Good News for All Nations | Acts 2:1-13

May 24, 2026 - The Global Church - 

Jerell Carper takes a closer look at Acts 2:1-13 on Pentecost Sunday. As the Feast of Weeks gathers Jews from all nations, God's Spirit empowers 120 followers of Jesus to proclaim the good news in their native languages. As these 3,000 new believers return back to their homelands, God's promise to bless all nations rushes into our first century world. 

/// Pentecost Sunday ///

The Global Church: Part 1

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hey, welcome to Pentecost. Good to see your beautiful faces. I'm excited to enter into this new season. And it's getting warm outside, so happy summer. We're going to start with a little group, uh, turn to your neighbor and chair. So on the screen are two questions just to kind of break the ice, get you squirming a little bit. The first is what moment in your life has been your biggest cross-cultural experience outside of your marriage? And which two locations here's which two locations in the US have the biggest cultural difference?

SPEAKER_00 0:37

Talk about how do you not know what I mean? New York.

SPEAKER_01 3:19

Seattle and Shrevefort. Where is that? Louisiana. Okay, so a Pacific Northwest town, and then kind of a center south Bible belt. Okay. Yeah, Renee. Okay. Oh. Yeah. Uh very different, uh, Ethan.

unknown 3:45

We said Portland and Miami.

