+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In sermons here before I’ve brought up the concept of prolepsis—the forshortening of time. This is something more than foreshadowing, something in the present hinting at the future in a text. Rather it is the future reality impinging on the present reality, invading wherever one happens to be in time as we perceive it. I’ve mentioned it before in relation to Christ’s transfiguration, and we see the phenomenon today in the lesson from Acts.
We tend to think of the sermon of the apostles in which the native languages of each listener was heard as a discrete miracle in which God suspended the laws of nature to effect the special purpose of converting the hearers to Christ, and it is that. But then we tend to ignore the content of Peter’s explanation. He quotes from the Book of the Prophet Joel, with plenty of rather spooky imagery of prophecy and celestial signs. Hear those words again:
In the last days it shall be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams;
yea, and on my menservants and my maidservants in those days
I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy.
And I will show wonders in the heaven above
and signs on the earth beneath,
blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke;
the sun shall be turned into darkness
and the moon into blood,
before the day of the Lord comes,
the great and manifest day.
And it shall be that whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
The Pentecostal moment is an evangelistic blessing for sure, but it is also an eschatological “inbreaking.” “In the last days” these things shall take place. Peter’s implication is that the last days were manifestly present on the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem, nearly two thousand years ago.
There is an assumption which is almost taken for granted in modern biblical criticism that we see in the New Testament’s development a transition from intense apocalyptic expectation to a more attenuated, deferred hope as generations passed and Jesus had still not returned. There is surely some of that (it’s probably why Paul had to write two epistles to the Thessalonians, each dealing with the proper approach to Christ’s return and what might be experienced as a delay). We may, however, make too much of this dynamic when we forget the strange nature of God’s interaction with time. It should make perfect sense, however counter-intuitive its implications may seem, that God existing outside of time means that he can do funny things with it. Chief among these is to fold it round us in such a way that we may experience the future in the present, that, in other words, the Last Day and the Coming Kingdom, is both “already” and “not yet”.
Our Lord said “the Kingdom of God is among you,” and I suspect he was saying something more radical and substantive than that the virtues of the Kingdom were reflected by the disciples in how they lived. (Frequently they didn’t succeed in that, anyway.) Still less was he saying that they or we have the power to effect the Kingdom by modeling our lives or our society in some particular way, as laudable as attempts at that may be. Rather, I think he was saying that the eschatological reality which we will one day experience in eternity had broken into the present and onto the beloved community such that it was and is the Body of Christ on earth.
And this is why it is so appropriate that we will welcome this morning into that body its newest member, Jacob. It is a sweet and happy thing, yes, but it is something much deeper and stranger. It is, in fact ominous in the sense that word held before it shifted to having a more pejorative connotation in contemporary English. It’s positively otherworldly, a sort of eldritch initiation, binding the human soul to death in Christ Jesus and thus to life in his eternal habitations, not just on Judgment Day, but here and now.
This a lot spookier than just “getting the baby done”, but it’s profoundly liberating, knowing that with the application of a little water and the name of God and the right intention, the Holy Spirit not only comes among us, but transports us, so that we are, metaphysically speaking, already citizens of heaven.
In this morning’s epistle Paul reminds us that the Spirit gives manifold gifts, that each is valuable, but that which particular gift a Christian manifests is not as significant as the source, who is infinitely significant. We do not know what sort of person the grown-up Jacob McConnell will be, what sorts of gifts he may use in service to the Gospel, but he will drink of the same Spirit that we have done, and that is enough to make the spiritual body healthy and whole. And so will we eat and drink again of that same spirit in sharing Christ’s Body and Blood, itself good spiritual medicine. And what’s more, each of these is a fulfillment of the Prophet Joel as St. Peter proclaimed it, a breaking in of the Kingdom of God, here in these last days, as foretaste and promise of what great things are to come.
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.