Fire in the Upstairs Room

The two men in white were not finished. “This Jesus, who has been taken up away from you into heaven, will come back in the same way as you watched him go.” And that was all. The eleven of them were left standing on the top of the hill in the ordinary morning, with the grass and the olive trees and Jerusalem spread out below them, and nobody to tell them what to do next — except that he had already told them. Wait in the city. So they went.

They came down off the hill still turning to look at the sky, and walked back into Jerusalem. It was not far — a little over half a mile, the length of walk a person was allowed on a Sabbath day — but nobody said much on the way. They went to the house where they were staying and climbed the stairs to the big upstairs room. Peter was there, and John, and James, and Andrew. Philip and Thomas. Bartholomew and Matthew. James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon who had been one of the hot-hearted ones, and Judas the son of James. Eleven men, in a room that used to hold twelve.

They were not the only ones up there. The women who had come all the way from Galilee with him were in that room. Mary his mother was in that room. And so were his brothers — the ones who had not believed him while he was walking around alive. There were about a hundred and twenty of them altogether, coming and going.

And what they did, day after day, was pray. Nothing much happened for the next week and a half. He had told them to stay in the city and wait until they were given power from above, so they stayed, and they waited, and they prayed together with one mind, and nothing happened. They had seen him alive. They had eaten fish with him on a beach. They had watched him go up out of sight. And then, for ten days, they sat in a borrowed room in a city where the men who had killed him were still running the temple, and did nothing at all except pray and wait for something they could not have described if you had asked them.

One of those days Peter stood up in the middle of them. “Brothers,” he said, “the writings had to come true — the ones the Holy Spirit spoke long ago through the mouth of David, about Judas. Judas was one of us. He was counted with us. He had his own share in this work of ours. And he was the one who showed the men where to find Jesus on the night they came to arrest him.” Everybody in Jerusalem knew what had happened to Judas afterward. He had bought a field with the money they paid him, and he died there, and people called that field in their own language Akeldama, which means the Field of Blood. “It is written in the book of Psalms,” Peter went on. “‘Let his home be left empty, with nobody living in it,’ and, ‘Let somebody else take over his work.’ So it has to be one of the men who was with us the whole time — all the time the Lord Jesus was going in and out among us, from the day John was immersing people in the river right up to the day he was taken up away from us. One of those men has to become a witness with us that he is alive.”

Two of them fit that: Joseph, the one called Barsabbas, who was also called Justus, and Matthias. Nobody argued about which. They prayed instead. “Lord, you know everybody’s heart. Show us which of these two you have chosen to take the place in this work that Judas left when he turned aside and went his own way.” Then they drew lots, the old way of letting God pick, and the lot came out for Matthias, and from that day he was counted with the eleven. Twelve again.

Ten days went by. Then came the morning of the feast the people called Pentecost — the harvest feast, fifty days after Passover. Jerusalem was as full as it ever got. Every street had strangers in it, and every language you can think of was being spoken somewhere in the city that morning.

The whole hundred and twenty were together in the one place. And suddenly there was a sound out of the sky like a great wind rushing along — not a wind; a sound like one — and it came down and filled the entire house they were sitting in. There was no draft. Nothing moved. Only the sound, everywhere, all at once.

And then something came apart in the air over their heads, like flames dividing, and one settled on each of them. On each of them. Not only on Peter, not only on the eleven. On the women. On his mother. On the brothers who had not believed him. On every single person in the room. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they began to speak in other languages — languages they had never learned and could not have learned — as the Spirit gave them the words to say.

The sound brought people running. They came from all over that quarter of the city, and a crowd built up outside the house, and then something happened in the street that stopped every one of them where they stood. Each person in that crowd was hearing his own language. Not a language he had picked up on his travels. The one he was born into, the one his mother used to sing to him in. The people from Egypt heard Egyptian. The visitors from Rome heard Latin. The men who had come months along the road out of Parthia heard the great things God had done said in the words they had grown up with — and when they looked to see who was saying it, it was a fisherman from Galilee who had certainly never been anywhere near Parthia.

