TIB: Bag of Hammers

Acts 2:37-47

"Baptism!" George Clooney's character in O Brother, Where Art Thou? says derisively after learning that his traveling companions have had their sins washed away, "You boys are dumber'n a bag of hammers." This line was especially funny to my friends and me because of our religious heritage.

I grew up in the Church of Christ, where standard doctrine is that if you want to go to heaven, you have to get wet. And not just a little wet: full immersion. If we were Greek we might tell the story of Achilles as a cautionary tale. We found this line hilarious, so much so that we bought one of our fellow disaffected CoC'ers a bag of hammers for her birthday. We made it a decorative thing -- they were some sort of cute little craft hammers -- and for all I know she still has it on her wall.

Peter tells his contrite crowd that to appease God they must be baptized, and we have no reason to suspect that he had anything but a good dunking in mind. Curiously, however, going to heaven when you die is neither mentioned nor clearly implied. It doesn't seem to be an issue. Peter, I'm sure, probably believed in some kind of conscious afterlife, so that's still on the table, but it doesn't seem to be what the whole baptism schtick is about, or at least it doesn't exhaust it.

My guess is that it served as a marker of being part of the eschatological community, a blood-on-the-doorway kind of thing. If the Day of the Lord is coming, and especially if you just killed the Messiah, you might want to get your affairs in order. But this isn't a get-out-of-hell-free card; it's making sure you end up on the right side when judgment rains down.

Moreover, they would almost certainly have heard this in a communal context: Israel's collective sins would be forgiven, and God would finally deliver them from exile. The promise, he tells them, "extends to your children and those who are far off..." which suggests that even people who didn't get wet -- dare I say it? -- would nevertheless be beneficiaries of this act of contrition.

We may or may not get more of this idea in Acts, but I think there's reason to believe that the early believers saw themselves as part of a divine plan to save everyone -- kind of like one of those Star Trek episodes where the crew of the Enterprise has to prove to some alien race that humans are worth keeping around. There's nothing new under the sun.

But what does this new community look like? Luke tells us, actually: "They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers." This, too, is a Church of Christ mainstay, only we seem to interpret as a fragment of a 1st-century church bulletin: "Apostles' teaching" is preaching, "fellowship" (the word in Greek has financial overtones) is the offering, "breaking of bread" is communion, and "the prayers" means that somebody (and by "somebody" we meant a man) prayed over each of these stages. There was an opening prayer, an offering prayer, a communion prayer, a prayer before (and sometimes after) the sermon, and a  prayer to cover the awkwardness of no one coming up for the invitation, which may or may not have doubled as a closing prayer.

Things aren't quite like that at our church today, for some good reasons and some bad ones, and I'm obviously poking a little fun. The gist is that I grew up thinking that Acts 2:42 describes things that we have to do on Sunday in order to get church right. I think this misses the point, especially if we take a closer look at the rest of this chapter of Acts, which describes them sharing their resources (holding all things in common, in fact), especially food, and spending time together.

Where the New Testament describes the assembly, they're eating, sharing, and making decisions together. In fact, the only time one of the words commonly translated as "worship" gets used to describe the assembly, it's an unbeliever doing the worshiping (specifically, falling prostrate in response to the open prophesying of the gathered community).

In a way, Acts 2 is Luke's version of, or extended commentary on, the Great Commission: "...make disciples of all nations..." -- check -- "...baptizing in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit..." -- check -- "...and teaching them to do all I have commanded" -- check. Simply put, there's no way, textually, that we can make Acts 2:42 something different from 2:43-47.

To say they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching is to say that they were committed to doing the things the apostles taught them. These are things the apostles learned from Jesus, so we can see this latter part of Acts 2 not only as unpacking of of 2:42 but also as an earnest attempt by the post-Pentecost community to keep Jesus's commandments. It's not exhaustive, certainly, but it is instructive.

"Fellowship," then, means more than taking an offering; it means a deeper level of sharing than, say, 10% of one's income. This was not compulsory (my conservative friends can rest easy that this is not a defense of state socialism) but neither was it rugged individualism or mere "charity" (a very good word that has taken a lexicographical beating, but that's for another day).

The most basic sharing was the "breaking of bread." This has eucharistic overtones, of course, especially by the time Luke and Acts are being put into somewhat final form, but we cannot limit this to the eucharistic rite itself. They ate together, as a means of sharing each other's company but also a means of sharing their food. Luke will have more say about this in upcoming chapters, so I won't belabor the point, but: they shared their stuff.

Finally, "the prayers" included (without necessarily being limited to) the singing or chanting of the Psalms, something that would have been familiar to them from the synagogue tradition. A communal act. Common prayer. The analog in our day would not be merely the utterance of a prayer in front of the congregation by a male representative, but singing songs together. You know, since we don't chant psalms.

[Should we? I don't know. Some early Calvinist groups famously (or notoriously) forbade the singing of anything but psalms in their assemblies. In our day, it might be an interesting way to re-school ourselves in Biblical language, a check against the vapidity of Jesus-and-me evangelicalism. At any rate, I think those responsible for writing and selecting songs for the assembly should take much greater care in attending to the lyrics, to the words they are putting in the mouths of the worshiping community. If the answer to "What language can I borrow?" is "80s love songs," perhaps we're missing something. Not that I'm prejudiced; some of my best friends are 80s love songs.]

So: we are baptized into a particular kind of community with particular practices. It's less a metaphysical transaction than initiation into a people. I do enjoy the symbolism of baptism, of death and rebirth, of the cleansing waters. We're baptized "in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit," the meaning of which is not, if I'm honest, immediately apparent. It's a nod to the Trinity, sure, but I suspect we're missing something here, some original context that might well be unrecoverable. If the passage where this phrase occurs is an interpolation of a later baptismal formula, which I find plausible, then any "original meaning" was lost before the words got put into Jesus' mouth.

