Foundry UMC DC: Sunday Sermons
Religion & Spirituality:Christianity
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC May 19, 2019, the fifth Sunday of Easter. “Questions Along The Way” series.
Texts: Acts 11:1-18, (John 13:31-35)
This Spring season has been such a gift for me this year. The birdsong, the breeze, the growing green, the waves of flowers, have all been like medicine for my weary spirit. Perhaps you know what I mean. Those of you who follow me on FaceBook may have seen the pictures of flowers in my yard…medicine! Such beautiful diversity of color and texture in the garden… Diversity in a garden is beautiful and desirable and takes some work and planning but is fairly straight-forward to achieve. Diversity in human community is also beautiful and desirable… and makes everything harder. Creating a healthy and just diverse human community is decidedly NOT straight-forward to achieve.
Today we read of an extraordinary moment in the early church as it tried to figure out how to live as a community according to the Way of Jesus: The story opens with Peter being challenged by the Jewish Christians in Judea because they’ve heard that Peter shared the gospel with Gentiles and baptized them! You see, the United Methodist Church is not the first community of Jesus followers to struggle with issues of diversity and to have conflict over who is “in” and who is “out.” In the earliest days of the church, there were great disputes about who could be included in the church’s ranks; one main issue was whether to be a member of The Way, one needed to be circumcised—that is, either a born Jew or a Jewish convert. Prejudice on this point was as virulent as any prejudice we are familiar with today.
Peter defends his actions by sharing a vision he had received while still in Joppa and recounting what happened as a result. Peter’s vision is odd (as visions often are) and came to Peter while he was praying and distracted by hunger. At that moment “something like a large sheet” descends from heaven (a sign that the vision is from God). The sheet holds all kinds of animals—in fact, the list is a conventional classification of creatures for the literature of the time—“four-footed creatures and beasts of prey and reptiles and birds of the air.” A voice from heaven urges Peter to kill and eat up! Peter protests, citing his interpretation and practice of orthodoxy—“I’ve never eaten anything that is profane or unclean.” And the voice gives a correction, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” This animal-laden sheet appearance, the voice, the protest by Peter, and the corrective repeat three times.
One of our Foundry folk (Lorrea Stallard) has given me a new shorthand for Peter’s vision encounter: it’s “bed, bath, and the great beyond!” But what is going on here? It is important to remember that, like Jesus, Peter and all the original twelve apostles were observant Jews. There were very strict rules about food—what was “kosher” and what was considered “unclean.” Peter reacts to the animals on the sheet as if all were unclean—though that’s not the case. Some of the animals listed would have been OK to eat according to the food laws. So there’s something “off” about Peter’s perception or interpretation of either the religious law or of what he was seeing displayed on the sheet. What Peter thought was the right thing to do was corrected not once, but three times. Peter was puzzled. //
Now another vision occurred the day before Peter’s—received by one Cornelius of Caesarea, a Gentile. Cornelius is described as a devout man who “gave alms generously to the people and prayed constantly to God” (Acts 10:2). The message he received in his vision was to send for Peter. Cornelius dispatches some from his household to fetch Peter from Joppa.
These are the messengers who appear as Peter is trying to make sense of his “bed, bath, and the great beyond” vision. And what Peter recounts to his up-in-arms colleagues in Judea, is that when the messengers from Caesarea arrived, “the Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us.” Once he arrived in the home of Cornelius he shared the good news of Jesus Christ, the news of peace and power and healing and release from oppression and new life and forgiveness (Acts 10:34-43). And then, he reports, “the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning.” Acts 10:45 records, “The circumcised believers who had come with Peter (to Caesarea) were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles…” Astounded. God’s grace, God’s Spirit, God’s love was not reserved only for them. God’s gifts were shared with those who were different from them. Astounding.
This story contains one of the most important tenets of our faith: The good news of Jesus Christ is for ALL…the Holy Spirit is a gift for ALL…the saving love and power of God is for ALL. Followers of the Way of Jesus are called from the very beginning “not to make a distinction between ‘them’ and ‘us,’” to cross boundaries in order to share the love, mercy, and justice of God with everyone.
This story marks a turning point for the early church, a new way of understanding what God is doing. For it becomes clear that God, in Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit has expanded the saving territory beyond the boundary of the “chosen people” the Jews and truly beyond any boundary! Peter, seeing that the Holy Spirit was received by the Gentiles he met in Caesarea, says this astonishing thing: “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?”
