As We are One (Easter 7C)

 

As We Are One (Easter 7C)

Homily delivered at the Episcopal Mission Church of the Holy Spirit (Sutherlin, Oregon)

Sunday May 29, 2022 10:00 a.m. Said Mass

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

Acts 16:16-34; Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20-21; John 17:20-26; Psalm 97

 

Lord Jesus, give us hearts courageous enough to love,

Make us one as you and the Father are one.  Amen.

 

When I first moved to China, I took a year of language courses and cultural studies.  We learned that Chinese culture values the group rather than the individual, as we do here in the West.  That Chinese culture is all about harmony and order, not pursuit of personal interest.  But when I arrived in China, the first time I saw the traffic patterns, I was appalled:  chaos, every man for himself, and an apparent total disregard for even their own rules of the road.  And line behavior!  Or rather crowd scrumming behavior before a ticket booth:  there were no lines to speak of.  I wondered, “Where is the harmony?  Where is the valuing of group over self?  I realized quickly that, for good or for ill, there were certain patterns of behavior behind such unfair and prejudicial stereotypes in the West as “a Chinese fire drill.” 

 

The next time I was in a class where “Chinese culture” was discussed, I mentioned the contrast to my teacher, who also was stressing the relatively heavier weight Chinese philosophers and moral teachers put on community, group, and harmony than their Western counterparts.   The teacher was wise.  He resolved my conflict for me.   “You must remember,” he said, “that a culture often desires most what its people lack the most.   We Chinese value and talk about harmony and community so much because at heart we are such radical individualists, selfish for ourselves or our little group (family, village, schoolmates).  You Americans talk about community values too—in some ways, Americans and Chinese are very much alike, despite the differences in history, language, and political systems.  That’s why, I think it is so easy for Americans and Chinese to become friends.” 

 

Think about it:  we Americans talk and talk about family values, but have such a high divorce rate, rates of infidelity, and adult children warehousing their elderly parents.  We talk and talk about individual freedoms and liberty in a setting where abroad we regularly use foreign policy and military power to force our ways on others, and domestically tend to be creatures of predictable herd behavior. Those who support gun rights the most, even when such horror as this week occurs, tend to be people who feel the most fear and insecurity in their own lives.  Those who are most worked up about imposing their codes of sexual morality on others sometimes seem to be the ones most conflicted about their own sexual drives.  If only we Americans could live our better values and bring our political leadership to do so! 

 

Now we Christians talk a lot about unity.  About being one.  About charity and love in community.  But from the beginning, we have been a fractious lot, damning and denying communion to each other (yeah—that happened too this week in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco!) because we disagree on all sorts of things, whether esoteric points of abstract doctrine or practical points of trying to do what’s right.  We read plenty of passages in the New Testament, like today’s Gospel, about being one, about being unified and loving.  But even in the New Testament are dozens of examples of serious division, infighting, schism, and mutual exclusion within the larger Christian community. 

 

We tend to value and talk about the things we feel the most need for.  But talking about unity and love doesn’t create it.  Often, appealing to the need for Christian love ends up being a none-too-veiled effort to force someone into submission.  You know the line “we need to love each other, to be one: so give up on your wayward ways or wrong opinions, your heresy, and join us in one big happy loving Christian family.”  Such appeals to unity, while common, are to my mind, nothing more than weaponizing Jesus, turning the Gospel of Peace into a club with which to beat others into submission to us. 

 

So how do we avoid the trap of talking peace while actually waging war? 

 

I think part of it here is found in being honest about what behaviors and attitudes build unity and mutual love and which mimic unity and love while actually undermining their achievement. 

 

First, is a commitment to each other.  In the words of the great adventure novel, The Three Musketeers, we must be all for one and one for all.   We together must take to heart the needs and aspirations of each and every one of us.  But each of us must be willing to sacrifice our own comfort and priorities for the common good. 

