"Children of God" (Acts 2:1-4; Gal 4:1-7)

This morning I will continue with the practice of interspersing some commentary among the scripture. If you’re following along on the insert or in your Bible, just know that I will be pausing periodically to elaborate on what we’ve read.

“A Wind from God”: God’s New Creation

Acts 2:1   When the day of Pentecost had come, they [the disciples] were all together in one place. Pentecost was another name for the Jewish Festival of Weeks, a pilgrimage festival that originally celebrated the first fruits of the wheat harvest and later came to be identified with the day on which God gave Israel the law. As we will see shortly, there’s a poetic reversal at play in the Christian celebration of Pentecost. The day that once commemorated the receiving of the law, has become for us Christ-followers a day that commemorates our graduation from the law into the freedom of the Spirit.

2 And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. In Hebrew, the word for Spirit is the same word for “wind.” We are told in Genesis that when God created the heavens and the earth, a “wind from God” swept over the waters. God’s spirit was brewing something, stirring up new life. We can see Pentecost in a similar way. God’s spirit is brewing something, stirring up new life, amid the followers of Christ who are gathered together. They are going to become the church, a distinctive witness to God’s new creation in Christ.

3 Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. I must confess, I have trouble imagining people suddenly speaking languages they have no knowledge of. Is this just an inexplicable miracle, nothing more than a sign of God’s power? Maybe so. But in the context of what we’ve already noticed—namely, that Pentecost is reminiscent of creation, where God’s wind-spirit sweeps over the elements, stirring up new life—in this context, I can’t help but notice the emphasis on words and speech. Creation began with God speaking the world into existence. Or as John puts it, in the beginning was “the Word.” God’s new creation in Christ begins in a similar way, with the Spirit inspiring people to speak. In the rest of the book of Acts, the Christ-followers proclaim the story of Christ. Which is to say, they begin to change the story. The story that the world tells, which is a story of gods of power, a story of competition, a story of winners and losers. They begin to proclaim a different story, a countercultural story, a story of a crucified God, a story of an alternative way, the Jesus way of forgiveness and generosity and peace.

Stories shape our world. We live into them. By proclaiming the story of Christ in word and deed, the church is speaking God’s new creation into existence.

Graduating from the “Basic Principles”

Now we pivot to Paul’s letter to the Galatians, which we’ve been reading the last few weeks.

Just to refresh before we begin: in the last couple weeks, we’ve heard Paul proclaim that followers of Christ have been fully received into God’s fellowship, not by virtue of anything they have done but by virtue of Christ’s love for them and faith in them. Paul’s proof for this claim is simple: people’s experience of the Holy Spirit. He reminds the Galatians about how they experienced the Spirit of God in some amazing ways—which we can only imagine refers to the kinds of life-changing events that we see elsewhere in scripture and in early church history, changes like the personal divestment of wealth and honor, and the breakdown of the social class system at a common table, and the healing of diseases.  Paul’s point is that all of this happened not as the result of following some rules, but as the result of trusting in the love of Christ and receiving the Holy Spirit. For Paul, the free and unconditional love of Christ becomes our new center of gravity, our new identity. It’s like putting on a different set of clothes, living with different habits. It also means taking off our old clothes and setting aside our old cultural identities, based in things like our nationality, our gender, our race, our religion, and so on.

Today, Paul  elaborates on the experience of the Holy Spirit, on what it feels like and how it changes us. He uses the rich metaphor of growing up.

Gal. 4:1   My point is this: heirs, as long as they are minors, are no better than slaves, though they are the owners of all the property 2 but they remain under guardians and trustees until the date set by the father. Last week, Paul compared the law—meaning the traditions and dos and don’ts of our culture, Jewish or otherwise—to an old-fashion school-teacher. Here he’s riffing off the same idea. When we are children, subject to that old school-teacher who’s keeping us in line, we are held back from the fullness of life. We have not graduated. We have not come yet into our full inheritance.

3 So with us; while we were minors, we were enslaved to the elemental spirits of the world. Another translation is “enslaved by the basic principles of the world,” which is to say, the customs and laws that ordered life in our culture. These basic principles (back then as well as now) might include things like, men should be strong, women should be pretty, time is money, money is power, and so on. These principles told us how to live, and in some ways they might have been helpful. But they also limited us and held us back from the fullness of life.

