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If someone says the word “refreshing” to you, what comes to mind. For me, it’s the Nestea Plunge? Y’all remember those commercials from way back when in the 70’s and 80’s? One of them went: A man is driving across a parched desert in his Jeep Cherokee. The sun is relentless. The soil is cracking. He’s spent. Someone miraculously hands him a tall glass of Nestea and suddenly he’s falling backwards into a swimming pool of cool, crystal clear water. In slow motion he goes under and resurfaces smiling, revived, refreshed. Then someone says, “Take the Nestea Plunge.”
I was a kid in the late 70’s and there was hardly a swimming pool that I went to that I did not Take the Nestea Plunge into. Just stand on the edge of the pool and fall backwards into the cool, refreshing water. There was something so “mature teen-ager” about doing that over and over again and if you let your butt hit first you didn’t end up with whiplash.
The Nestea Plunge commercials are iconic for defining the word refreshing…at least for me. If you mention the word refreshing to me it really is the first mental image I and many people get. Nestle really nailed it with that ad campaign.
Well, when we say something is refreshing, we mean that something is pleasantly different than what we are used to, something that restores our strength and vitality. It animates us anew. There are times when we need to be refreshed. Of course, when we’ve been working or playing outside in the heat a dip in the cement pond or a cool glass of sweetened ice tea is refreshing (not unsweetened). But there are also times when our lives in general just need refreshing. We’re stuck in a rut and we need something different like a vacation, or a walk in the woods, a new career, a change in geography, a change in diet or lifestyle, or (and since I’m a minister, I can bring it up) we need to develop a devotional life. We need to be refreshed, renewed restored with respect to God, get the slate wiped clean and start anew.
Here in our Acts reading in this sermon Peter gives, he speaks of times of refreshing and it is interesting what he means. It’s not simply a refreshing of me from my individual malaise. It’s the refreshing of a whole people and the means to it doesn’t seem to be so pleasant as freefalling backwards into a pool of cool water on a sweltering day. The plunge the people have to take involves “repentance” and “turning to God”.
First, let’s set the context. Peter is speaking to the “Jerusalem crowd”. This particular crowd may or may not have included a good many of those who were shouting “Crucify him” when the religious authorities brought Jesus to trial before Pilate several months prior during the Passover Festival. This crowd, regardless of whether they were there then or not, stands as representative of the whole of God’s people who did not recognize who Jesus was and what God was doing in, through, and as him and in turn acted horribly in ignorance of that. How this crowd responds to Peter’s sermon will somehow have an effect on all Israel.
This crowd had gathered in amazement around Peter and John and a man Peter had just healed at one of the Temple gates called the Beautiful Gate, a man who had been born lame. The man had made quite a commotion when Peter healed him. He went leaping through the Temple praising God loudly. The crowd there at the Temple recognized him as the lame man who used to sit at the Beautiful Gate begging and now he was as Peter said, restored to perfect health.
They are now in the temple courtyard. The man is clinging to Peter and John as the crowd, amazed, runs to gather around them. Peter is quick to ask why they are so amazed as if it was by his and John’s own power or spirituality or something that the man was healed. He is quick to say that God did it in the name of Jesus. God acted in faithfulness to Jesus, the one whom they had handed over to Pilate, the one whom they rejected (disowned), the one they had Pilate crucify even though Pilate could not find any reason to convict. They even had Pilate release Barabbas, the murderous insurrectionist, instead of Jesus when Pilate gave them a Passover gift of releasing a prisoner.
The main point of Peter’s sermon is clearly that God is on the Jesus side of things and that is the side these people need to be on. It’s on the Jesus side of things that they will find the presence of the Lord who will give them “times of refreshing” until Jesus, their Messiah, comes with the complete overhaul of everything. This “perfect” healing of this man born lame is one such example of a time of refreshing now and the way things will be when Jesus returns.
You folks know I’m a Greek nerd, and you haven’t run me out of town yet so I figure it’s okay if I go nerdy on you again. I wish we could sit down together and look at how Luke has put this sermon of Peter’s together in the Greek because he’s a really good writer and there are subtle things here that just don’t translate from the Greek over into English very well or the translators just got lazy and decided to let the people who write commentaries play with the nuances. So, let’s have a little Greek nerd fun and dig into the nuances of what Peter meant in speaking of “times of refreshing” coming from the presence of the Lord.
The word for “times” here is one I’ve mentioned before. It’s not the tic-toc passage of time. The word chronos (chronology) serves that purpose. The word is kairos and it means a decisive moment in time or a period of time that’s characterized by certain problems or challenges that humanity needs to work through. I’ll give you an example.
Modernity is a “kairos time” that we are nearing the end of by spiraling into an arrogant narcissism that’s turned us away from God as the ultimate source of Truth to “me, myself, and I” being the only truth I will trust. One of the prominent early philosophers of Modernity was René Descartes, a brilliant French mathematician in the early 1600’s. He gave Modernity it’s poster slogan. One afternoon in a bit of a drunken stupor he was pondering the question of “how do we know we really exist” when it suddenly occurred to him: “I think, therefore, I am.” His realization was that the simple fact that we think is the evidence that we exist.
The unfortunate side effect of this realization was that it turned Western culture towards individualism in a not so helpful way – the thinking human individual winds up becoming the center of its own little world such that “me” and what “I” think, feel, and do is more important than anything else. “Me” has taken precedence over “We”. Now, here at the end of Modernity we thinking individuals have lost our ability to think critically in the midst of internet information overload and we rest our laurels on Truth being what feels true to me. Unfortunately, insularism, bigotry, and hate are what feels true for so many. And so, we believe lies and liars quite readily while a pandemic eats away at us and we are on the verge of a global climate crisis and doing little about it because it feels better to live in naiveté and trust the guidance of billionaires and multi-national corporations who profit on our ignorance and the politicians they fund rather than simply trusting the science. Sorry, that was just trying to offer a current example in an overly simplistic way and it turned into a rant. Back to Acts.
