Spirit-Empowered Community | Acts 2:42-48 | June 14, 2026

Teacher: Othneil Oswald

Scarlet City Church - Columbus, OH

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114 Morse Road, Columbus, Ohio 43214

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

It's great to see you all this morning. It's good to be here. Like Janelle said, my name is Othneel. I serve as one of the pastors here at Scarlet City. And I want to invite you to open up your Bibles this morning to Acts chapter two. And before we dig into the passage, I just want to say, first of all, how much gratitude my heart has been filled with as we have turned this corner into the book of Acts and looking at the outpouring of God and the birth of this community that comes to be known as the Ecclesia, the church. And we're going to go on to see today and in the future weeks how beautiful and life-giving it is from the very beginning. And as I was preparing this week and reading the passage, I was struck by this question about when did I first catch a glimpse of how beautiful a church community can be? When did I first catch a glimpse of this? And I spent a few minutes reflecting on it. And I'm not joking when I said I was sitting there in the coffee shop, kind of in tears, thinking about this. Because I thought back to all the deep friendships that I've had in the church throughout my life and how I've felt known and seen in the midst of a world where I'm often tempted to think that I'm on my own. And I realized that even though throughout my life I've spent a lot of time skeptical about the Holy Spirit, I've now got a long list of moments of God blessing me and speaking to me powerfully and personally, even through near strangers. And I thought about the faithful friends that I had right after college who walked with me through a season of immense grief and doubt and deconstruction. I thought about how my pastor bought me groceries when medical bills drained my bank account. And I had someone who sold me a car for a dollar so that I could get to work. All these ways I've been blessed. But as I went further and further back in my story and I tried to think about my first experience with the beauty of the church, and this is the one that really got me choked up. I realized I don't even have memories of it. I don't even have memories of these first blessings because I was only one year old. I needed open heart surgery. And my parents, who were in their mid-twenties, terrified, pretty new to their community, they saw the local church rally around them and support them and carry them through this time and even offer to donate their very blood on my behalf. I'm alive today, in part because of Mr. House donating his blood and my dad and others giving of themselves for my family and even for me. And as I reflected on all of that, I realized that, man, regardless of the pain and messiness that I've also certainly experienced in the church over the years, that God has just loved me radically and personally and persistently through his church since before I can even imag uh before I can even remember. And I want to turn that question then to you this morning and ask you the same thing. When did you first catch a glimpse of how beautiful a church community can be? And I know your answer to the question might not be quite as melodramatic as mine. I don't know, maybe it is. But when when was that for you? What was it for you that showed you what God does through his church? And I think this is a perfect question for our gathering today because as we open up scripture together, Luke is about to tell us the early church's answer to this question. When they first saw a glimpse of what God could do in his church. And Luke, as an author, he's been building up to this event for weeks, right? The whole story of the early church has been ramping up for two whole chapters. Luke starts this book by indicating this is the continued work of Jesus in the world. But then Jesus goes to the Father and he tells his disciples to wait for the Holy Spirit, and that that spirit will be the agent of his work in the world as he continues to do that work. And so the disciples get together and they wait for this to happen, and then it does, right? We get the day of Pentecost, and the Spirit pours out on everyone, and everyone can understand the good news of the Messiah in their own language. And Peter stands up and declares, this is what we've been waiting for. This is the day that the prophet Joel prophesied about, that God was going to pour out his spirit on all flesh, and that all his people, women and men, young and old, would prophesy and dream and embody his power in the world. And as we saw Jay preached about last week, Peter calls everyone to turn to this Christ and to join in this new movement of God. And thousands of people believe. And then what? What comes next? We got to remember the day isn't even over yet, right? We're still in the day of Pentecost in the narrative of Acts. So what's the climax of all of this? What's the result of all of this? What's the ultimate conclusion of this beautiful, glorious day of Pentecost? We're going to open up, like I said, to Acts chapter 2 and see page 966 in your Pew Bibles. If you need to use that, it's going to be on the screen behind me as well. But let's read together Acts chapter 2, starting in verse 42. They were devoting themselves to the Apostles' teaching and to fellowship and to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Reverential awe came over everyone, and many wonders and miraculous signs came about by the apostles. All who believed were together and held everything in common. And they began selling their property and possessions and distributing the proceeds to everyone as anyone had need. Every day they continued to gather together