Peter and LeRoy
Yes, a promised study of some sort, Bible or amateur theology, or other, but if your mind ever picked up and latched onto a song that wouldn't go away, you know how this is. On WMBB Channel 13 this morning there was the trivia question, something like Which of the following art critics coined the term Impressionism? and listed four names. Well, who knows? Coming back a few minutes later, the answer was something Leroy.
Leroy. Leroy? The only Leroy I know is Bad, Bad Leroy Brown, baddest man in the whole dxxx town.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwPRm5UMe1.A
Whoever remembers Jim Croce** and his songs remembers the day he died. A solid Jim Croce fan (he must have been every teenagers' superstar at the moment), our daughter Malinda was 15, in high school in Columbus, Ohio, where we were living at the time. See, I'm relating this because it's one of our family memories of living with a teenage daughter. The first daughter at any event, the second daughter I'm still not over her going away to college.
Anyway, "If I could save time in a bottle" and "I'll have to say I love you in a song". News came over television that morning, that Jim Croce had been killed in a plane crash. It was September 20, 1973, and, knowing how upset she would be and that she would put up a horrific sobbing, screaming storm about not going to school, we decided not to tell Malinda that morning, but to wait until she got home from school. Actually, Linda decided that, I was ambivalent, sensing the likely results.
So, mistake. Big mistake. BIG Mistake. big Big BIG MISTAKE. Malinda arrived home from school that afternoon sobbing and enraged, screaming at her mother (Commander Weller was blessedly at the office) for not telling her and she had to find out at school, or maybe it was on the schoolbus going in that morning, where everybody knew but her. Running upstairs to her room and slamming the door, vowing to never speak to us again.
Growing up with Malinda was a trip. That we did and do love her dearly in no way alters the fact of ongoingly surprising experiences of our own growing up through eighteen years of our twenties and thirties, with Malinda at home. What do I remember? How I doted on her from the moment she was born. Screaming fits of temper. Brand new bluejeans being sandpapered threadbare then thrown in the washing machine and a full carton of table salt, or preferably a full box of ice cream salt, poured on top of them. Cars being wrecked. All the many, many loving things she did for me over the years. Fighting with her mother over eyeglass frames. Smoking marijuana in the woods with other teenagers when we thought she was at basketball games. There's more, lots more. No young parent couple, we were 21 and 22 when she was born, is prepared for their first child. Nonplussed may define our first twenty years of marriage and family.
Here's one of next Sunday's Bible readings
Acts 2:14a,36-41
Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd, “Let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.”
Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, “Brothers, what should we do?” Peter said to them, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.” And he testified with many other arguments and exhorted them, saying, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added.
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It gnaws at me, I'll admit it, that the latest Bible translations say Messiah when the gospel evangelist wrote Xpistos, Christ. SV, the Scholars' Version translation of The Jesus Seminar, never says either, it renders Xpistos as "the anointed one". Here's the phrase Luke uses in Acts καὶ κύριον αὐτὸν καὶ χριστὸν. Granted, Messiah is probably more appropriate for our better understanding, but the old ways were best.
Anyway, baptism, three thousand were baptized. At that immediate point in the gospel age, that Day of Pentecost less than two months after the Resurrection, the Jesus Movement was just budding, a new understanding of Messiah, would not yet have been organized and institutionalized. Baptism would still have been in the style of John the Baptist, baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The folks who were baptized that day would have been seeking to escape condemnation for any judged complicity in the murder of Jesus whom Peter preached as both Lord and Messiah (a Jewish figure).
We say Lord & God, Luke did not say Lord & God, that was Gospel John, writing maybe half a generation after Luke, who might have said Lord & God. But then Lord in NT Greek is kurios, which also is used in the LXX to render Y'Vah the Hebrew name for God that is spoken as Adonai or haShem: kurios. So, calling Jesus kurios, Luke's christology could be argued in Sunday School class.
But baptism. While baptism on that actual Day of Pentecost would have been understood as John the Baptist offered and practiced it, the book Acts of the Apostles was not written until maybe sixty years after that Pentecost, by which time baptism would have evolved from its Jewish understanding to the newly developing Christian understanding of being baptized into Christ, and perhaps in the sense of Matthew 28:19, with which Luke may have been familiar.
Unless that's a later addendum to Matthew, which could be another Bible Study, eh?
Still anyway, this is our first account of people coming to Christ, confessing Christ crucified and being baptized in His Name, en masse.
RSF&PTL
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