May 23, 2025
The "We" Passages of Acts
During the night Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them.
We therefore set sail from Troas and took a straight course to Samothrace…
~ Acts 16:9-11
What you just read is an excerpt from this week’s first scripture reading . During Eastertide, Acts often serves as the first reading in lieu of a reading from the Old Testament. Acts and the gospel of Luke were both written to “Theophilus.” This was most likely the person or people who paid to have these manuscripts “published.” This was an expensive undertaking. We believe this was a Gentile person or community who were “God Fearers” or people who were drawn to Judaism, but not converts. These people had evidently heard of the movement within Judaism led by followers of Jesus called “The Way.” Their hope was to learn about Jesus and the community that his followers established. (See Luke 1:1-4; Acts 1:1-3)
Luke and Acts are traditionally attributed to a Gentile physician, named Luke, who was a traveling companion of Paul’s. We believe this in part because of passages found in the latter half of Acts that describes the travels of Paul by ship that are written in first person plural. The above text is an example. “We” and “us” appears to have included Luke in every case in Acts. We do not know for certain who wrote Acts, but passages like the one above seem to have been taken from a diary or some other writing of Paul’s companion, Luke, if not written by Luke himself.
It shouldn’t be a surprise then, that Luke-Acts is a double-barrel apologetic for full inclusion of Gentiles into The Way. Both books go to great lengths to show that Christian faith is compatible with Roman citizenship. The villains in Luke-Acts at not Romans, or even Jews, but the wealthy and powerful. There is an economic ethic in these books that stands out in the New Testament. They also stress that The Way is not a philosophy but a community, and communal living is essential to following Jesus. In this respect, the entirety of both Luke and Acts are about the “we” of the faith.
My Old Testament Professor at North Park Seminary, Fred Holmgren, would remind us that the Bible is in dialogue with itself. Luke and Acts are compatible with all of the books which comprise our New Testament, but they are all distinct in terms of their audience and emphasis. In our current church year, the lectionary centers itself around the Gospel of Luke, so we will get a heavy dose of Luke’s perspective this year. But it must be seen as one part of the three-year cycle of texts which elevate other themes and perspectives. We each have perspectives we gravitate towards, but our preferences need to be held in tension with the other, less popular (to us) voices in the scriptures. Like the church Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 12, there is unity in diversity within the scriptures which allows our diversity as a church to remain a “we” in Christ.
With audacious hope,
~ Pastor Todd