A Kairos time is a time for decisive action and here in our Acts passage Peter preaches that God is presenting humanity with a kairos time centered on Jesus. How we humans respond to Jesus is what will determine how humanity’s future goes. We can become his disciples and discover his presence with us, the presence of the Lord, and there will be refreshing that happens, saving moments, forgiving moments, healing moments, reconciliation moments. Or, we can continue to spiral into the consequences that are coming with Modernity coming to an end.
I think of how things are today, all the worry and fear we have with respect to the pandemic, and I think that being refreshed by the presence of the Lord is exactly what everybody needs. In the midst of the ambiguities and anxiety that the reality of climate change is hanging over our heads, it sure would be nice to be feeling refreshed in the presence of the Lord. In this world divided by wealth, and race, and gender, and the lack of common sense, it sure would be nice to feel the unity of peace found in the Spirit of God resting upon his people as we find our rest in God. Times of refreshing certainly would be nice.
Well, if we are to take Peter’s sermon seriously, following Jesus in single hearted devotion is the Nestea plunge we must take to find this refreshing. Peter gives us the route to this kairos of refreshing. The single big word is faith. Yet, faith isn’t just believing things about Jesus nor is it just simply trusting. In the Greek language (and Hebrew) faith and faithfulness (acting according to faith) are the same word. To believe is to do. According to Peter here, faith in God is following Jesus.
In our Presbyterian corner of the world, we tend to talk more about God than we do about following Jesus. We talk a lot about the belief that there is a God in a world that doesn’t so readily buy that anymore because you literally can’t buy faith. We practice our belief be participating in a congregation mostly around Sunday morning stuff, by trying to become better people, by trying to have a prayer life. But Peter is saying here that Jesus needs to be central; devotion to him, following him, living according to his teachings needs to be the heart of whatever it is we call faith in God.
In Modernity, in the world out there faith in God is whatever each individual believes it to be and in the end, if a person says they have faith it’s mostly an emotional crutch for the tough times that doesn’t really affect how “I” live “my” daily. But what Peter is saying here is that faith in God equals following Jesus as his disciples. Faithfulness is discipleship. Discipleship is a group of people struggling together to live according to the Jesus Way and that changes everything about how we live our daily lives.
Peter paves the road to discipleship with two stones: Repentance and Turning to God. Let’s briefly look at those. You may have noticed that at several times throughout the year I will rant on about what repentance is. The rant will reflect how we have inherited a very Medieval misunderstanding of repentance. This austere, finger-pointing judgmental thing of “repent you sinners” where we’ve been led to believe that repentance is beating ourselves up for our naughty wickedness and that we haven’t really repented unless we feel full of guilt and shame and the fear that God is going to send us to Hell, and that to live in repentance is to live with the constant awareness that we are never good enough for God to accept us. If that’s what repentance is, then no wander nobody does it.
Repentance needn’t be such a scary thing. It’s actually a healing thing. The word in Greek literally means to become with-minded with God. To think on the things of God rather than the things of Man which results in doing the things of God rather than the things of Man. Looking back into Peter’s sermon and one of the nuances there, it’s interesting that the word we translate as “rejected” here in our reading (the crowd rejected Jesus in the presence of Pilate) simply means to not agree with a person to the end that we disown them. To reject someone is to be “minded” against them so that your disagreement with them becomes a disowning of them. Repentance is the opposite of that. It is to agree with someone so strongly that you walk in unity with them. Repentance is learning the mind of Jesus and expressing it through the unity of walking with him in the manner in which he walks. That turning from walking “my way” to “walking with Jesus in the Jesus way” is the turning part of “Repent and turn so that times of refreshing may come from the Presence of the Lord.” It’s turning around to walk with Jesus not just turning to God. The people in the crowd were already turned to God otherwise they wouldn’t have been in the temple.
Changing what goes on in our minds is a big part of what repentance is. We have to be mindful of what is going on in our minds to follow Jesus. This means that we have to attend to our spiritual life. Oddly, the Bible doesn’t tell us much on how to foster the inner or spiritual life other than to meditate on Scripture and to pray without ceasing and walk humbly with God in in the ways of justice and mercy. A couple of decades ago there was a big push on “Spirituality” and there was lots of stuff we could buy pertaining to spiritual disciplines. You could even get “Chicken Soup for Your Soul” at the check-out stand of every grocery store. Well, you don’t see a lot of devotional materials like that anymore. Because so much of it become about more about me and how spiritual I feel that it was about learning the mind of Jesus and following him. It was about feeling better about ourselves the way we more so than thinking the things of God rather than the things of man so that we become more like Jesus.
Here’s something to try. At least I’m going to try it…again. Many years ago, I set out to memorize the Sermon on the Mount. I took it one verse at a time, one verse a day. I memorized that verse and as often as I could think about it throughout the day, I repeated it over and over to myself. Particularly when I went for my daily jog. I was making my mind think the things that Jesus said instead of letting it just run willy-nilly down the trail of sick worry. The Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount runs from Matthew 5:3-7:27 and that’s roughly 106 verses so it will take 106 days to do this starting with “Blessed are the poor in Spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” Memorize that verse and just start saying it over and over to yourself throughout the day. When I did this a few years back I caught a glimpse of just how non-judgemental Jesus is and it changed me to be more welcoming to people whom I otherwise would have treated as outcast by God. I became more understanding and welcoming to people whom I thought God rejected. I’m going to do this Sermon on the Mount thing again. Will you join me? Amen.