And this gets us to our question for today: Are we obstacles or instruments? God is always trying to draw the circle wider, to do something new in us, to expand hearts and minds, to bring reconciliation and justice, to tear down the walls of division. And we can so easily get in the way; wittingly or not, we can hinder what God is up to. Any of the persons in the story might have been an obstacle to God’s movement. Cornelius could have been an obstacle to his household receiving the good news of God’s love in Jesus and receiving the Holy Spirit—if he had ignored or rejected the message he received in prayer. The messengers could have been obstacles by not agreeing to relay the invitation to Peter. Peter could have been an obstacle by refusing to receive the correction to his limited and likely erroneous perception of the religious law or by refusing to go to Caesarea. Peter’s companions could have been obstacles if they had tried to keep those in Cornelius’ home from being baptized. But all along the way, these folks allow God to work in and through them; they are like what the 14th century mystic poet, Hafiz, describes when he says, “I am a hole in a flute that the Christ’s breath moves through.” They are not obstacles, but instruments, open to Spirit to move through and move them to embrace, include, and love. I think of the prayer of St. Francis that begins, “Make me an instrument of your peace…”
In the story, there is a moment of truth: will the “apostles and the believers who were in Judea”—those who hadn’t had a personal experience of these Gentiles—will they be obstacles to what God is up to, holding fast to the old rule, clinging to the well-known requirements as gatekeepers of their tribe? Or will they be instruments, allowing the breath of Christ to move through them and open their minds and hearts to the expanded community God is offering? The story makes it sound so easy! Peter and the others tell the story…and those in Judea who are opposed to this radical shift in “the way we’ve always done it” are silenced in their objections and give praise to God.
We know it’s not so easy, though. Letting go of the familiar and comfortable is never easy. Letting go of what has given us a sense of order and identity is never easy. And the call of God to “make no distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them,’” while beautiful and powerful, isn’t easy either. To make no distinction between “them” and “us” is not to erase the real differences that exist in the human family. Human beings come from different places, have different strengths and weaknesses, and have different cultural, racial, political, theological, and sexual and gender identities. We communicate in very different ways, we have different love languages and priorities and perspectives and preferences—from music to food to art to sports team loyalties… This is the way it is. And to be Christian doesn’t mean that we are to ignore these diversities or to try to make everyone the same. Far from it. A community in which everyone looks, thinks, acts, and reacts the same way would be a boring fiction—and might describe the goal of some human political factions, clubs, or even church communities. But that isn’t what authentic Christian community is—and it is not the way God created the creation. To make no distinction between “them” and “us” in the church means that we recognize that, regardless of who a person is, where they come from, how they act or think or love—that person is a child of God, that person has received (or has the capacity to receive) the Holy Spirit, that person is a fellow member WITH US of the Body of Christ.
That is not easy—not ever—and especially not in these polarized and anxious days in which we live. It’s one reason why so many Christians and churches find themselves being obstacles instead of instruments of God’s grace and love.
Right now at Foundry and across the United Methodist Church, we are grappling with all of this—really at every level. Here at Foundry we are committed to practice healthy relationships with one another, to extend grace and compassion, to be accountable with each other, to do justice, to be humble, to listen, to honor the beautiful diversity within our community and to try to remove obstacles that get in the way of greater diversity and creation of true beloved community. We are engaged directly and meaningfully in all the conversations happening locally and nationally to create a church that is fully inclusive of LGBTQ persons. I hope you read last month’s Forge piece that shared the resolution by the Board—to more deeply and intentionally address issues and opportunities to strengthen our practices for racial equity and justice. And this next issue will share an excerpt from and link to an essay I wrote for The Circuit Rider online journal that reflects on what I see as the opportunities God is giving us right now as a denomination. I believe God is calling us to repent of an unjust past—related to everything from race to colonial practices to gender inequity to exclusion of LGBTQ folks. And I also believe God is calling us to reset for a revitalized, faithful, dynamic, fully inclusive, anti-racist, anti-colonial future that draws upon the best of our Wesleyan tradition.
The challenge for us is that to practice the Way of Jesus is to love like Jesus. Jesus knows how to love the beautifully diverse human family. We continue to struggle to get it quite right. But we can choose to be open, to be responsive to God’s movement in our lives, to be instruments through which Christ’s breath can create something new, something beautiful. By God’s grace, we might be like those in Judea whose concern and anxiety was turned to praise for the surprising, amazing grace of God that melts away the walls that divide people into clean and unclean, praise for the love of God that is poured out on all so that abundant life might be a possibility. Who are we to hinder God?? Today I invite you to consider where you might be— intentionally or not—hindering God…where you need to get out of the way… and where you are being invited to be an instrument of God’s peace, hope, compassion, justice, and love in the world…
We are at a turning point in our communal life as the United Methodist Church and at Foundry as a result. Will you be an obstacle or an instrument for God’s leading?
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