 

Second, we need to invest in the relationship.  That means taking time to join in common work, service, and ministry.  It means putting such time commitments on a relatively high priority.  It means sacrificing our wealth and resources for the joint ministries and the ministries of those with whom we are in relationship.  Remember that Jesus said, where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. 

 

Third, we need to remember the importance of honesty, tempered with compassion, in all relationships.  We need to learn to “fight fair.”  If someone offends us, whether personally or on a matter of principle, we need to show that person the dignity and respect of telling them.  Not labeling them, shaming them, or excommunicating them.  But telling them, and that, not in accusatory, passion-enflaming words.  We need instead to learn to use “I” statements:  “I feel (give emotion) when you (state the behavior, not some kind of attribute or way of being) because (explain why the behavior provokes the feeling you have, again, in non accusatory language).”   We need to be honest and talk to each other, and take responsibility for our own feelings and opinions.  No manipulation through third parties or anonymous “some people are saying.”  The key here is not letting things get bottled up, piling deeper and deeper until they explode in a horrible scene of mutual accusation and rejection.

 

Fourth, remember that we are all in this together.  It never should be about me versus you or us versus them.  This is the idea that lies behind the practice of compassion that prevents honesty from becoming brutal manipulation. 

 

Fifth, listen to the other person’s viewpoint and experience.  Don’t reject them out of hand.  Embrace diversity, even diversity on important things, as valuable.  Don’t let your own experience and struggles with something blind you to the person in front of you.    When Jesus says that way to salvation is narrow and the gate to it hard to pass through, he is not restricting salvation to the very few elite.  He is saying we cannot move forward and make progress in the Spirit without getting rid of the baggage that burdens us down and makes it hard to get through the door. 

 

I think that in community life, in any relationship, it is important to keep saying “I’m not giving up on you yet!”  And “I hope you’re not giving up on me yet!”  An open heart and mind is the way forward, not a heart and mind that says “I know what’s what, and that settles it!” 

 

Again, the habits of being united in charity and love are 1) commit to each other, 2) invest time and money to build the relationship 3) be honest in differences and learn to “fight fair,”  4) talk and think in terms of us not you and me, and 5) embrace diversity and listen to each other.  

 

One for all, and all for one.  Let’s listen to and heed what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”  Rather than just talking a good game, let’s act and actually follow Jesus.  In the face of all the rotten and scary things we are seeing, I pray that each of us can do something—even if it’s small—to help bring the Reign of God closer.  Let us remember that to be one as the Father and the Son are one, we need to remember the rules of the road for basic relationship and community. 

In the name of God, Amen

 

Ascension ("Paw Prints" meditation)

 

 

The Ascension, Salvador Dali

Ascension

Fr. Tony’s Meditation 

for St. Mark’s Episcopal Church’s 

weekly “Paw Prints” e-zine

 

May 27, 2022

 

Yesterday, Thursday, was the Feast of the Ascension, 40 days after Easter and ten days before Pentecost.  It is a Greater Feast of the Church, and commemorates the end of the 40-day ministry of the Risen Lord to his disciples after his resurrection.  Many churches observe the Ascension on the feast day itself; some honor it with the Feast’s readings on the following Sunday.  

 

Many of us are uncomfortable with Ascension because it seems to use a view of the universe that is so contrary to our modern scientific view.  The story of the Ascension assumes an ancient way of seeing things: heaven and God are up there somewhere, we are down here, and Hell and the Underworld are somewhere down there, far beneath our feet.    In this view, reflected in the Creed, Jesus “came down from heaven” and became incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became truly human.  He descended to the dead (in the grave or the Underworld), then rose again, and ascended into heaven where he is now seated at the right hand of God the Father. 

