

And it's appropriate that for the giving of that first covenant, a covenant that said, Here are my laws, obey them and live, disobey them and you will die.

A giving of that of that type of covenant, it is appropriate that it would be marked by an incredible fear.

If fear at two things, one, the very presence of God drove them to terror, and two, if they understood the nature of themselves and the nature of the covenant at all, then they should have been deeply terrified.

Because they should have known we can't obey those laws.

What type of a hope is this that we are receiving in a covenant like this?

It will certainly be a curse on our own heads.

You see, that old covenant, the giving of the law, throughout time we see it expose over and over again the depth of depravity of humanity.

It's not that they didn't know.

Philosophers spend so much time.

End of sentence.

But they spend so much time going back and forth, seeing can we piece together what right and wrong is?

And they develop different theories so that they can articulate it to each other and themselves.

Here's what's right and here's what's wrong.

What a waste.

We know what right and wrong is.

It looks like we know why we can't do it.

Why do we constantly find ourselves betraying our own word?

Why do we constantly find ourselves cowarding before someone who needs defending?

Why do we live our lives in those places of fear and hiding when we know what right and wrong is?

It's because the old covenant was meant to expose a depth of corruption in the human heart.

It was meant to bind us up, to tie us up in an explicit corruption.

That way we might be driven towards something better, towards a hope of a new covenant.

And that new covenant is what we see come down at Pentecost.

It's a wind and a fire, and I'm sure that on some level it was frightful, and yet it immediately causes the exclaiming of the great works of God, so that everyone present was able to understand it.

It's a different sort of covenant that is taking place at Pentecost.

A law is not written on tablets that are outside of you that you walk up to and try and read and discern.

This new covenant, the law by the Spirit, is written on our hearts.

It's not one that if we fulfill, then we will perhaps receive such a thing as an immediate communion with the Spirit of God.

It's something that has been fulfilled for us in Christ, so that by grace, in our disobedience now, He cleanses us, so that we might receive the Holy Spirit by no fault of our own, but only, only by the pure grace of Jesus.

This new covenant is a different thing.

The writer of Hebrews makes this connection so well that I just wanted to read it.

So this is Hebrews 12, 18 to 24.

For you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them.

For they could not endure the order that was given.

This is the type of holiness that they saw in God, realized at Mount Sinai.

If even a beast touches the mountain, you have to kill it.

Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, I tremble with fear.

But even at Pentecost, we see the beginnings of a different mountain.

But you have come to Mount Zion, into the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, into innumerable angels in festal gathering, into the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, into God, the judge of all, into the spirits of righteousness made perfect, of the righteous, made perfect, into Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, into the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

Do you remember when Cain killed Abel?

And then God comes to Cain and he's like, Where's your brother?

And he's like, Am I my brother's keeper?

And uh God says, Your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground.

Abel's blood was crying to God from the ground.

And what was it telling God?

It was telling him, Cain is guilty.

Jesus' blood has a better message than Abel's.

It cries to our Heavenly Father as well.

And by Jesus' blood, it cries out a message that is better than Abel's, one that says, all who are sprinkled in my blood are clean.

There is a new covenant established between God and man.

And that's what we see happen at Pentecost.

When you see the similarity between Mount Sinai and Pentecost, it opens your eyes to see that this new covenant is so utterly different.

It is one truly based in grace by the sacrifice in the work of Christ, which is given to us.

Freely given.

Unearned.

If you've been a Christian for a while, you know that, and it may sound repetitive, but I bet you forgot this morning.

Unearned.

Freely given.

Jesus' blood is better news for us.

So, next, uh, what happens?

Pentecost continues and God grants this unity.

Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven, and at this sound, the multitude came together and they were bewildered, because each one was hearing them speak in his own language.

And they were amazed and astonished, saying, Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?

And how is it that we hear each of us in his own native language?

Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadacia, Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, Egypt, and parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians, we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.

So the Spirit falls, everyone who the Spirit falls upon begins speaking in tongues, and they're speaking in the tongues of the people who are present.

