Pentecost. The Spirit has come, the disciples are speaking in other languages, and a crowd has gathered bewildered. Peter stands and preaches — his first sermon, which begins with Joel and ends with a declaration that God has made Jesus “both Lord and Christ” (v. 36). The crowd is cut to the heart and asks what to do. Peter's answer is the most compact statement of the gospel response in Acts: two imperatives (repent, be baptized), one promise (forgiveness + the Spirit), and an expansion of the audience that defies every ethnic and temporal boundary.

From the writers we read together

Saint Augustine

Bishop of Hippo (354-430 AD)

Augustine's conversion was the most famous metanoia in church history: a brilliant young professor of rhetoric, restless in the wrong directions for years, who heard a child's voice saying “take and read” and opened Paul's letter to the Romans and was turned. He described repentance not as a moral achievement but as the soul finally moving in the direction it was always made to move — toward God. His Confessions is a book-length Acts 2:38: a personal account of what happens when the soul turns and receives the Spirit's gift.

The phrase “for all who are far off” in verse 39 is Peter's expansion of the promise beyond Jerusalem, beyond Israel. Augustine, a North African reading a letter originally written to Rome, was himself one of the “far off.” His life is the evidence that the promise landed at the distance Peter promised it would travel. The restlessness Augustine describes in his opening sentence is the precise condition that Peter's command addresses: the soul that is far off, restless, moving in the wrong direction. Turn. Be baptized. Receive the gift. The rest follows.