What I like to think it means, which I'm not sure is supportable by the text itself but is at least consistent with the ecclesiology of the book of Ephesians, is that we are baptized into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, that we are immersed in the divine Name, swimming in the eternal Logos, bouyed by the amniotic waters of the Spirit from before time began. That we breathe the very breath of God and become the Body of Christ.

And maybe -- just so they don't take themselves too seriously -- we should give the newly baptized a bag of hammers.

TIB: Peter Addresses the Crowd

Acts 2:22-36

In the latter part of Genesis, Joseph is rejected by his brothers, and yet not only does he become the hero of the story, the very means by which he is rejected is also the means by which he effects his brothers' salvation. It's like tragedy in reverse. Peter seems to allude to this in his message to the crowd at Pentecost. First, he offers a précis of the situation: Jesus, a Jewish prophet whose wonder-working was a divine endorsement, has been executed by the Gentiles at the behest of his own people. Peter asserts that this was God's plan all along, similar to Joseph telling his brothers "What you have intended for evil, God has intended for good," because it turns out that this is how the Messiah would come to them.

The situation on the ground, I think, is that Jesus threatened the tentative peace between the Jews and their Roman overlords, and the expedient thing, the way to protect that tentative peace, was to have him done away with. There are more dramatic and more rhetorically charged ways of putting this, but that's the basic premise. No one need be particularly evil or capricious for this to take place; in fact, it's a fairly mundane operation of the sociopolitical machine.

Peter tells them that God has raised Jesus up, and that this is not just some miraculous event -- this, too, is a fulfillment of prophecy. Here he does another of Peter's Interesting Psalm Interpretations. He takes Psalm 16, which in context is a proclamation of David's confidence in God's protection. The language is a bit hyperbolic: David trust that God won't let him die. It's like saying "Long live the King" or "God save the Queen" -- that sort of thing. I don't think, in context, it's saying more than, say, Psalm 23 is, though it's not saying less, either. God will protect the righteous. This is the hope of Israel.

Peter reads this as saying that God's chosen servant will never die. David died, ergo David was not the chosen servant. One of his descendants would be. It's not that odd that Jesus would be killed and come back, because he's the Messiah. See what David says here? That's what this Psalm really means. So the bad news is, you killed the Messiah; the good news is, God raised him up and seated him at God's right hand and you can be in on the ground floor of the new regime. Only, by the way, you'll rule by serving and you don't get to kill Romans. Sorry. The Cross wasn't so much a tragic mistake as a new paradigm.

There's a subtext here that doesn't come out so much in this passage but bears attention nonetheless. David died and  therefore can't have been the Messiah -- the son of David would be. The son of David would build the temple that David could not because David was a man of war. But it's also not Solomon, who built the temple that got destroyed. That didn't last, so it's not him. And it's not any of the Hasmoneans, or Herod, whose various efforts to rebuild or restore the temple have messianic overtones. That's not going to last, either. These are men of war, ruling by the sword in the ways of the world. The true son of David is Jesus, who is not a man of war, and who is (and/or is building -- there's a lot of stuff there we don't have time for) a temple not made by human hands.

Then Peter tells the crowd, whom he's working into a penitent lather, that "God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified." This is an interesting turn of phrase, especially from the pen of Luke, who gave us the traditional Christmas story. Oh, sure, Matthew got the Magi and all that, but he's not the one who gets quoted in the Charlie Brown Christmas special. So why does Peter say that God has made Jesus Lord and Messiah? Wasn't he born that way? Wasn't Jesus the rightful claimant to the throne by virtue of his divine parentage and Davidic lineage?

Perhaps it's nothing. A bit of linguistic ambiguity. But we have hints of this in other places, like Romans 1, where Paul tells us that Jesus was declared to be the Son of God by his resurrection, which fits what Peter is saying here. Or Mark's gospel -- which lacks a birth narrative (and might lack a resurrection narrative in its original form) -- in which God says "This is my son" at Jesus' baptism. Or in Hebrews, where God says (quoting a Psalm that we'll see later in Acts) "You are my son; today I have become your Father." On one hand, we have Jesus being born the son of God; on the other hand, we have texts in which this is conferred upon him either at his baptism or upon his resurrection/ascension.

I don't want to make a lot of hay out of this. The broad gist of things is that these texts are claiming that this crucified man is, beyond appearances to the contrary, the long-awaited Messiah. The cross, intended as an instrument not just of torture and execution but also abject humiliation, has been turned into triumph and exaltation. What was intended for evil God has used for good. That claim gets narrated in different ways, like the different voices in a fugue; they have different entrances and are given slightly different treatments, but they contribute to the cumulative effect.

The way Peter describes it -- "God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified" -- couches things in terms of a divine judgment rendered, a rebuttal to human reckoning. They dispensed with a volatile charismatic leader for the sake of the good of all and unwittingly kill the messiah. It's a twist that would make O. Henry proud. The twist of the twist -- the inversion of tragedy -- is that this is soteriological after all; the fact that killing off the guy who turns out to be the Messiah isn't the tragic end of the story is also a rebuttal to human reckoning.

There's a tautness to the narrative here: the operations of violence and state power that Jesus ultimately renounces are those that kill him. One of the arguments against violent retaliation -- that we might unwittingly make things worse because we know not what we're actually doing -- is played out in the central narrative of this new people God is fashioning. It is part cautionary tale and part myth of origins. Like Joseph, Jesus saves his people through the very mechanism by which they attempt to dispatch him. Unlike Joseph, Jesus does not sidle up to worldly power to get this done, but rather embraces the power of the Cross.