The second chapter of the Book of Acts

I'm back on US soil! Well, US pavement. I'm not sure I've seen any soil yet. I'm in New York City. After arriving at JFK airport yesterday afternoon, I got on the Air Train to the Jamaica Station in Brooklyn, where I got on the E train and rode for about an hour till I ended up at 23rd Street and 8th Avenue on the Lower West Side. Amazing how that works. From there, I walked about four blocks to the Desmond Tutu Center at the General Theological Seminary where I'm staying for two nights, and where the wedding of Adam Shoemaker and Courtney Davis will take place on Saturday. Just couldn't bring myself to pay $50 for a cab from JFK (how many orphans in Burundi would that feed for a week?) when I could have such an incredible New York experience for $7!

But what a shock! Miles and miles of pavement -- and tracks. More than most African countries right here in one city. Thirteen miles in all of Sudan. How many in NYC??? Mind boggling.

I had been up for about 48 hours when I arrived in New York. Short little catnaps on the plane (actually planes -- three of them), but that's all. From Kigali I flew to Nairobi, where I had a seven hour layover. That was a long time in the Nairobi Airport. Then the flight to Amsterdam, where we arrived at about 6 am on Thursday, Amsterdam time, and where I would spend another seven hour layover. But seven hours in Amsterdam is enough time for a mini European vacation, so that's what I did. I got on the train into the city, and helped Amsterdam wake up. I walked several miles through its charming but slightly trashy streets (what a contrast to Kigali where they are swept and pristine). I ended up in the Leidseplein area where I got some breakfast at a local pastry shop, then walked over to the Van Gogh Museum; but I was too early to get in, so I went a few blocks to the StayOkay Youth Hostel where George and I had spent a couple of nights last year, brushed my teeth, charged my phone and PDA and read for a while. Then back to the Van Gogh, where I found a long line of screaming schoolkids waiting to get in, and a line of big people, too. It was going to take a half hour just to get through the line, and I only had an hour left by this point until I could safely leave the museum, get back to Centraal Station, and on the train back to the airport in time to make my flight -- so I missed the Van Gogh this time. Except for the large prints that decorate the outside of the building. Oh well. It was fun to be in the city all the same.

And then the long flight back to the US.

You're probably wondering why I named this post "The second chapter of the Book of Acts" by now. (Just to get you hooked?) Actually, it's what I woke up thinking about this morning. My mind is racing, actually. I woke up around 4 am (that's 11 am Kigali time). Carolyn arrived from Andover last night around 10:30 pm, and we got to bed a little before midnight. It was so wonderful to see her after a whole month apart. When I woke up, I realized that I had been dreaming about Africa all night -- at least it felt that way. I'm despairing of ever being able to adequately process the whole experience, and am realizing how much harder that's going to be here. I'm in New York City, for God's sake! It's a different world! And I'll soon be back in Andover, playing with puppies, preaching sermons, pastoring people, and puzzling over capital campaigns. How do I do that?!

One possibility is this blog, where (I'm told) a few people have been looking in from time to time during my African experience. I'll confess, however, that it's a little intimidating to think of people (some of whom I don't even know and who don't know me) looking in on my thoughts here. But I guess that's what anyone who writes (whether blogs or books) has to face. And it's probably why I've never done either until now. I'm terrified that I'll express an unperfected thought, and someone will discover me for who I really am. (Oh no!!!) Or come to some conclusion that I would want to express in a different way if I were in a two-way conversation with them. (Yikes!!) People might fail to grasp the subtlety and the brilliance of my complex mind. (Arghhh!) But this is part of the growing experience for me. I'll get over it.

Back to Acts 2 for now. On Sunday I was asked to preach in a church in Bujumbura, Burundi. It's a new church, n0n-denominational (or perhaps they would say post-denominational in a post-colonial sort of way), and very international (in a sort of post-modern kind of way). (I'm also terrified that readers won't get my terrible and not always very funny humor.) This church is post-everything, in other words. But not really. They have the "worship team" that so many American evangelical churches have. (That's a group of people who stand up front with microphones in their hands leading praise choruses at the beginning of a service, for all of you Episcopalians and other folks who don't know about these things). It's very non-liturgical (post-liturgical?), and (to be honest) a lot like the churches so familiar to American evangelicals back here at home. But the pastor, Emmanuel, has a vision for a different kind of church in Bujumbura. He is concerned -- and rightly so -- about the lack of education and training among so many people starting churches in his country, and his vision for this new church is to create a community among younger, well-educated people, who will get theological education and training in church leadership through an institute they want to create, and then go out and help raise the level of knowledge in the churches in their country. Otherwise, many of these churches are simply mimicking the worst of what they see from American TV evangelists preaching a "prosperity gospel" message.