4 But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, 5 in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. “Adoption” may be a misleading translation. Earlier in Paul’s metaphor, he suggests we are already children awaiting an inheritance, but we are kept under the guard of our teacher-disciplinarian—that is, the law of our culture. In other words, the moment of change or transformation to which Paul refers is not a matter of space but a matter of time. It is not a matter of us being outside God’s household and then being brought in, but a matter of us being adolescents and then graduating or growing up into our full inheritance. We graduate from the “basic principles” and enter into the freedom of love.

If you think for a moment of the parable of the prodigal son, consider the character of the older brother, the one who stays at home and is a dutiful servant of his father. When his brother returns home and his father throws a homecoming feast, the older brother refuses to join them. Why? He has not graduated from the law. He has not grown up into an appreciation of his father’s love. He still lives according to the basic principles of good and bad, deserving and undeserving, winning and losing. He sees himself as a dutiful servant of his father, someone who deserves reward, and his brother as a wrongdoer, a failure, someone who deserves to be kicked out.

Beyond Teenage Rebellion

6 And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” 7 So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.

I’m fascinated by Paul’s metaphor of growing up and graduating from the law.  In the past, when I’ve read the verse about the Spirit crying, “Abba,” I’ve thought of a little child crying out to God, “Daddy!” And I don’t think that is invalid. Jesus teaches us that to enter the kingdom of God we must become like little children. But as I read these last couple verses today in the context of Paul’s metaphor, I think they are painting a different picture.

Think for a moment about the idea of “teenage rebellion.” Perhaps you went through this stage yourself. Or perhaps you’ve seen it in others. It is undoubtedly a complicated time in anyone’s life, and I wouldn’t want to reduce it to a simple lesson. For some people, there may be very good reason to rebel. For others, it’s just a part of differentiating ourselves from our parents. In either case, a teenager who is in active rebellion probably does not see their parents as loving guardians but as something more like a slavemasters. And yet at some point down the road—it might be in their 20s when they get their freedom and encounter the hard knocks of life on their own, or it might be in 50s or 60s as they care for their aging parent—but at some point, they begin to acknowledge and appreciate their parents’ love for them.

Of course, that love is not always expressed in healthy or helpful ways. I remember hearing once a woman speak about her abusive upbringing, and how her  mom was constantly on drugs and wrecking whatever residence they had found to live in. When the daughter grew up and left home, she determined never to see her mom again. But as it would happen, one day she received a phone call to inform her that her mom had dementia and was dying. With great trepidation, she went to meet with her. The daughter was in a much better, much healthier place herself, and she felt strong enough to face her past. She says that when she saw her mom on the nursing home bed, it was like seeing the sun for the first time. She said she realized that all her life, her mom had loved her, but that love had been hidden behind the clouds of addiction and bad habits and a long history of hurt. But finally the clouds had lifted. Not everyone with abusive parents is blessed with such a moment, but I have to believe the truth holds. Love is always there, however much it is buried underneath disease and dysfunction.

All of this to say, when I read these verses in the context of growing up, what I see in my mind’s eye is not an infant crying out, “Daddy!” but a mature son or daughter outgrowing their rebellion and finally recognizing God for who God is: not a taskmaster, not a disciplinarian, but a loving father, a loving mother. I imagine the prodigal son’s older brother having a moment of clarity, waking up to what he’s been missing his whole life. His father loves him. Would give him the world. Even if he didn’t deserve it. Even if (like his brother) he’d done everything not to deserve it.

And that is a profoundly different kind of story than the one our world tells. Which is why Pentecost is pivotal. It marks God’s new creation, when God’s wind swept over the waters once more, when God’s Spirit filled followers of Christ with a new story to share with the world, a story of a father’s unconditional love.

Originally Pentecost marked the receiving of the law. But in Christ, it marks a growing up beyond the law, a graduation into the freedom of love. Through the Spirit of God that has come to us through Christ, we realize we are beloved children of God, forgiven and free to love others as we have been loved.

Prayer

Tender God,
Who cares deeply for us,
Whose Spirit broods over all creation—
Today we celebrate your Spirit,
A spirit of fierce love and forgiveness,
Meant for us, but not only us
…
God, sometimes we have trouble believing
We are your children,
Truly forgiven, truly free.
Open our hearts to receive
This good news,
So that we might share it with others,
And enter more fully into your new creation
In Christ: Who taught us to say, “Our father,” “Abba.” Amen.