A God of Suprises (Easter 6B)

 Cornelius and the Angel

A God of Surprises

Easter 6B
6 May 2018; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

The Very Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Acts 10:44-48; Psalm 98; 1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17

God, take away our hearts of stone
and give us hearts of flesh. Amen. 

I learned not to give advice to people while living in Maryland a few years ago.  Our next-door neighbor and I were both mowing our lawns one Saturday afternoon.  He called me over to the fence.  “Are you going to buy lottery tickets today?  The Powerball prize has gone to $5 million.  I got my tickets.  You got yours?”  “Oh, I never play the lottery,” I replied.  “It’s just throwing your money away.  The odds are skewed against you.”  He replied, “Well, I buy two tickets every Friday and over the years I’ve always broken even.  One thing’s for sure: if you don’t buy a ticket you won’t ever win.”   The next Tuesday at breakfast, our son David reported that at school on Monday, our neighbors had come by the elementary school to pick up their kids and take them out of classes. “Their dad won the lottery and they’re moving.”  “David, how can you be so gullible?  Your friend was just pulling your leg and giving you a bogus reason for being picked up from school.”  David replied vehemently, “No!  Look our the window!”  And there, next door, were dozens of television uplink trucks and a press gaggle behind a rope.  The neighbors indeed had won the $5 million and moved just days later. 

God is a God of Surprises.  I’m not saying you should gamble and play the lottery.  All I’m saying is that the unexpected happens.

God is a God of surprises. 

There is no way that in Spring 2011 that I would have imagined moving to Ashland Oregon for full-time ministry.  Before I moved to Hong Kong in 2006, there was no way that I thought I was ever going to be ordained, despite my sense that God was calling me.   

God is a god of surprises. 

The stories we have been reading these last few Sundays from the Book of Acts tell of one of the great tricks played by God, when the early Christian Church, despite itself, reached out and brought in the gentiles as equal partners to what previously been a Jews-only affair.  

In Acts 8, we read where Philip privately preaches to the Ethiopian Eunuch and baptizes him, despite his being a gentile and having a physical impediment the Scriptures specifically taught should prevent participation in God’s people (Lev. 20:20).  Phillip is bubbling over with excitement about the resurrection of Jesus.  And it’s contagious.  The culmination of the story is when the stranger asks Philip, “Here is water.  What prevents me from being baptized?”  With this God of surprises, what some consider an impediment just ain’t. 

 

Cornelius

Today’s reading is part of the story of Peter and Cornelius, a centurion of the Italian Cohort, a famous military unit known for its harsh suppression of anti-Roman nationalism.  He is a believer in the one God, but one who has not converted to Judaism by being circumcised, or observing Torah.  During this age, such people were termed, “God fearer”: on the fringes of Judaism but still squarely on the outside.  An angel replies to Cornelius’ faith and good works by telling him to go and find Peter. 

Meanwhile, Peter takes a midday nap and dreams he sees a giant cloth loaded with every kind of animal, most of them forbidden as food by the Hebrew Scriptures.  A voice tells Peter to butcher the animals and eat their flesh.  Peter, understandably reluctant, says he has always tried to keep the commandments of God and doesn’t want to start disregarding them now.  “I try to keep kosher, like God commands. This is a test, right?” 

Place yourself in Peter’s position.  Think of something you have always been taught is wrong and disgusting.  The dream tells you:  go ahead, partake.   You gag and say no thanks.  

Relentless, the voice repeats, “What God has declared clean, don’t call unclean.”  Peter wakes up troubled.  Just at this time, the messengers from Cornelius arrive.    Coincidence?  Synchronicity? He agrees to meet Cornelius.  

Cornelius is a gentile.  Even eating with Gentiles is a contaminating act under careful and strict interpretation of the Law: “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.”   

Yet God, that trickster, has other plans.  Peter shares the Good News about Jesus with Cornelius, beginning, “Now I understand that God shows no partiality… no matter what nationality, anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to God.”   The Holy Spirit falls on those gathered, even on these free-riding gentiles.  So Peter declares, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people?  They have received the Holy Spirit just as we have!”

Peter and the other leaders of the early church did not want to welcome these marginal people outside God’s Law.  And they were shocked when they see in the lives of these unclean strangers the very signs of God’s love they have seen in their own lives.

Peter, against his native sense of duty to obey the commandments, openly baptizes gentile Cornelius.   In coming chapters, Paul, that one-time strict interpreter of Law who persecuted Jewish Christians for their lax observance, focuses his mission on gentiles and succeeds beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.  Large congregations of Gentiles become the mainstay of the Church.  And so in chapter 15 of Acts, the Church meets and figures out in Council how to manage the tensions created by this new reality, Gentile Christians.   

This pattern of greater and greater inclusiveness, and of reinterpreting and over-riding restrictions from previous scripture is at the heart of the early Christian movement.  It comes from the simple fact that the resurrection of Jesus is the ultimate surprise from this God of surprises.  If the bonds and overwhelming limitation of death can be overcome, any impediment can be overcome, any bond broken. 

The Church in the last fifty years has faced other bonds, restrictions, and limitations to its welcome and hospitality.  These were justified by warrants in scripture, rightly or wrongly:  racial harmony supposedly demanded separation and ordering in society; women needed to be subordinate to men and could not lead in the Church; divorced and remarried people were considered great sinners;  gays and lesbians were guilty of abomination condemned in at least six different passages of scripture; and transgendered persons violated the order of creation, supposedly.  But in all cases, the Episcopal Church has found that we need greater inclusion and hospitality, more honoring of the presence of God at work in the lives of these people previously thought beyond the pale. 

This is not because we are defecting from the way of Jesus, but because we are adhering more closely to it.  It is because we understand the logic of God’s work in Act 8-15.  We accepted communion for remarried divorced persons.  We welcomed women into all ministries of the Church.  We stopped stigmatizing homosexuals and began honoring their faithful relationships, and now have marriage equality.  We are overcoming our discomfort with transgendered persons. 

These actions have caused some to say we are rejecting the Bible:  “you can’t ordain that person because she is not a man, like the Twelve apostles,”  “you can’t accept that person who perverts God’s natural order and commits what scripture calls abomination,” or, perhaps, “you can’t baptize that Ethiopian eunuch, Phillip, because he is an Ethiopian and a Eunuch.”  Some have left the church because they say we have rejected the Bible. 

But no.  We have not rejected the Bible.  In fact, in this, we are following the Bible.  We understand the logic and dynamics at work in Acts 8-15.  We see God at work in the lives of previously marginalized or vilified groups, and we honor God’s work in their lives:  “Here is water.  What is to prevent me from being baptized,” “When they saw the Spirit fall upon even the gentiles, they welcomed them,” and “Now I know that God does not discriminate between people based on race, ethnicity, or even religion.”  We work for more inclusion and greater radical hospitality because of our Biblical faith, not despite it. 

God is a God of surprises.   

Thanks be to God.

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