Anyway, Emmanuel told me that during the season of Pentecost they're working through the Book of Acts, and he had preached on Acts 1 just the week before. So he asked if I would do a sermon/teaching on Acts 2, which I was happy to do. I know that chapter. Almost by heart (at least a few choice verses of it). Acts the second chapter formed the whole basis of the soteriology and theology (that is, the understanding of salvation and of God) in my Pentecostal background. There's a lot more to say about that at another time.


So, I preached on Acts 2 this past Sunday. Emmanuel had told me that many of the people in his church, who have come from various backgrounds, are very focused on the gifts of the Spirit as experiential phenomena, but that he is trying to help them see things from a broader perspective. I took his cue, and spent my forty-five or so minute sermon -- yes, Christ Church folks, they WANTED me to preach for forty-five minutes! :) -- to talk about not only what happened at that first Pentcost, but what it meant. The failure of so much of pentecostal teaching is that it goes over from the "descriptive" to the "prescriptive" -- taking what happened as recorded in Acts and making it into something that has to happen for everyone who wants to be saved -- and in the process, perhaps even missing the whole point. So I steered away from the spectacular elements of the story to focus on the meta-narrative -- how the Pentecost story becomes a new "framing story" not only for the church, but for the world God is seeking to re-create. It's the counter-narrative to the Babel story from Genesis 11 -- where God confuses the languages of the people of the earth, who try to set themselves up as God. If Genesis 11 is part of the etiological myth (as biblical scholars say it is) -- (that's just a fancy word by the way for "how things got to be the way they are"), then Acts 2 forms part of the new myth of how we're getting from where we are (confusion of languages, cultures, ethnicities -- all the things that divide and separate us as the people of the earth) to the new kind of humanity God is bringing into being. Confusion of tongues turns into "everyone hearing the good news in his or her own language." People being divided and separated into groups and categories turning into "all being of one accord in one place" and "having all things in common with one another" and "distributing the proceeds to any as they had need" and "breaking bread with glad and generous hearts." It's a picture of the new humanity envisioned in Jesus' message of the kingdom of God.

It wasn't all that brilliant a sermon -- pretty basic, really. But it did give an opportunity to introduce a different kind of biblical hermeneutic (sorry, "method of intrepretation") to people whose tendency it is to create doctrines out of details. But Emmanuel loved it!

Now what really is sort of post-modern in his approach to church is that after the sermon, there's a Q&A time. He's trying hard to get people thinking, and out of the mode of blind acceptance of what a preacher up front says. He threw out some questions, and had people stand and give responses to how this understanding of Acts 2 might help shape their own lives and the life of a society that has been so divided between Hutu, Tutsi and Twa. It was pretty amazing, actually, to see and hear how they were really getting it, and what they thought they might do if they were really to begin to live into this new "framing story" and away from the old one defined by Babel.

On the plane yesterday, I dipped back into Brian McLaren's book, Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope, now that I have gotten to know Brian personally through the Amahoro conference. (As I said in a previous posting, "Read this book!") In the early chapters he writes of his first experience in Burundi a few years ago, and the challenges of helping pastors there come to terms with the social dimensions of the gospel. He writes eloquently of the problem with religion that focuses on how to get to heaven without ever addressing the systemic social and global realities of injustice, poverty, and the ecological crisis; the hollowness of doctrine apart from the the context of real human lives; the futility of any sense of salvation apart from the lived realities of people on the planet right in the here and now. And those issues are certainly not unique to Africa. It is a knockout book drawing on some of the best contemporary biblical and theological scholarship, as well as some of the best critical thinking on our social and global challenges. And yet it is written in an accessible style that even I can understand. When Brian gave his talk toward the end of this year's Amahoro conference, one of the panelists seemed almost stunned. He said, "You must have been thinking about these things for a long time!" He has.

Better post this before I start rambling. ("Start?" you say!) It's the jet-lag. That's my excuse anyway.