They're speaking these languages so that those who are present who have gathered from the whole Roman Empire, all the Jewish dispersion, gathers in Jerusalem for the celebration of the Pentecost.

And they all speak these different languages.

And taking place in the common vernacular, the mighty works of God are being displayed.

You know, this isn't the only time in history that that's taken place.

A lot of people credit the explosion of the Reformation with all of a sudden the Bible is translated into the common vernacular.

It's no longer tied up in just Latin, but here it is in German, which, if you speak German, means you can read it.

And it's accessible to me, and now these words that were so vacant, that were so distant from me, all of a sudden they're having a real impact on my life.

That same sort of thing is taking place where in this common vernacular, in the everyday language and experience of those who are present, they are hearing the mighty works of God proclaimed.

You see, this event also has a perfect Old Testament counterpoint.

That if we understand, we can see, oh, there's something deep, there's a deep reversal happening.

In the same way that this is, in a sense, a deep reversal of the covenant of Sinai by a fulfillment of it.

This is a deep reversal of a curse that had moved into the world by our sin.

So let's go back way back to Genesis chapter 11.

Genesis 11 · chapter mention

Uh this is uh people are young at this point.

And it says, Now the whole earth had one language and the same words.

That's the setting.

And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.

And they said to one another, Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly.

And they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar.

Then they said, Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.

And the Lord came down to see the city in the tower which the children of man had built, and the Lord said, Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do, and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.

Come, let us go down there, confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another's speech.

So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.

Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth, and from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth.

See, uh Babel is the perfect counterpoint to Pentecost.

What happens is the whole earth has one language, all of humanity is gathered together in this unity, and that makes sense.

Because God's original covenant with humanity, his original command is be fruitful, multiply, cover the whole earth, and take dominion of it.

And man, who at this point had been corrupted by sin, they see even that commandment of take dominion of the whole earth, and they say, no, no, no, we won't spread, we won't multiply, we won't bring order where there is more chaos into the world.

We will let that remain so that we can make a name for ourselves.

This is not about making a name for the God who created us.

This is about making a name for ourselves.

So we will not spread, we will gather in one place, and we will use this capacity that God gave us to glorify Him, and we will turn it inwardly that we might just bring glory to ourselves.

Now, when humanity does that, chaos multiplies in the world.

Things get worse for everyone.

You can hear echoes in this passage of the uh Jews as slaves in Egypt, being able to being told make more brick with less supplies.

The evil increases.

And so God comes down and he says, This great capacity that I have given humans, that I have given them so that they might bring me glory.

They have turned on themselves.

And notice it says God doesn't go up to check out this great tower that humans can make, he goes down to look at it.

Because the glory that we produce together is nothing compared to the glory of our Creator.

It's such a futile endeavor.

And as he comes down, he says, I'm going to mitigate the harm that these people can cause, and so I'm going to create divisions in them.

And I'm going to create these separations in them so that they no longer will bring a chaos into the world by their unity, but by their diversity instead, we will mitigate the harm that they can cause.

Because they won't be able to rally together against me.

So what we see then taking place at Babel is perfectly undone at Pentecost.

Because at Pentecost, these things, this division that had been put in place between humanity to mitigate the harm that we can cause is now made a unity again.

And why?

Because God has changed his people's hearts by the Spirit, so that the old command that they were originally given could apply in a new way.

Go forth into all the world.

And as I told you to take dominion before, but you couldn't in your sinfulness, now go forth into all the world and proclaim a new kingdom that is coming.

By my spirit, be witnesses in all the world, through all cultures, to all tribes, nations, tongues, people, and proclaim that a new kingdom is coming, and it's one that means renewal of all creation, so that sin which corrupted everything in the world might fully be undone.

Far as the curse is found.

Because the people at Pentecost are given a new spirit, they're able to accomplish the mission, which is the original mission of creation, that God's glory might be spread throughout the whole world.

With the new spirit in them, they're able to accomplish that.

And so the unity is restored.

He gives a unity back to his people when it transcends any cultural norm.

