How Many Different Audiences? Preaching from Acts

I’ve been working on my sermon for this Sunday – from Acts 3: 12 – 26.  It seems like a pretty straight-forward kind of text. Peter and John have just healed a man crippled from birth and an excited crowd has gathered around them.  Peter uses the opportunity to tell them that the healing came from faith in Jesus’ name – the same Jesus that they (the crowd) had recently repudiated and handed over to Pilate to be killed.  Peter then called on them to repent so that the times of refreshing could come and led the crowd through the words of the prophets to convince them to repent.

Simple, right?

Well, yes and no.

This is what has struck me:  There are several different audiences submerged in this text – and each different audience may be receiving a different message.

The first and most obvious audience is the crowd – the “Israelites” – those early first century Jews in Jerusalem.  Some of them may have been Jewish pilgrims from far parts of the Empire who’d come to Jerusalem for the Passover festival.  Many of them may have been witnesses to Jesus’ arrest, trial, and execution (that seems to be implied in Peter’s accusations.)  What did Peter’s speech mean to that audience?

The second audience is less obvious; the readers of Luke’s two part work of gospel / acts of the apostles… This is a largely “imaginary” audience.  I say “imaginary” because we really don’t know who they would have been. Were they Jews or Gentiles or both?  Were they in Rome?  We don’t really know.  And so it is difficult to say what Luke might have intended this submerged “imaginary” audience to understand.

The third audience is impossibly unwieldy:  the universal church.  How has the Christian community through the millennia and around the globe understood this text? How has it been used and abused?

The fourth audience is more personal (yet still unwieldy) – what does it mean to me? 

And my fifth (at least fifth, perhaps there are still more) is my congregation.  And this one is, in some sense, imaginary as well.  What do I think, what do I “imagine” that this text will mean to those who will hear me speak on Sunday morning?  As Peter’s words flow through Luke, and church history and commentators and scholars and exegetes and, finally, through my unworthy voice, what will they hear?