 

But we don’t see the universe in this up-down sort of way:  as the BCP Eucharistic Prayer C says, the universe is a great expanse of interstellar space, even intergalactic space, and the earth is a single tiny fragile planet, our “island home.”   We don’t take the up-down language literally at all.  When Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin came back from the first human orbit of earth in 1961 and USSR Premier Nikita Khrushchev said that commander Gagarin hadn't seen heaven or God up there, most of us thought it a rather silly thing to say since so few of us still see such a three-tiered universe as an integral part of faith in God.  (Apparently, Gagarin himself might have agreed:  he had his daughter baptized in the Orthodox Church just before he set off for the flight, and kept icons in his home.) 

 

We thus do not see God as up there, or even somewhere out there, but rather, behind and within all things.  The up/down language has always been seen in Christianity as a metaphor.  The idea is expressed well in a trope of ancient Greek philosophy taken up in many Medieval and Renaissance Christian writings: “God is an infinite circle whose center is nowhere, and whose circumference is everywhere.”  

  

The idea of an ever-present but always transcendent God suggests another metaphor for those troubled by Ascension Day as being about some kind of divine elevator:  Jesus came out of the Ground of Being when he became flesh, and returned to it at the end of the 40-day ministry.  In this sense, Ascension Day is a “Return to the Ground,” a "Retreat to the Horizon," or a “Re-absorption of the Water of Life into the Earth” Day if the start or end point of the movement or process is the Ground of Being.   

 

Ascension thus is a symbol of Jesus’ return from mortality and limited humanity to the transcendent God, and perhaps a hopeful hint of the ultimate intention of God for all his creatures.  As T.S. Eliot writes in “East Coker,” “In my beginning is my end. … Love is most near itself when here and now cease to matter. … In my end is my beginning.”

  

Grace and peace, 

Fr. Tony+

 

A Friend Beside Us (Easter 6C)

 

The Risen Christ breathes on the Disciples in the Cenacle (Upper Room)

5th century mosaic, Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna

A Friend Beside Us (Easter 6C)

Homily delivered at St. Mark’s Parish Church, Medford OR

Sunday May 21, 2022 8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

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

Acts 16:9-15; Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5; John 14:23-29; Psalm 67

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41wA9-xOp8g 

Homily begins at 11:25

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

 

 

I once had a colleague at the U.S. Department of State who was a self-declared “Bible believing” Christian.  When she discovered that I was a regular Church-goer, choir member, and taught the weekly Adult scripture class on Sundays at my local Episcopal Church, she made it a point of regularly letting me know how her prayer life was going, and how proactive she and her church were in struggling against what she called the “wicked world we live in.”  One Monday, she seemed particularly self-satisfied, and first thing she took me aside to update me on her spiritual life. 

 

“Tony, I was so blessed today.  I’m too low ranked to merit parking privileges downstairs and can’t afford the regular parking fees at Columbia Plaza across the street so I usually park over near the Lincoln memorial and walk the four blocks here.  But I didn’t have time today, and so I just relied on God.  I prayed for guidance, and Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to me and led me to a side street just a half block away where there are never any parking places. But just as I turned the corner, a car pulled out and I found a place within 100 yards of the C Street entrance!  And it’s just the regular street meter fares that need to be fed only every 4 hours!  I feel so blessed.  God guided me, and sent his Holy Spirit just as he promised!  Just shows what He’ll do when we try to follow his path!” 

 

I nodded, smiled, and replied, “well it looks like you’re very happy.”   It was only on my drive home that evening that I realized what it was that so annoyed me in what she had said.  She was saying that Almighty God had been her personal parking valet, arriving at her beck and call, to save her the inconvenience of walking a few blocks and being late to a meeting.  I had been working on some life and death issues involving the Korean peninsula, and the contrast was all too great.  Really? God was personally caring for her parking needs because she was so close to God? And this in a world where it seemed that the Almighty couldn’t be bothered to move the hearts of the world’s people to abolish war, end racism, eliminate poverty, abolish handguns, or end hunger? 