When I was in school, we'll return to that, uh looking up at my professor like the girls looked up at Indiana Jones in the beginning.

And I was discovering the very makeup of my own identity.

And I was seeing there's a there's a reason that I think the things that I think, and I realized, oh, this whole quest to find the authentic me is probably foolish.

Because the project that is each of you as an individual has been taking place for millennia.

You just haven't realized your context yet.

And I realized that I was so deeply connected to my culture that in many ways I was inseparable from it.

Indistinguishable from my own culture.

And this means that I think and speak in so many ways that are completely irreconcilable with so many people all over the world.

Even people in our own country here, even us in this room.

Where we can have conversations that are from such disparate places that they're literally incomiserable.

We can't hear each other as we say them.

One of uh my favorite people who really put his finger on this and really realized this is a man named Leslie Nubigan.

Uh, a man named Leslie, I'm pretty sure that's a Johnny Cash song.

A boy named Sue.

That's the Johnny Cash song.

I just wanted to fill everyone in.

Uh grew up in Scotland.

And when he grew up in Scotland, uh he spent most of his adult life then as a missionary to India.

So he spends about 40 years as a missionary to India, and uh then he comes back to Scotland to sort of finish out his days, and uh he realizes that the culture had changed so much in his time away from Scotland that he was expecting to return home to a culture that would finally be intuitive, and he realized that that culture is long gone.

I actually need to approach my own home culture in the same way that I approached moving to India because the culture, the ground had shifted under his feet so much.

And of that type of an experience, he says this, and from this quote we'll get two principles.

He says this: as a young missionary, I was confident that the critical evaluations I made about Hindu beliefs and practices were securely founded on God's revelation in Christ.

As I grew older, I learned to see that they were shaped more than I had realized by my own culture.

And I could not have come to this critical stance in relation to my own culture without the experience of living in another, an Indian culture.

The assumption of these chapters is that the gospel provides the stance from which all culture is to be evaluated.

That's point one.

The gospel provides the stance from which all culture is to be evaluated.

Point two, but the gospel, as I have said, is always embodied in some cultural form.

Point one, the gospel provides the position that we need to evaluate all culture, which means when we become a Christian, when the gospel becomes the most fundamental thing that we believe about reality, from there we stand back and we see the culture that we are in, the culture that we have become a part of, and we evaluate it, maybe for the first time.

And we see a lot of these things in my culture that I have just taken for granted, these aren't uh truths that we hold to be self-evident, to borrow from one of our cultural documents.

These instead are uh these are just sort of cultural contingencies that I happen to have been brought up in.

And we're given a new stance from which we can look at our culture and say, there are things in this culture that are glorious and good and obviously intended by God since the creation of the world.

And there are things in my culture that are wicked and deceptive and are drawing my heart away from God.

And so we're able to make these accurate assessments of other cultures and then even the culture that we're a part of.

But making that assessment, stepping back from our culture, that does not mean that we all of a sudden are removed from the cultures that we're a part of.

That does not mean that we have in this pure vial a perfectly distilled gospel that we perfectly understand and then can hand over to another culture that they might have this pure vial of a gospel uncontaminated by the culture.

Because of the second point, which is the gospel is always embodied in some cultural form.

That's a good thing.

The gospel has parts of every culture that it celebrates and parts of every culture that it critiques.

And when we understand the gospel in that way, that it's making a critique of us as well as celebrating certain aspects of us, and that it's doing that for all cultures across the board, then we no longer confuse in our presentation those things in our Christianity which are not actually in our Christianity, they're just in our culture.

This is why Christianity, unlike any other religion, is able to cross cultural bounds and allow the Culture to stay intact and be enhanced.

No other religion seems to have that capacity.

When you see the spread of Islam, you also see the spread of a dress code.

And it's a dress code founded in a particular region of the world, which is the region of the world in which Islam developed.

But you don't see that with Christianity.

African Christians dress like Africans.

Chinese Christians dress like Chinese.

Denver Christians dress like we're always about to go on a hike in the 70s.