by common consent in the temple courts, breaking bread from house to house, sharing their food with glad and humble hearts, praising God and having the good will of all the people. And the Lord was adding to their number every day those who are being saved. Isn't that beautiful? Isn't it beautiful? I think that's the question that Luke is asking as he paints this picture. He's telling us, man, look what God is doing through his Messiah, what the Spirit is already doing in his church on day one, starting on day one. And I say starting because, of course, this whole passage, it's not all just one day. There's a passage of time that starts to happen here, verses 42 to 47. It kicks off at Pentecost and narratively it just flows directly out of it. In modern storytelling terms, this is the montage sequence, if you will. Right after the inciting event, right? The part where the music swells and you see quick flashes of the characters' lives, where you know you watch the athlete train for the big fight, or you watch the couple fall in love after their meat cute, or you watch the family moving into their new house amidst all the laughter and the chaos. And in these kinds of sequences, right, the goal is to set the stage for the story by painting a picture of who the central characters are, what kind of people they are, what they care about, what motivates them, how they respond to the world. The montage establishes the underlying assumptions and dynamics that ground the rest of the story. And I think Luke does this at the outset of the narrative because throughout the rest of the book of Acts, he's going to focus in on stories and experiences of specific people or specific communities, but he wants us to think of this as the backdrop for all of it. We're meant to picture in the background of all the other events of the rest of Acts that communities like this are emerging all throughout the known world. That the spread of this good news, the pouring out of this spirit is going to do this exact same thing, not just in Jerusalem, which is where Acts 2 takes place, but in Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. That's what Luke is having us picture here. And he might not have had montage as a category in his head, right? But I think his goal here is the exact same, to show us that the coming of this spirit and the spread of the spirit's power throughout the rest of the book of Acts doesn't just produce individual believers or isolated incidents of beauty and power, but instead it produces this ongoing radical community. Not just changed individual lives, but this entire new kind of humanity. Acts two wants us to see that the outpouring of God produces a family, produces this new kind of family. And that might feel a little bit trite to say, right? You've probably maybe heard sermons before about how the church is a family. Or maybe that idea feels abstract or distant to you. For for you, family might mean difficult, right? It might mean conflict and misunderstanding and unmet hopes. But I think family is an essential part of this picture. Like if we're going to read Acts two through the eyes of an early Greco-Roman or Judean reader, as we read about a group of people who are together daily, who fellowship not just in the public square but in their homes, who share meals and go to temple together and pray together and provide for one another's needs, even at great personal cost. The readers might have been a bit confused because they didn't really have a category for a group of unrelated people living like this. That's not how it had ever really worked in human culture. But as they read it, they would immediately see that against all odds, what Luke is describing here is a family, a radical, unprecedented, even multi-ethnic family, right? Because, well, at this point, Gentile, the full inclusion of the Gentiles is still a bit on the horizon in the book of Acts, but the early part of this passage tells us this crowd is made up of Jews and proselytes, which just means Gentile converts to Judaism from around the known world, people of many languages from many nations. And as Luke describes them as a family, nonetheless, it's shocking because it comes with all of the ancient connotations of family, deep, daily, even lifelong mutual dependence. And we urbanites in the modern West, on the other hand, we might not really connect with that definition of family, right? Deep, daily, lifelong mutual dependence isn't necessarily how we all experience family. Many of us experience family in terms of, you know, semi-frequent relational connection at most, right? We see them a lot in our youth, but then we become adults and we're encouraged to move to the big city or to go to college or to go get a job wherever the market's hot, buy our own house, and then we come back together to catch up a few times a year. But most humans throughout history haven't lived that way, right? Even today, most of the world lives in a far more communal way than we do in our own culture. And I remember experiencing this in a pretty eye-opening way about 10 years ago. I a buddy and I had a chance to live for about a year in southeastern Honduras, and we lived with a family there. And when I say we lived with a family, I don't mean we rented their guest bedroom, even though that on paper was the entirety of our relationship with them. In reality, we ended up sharing this miniature community with them, with Oscar and Yolani, our hosts, and with their teenage son, and often their older son, and Yolani's mother, and her live-in caretaker, and a teacher at a local school, and another woman named Gloria, and all the cousins and aunts and uncles that often came and stayed in the home. It was a constant party in that house. Barbecues, birthday parties, we danced at weddings with