Easter Expansion

Some of you may be wondering how I'm still writing under the Easter . . . "umbrella."  Short answer, everything in our lives as Christians comes from Easter.  Remove the event of the resurrection of our Lord and we would be without the one thing that makes Jesus the Christ.  There's a longer answer to follow because I really want to write about how the Easter event becomes ours and how we are best equipped to share it in the way that Pentecost intends.

Pentecost is an Easter holiday.  As the last day of the special season of resurrection focus and celebration, Pentecost does not close down our observance but accelerates it, distributes it,  and shares it.

The story from Luke's Acts of the Apostles is that Jews returning to Jerusalem to observe the Festival of Weeks heard the languages they had learned living and growing up away from Jerusalem being spoken and the message was the same no matter the speaker.  Peter finished his acknowledgement of this shared amazement by quoting the Prophet Joel and closed with "Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” (Acts 2:21, NRSV)

Pretty simple, don't you think?  Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.  Simple but apparently not easy.  I say apparently because so many of our modern day versions of being Christian are not "calling on the name . . ." but are more war-like or even worse more commercial.

So much of what we do is to preserve and protect a territory -- we call it "the church" -- or research and market a product and we call that holiness.  We recruit, we indoctrinate, we keep score like it's a zero sum game to be won.  Some Christians are worse than others but we are all guilty of trying to keep up with the Joneses. 

When evangelism is done using the same metrics as advertising -- think "market share" -- the actions we take leave little room for our own calling on the name.  Instead we perfect "elevator speeches" and employ Harvard's best business models for things like purpose, message and feedback.

What Peter says is simpler but harder because it means telling the truth about ourselves first and from that ground to call.  And our calling sends a message that we understand something important about the one to whom we are speaking. When Peter repeats Joel's prophecy he is admitting that even as we have these new powers to utter praise in the languages of others we are acknowledging the greater power of the one to whom our cries ascend. 

That's because there's more to "the name" than an identification of the person.  Especially in this case Peter is talking power and authority, God's power, God's authority now known and demonstrated in Jesus who died and was raised. Hear the Easter echoes? 

Our salvation is NOT withheld until we reach a committee approved benchmark or until we have honed a skill down to a "bright brass" shine or dotted all our eyes and flawlessly crossed ourselves. 

God's help -- our salvation -- is always ready because everyday is Easter.  God's help will not be forced on us but only waits for our honesty, our confession, our respect and our gratitude.