The Last Days Are These Days

He reads the book of Acts the way a man reads a catalogue in a museum.

With genuine reverence. With real attention. And with a low glass between himself and every single page of it.

He would not put it that way. If you asked him he would say he believes all of it, and he would be telling the truth. He does believe all of it. He believes the wind and the fire and the three thousand and the shadow of Peter falling across the sick in the street.

He believes it happened.

And that verb, in his mouth, is doing something enormous and completely invisible.

Because there is another thing he believes, which he has never said out loud and would probably deny, and which governs how he prays, how he reads, how he sits in a meeting and what he expects when he closes his eyes.

He believes he arrived after the interesting part.

Not much after. He would not say two thousand years. In his particular version it is more like forty. There was a time, in his hearing, in the stories the older ones told, when things were different in that building. He came in at the end of that, or just after it, and ever since then it has been the museum.

Ask him when the great days were and he will not be able to name a year, but he will look somewhere over your shoulder.

Now put him down a moment.

Which century do you think you missed?

Peter used the present tense in the street

Something has happened in Jerusalem and a crowd has formed, and they are saying the obvious thing, which is that these people have been drinking.

And a fisherman with no education stands up in front of a crowd of religious professionals and does something extraordinary with a text.

No, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel: In the last days, God says, I will pour out My Spirit on all people.Acts 2:16 and 17

Sit with the tense for a moment, because the tense is the entire argument. You are standing inside the days that sentence opened, and the Holy Spirit who was poured out that morning is nowhere afterwards described as having stopped.

Two words. This is.

Understand what has just happened. Joel wrote his sentence somewhere around seven hundred years earlier. For every one of those seven hundred years, that promise had been read, and studied, and preached, and every time it was read it was read as a thing that was coming.

And Peter, who is not a scholar and has not prepared, stands up in a street and closes the gap in two words. This is that. The thing you have been reading about as future, you are looking at.

Then look at the phrase he keeps.

In the last days. Peter did not soften it, he did not say the last days will begin at some point after this, he applied it to the Tuesday morning he was standing in. Which means that whatever the last days are, they started then, and every century since has been inside them.

Now hear where that puts you, and hear it carefully, because the glass in front of the page is very thin and you have never noticed it.

You are not living after the interesting part. Scripture puts the last days at Pentecost and never revokes the tense, and the Holy Spirit poured out on all people has never once been described in that book as having finished.

And I want to speak to the smaller and more painful version of this, which is the forty-year one, because that is the one that actually has you.

You are grieving a room. Not a century. You heard the older ones talk about how it used to be in that building, and you arrived just after, and the ache you carry is not really theological at all, it is a loss, and it has quietly dressed itself up as a doctrine.

This house does not tell anybody their church has failed and it will not start with yours. Nothing is being prosecuted here. But a memory is not a verdict on the present, and the word does not put the outpouring in the past tense anywhere.

The fire that this house is named for fell in 1906, in a stable, on people who had every reason to think the days of that sort of thing were nineteen centuries behind them. Nobody in that room had been born into it. They had all read about it.

And you are inside these days rather than looking at them. Acts 2 says the last days began on that morning and never once revokes the tense, and the Holy Spirit is not a chapter anybody has closed.