The Age of Communication

May 19, 2002

Acts 2:1-21

We live in the information age. We have more information today than there has ever existed in the history of the world. When the Apostles gathered in the upper room on the day of Pentecost you could have stored all the printed information in the world on one small bookshelf. In two thousand years the amount of information available to us has exploded especially in the last fifty years. The Library of Congress has quadrupled in size in the last twenty five years. We have slick machines that collect and store this information quickly and easily. Anyone can find anything on the internet any time. It is remarkable. But it is also overwhelming.

I read recently that a person in charge of computerizing all the data published in medical journals said that if a physician would work diligently and read two articles from medical journals every single day to keep up on the latest research and understandings (no small task) in his or her field, at the end of one year he or she would only be eight hundred years behind in his or her reading of medical journals.

This is the age of information. It is a far different world today than it was two thousand years ago.

On the day of Pentecost there were maybe twenty or thirty people who would call themselves Christian, if they knew the word. They had no information about how to start up a religion. There was no handbook. They actually had no scriptures describing what it was to be a Christian or even a book about who Jesus was. There was obviously no internet to find any of this information. It would turn out that there would be a central church but it would be an impoverished church and would be destroyed within just a few years so it could not manage the information about Christianity. All the primary leaders who should be in charge of disseminating information Peter, Paul, Stephen and James would be dead by the year sixty eight. The small movement would be harassed as we read in the book of Acts. The early church would not be aided by political or military campaigns. In fact it would not be connected to any political entity for three hundred years. Christian information would travel in only a haphazard way, word of mouth.

There was little information about Christianity. There was no one managing the information. And there were only very primitive ways to move the information.

And yet, and yet, churches were established across the Mediterranean world with remarkable speed. Within twenty five years of Jesus’ death there were churches as far away from Jerusalem as Europe. And churches were springing up all over that world. It really was remarkable.

The reading for today does give us a clue or at least part of the answer as to how this happened. There are three manifestations of the Holy Spirit that are sited in this passage. One is the appearance of flames over the apostle’s heads. Another is a rush of wind that came through the room. Though these two might get your hair to stand on end I can’t imagine they would be able to inspire great numbers of people to faith. But the last is something else. The popular phrase for it is “speaking in tongues.” There are two kinds of this phenomenon in the Bible. One is a kind of ecstatic jibberish that no one really understands but is said to be a sign of someone’s connection to God. You will see this behavior if you go to a Pentecostal Church. The other is what is described in the second chapter of Acts. People inspired by the Holy Spirit speak to people from other countries with different languages and are understood even though the speaker doesn’t know that language.

Now I don’t know if this literally happened. It seems a little fanciful to me. But the fact is that the Christian message made sense in every language. That is a historical fact. The message transcended culture and geography in a way that no one can really explain.

No they did not have the gift (or burden) of information but they did have the gift of communication.

Now I know that the word communication brings up visions of satellites and televisions and information being beamed all over the globe. But that is not the kind of communication that matters. That is merely the noise that fills up our lives. Communication is the emotional connection made through the sharing of one’s spirit. Everything else is just trading information and it has very little meaning. It can be useful but it is hardly important in any ultimate sense. But communication, that is what we live for.