SPEAKER_01 3:47

Portland and Miami. They're both big cities, though. But yeah, you get the point. All right. Well, that was to prime the pump. I think as the sermon goes, you'll see why I asked you those questions. Um, so it's Pentecost Sunday, and we've taken we're taking a pause in our story of God series. But if you've been paying attention in the story of God, one of the things that we we absolutely should know by now is that God's original blueprint in Eden was meant to expand throughout the whole earth. Okay, we've does that sound familiar if you've been listening to these sermons. Okay. So Adam and Eve were told to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. They were in this garden called delight. And so this garden was meant to expand out through all creation as they worked and worshipped God. Interestingly, Noah was given this exact same command after kind of the cosmic reset that was the flood. Abraham, we talked about God's covenant with Abraham, he was blessed to be a blessing to all nations, that this one person would bless all people, this one nation would bless all nations, one tribe, all tribes. But as we followed along through the story, we kind of realized when was this supposed to happen? Because it just looked like it didn't happen, right? Other than a few people who kind of came in from the outside, Rahab being one, or Ruth, when we preached through Ruth, we kind of saw her as the foreigner that found hospitality from Boaz. And so as we go through the story of God, we should be asking ourselves through the Old Testament, when and how will all nations be blessed through this one family and one nation? When will this tribe and language and land bless all tribes and languages and lands? So anytime we're reading the Bible, we should be asking, what do the original authors want us to be asking right now? Not our questions, but what questions is the text asking? One of those is, hey, when is this global blessing thing going to happen? Because it just looks like it's not happening. And so Jesus arrives on the scene, and as we saw in the Gospel of Mark, he starts to expand and explicitly push the geographic, the ethnic, social, economic, and cultural boundaries of God's kingdom well beyond the status quo, beyond the borders of Israel and Judah. We had that sermon Bread for Everyone. Chris taught on Holy Week that this temple is supposed to be a house of prayer for all nations and kind of drove out people who were preventing all nations from worshiping God. It's a quote from Isaiah 56. And so we get to Acts 1.8. Jesus has died, been resurrected, and is about to ascend. And he kind of gives this famous commissioning to people who have lived with him and seen his ministry and been his friends and followers. It's a famous text that many of you probably know. It's Acts 1.8. He says, This, you will be my witnesses, people who have seen me and can testify about who I am in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. And this is really the kind of thesis statement of the book of Acts. This is how the book of Acts plays out. And so Jerusalem is their urban religious hub. It's where the temple is and all that goes down. Judea is kind of the rural surrounding farmlands and communities. Samaria are their, the Samaritans are their ethnic and religious cousins, kind of bad blood neighbors. They're just enough like them that they don't like them. We know what that's like. And then the ends of the earth are well to the Greeks and the Persians, the Arabians, the Africans, to the barbarian lands, cultures, languages, and ethnicities. I don't think we had discovered the roundness of the earth yet. But, you know, the ends of the earth, however far that is. And so then this brings us to this really unique question. And this is one that the whole New Testament and the early church really wrestles with. It's this how can or should the message of Jesus translate outside of Jewish culture and geography? How can they be faithful to God's covenant instruction while living in a different culture? And this is what the book of Galatians is all about. This is one of the biggest themes of Romans. This is what most of the book of Acts traces. It's the biggest conflicts in the early church are cultural ones about festivals and food and Jewish rituals. It leads to the first church council in Acts 15, where all the bigwigs come in, like we should decide what we believe about this. And it's how culturally Jewish does someone need to be in order to receive Jesus? And this affected their food, their meals, their engagement with the city, the city's cultic worship and their social classes. So one way to illustrate this, and Jeff Hogue is not here, which by the way, he the more I wrote this sermon, I was like, Jeff should be preaching this sermon because he has his doctorate of ministry in intercultural studies and has been a missionary. And I was like, I'm glad he's not here because he would be critiquing me. But this is an illustration that I've seen different iterations of this. This is one that Sandra Richter kind of showed, and it's basically showing a truck and cargo. And the cargo is the message, and the truck is the medium. And so the question is: how can different cultures, how can different trucks carry the same cargo without changing it? Um, and the temptation has always been there for us and for all tribes to turn parts of the truck into the cargo. So to turn part of the medium into the message. And I think we're we're tracking this. How does Jesus transcend cultures when his original followers and the story so far has been so concentrated in one particular place and um ethnic culture? You excited yet? I love this kind of stuff. I I cut a huge chunk of the sermon out because this is too long. Okay. And so this scattering, what you'll find in uh in Acts 2, this scattering happens through a number of different sources. I'll show the next slide and basically trying to trace the history