And so our Christianity informs our culture, but it doesn't remove us from our culture.

Now that provides us a really unique place to relate with people.

Where all of a sudden we have a new way of being heard across these cultural lines.

And in I I've I've been alive a short while.

But since that time, I've never seen such completely incommiserable sides of our nation.

Where we really and truly can't hear each other.

We can't listen.

We're on utterly different frequencies.

There's at least a language barrier of difference in the way.

It's at least the same as a language barrier that's in the way of our country right now.

And what we see on Pentecost is this Holy Spirit event, of which throughout the book of Acts, there's seven.

There's seven Holy Spirit events in the book of Acts, and they all show the same thing.

They all show that the gospel moves across cultures.

That these normal, everyday boundaries and barriers that we live our lives with relationally, the gospel moves through those as though they weren't barriers, but they were roads.

That's what we see at Pentecost.

When I was writing this sermon this past week, this was obviously a deeply politically tumultuous week.

Can I get an amen?

That's the first time I've done that, but it's the first time it's felt appropriate.

And so I was writing and I was like, this seems, this text seems to speak so clearly to uh people that couldn't understand each other and now they can understand each other.

And so I kind of had like a Jerry Maguire moment and I just like wrote, which rarely happens.

Normally writing a sermon is like, oh no, this is so terrible.

But I I I just wrote, uh, which was which was nice.

Oh, so I I'm gonna close out and I'm just gonna read you what I wrote.

Because I I want to get the words right.

Because I don't like to talk about politics.

But I I want to get the words right.

Because this is a golden opportunity for us as a church.

It's like the way is being paved for us.

And if we look at it through the through the wrong lens, it will look like barriers.

But if we get our lens right, this can be the most influential time in church history.

I'll begin reading now.

I said, I'm required by law not to speak about politics.

I can't endorse a candidate or instruct your voting.

Some churches do it anyway, but they shouldn't.

Because our particular nonprofit designation prohibits it, and I think that's good.

Because the separation of church and state is first a Christian idea and second, an enlightenment value, along with human rights, liberty of thought, reason, and justice.

The Enlightenment being one of those revolutions sparked by the cultural depth charge of Christianity.

This past week has included one of the most emotional political dramas I've ever seen.

Nearly everyone I've spoken with has talked about it and has an opinion one way or the other.

In all honesty, I've found most of them baseless.

We don't know what happened, but we have different incentives to pretend that we do.

That victimhood could be a power is a Christian idea.

So the thought that conservatives calling the desire to see victimhood demonstrated as a power is innately unethical, that's flawed.

Likewise, victimhood is meant to be a power that's couched in a deeper hope that true justice will be realized because this life is not all there is.

So the liberal mind, considering that all victimhood ought to become power, says that justice can be separated from the truth in a devastating way, taking into our own hands that which exclusively belongs to God.

In either case, the political conversations centered on these values have become incomiserable.

Happening on AM and FM frequencies so that the conversation becomes shouting into voids and chasing the dopamine hit and listening to someone who agrees with you.

But the reality is the languages have become so different that we can't understand each other.

We are scattered like babel.

The Holy Spirit brings with it this incredible hope.

That the good news can be heard in any language, and even more than that, it shows that the very differences in our language are the mechanisms that God has installed into creation to bring the surprise that knocks us out of our stupor when we hear a foreigner speaking in a language we can understand.

What surprised the people at Pentecost?

They weren't shocked by how under how uh they weren't shocked by how confusing it was.

They were shocked they could understand.

They were shocked that they could hear something from someone so different from them and then understand it.

Without that difference, there's no opportunity for that type of shock.

I've heard so much despair that the distance in our values has become so far that the gospel will be relegated to one side of the aisle, and the church will need to simply buckle down and weather this period on the cultural sidelines.

But that fear is not grounded in Scripture.

It is deeply neglecting a true doctrine of the Holy Spirit.

These vast differences are not obstacles to the gospel, they are the very channel it moves through, creating a third type of people in a dichotomous world.