 

Perhaps that contrast was unfair, both to her and to God. Jesus taught us that if we pray with faith, God will grant us what we pray for.  Paul told us to make our desires known to God.  Many, many passages tell us to be thankful to God for all good things in our lives.  Jesus tells us that God is aware of and cares for even individual sparrows in flight or hairs on our head. 

 

Even with me knowing all this, she really had annoyed me, mainly because she seemed so self-absorbed.  Maybe God did help her that day.  Maybe the Spirit “guided” her.   Her thankfulness was thus right.  But making this into a servant to her own ego and sense of partisan advantage (“only we true Christians can experience such blessings!”) cheapened what otherwise might have been innocent open-heartedness.

 

Today’s scriptures talk about us being in touch with God, and God being in touch with us.  The reading from Acts portrays a scene where the early apostles are led by the Holy Spirit to make major decisions on where to place their missionary efforts.  There are surprises along the way an unexpected side trip to Macedonia, where, they find an improbable major donor and benefactor.  A wealthy gentile woman who attends synagogue is among the first to be attracted by Paul’s message, and she convinces the apostles, seemingly against their better judgment, to make her home their base of operations.   The reading from the Revelation of John tells of the final state of God’s created world, a beautiful city without tears or darkness, where there is no need for temples or churches, because God dwells with its inhabitants personally.  

 

The Gospel reading is part of Jesus’ great farewell discourse in the Gospel of John.   Jesus says he will not leave his friends behind alone, bereft.  He will go away, but yet come back soon to them, by sending them “another, a paraclete.”  Parakletos means someone “called to stand beside” you.  It is from the verb kaleo, “to call”, and the preposition para, “along side.”  Translated verbally in Latin as Ad-vocatus, we sometimes hear it translated as “Advocate,” with the overtones of someone who stands beside us in court or a dispute to defend us.  But another way of understanding the word comes from a related abstract noun, paraklesis, which means “a standing with,” in the sense of consoling and empathizing.  This is where the King James Bible gets its translation, “Comforter.”  Eugene Peterson’s The Message translation understands it in a more comprehensive way, “The Friend, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send at my request” (John 14:26). 

 

In John, on the evening of Easter Sunday when Christ was raised from the dead, Jesus returns to his friends and says, “Peace,” and then breathes on them adding, “receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:21-22).  In Luke/Acts, the coming of the Holy Spirit to the Church is placed 50 days later, on the day of Pentecost, after the Ascension of Jesus.  But though John wrote decades after Luke, his view seems to reflect the earlier understanding of the coming of the spirit:  Paul writing just a decade after Jesus’ death, says that “the Lord” (that is, the Risen Jesus) “is the Spirit” (2 Cor 3:17)

 

The basis of Christian spiritual life is having this Advocate, this Comforter, this “Friend” beside us, the Holy Spirit who makes Jesus present for us.  And not just having that one beside us, but listening to them.

 

It is a much-abused concept, as I saw in that parking lot story.  We saw such abuse this week in San Francisco, when the Roman Catholic Archbishop announced that Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi can no longer receive Holy Communion in his Archdiocese, her home.  He appealed to canon law in this markedly graceless act, presumably because of inspiration by the Holy Spirit in his conduct of pastoral relationships.     Simply because people think the spirit is talking to them does not make it so. 

 

Saint Paul gives a practical guide for when the spirit is with us.  He says, “the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Gal 5:22).   Jesuit anthropologist Fr. Teillard de Chardin said that the infallible sign of the presence of the Spirit is joy. 

 

Note that in John’s accounts both of the Last Supper and of the Risen Lord’s appearance on Easter evening, the spirit is promised or given along with the gift of peace, of a sense of wholeness, abundance, and calm. 