of God's people. So for most of the Old Testament that we've been in, Israel has been a theocracy. So it's a religious nation with boundaries and land, it's one ethnicity, um, and its political government is intermixed with its religious expression. So an outsider could always be welcomed into this nation, and we saw that with Rahab and Ruth, but they would experience God's blessing by basically becoming an Israelite, entering into their culture and into their practices and into their nation. This is how you received the blessing of God. Like you can come in. And the story continues until Israel is eventually exiled to these other nations. The big one was Assyria in 722 BC, comes and kind of captures the northern tribes of Israel and assimilates them into their culture. These are the big bad powerhouse nation of the day. And then in 586, Babylon, which is the new powerhouse nation, comes in and exiles uh Judea. Um, and basically at this point, this nation that was a theocracy that worshipped centrally in Jerusalem and the temple is now all over, absolutely scattered, and they are being assimilated into Persian, Greek, and Roman cultures over the next 500 years where God's voice remains mostly silent. And they're intentionally shuffled around and intermixed by these more powerful nations to kind of de assimilate the culture. Well, that's the right word, but spread out Israel's culture so that the Assyrians or the Babylonians or the Persians or the Greeks could be dominant. And over the time, um different economic and political influences led more Jews to scatter and leave Israel, and this is known as the diaspora or scattering. And by the time we get to the New Testament, there are large populations of Jews in Egypt and Syria. Some had even been taken to Rome as slaves, found their way to Babylon and Asia Minor. And so this is when James writes his letter. He begins by saying to the twelve tribes scattered among the nations. And that's how he begins his letter. And so if you were uh an Israelite, a Jew, you you tied yourself to Abraham, and you're out in Persia or in Egypt or in Rome and you're reading your your Torah and it says, Go to the temple and do this and do this types of do these types of things with Yahweh. And you're like, how do I how do I live faithfully to God when I don't live in this theocracy anymore? And this was a huge question, one that the Pharisees answered really well by through the practice of synagogue, where they basically brought the temple out into the local region. And the Pharisees were really innovators of how to be faithful to Torah when you're not centralized around the temple. And I'm here to say the Pharisees were actually a lot better guys than you thought. Um, the more I read about them, Jesus was just that much better that they look bad. That's my that's my new thesis. Um and so, anyways, here's the big idea. By the time Jesus steps on the scene, God's covenant people have spread all over the known world. Um, there's a sense that God's people have scattered and expanded. Whether or not they're bringing blessing is another one. And this is really what Luke highlights in the beginning of this book that we call Acts. So we're in the book of Acts. It's written by this guy named Luke. He wrote this gospel that we call Luke. This is really part two of all that Jesus continued to do and teach. And I want to show why all of that nerdy history. Are you guys tracking? Like, is this somewhat fun? Okay. I I have I'm having fun. Um, let's find out why all this matters and jump into the text. So, this is the Bible verse verses that Jenny read so well. It's about God's spirit dwelling and empowering those who follow Jesus. Let's look at the first verse, Acts 2.1. When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. So Pentecost is a Greek transliteration of a Greek word penta, meaning 50. Yeah, five, fifty, we'll call it 50 for now. Um, originally in the Hebrew, this is one of three major festivals called the Feast of Weeks. The Feast of Weeks. So if you were um growing up in the nation of Israel and you were an able-bodied male, there were three major Jewish festivals that you would travel to Jerusalem for, no matter where you are. It's Passover, Pentecost, and the Feast of Booths. Um, which is Pentecost wasn't called Pentecost till the Greeks took it over. Okay. So there's three major festivals. Um, Passover is where we we have the stories about Jesus dying, and then 50 days later we get to this time called Pentecost. And so what this means is that this is one of the three times a year that if you could make it to Jerusalem, you would. You would walk. It's like Seattle with the World Cup coming, or Eugene when the World Track Championships were here. People are just flocking in and hotel prices are through the roof. Um, and so these people from all different countries now, they've been assimilated for hundreds of years, generation after generation, different food, dress, accents, dialects, ethnicities, worldview, they're all coming into Jerusalem for this feast of the first fruits for Pentecost. And these groups, they're all together in one place. There are these 120, which if you read um Acts 115, you'll find 120 believers, people who witness Jesus and trust him and are following him. They're kind of gathered together in Jerusalem. They were told to just wait. Um, and so you kind of have this like collision, like you can almost feel something big is happening. All these people are coming to Jerusalem. There's 120 believers just huddled up, wondering what it means that Jesus died and rose and has ascended. And something major, really major, is about to happen in the life of these people. And so suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they're sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues or languages as the Spirit enabled them. And so we looked at this in our our theme of the temple, but this is imagery about God's Spirit