First, it did it in a world of Jews and Greeks, so we are saying it can't do it in a world of conservatives and liberals?

The Spirit empowers us to be that third type of people.

No longer hoodwinked by a false deistic conservatism or a liberalism trying to understand itself in atheistic terms, not realizing they're chopping off their own moral legs.

This is not a time for the sidelines.

It is a time for true Christian boldness.

So here is our hope.

These vast differences, these vast differences in the political environment as it exists in the United States today, are for us.

In the same way that the vast differences in language were for the day of Pentecost, these differences are for us.

These are the very channels that the gospel moves through to show itself as the true gospel.

So when we see differences like this, we ought to be filled with an incredible hope for the spread of Christianity.

The gospel from its very beginning has made one thing from the previously incommiserate.

So seek deeply to be empowered by the Spirit that you might have a voice that offers hope and rescue.

Have the courage to stand in your ignorance, not pretending to having to have opinions on things you can't possibly know.

Oh, poor thing.

But in prayer, handing them over to the one who does.

When you find that this courage doesn't exist in you, pray that God by his spirit might provide it and give you words that can be heard for his glory, not yours, his kingdom, not yours, his power, not yours.

Don't move until you have the spirit.

And when you have it, don't stand still.

Who can you look down on?

You creature from the dirt, saved by grace.

Who in our culture can you look down on?

And who could you fearfully cower before?

You son or daughter of the king.

You're in a prime position by the Holy Spirit to have a voice that can be heard.

This is the day one clarity.

The day one clarity that the church had, that we need to have right now.

This is a golden opportunity.

In retrospect, it makes sense when you look at early church history because we can connect the dots looking backward, but I think we miss it when it's happening in our present experience.

This division of the very channels that the gospel moves through.

When we learn to stand in the gospel and both critique things in our culture and celebrate things in our culture by an understanding given to us by the Holy Spirit.

In ours, there is nothing so close that we can't make it further away.

Pentecost says that there is no division in culture that is too great, that the gospel can't move through it, that it can't make one out of the two dichotomies, that it can't bring together this incredible unity that transcends the culture that it's a part of, while enriching it.

I want us as a church, I so badly want us as a church, to view this moment in our history, the moment that we happen to find ourselves in, as the grand opportunity that I think Scripture paints it as.

As we see these distances that most of the world looks at and sees, well, this is just things getting more and more separate, more and more worse, and we see the surprise of that gap being bridged will be so great that people will only be able to point to Christ, the one who's able to bring that type of unity out of that type of diversity.

There's one hope for that.

We're called to be His witnesses, empowered by the Spirit, to do that very thing.

Let's have that day one clarity together.

Okay, I'm gonna take one question.

Cool.

We covered it.

So go do it.

We have to have the right paradigm.

My mom's clapping for me.

She's so sweet.

And now she's so red.

Okay, let's pray.

Father, our hope needs to be grounded in your gospel.

And I pray that you would bring conviction where we see how uh how enraptured by the promises of the world we've become.

And we can see that in what we celebrate, and we see it in our disappointments.

But Lord, I pray that you would bring conviction over those areas, that we might bring ourselves into full submission under you, that you would be our king, you would be our God, you would be the one that sits on the throne of our hearts, so that we might celebrate the victory of your gospel more than we celebrate anything.

It is so easy to confuse the project of world unity that other groups seek to bring about.

But those projects, they they never move through the diversity, they always eliminate it.

It is only your gospel that moves through the diversity in the world so that we might look at a culture that has just received your gospel and immediately learn something about the way your gospel moves in the world that we wouldn't have been able to see.

Lord, let us seek the manifold nature of your glory in the world.

Let us build relationships with people that are so unlike us that when we say something from your gospel that makes sense to them, they might be shocked by how familiar it is coming from someone who's so unfamiliar.

Father, I pray that you would use this time for our church and for our country, that these things that we see as obstacles we might see in a new light as the very channel that your gospel flows through.

Capture those parts of our hearts that don't submit to you.

Bring them into submission, that our joy might be complete in your success.

Father, we lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.