They stared at each other. “Look at them — aren’t all these men Galileans? Then how is it that every one of us is hearing them in the language we were born speaking? We are Parthians and Medes and Elamites; we come from Mesopotamia, from Judea, from Cappadocia, from Pontus and Asia; from Phrygia and Pamphylia; from Egypt and from the parts of Libya out toward Cyrene. Some of us are visitors from Rome. There are Jews here and people who have joined the Jews, men from Crete and men from Arabia — and we can all hear them telling the great things God has done, every one of us in our own tongue.” “What does this mean?”

And some at the back laughed. “They have been at the new wine,” they said. “That is all this is.”

Then Peter stood up, with the eleven standing up beside him, and raised his voice so the whole street could hear him. This is the same man who, seven weeks before, had stood warming his hands at a fire in a courtyard and told a servant girl he had never heard of Jesus. “Men of Judea, and all of you staying in Jerusalem — let me tell you what this is. Listen to what I say. These men are not drunk, the way you are thinking. It is nine o’clock in the morning. This is the thing the prophet Joel talked about. God said: ‘In the last days I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh — on everybody. Your sons and your daughters will speak for me. Your young men will see visions and your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, the men and the women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they will speak for me. And I will put wonders in the sky above and signs on the earth below: blood, and fire, and smoke going up in a cloud. The sun will turn dark and the moon will turn the color of blood, before the great and shining day of the Lord comes. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’

“Men of Israel, hear these words. Jesus of Nazareth was a man God showed you plainly. God did powerful things and wonders and signs through him, right in the middle of you, where you could all watch — and you know that as well as I do. This man was handed over, and it happened exactly the way God had known and settled beforehand; and you took him, and had lawless men nail him up, and killed him. And God raised him up. God untied the pains of death and let him loose, because there was no way death was going to keep hold of him.

“David said about him: ‘I kept the Lord in front of me all the time. He is at my right hand; I will not be shaken. So my heart was glad and my tongue sang, and my body will rest in hope too, because you will not leave my soul in Hades, and you will not let your holy one rot away. You showed me the ways of life; you will fill me with gladness in front of your face.’ Brothers, I can say this out loud to you about David our father: he died, and he was buried, and his tomb is here in this city, and you can go and look at it today. He was a prophet. He knew God had sworn to him that one of his own descendants would sit on his throne. He saw it coming, and what he was talking about was the Christ getting up out of death — not left in Hades, and his body not rotting away. This Jesus is the one God raised up, and every one of us standing here saw him.”

“God has lifted him up to his own right hand, and he has been given what the Father promised — the Holy Spirit — and what you are looking at and listening to this morning is him pouring it out on us. Because David never went up into heaven. David himself says, ‘The Lord said to my lord: sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet.’ So let the whole house of Israel know it for certain. This Jesus, whom you crucified, God has made both Lord and Christ.”

It went through them like a spear. “Brothers — what should we do?”

“Change your minds and turn around,” Peter said, “and every one of you be immersed on the name of Jesus Christ, and your sins will be forgiven you, and you will be given the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you. And for your children. And for everybody far away — for as many as the Lord our God calls to himself.” He kept at it a long time, saying it a lot of different ways, and what he came back to was this: “Get yourselves out of this crooked generation. Be saved.”

And they came. Everybody who took his word was immersed that day, and about three thousand people were added to them. In the morning there had been a hundred and twenty of them in an upstairs room. By the evening there were three thousand more, and Jerusalem had a new thing in it that nobody had a name for yet. Peter had said it to their faces — this Jesus, whom you crucified — in the same city, seven weeks after it happened. And they had asked him what they should do, and he had told them, and they had done it, and they were counted in.

And what those three thousand did next was stranger than the fire. They kept at four things, and would not be pulled off them: the apostles’ teaching, and being in one another’s company, and the breaking of the bread, and the prayers. A kind of awe settled on everybody, and a great many wonders and signs happened through the apostles. Everyone who trusted was together, and they had everything in common. If a man owned land or a house and somebody in the group needed something, he sold it, and the money was shared out to whoever needed it. There was no keeping of accounts about it. Day after day they were up at the temple together, and then they went home and ate in one another’s houses, passing food around from table to table, glad and plain-hearted, praising God. Everybody in the city liked them. And day after day the Lord added more people to them.