descending on the tabernacle or the temple. Remember, we asked the question how is God's presence still on earth? And it's through his spirit in the lives of these early believers, we are now mobile homes for God, right? This is consistent with how God fills things, whether it's the tabernacle or the temple or mountaintop with his presence. So these 120 believers huddled up in Jerusalem are now the presence of God on earth. They are the temple of God's presence. And so what happens is somehow through this experience as they're talking to each other in this kind of crowded, semi-public area, they're conversing, however, it works, their conversation becomes multi-lingistic. People who are rubbing shoulders with them hear their conversations and they look and they see a group of Galileans and they hear them speaking in their own language. I know there's big conversations around speaking in tongues in Christian circles, but at least for now, let's just look at what this author wants to show us. So, verse five. Now we understand what verse five means, right? We understand why they're in Jerusalem. We understand why they're coming from every nation under heaven. And when they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken. Utterly amazed, they asked, Aren't all these speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language? And so in verse 4, I realized that they're speaking, like they think they're speaking one language, but it's heard in a different language. These people are hearing this, these people speaking Aramaic, but they're hearing it in Greek or Coptic or Iranian or Anatolian dialects, among others. And here's the representation of all these nations. You can go to this map that shows all of the people coming in. Um, so quick story before I read this, or just look at this. Um, I did this thing called Bible quizzing growing up. Did anyone do Bible quizzing? Okay, Lars. Um, I grew up in a Mennonite church in Pennsylvania, and the intensity with which large groups of Mennonite youth groups memorize scripture and compete on who knows it better is will blow your mind. Um, yeah, it is my grandma did Bible quizzing, my mom did, I'm a third-generation Bible quizzer. Um, and basically, you know, you're up there with your buzzers, and there's this judge who asks questions, and the first one to buzz in and answer, even before they've completed, gets points for your team, and you can be a better Christian than the other ones that are there. Um, and one of the three years that I did Bible quizzing, uh, we did acts. And so there was a time where I had this whole thing memorized in middle school. So that was the point of that story. You just look like you needed a breather. All right, and so you have all of these residents, if you see the map from all over. I just think it's helpful for us to see how big and expansive this is. And so they hear this message of Jesus and what what Peter then goes up, if you continue reading Acts, he preaches the good news of Jesus, ties it to the Old Testament, and tries to explain how Jesus is the Messiah. And so after Pentecost, all of these people are going back to their homes. They're all going back to their homes with this message of Jesus the Messiah in their own language. And there's two really cool things that made this awesome. The first is the the Greek culture. So Hellenization through Alexander the Great had spread and kind of brought all nations together, everyone knew Greek. I I don't know if I should say this, but it's kind of like English, where we go, we walk around, we think everyone probably knows a little bit of English. It was kind of like that with Greek. Everyone had some type of cultural connection. And then, secondly, uh, Roman infrastructure. So the Romans built roads and security with their soldiers, which is known as the Pax Romana, which you guys did history class. So basically, there is this universal language and culture and And quick and safe travel back. And you can see here this church, this community of Jesus followers spreading out of Jerusalem really quickly. And what we find in the book of Acts and in our life, all throughout the history of people following Jesus, is this that the gospel is a cross-cultural message. Somehow, without sacrificing what it truly is, it can contextualize and become good news to people all around the world. Daryl Bach, who's a commentator on Acts that I was reading, he says this God is using for each group the most familiar linguistic means possible to make sure the message reaches the audience in a form they can appreciate. So the miracle underscores the divine initiative in making possible the mission of God. And here's, I like this line. In a real sense, God is bringing the message of the gospel home to those who hear it. God is bringing the message of the gospel home to those who hear it. It's in their most familiar linguistic means. In other words, God does the work of contextualization. He's comfortable moving into our world, wearing our clothes, speaking our language, eating our food. And we see this in Jesus. And this is this key moment. This is the question we've been asking for the whole Old Testament. When is this thing going global? When will this bless all nations? And here it is, Acts 2, Pentecost, the birth of the church, where God's blessing actually does begin to spread to all nations. Different values, different languages, different governments, different social norms, economic structures, and dress and culture. And one way to illustrate this is with my homie the chameleon. And this is kind of this is a short illustration, but all it is. The chameleon stays the same, but he can blend in with its surrounding areas. This is kind of what the gospel begins to do. And so the book of Acts tells this story of this good news of Jesus spreading from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria to the ends of the earth. It spreads through the Jewish diaspora to all nations