them and walked in funeral processions with them for people that we didn't even know because that's just what family does in their culture. And this wasn't unique to their house. Most of our friends there lived in multi-generational homes, often with their extended families. They lived in interdependent community, something far more similar to the world of the early church than the culture that we tend to swim in here in the States. Because, like I said, in the ancient world, much like in Honduras, family wasn't a peripheral part of life. It was at the core of one's reality and identity, right? It was a primary source of meaning and security and loyalty for ancient people. But that doesn't mean that the work of Jesus and his church weren't radical departures of what even they had previously known, because, you know, for us in an individualistic culture, it's this daily mutual dependence that maybe feels a little bit challenging. But for them, the bombshell here is that this interdependence ought to cross lines of blood relation and ethnicity and nationality and status, that membership in God's new family supersedes all of the rigid social boundaries by which they tended to define what family means. This is why it's so radical when Jesus tells them that those who do God's will are his true brothers and sisters. When he says that following his way might mean strife in the family, might mean leaving father and mother to follow him. That was radical to his early hearers. And he said those things not because immediate families aren't beautiful or important. In fact, many households will come to follow Jesus together throughout the book of Acts, we'll see. But Jesus throws down this gauntlet about family strife because he knows that people's attachments to their own rigid cultural boundaries are going to quickly end up at odds with the expansive nature of God's love, with the then unthinkable breadth of who all God wants to bring into his family. The widowed and the orphan and the immigrant, the outcast, the sick, the poor, soon enough, the Gentiles of all nations are going to be invited into this thing. And in doing this, the Spirit is just moving in the footsteps of all of Scripture's witness and trajectory, right? God makes such a point throughout all of the law, the prophets, the writings of calling his people not just to care for their own, but also for the other, for the outsider, for the vulnerable. And who throughout Scripture do we see the vulnerable consisting of? Those who most likely are disconnected from family, the orphan and the widow, who found themselves without family ties, without the social safety net that comes from that. God calls people to care for the immigrant, those who are far from home, disconnected from the family protections and resources that they might have had, the sick, who are sometimes considered cursed, sometimes cast out of their families, the poor, who I have no doubt often overlap with the other categories I just talked about, people who had no one in their life to lift them up. And God's heart has always gone out to the vulnerable and to the other. And throughout the way of Jesus and his pouring out of his spirit at Pentecost, God is establishing amongst his people this whole new level, even of love toward those on the margins. And what the Spirit produces here in Acts 2, this is a completely radical, utterly unprecedented establishment of a new thing the biblical scholar N.T. Wright calls a worship-based, egalitarian, fictive kinship group. Fictive kinship essentially just means a people who are not family, from a wide variety of backgrounds and social locations, deciding that they're going to act like a family, not because of where they come from, but because of who they worship. Again, this is unprecedented in the ancient world to them, to the early readers of a text like this, to people who are watching the church from the outside, it might even sound like it has the potential to be an utter mess, right? Different homelands and cultures all trying to live as one people? That's chaos, right? But that's not what we see here at Pentecost. And why is that? I think first, just like the miraculous understanding across diverse languages, I think Acts presents radical unity as just a piece of what the Spirit does amongst God's people. But another thing we see as we look at Luke's description of this new family is that they aren't just a group of random people who like each other and so they're going to attempt some diversity and equality out of nowhere, right? They are a very specific kind of community. They exist for a specific purpose, and they have a clear set of practices and priorities that unify them. In Acts 2, we see exactly what these priorities are, right? We see, I think, four organizing principles that come to define what it means to be the church. We see that the spirit-empowered family is four things. It is sacramental, it is charismatic, it is liberatory, and it is invitational. And each of these facets is essential to the nature of the church, both then and now. They are first sacramental, like I said, by which I mean they have genuine reverence and awe for God. They have an attachment, an enchantment with the sacred. They're dedicated to the teaching of the gospel, to practicing the Lord's Supper together. They're devoted to prayer, which is more literally translated the prayers in this passage. This means that they carried over the communal liturgical practices of the Hebrew scriptures. They practiced the prayers together. They followed Jesus' commands by baptizing new believers. They worshiped and experienced God together through all of these communal practices. They were sacramental. Second, they're charismatic. They're filled with God's Spirit and they are confident in the power of