In today’s passage, the Holy Spirit has two functions: to “remind” us of what Jesus has already taught us and to “teach” us new things (v. 26).  This puts to rest the false dichotomy between standing with tried and true, canonical, and legal constraints, versus being bold in seeking new truth, with all the risk that entails.    Modern neurological and psychological studies of memory have shown that in fact, remembrance in its very nature includes learning new things.  We normally think of memory as a bank of recordings in our brain that we access again and again when we remember things.  But what the studies who is that when we access memory, we are actually accessing not a simple recording, but rather, our experience of the last time we accessed the memory.  As we grow and change and have more experience, we attribute new meaning to our prior experiences and focus on new details. That’s why sometimes different people over time can remember events so differently.  Memory and learning two sides of the same coin. 

Siblings in Christ:  I have had moments in my life where I know I felt the Spirit: when I decided to marry Elena, to study at the Catholic University of America for my doctorate, to join the U.S. foreign service, to go to work in China, to become an Episcopalian, and to respond to a call to Holy Orders.  All of these moments were marked with peace, clarity, loving kindness, courage, and joy.  I suspect you all have had such moments as well.   It is important to periodically review them, remember them, and recall how they feel.   

We are well advised to reason and study things out, to seek counsel and advice to help us get our bearings and direction.  And it is wise to be cautious in making claims of “being guided by the Spirit,” if only to relieve God of the burden of having silly or wrong things chalked up to his account.  

 

But we need to listen, and we need to be tuned in.  An active and regular prayer life as part of a rule of life, reading scripture as well as thoughtful, uplifting and even challenging books, a regular practice of contemplating beauty and serving others, and listening—all these are ways to help hear the Holy Spirit. 

I invite us all this week to look at how we’re doing in pursuing such regular practice. 

Jesus is here now, present for us.  The spirit of love and holiness is here now.  Joy is here now. 

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

 

Meditation at Day's End

 

Meditation at Day's End 

--Anthony Hutchinson

 

We are such wretched creatures:

war, abuse (even when we say we love),

obliviousness to what we are doing to the mother

   that gave us birth (the earth)

   and to each other.

Wretched creatures.

 

But we have our moments of the sublime:

real love,

self-sacrifice,

compassion for not only our own,

   but for those totally strange.

Courage to fight the demons in our hearts

   and those of others.

Sublimely transcendent demi-gods.

We might be the center of the universe,

or the irrelevant margins of a wholly indifferent cosmos.

 

But the spark, consciousness, is in us.

It is the Imago Dei.

 

At night, we search for stars.

In day, we shelter our eyes from the burning sunlight.

And what bitter sweetness it all is!

We love, and we die.

We fight, and are reconciled.

We fear, but are consoled.

We dream for good or ill,

   but awaken.

 

And we hope.

We hope beyond all that we have experienced.

And it is sweet.

 

                                            

 

Dunstan of Canterbury

 

Saint Dunstan of Canterbury,

Archbishop of Canterbury, 19 May 988 CE

--The Rev. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

  

Today is the feast day of Saint Dunstan of Canterbury, Archbishop of Canterbury.  Dunstan was born in Glastonbury, the spiritual heart of England from pagan times and one of its  earliest Christian sites.  He was born in about 909 CE, a decade after the death of King Alfred the Great, who first sought to unify the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms against the Danes who had invaded and taken over half the country in the 800s.   The pagan Danish invaders had destroyed nearly all Christian monasteries, and with them English monasticism.  Dunstan played the leading role in restoring monasticism to England.  Even after 1,000 years, Dunstan shines out as a fascinating, individual personality: gifted in the graphic, musical, and metallurgic arts and technologies, one sorely tried at times by what look like surprisingly modern temptations.  

 

Glastonbury Tor, with tower of ruined St. Michael's Church.