and eventually breaks out of the Jewish bubble into the Greek and global world. This primarily happens through this guy named Paul who travels around the Mediterranean preaching and planting churches. And he kind of identifies himself as an evangelist to the Greeks first and then the Jews second. How are we doing? Good. Okay. Fun times. So this is the part that I cut, but here's the short version. This is also not my area of expertise. I've had to wear a lot of hats in these sermons I've made myself preach recently. And I am not a global history or Christian history expert, but here's a simplified version. So this is 2,000 years ago, but here we are, right, in Eugene, Oregon. Beautiful sunny night. And so there's this initial spread with Paul and the apostles. There's even tradition about Thomas taking the gospel to India and drawing straws and who gets to go where. So they're very intentional about spreading. And there's these three major Christian stream traditions that pop up an Eastern, Western, and Coptic, which is like Africa-Egypt tradition. And so this good news of Jesus and followers of Jesus are now global. It's spreading for a few hundred years, and then it encounters something that, in a sense, causes it to shrink. And these two things would be one persecution, whether that's from other religions, the local government or Rome. And then the rise of Islam really took over a lot of areas that were following the way of Jesus. And so we have these kind of localized followers of Jesus, and we kind of fast forward to a long time ahead, and we get to this kind of period of colonization, which we know is maybe not like the most happy thing to think about in world history. But out of Europe, people who had a lot of money and power and more advanced resources began to stop fighting with each other for land, but decided they could take land that's out there in other parts of the world. And so European Western thinking missionaries brought Jesus along with their dress and their culture and a lot of other things, their weapons. And Jesus spread through colonization. And then I think more recently has been the period of indigenous missions, where missionaries have recognized some of the faults of not just bringing the cargo of the truck, but bringing the truck itself, which would be Western culture, European culture, or in our sense American culture, were guilty of that as well. And a new missionary movement that focuses on training the locals and rising up indigenous leaders to speak the gospel and plant churches in their own language from the natives, which the more I read about that movement, it's it's really encouraging. And I I would say, Jeff, if if Jeff was here, he could stand up and tell you all about that. So, anyways, it's cool, it's messy, it's complicated, it's wild, but we have people all over the world who trust Jesus in their context. And so we're gonna enter this series that I'm calling the global church. And for the next five weeks, um, we're gonna bring in people who have either been pastors or missionaries or leaders or worked for a significant period of time in a church or church context in a completely different culture. So we have Nicaragua, Nigeria, Middle East, North Africa, Cambodia, and then also Eugene. We're doing Eugene because I think that'll be fun. Um and what can happen, one of the reasons I want to do this series is that every culture, but I think particularly Western cultures, we can think that we've got everything right. Um we don't always realize that we're shaped by our environment, and what we think, the form of faith that we know comes natural to us, it doesn't come natural to other people. Um, we've been shaped by Plato, the Renaissance, humanism, modern modernism, the scientific and industrial revolutions, and so on. We have learned to follow Jesus in a in a in a cultural soup that's highly individualistic. And we don't stand outside of these worldviews. Um, and so one of the ways to illustrate this is maybe you have seen this before, it's with fish. Um, this is censored. It's usually it says PG. There's usually a PG 13 word in there. Um, but it's the story of this older fish swimming along and meets these two young fish, and it says, Morning boys, how's the water? And the two young fish says, say, What the heck is water? And it's this idea that the fish don't know that they're swimming in water, right? And the same thing for us is that we exist in a cultural context that has saturated the way we think and perceive the world. We don't always realize that we're swimming in it. And our spiritual grandparents um were shaped through this. Our Western expressions of faith in Jesus have had its ups and downs, its appropriations and its misappropriations of the gospel. And I know that we can have a tendency in America or in the West to think we're like the big deal, like we're where God is moving, we're kind of on the forefront of the faith. Um, but we have our own blind spots. And if you're driving, a blind spot, right, is that part, that part of the road where you can't see out of your rear view mirror or your side view mirror, but there could be a car right beside you and you just simply don't know it because you can't see it. And so one of the one of the hopes of this global church series is that as we hear from Christians in other contexts, they would kind of show us a little bit. They would show us the water that we're swimming in and give us kind of a fresh lens to read the Bible and to follow Jesus. I put three books on the back table if you guys want to just take a look at them that I think would be helpful for this conversation. One is by Michael Goheen called The Core of the Christian Faith: Living the Gospel for the Sake of the World. I think I read about like most of it in the last three days, um, and I couldn't put it down. Here's what he says In every cultural institution, practice, or custom, there are both a good, both good underlying