God's Spirit to heal and transform and do genuinely mighty things among his people. They have openness and imagination. They ask God to move and they expect God to move. They're also a liberatory community. They embody God's justice to the vulnerable, not just by including them, but by lifting them up, by elevating them through radical generosity, by the upending of worldly hierarchies. There's a passage similar to this one in a couple chapters, Acts 4, and it re-emphasizes this value's centrality. Chapter 4, verses 3 and 33 and 34 tells us that God's grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. Imagine that. All this leads to this final facet of the family that the Spirit creates, and that's that it's for everyone. The church is invitational. It is, in the classical sense of the word, evangelical, evangelistic, convinced that others need to hear this good news, need to be invited to turn from sin and death and participate in the family of God. And this church, from its inception until today, is called to be these things, to be sacramental, charismatic, liberatory, invitational. And I think it's amazing that these things are so clear, even from the church's very first, very brief description in the book of Acts. Because when I think about all the ways that a church can stray from God's character or become maybe harmful or irrelevant, it tends to be because one of these things is turned down way too low or missing entirely. It's like the band that we had up here this morning, right? It's been wonderful to worship with them together. It's great to have a bit of a bigger band, a drum set up here. But what would happen if Andy, our awesome tech guy back there, forgot to unmute the bass guitar or turned up the drums way too loud or didn't balance the vocals. Things can so quickly become distorted or discordant when the elements are out of whack or when something's left out. And I and I think this is the same for the church's core characteristics, right? Any one of these. You turn up sacramentalism too loud and you can make the church into stale ritual and dry theology. But without it, you lose enchantedness and groundedness and you risk disconnecting the church from its historical roots. Turn up charismaticism a little too loud, and it can become all about elevated, heightened experience. But if you mute it, you end up closing off your imagination to the living, breathing, transforming work that God delights to do among his people. Liberation, similar, without the others, it can become this all-consuming thing, leaving us angry or jaded about the corruption and injustice in the world around us, but it also needs to be prominent in the mix, or we might just find ourselves aloof and comfortably complicit with that same injustice and corruption. And of course, invitation. This is the one that often plays lead vocals, if you will, in most evangelical traditions. And it is, like this early church shows us, an essential piece of God's mission. But when it makes itself the star at the expense of all the others, Others, then the church doesn't have anything real to give all those butts that it puts in seats. And I say all this, and in Acts 2 emphasizes the centrality of all these things, not because it's our job to anxiously manufacture all these things through willpower. It ought to help us notice, obviously, if something is glaringly absent in the mix, absolutely, but it's not a rubric for how to get God to move by creating some perfect thing through sheer effort. And certainly as we continue reading the book of Acts, we're going to see Luke has no interest in depicting the early church as perfect either. He's going to talk about all their problems and disagreements throughout the rest of the book. And the same, I think, goes for us. We're not perfect. Luke's not telling us that we need to be. And he's also not pretend presenting what I think it's maybe easy to see. He's not presenting some utopian time that the modern church ought to long to go back to, as I often hear talked about, as I've often thought about myself, but I realize, you know, the same spirit is here, now, the same amount of power, the same heart in our context. I think the real purpose of this passage is to first tune our eyes and our ears to notice and embrace the work that the Spirit does and longs to do in his church in any age. And second, and I think perhaps even more clearly, I think this Pentecost passage exists to glorify God, to just celebrate the wisdom and the goodness of how he's designed his body to live on earth. Like I said, Luke presents us this and he says, Man, isn't this beautiful? Praise God. That's his goal here. I think as important as they are, I don't want us to get us so lost in the details that our main takeaway from this passage is, well, we got our work cut out for us if we're going to live up to all that. Acts two, it might be a mirror that helps us notice when something's off in the mixed, but it's not a textbook giving us a formula for how to get God to do something for us. It's first and foremost a glowing personal account of the best party that the early Christians had ever seen. It's meant to be gratitude and raucous worship that bleeds through the page into our hearts and out into the world as we read this and reflect on it. That's the message of the first church. That's its purpose, even to worship and to glorify God. The end goal of God's family isn't to craft the perfect community, but to cultivate a common life of perpetual celebration of what God has done and who God is and what God is doing. It's about cultivating common celebration. It's about paying attention to what the Spirit is already doing among us, listening and responding to his voice, living into the family that Christ has given us. Like we see here, glad and sincere