Pentecost – Acts 2 (2018.05.20 Sermon)
May 25th, 2018 | John Chandler
Madelynn Marlow begins our summer in Acts as we celebrate the story, and hope, of Pentecost together.
Resources/Quotes:
- “The Bible is full of accounts of God’s use of actions and physical objects as means of self revelation. Jeremiah wears a yoke or smashes a clay pot. Jesus places a child in the midst of a crowd. Actions become means of God’s coming to us. Because Judaism knew that God is transcendent and consequently never confused with objects, the Old testament can speak with confidence of God’s acting with things. Christianity, in turn, built upon this concept of transcendence and thereby is freed from fear of idolatry. It can accept actions and things freely. Christianity does not try to out-spiritualize God by evading the physical order. Rather, it is precisely through actions that Christianity discovers God’s expression of love to us.” — James White
- “Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury in the mid-twentieth century, wrote, “We do not know the whole fact of Christ incarnate unless we know his church, and its life as part of his own life…The Body is the fullness of Christ, and the history of the Church and the lives of the saints are acts in the biography of the Messiah. We do not solely know the Messiah through the red-letters in the gospel texts. We know him in his fullness because we are joined to him in his Body, the church. In this joining, we do not lose our individuality or our individual stories of conversion and encounter with Christ. Instead, our own small stories are wrapped in the story of all believers throughout time, which are together part of the eternal story of Christ.” — Tish Warren
- “Human beings have persistently rejected, and continue to reject, that communion… As a result, the musical harmony of God’s self-giving communion is transmitted into a cacophony of voices competing with one another for access to power, to material resources, and to self-validating identity. Despite our created destiny for communion, we human beings do not typically give and receive freely with one another, and certainly not with any trusting expectation; rather we seek to secure our lives at the expense of others. Our discourses are built not on the trinitarian surplus of self-giving and self-receiving communion, but rather on the competitive desires of individuals whose life is sought at the expense of others.“ — L Gregory Jones
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