structures that are given by God in creation and idolatrous twisting elements that are shaped by sinful idolatry. So to know our own culture is not as easy as it sounds. And he suggests two things that we can do to better understand the water that we're swimming in. The first is that we need to listen to Christians who stand outside of our own cultural setting, who have some distance from our way of life. And so that's what we're doing in this Global Church series. And secondly, uh, we need to understand the story behind our culture that our beliefs and our kind of worldview did not just drop out of the sky. Um, I'll I'll make this short for the sake of time. Gosh, there's so many cool things I wanted to talk to you guys about tonight. But we gotta go. We gotta go soon. All right. Hendrix Park. Yeah, we're going to Hendrix Park for hanging out afterwards if you're free. Everyone's going. Okay. I'll tell you more. I'll read my notes. Um, but uh here's kind of just my my cliff notes version is I think that we're we're at an interesting time culturally. I think we're standing between modernity and post-modernity in kind of our Christian worldviews. So if you think about an older Christian who was shaped by humanism and the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, America was birthed in these streams that we can see the world and read the Bible by wearing tinted lenses of individualism. So if you think about how we often talk about the gospel, it's a lot about how you, it's all about you and just one of you, just only you. How can you do this with Jesus? It's a very individualistic reading of the Bible, or prosperity in our prayer requests, or consumerism in the way we shape the church to be a consumer experience, or just our own love of personal freedom and autonomy. And I think that a new generation, you young folks in the back, um, you are not raised on those principles of modernity. You've seen its holes and you've you've said, ha, I don't think that you're as holistic as you think you are. And we've moved into this new postmodernity subjectivism, um, where objective reasoning is now replaced by subjective experience. We don't want our identity from external structures or institutions, but we want our identity from our own emotions and our own experiences. And so I think that one of the reasons I want to be an intergenerational church is because we need to hold each other in check. And so one of the things that we've said about citizens from the beginning is that we want to be a church that exists in conversation with the historical and global church. And two of our two of our practices are wisdom and confession, which I think will come out in these series. And so this is the global church series that we're about to go into. I want to view it like uh like a car checkup. Have you ever taken your car into the garage? You're gonna buy a car and you take it to the shop, and can you just like give it a look over and tell me what's wrong with it? And then tell me that it's $3,000, and I'll try to watch some YouTube videos and do it myself. Um, but this is my hope is that this global church series would be like a checkup for us. What are the cultural blind spots that we have? God's church has gone global, we are now part of it. We are no longer the center of percentages of Christianity. Um, other nations are sending missionaries to us, okay? And I think that's a good thing. So here's what I want us to come out with. The first is praise. I want us to be blown away by how God is and has been at work all over the world. We're going to hear stories of his presence and restoration from places that are very different than ours. I hope it's energizing. The second is humility. I want us to, I want us to be a humble church. I mean, if we could fast forward 10 years and we're still doing this church thing, and you could ask me, what's one thing you want to be true of us? I want us to be humble Christians. I want us to be humble Christians, that we would see our blind spots and misappropriations, that we wouldn't view ourselves as the heroes of the West or the center of Christianity. We actually would want the rest of the world to come and speak to us. And finally, is mobilization. I hope that as we hear how Christians all around the world are contextualizing in their cities and in their contexts, it would inspire us to look out at Eugene and think how where does the good cargo of Jesus reach the truck that is the Eugene culture? Like where does the gospel intersect with our neighbors? Where is it good news for our, you know, track running, matcha drinking, tie-dye wearing, Saturday market neighbors, track running neighbors, duck fan neighbors? What does it look like? Where does Jesus meet the lives of those in Eugene, Oregon? And so there's a map I think that shows maybe not all the places we're going to go. Um and so the story of God ends in this book of Revelation, and it is this picture of a new creation where every tribe and every tongue is worshiping Jesus. And so there's still at the very end of the story, there's still cultural distinction in the new creation, and that's a beauty, that's a beautiful part of our world, and I want to step into it and appreciate that. Sound good? All right, Pentecost Sunday. Good to spend with you guys. Let me pray, and then I'll invite you to the table. God help us uh to be humble people, and as we read the story, we're we're glad that that through so many ways, the good news of you spread out to the world, and we are recipients of that. Far, far from Jerusalem, far removed from uh Jewish culture 2,000 years ago. You have found us and you have spoken our language, you have met us in our clothes, around our tables, and may we be those who continue to witness to those who are near us. May we be humbled and encouraged by the voices we hear the next five weeks. Um, and may we be people who engage um in Eugene in a in a similar way. In Jesus' name. Amen.