All Things New (Easter 5C)

“All Things New”
Easter 5C
19 May 2019 8:00 a.m. Said and 10 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Acts 11:1-18; Psalm 148; Revelation 21:1-6; John 13:31-35

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

I am so sad about the current strife going on in the United Methodist Church, strife that threatens to disunite it.  I am troubled by the illiberality of the times:  on the right, trying to roll back women’s rights and minority protections, on the left, trying to shut down free thought and discussion of difficult things.  But, as one of my seminary professors put it, “Human beings often mistake our petty programs for the arrival of the Reign of God.”  

Such turmoil is part of a larger problem of being human, of becoming distracted, of mistaking last things for first and insignificant peripherals for the core.  We often let the urgent things in our life push aside the important things. We mistake someone’s plea for attention and empathy for a request to step in and fix things, make suggestions, or worse, give direction.  We play down the importance of mutual relationships and of just being with another and exaggerate our own power to judge things rightly and actually help others.   And we think that we need the right answers, or worse, HAVE the right answers, when in fact what we need are the right questions.  

Today’s story from Acts tells about Peter turning from tried and true answers to more important questions.  Just how broad is God’s love?  How have we tried to make our own boundaries and tribal divisions into God’s will?  What does it means when a stranger and a foreigner experiences things that we call blessings from God?    In this story, Peter stops worrying about maintaining and defending the boundaries he thought God had erected.  He breaks down barriers, overcomes human divisions, and embraces the sacrificial, transforming love that comes from a living God. The inclusion of the Gentiles—that great unexpected and, at the time, anti-scriptural overturning of past prejudice—is a great theme of the Book of Acts, which sees it as the direct consequence of Jesus’ resurrection.   

 

Everything Peter knows about clean and unclean, proper and improper, moral and immoral, holy and profane is upended by this. He is going against the Holy Scriptures as taught and understood in his day.  This causes people in the Church to question him.  He intentionally goes to them, takes time and explains, “step by step.”  He simply says what has happened to him to help him change his mind from where he once was and where those criticizing him still are.  He is careful to include the details of his dream vision: “Lord, I can’t eat that stuff because it’s against your commandments and I’ve tried since I was little to keep them.  I can’t eat it because it’s disgusting.”   “But then the voice of God said, ‘call nothing unclean that I have made clean and nothing profane that I have made holy.’”  And Peter then actually gets to know some of these believing Gentiles and sees in their lives the signs that God has been active in their lives, just as much as in the lives of Jewish believers.  This for him is the sign that God has indeed made these Gentiles holy, without benefit of following Torah, the Scriptural Law that Peter knows. 

The Resurrection of Jesus changed the world for his followers.  All things were made new.  Jesus in his life had proclaimed the arrival of God’s Reign; God raising Jesus from the dead showed that the Reign had indeed come.  As so we have to live as if the Reign of God is already here.  This includes God’s great banquet for all peoples at the end of time, as described in today’s reading from Revelation.  This includes all people being priests and prophets.   (It’s why Eucharistic Prayer C, which we here at Trinity use during the Great 50 days of Easter, is a dialogue between the celebrant and the people, all serving as priests whose prayer consecrates the elements.)   Jesus’ disciples re-evaluated everything in light of the Resurrection. Their contemplation of the Beauty that raises the dead to life made them quickly see the universality of God’s grace, and the impermanence of human barriers. 

“Call nothing profane that I have made holy!”  “Call nothing unclean that I have made clean!”

The resurrection of Jesus should change all things for us.  All things made new! If we are to follow God’s call, we must stand ready to witness to the truth of God’s action in our lives and the lives of others, especially those different from us.  With Peter, we must reach out and get to know the unfamiliar.  We must “go” with them and learn to see the hand of God in their lives.  Then we must go to those who criticize, and explain gently, “step by step,” what has led us to see God’s hand at work in our fellow human beings.

This issue is still very much with us today.  The full inclusion of first women as priests and bishops and then gays and lesbians fully in the common and sacramental life of the Episcopal Church has caused a lot of controversy in the Church and the Anglican Communion in the last 30 years.  Like the devout Jewish Christians in today’s story, some have criticized inclusion, pointing to Scripture as they understand it, and asked how we can do such a thing. 

All things made new! The Gospel calls us to break these barriers too.  In Christ, there is no white or black, slave or free, male or female, Jew or Gentile, gay or straight.  Our reading of Holy Scripture, our reflection on tradition, and our reason tells us that we are seeing clear evidence of God intending women to be church leaders, and redeeming, transforming grace at work in the lives of gay, lesbian, and transgender people of faith.  This has led us to discern, to be led by the Spirit if you will, that we must open these ministries and sacraments to all, including people previously marginalized and condemned due to impediment of gender or what had been seen as the moral failing and disorder of same sex attraction and love.  Call nothing profane that God has declared holy! 

The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is what calls us, just as it did Peter.

Many members of this congregation over the years have been great examples of working for the ordination and episcopal consecration of women, and full inclusion in the sacraments and life of the Church of gays, lesbians, and transgender persons.  These Trinitarians are models for us all. 

All the blessings of full inclusion have been obvious, not just for those now newly included, but for us all, who have been graced by the gifts and contributions they make in our common life.   

I know that we often operate by the rule: to get along, don’t talk religion or politics with people, especially if they disagree with you.  But far from avoiding the difficult conversations with those who question or disagree with us here, we need to learn to commend the faith that is in us.  Like Peter, we need to go to them, and explain these things step-by-step.  And we need to do this because we see in them also the children of God.

Frederick Buechner writes:   

“On her deathbed, Gertrude Stein … asked, ‘What is the answer?’ Then, after a long silence, ‘What is the question?’ Don't start looking in the Bible for the answers it gives. Start by listening for the questions it asks. We are much involved, all of us, with questions about things that matter a good deal today but will be forgotten by this time tomorrow—the immediate wheres and whens and hows that face us daily at home and at work—but at the same time we tend to lose track of the questions about things that matter always, life-and-death questions about meaning, purpose, and value. To lose track of such deep questions as these is to risk losing track of who we really are in our own depths and where we are really going. There is perhaps no stronger reason for reading the Bible than that somewhere among all those India-paper pages there awaits each one of us, whoever we are, the one question that (though for years we may have been pretending not to hear it) is the central question of our individual lives. Here are a few of them:

“For what will it profit anyone if they gain the whole world but [lose their soul]? (Matthew 16:26)
Am I my brother’s keeper? (Genesis 4:9)
If God is for us, who can be against us? (Romans 8:31)
What is truth? (John 18:38)
How can anyone be born after having grown old? (John 3:4)
What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun? (Ecclesiastes 1:3)
Where shall I run to escape your Spirit? (Psalm 139:7)
Who is my neighbor? (Luke 10:29)
What shall I do to inherit eternal life? (Luke 10:25).”

“When you hear the question that is your question, then you have already begun to hear much. Whether you can accept the Bible's answer or not, you have reached the point where at least you can begin to hear it too.” (from Wishful Thinking and later Beyond Words).  

Beloved, focusing on answers rather than questions, trying to systematize and tame God, getting first things last and last things first—all this is actually reflects a kind of idolatry, setting in stone our image of God at a particular time and thinking that it must never change.  Under the lens of faith, it is a kind of pride, one of the sins that will kill your life in God.  We must always remember that we are not called to play God.  Rather, we are called to follow Jesus. 

Amen.  

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