hearts praising God, savoring mutual dependence and mutual belonging. Scripture, prayer, table, worship, generosity, justice, hospitality, invitation, all of this in us, born out of this deep conviction that we belong to and exist for someone beyond ourselves, for the Almighty God who has revealed Himself to us and redeemed us in Christ, and who has given us his very spirit to no lesser degree today than on this first day, all those years ago. And as I reflect on all of that, and as I thought this week about how God might invite Scarlet City to respond to this this morning, the main sense that it drew out of me wasn't some grand new thing that we ought to be doing, but just a great, deep gratitude for what God is already doing among us. It's been such a blessing to see and receive this, even myself, in these first six short months that I've been here, fully a part of this community, just as the Spirit does time and again across all the world. I look at the life of our church and I see gardens in bloom. I see the four distinctives of the early church in our core values. Right? We say we are word-centered, spirit-empowered, liturgical, sacramental, and missional. And that's easy enough to say on paper, but I've also seen these things be true among us. I've seen them in practice. I see these beautiful worship gatherings and communion together around a table and our prayer ministry and baptisms. I see our kids and youth ministries, Bible and prayer groups, community meal. I see the generosity of this church, the passion that each of you has for mission and justice. And I see God pouring out his love through you as you open your homes to your neighbors and your friends and families in need as you invest your resources in God's work around our city and the world. And it's not just about us, right? I'm grateful that even this building that God has provided us is a place of worship for multiple congregations. The Lord is praised in several languages on almost a daily basis in this place. I myself, like I said, I felt deeply blessed by this community as a people of honesty and unity and peace in the midst of a world and a wider cultural chaos that often screams for my own attention. Church, the Spirit of God is on the move in this place. And it's beautiful. And I don't share any of that to toot our own horn or to pretend like we've nailed it in some exceptional way. I'm thankful that we partner with so many other and celebrate so many other churches and ministries where these same things are happening. It's a constant reminder that Scarlet City here is just a small but beautiful slice of the much larger global family of God, the global story that he's telling, just like the church in Jerusalem is going to go on to be throughout the book of Acts. The Spirit is producing and always has been producing this kind of fruit all over the world from the beginning until now. And he's going to continue doing it until the Lord returns. And yes, there's always going to be new ways we can grow, new movements of the spirit to pay attention to, new calls to imagine rhythms of worship and generosity and invitation for each new generation or season of the church. But my goal, as I name the goodness of the here and now, is to embody the heart of this scripture, to draw attention to what the spirit is doing and just spotlight it and celebrate it, to invite all of us into the rhythms of gratitude and worship that I think we're all meant to experience as members of God's family. And more than that, it's to remind us that as we celebrate and as we dream of new ways to live out the four core tenets of the church we see in Acts 2, that as we do all of that, it's not our story that we're telling. This is, as we always love to say here, God's story. We are just people joining him in it. All this goodness that he's producing here, it points far, far beyond ourselves. And at its best, it points the attention of anyone who encounters us toward the God who is pouring himself out for them and for us. It points toward the future, in which all of these things that we see in Acts 2 and in our community will be always and everywhere and fully and perfectly and incorruptibly true. And until that day, we have this. We have the local church, an imperfect, sure, but glorious, beautiful image of the Messiah's new family, invited into ongoing growth and change, invited to bring fresh imagination into each new season. Invited to ask God's Spirit daily, what are you doing among us to make us more and more into a family? What are you doing to make us more sacramental, charismatic, liberatory, invitational together? And as the Lord responds and as he forms us more and more into his character, we are invited to celebrate, just as Acts 2 invites us with gratitude. As it says, praising God, breaking bread with glad and sincere hearts together. And we're going to do exactly that this morning as we gather around the table for communion. But before we do that, let me pray for us, Lord, we thank you. We come before you with such gratitude, seeing what you've been doing since the very beginning on that day of Pentecost as you poured out your spirit, established your church as this beautiful, radical new humanity, this beautiful family, this beautiful community, Lord. We thank you for all the ways that you've manifested that throughout all of history. We thank you for the ways that you're doing that here. We pray you would grow us all the more daily into your character, into your image, that we would listen to your spirit and continue to live in gratitude and celebration of all of the fruit you are producing here in our church, here in our city, and around the world in this global family of God that you have given us to bless and belong to. We thank you for being a God who loves us like that. Amen.