Born to a noble family, Dunstan was sent to court as a teenager.  He did not fit in well: He was too dreamy, too artistic, too much of a science and tech nerd. Because of his obvious gifts, he became a favorite of the king, but this only enraged his peers.  They accused him of reading pagan literature, using witchcraft to win the king’s favor, and practicing the evil arts.  They bullied him mercilessly, and finally prevailed on the king to send him away from court.  As Dunstan was departing, they attacked him, beat him severely, and threw him into a cess pit to drown.  Pretending to be dead, he managed to climb out and flee to Winchester.  There he entered the service of his uncle, Bishop Aelfheah the Bald (also known as St. Alphege.)  Aelfheah was not only bald, but short: his name means "elf-high" and probably refers to his stature.  Dunstan's uncle saw that the gifted youth would be a great asset for the Church, and tried to convince him to become a monk and a priest. But Dunstan was reluctant:  he did not think he was cut out for celibacy or a monk’s simple life. 

But a sudden outbreak of tumors and boils all over his body, identified by the healers of the age as “leprosy,” changed Dunstan’s mind.  Almost certainly cysts due to bacterial infection caused by having his open wounds immersed in raw sewage, his “leprosy” responded to proper washing, lancing, and bandaging. Dunstan saw his cure as a sign of God’s calling him to the life which his uncle said was for him.  He made his profession as a monk at the hands of his uncle and returned to Glastonbury to live the life of a hermit since few Abbeys existed.  He built a hut near the ruins of the old monastery, and devoted himself to study, music, metal working (particularly the technology of casting church bells). 

Here it was that the Devil is said to have appeared to Dunstan offering temptation, first as old man promising him money if used his metallurgy to fashion a chalice (perhaps for a “Black Mass?”).  When this did not work, the demon shifted shapes into an attractive young man (perhaps the object of homoerotic attentions?). Finally, the demon became a voluptuous and seductive woman (when all else fails, “Cherchez la femme!”).  Dunstan recognized the multi-formed personification of his illicit desires, and immediately took his red-hot blacksmith tongs, and grabbed the demon by the nose to expel it in torment.  In another version of the story, the devil appears in his classic mythological form, with horns, bat wings, and cloven hooves and all.  Dunstan uses a bellows to heat a horseshoe, beats it into proper shape, and then nails it through the hoof of the demon to the floor, demanding as the price of release a promise that demons never enter a house with a horseshoe over the doorway. (So that’s the origin of ‘the lucky horseshoe.’) These stories, as naive and quaint as they may seem to us moderns, probably reflected Dunstan's struggle to reconcile his Christian faith and monk's vows with his bodily urges, his love of pagan literature and arcane lore in general, as well as his desire for art, beauty, and technical prowess. 

 

In Glastonbury, in addition to working the forge and playing the harp, Dunstan honed his skills painting and copying and decorating manuscripts. 

A manuscript in the Bodleian Library includes one scene where a tiny monk kneels before an immense Christ praying “Merciful Christ, I beg that you protect me, Dunstan. Do not permit the Taenarian storms to swallow me.”  Probably a self-portrait, the illumination shows that Dunstan did indeed read pagan literature—”Taenarian storms” is how Ovid, that great erotic poet of first century Rome, described the descent into Hades.

 

As part of his efforts to restore the monasteries, Dunstan returned to court.  He again did not fit in and was asked to leave; but then King Edmund had a narrow escape from death while hunting, and attributed it to Dunstan’s prayers. In gratitude Edmund recalled Dunstan and in 943 CE ordered him to re-establish monastic life at Glastonbury. Under Dunstan's direction, Glastonbury Abbey became again an important center of learning, to last until the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII. 

 

The next king, Edred, adopted Dunstan's ideas for church reforms, including the control of cathedrals by monastic chapters.  He also followed Dunstan’s foreign policy advice: friendly relations with the Danish settlers rather than confrontation and war.  These policies made Dunstan popular in the North of England, but unpopular in the South. 

 

Edred was succeeded by his sixteen-year-old nephew Eadwig (Edwy).  On the day of his coronation in 956, Eadwig, drunk and hoping for a real sexual adventure to celebrate becoming king, left the banquet in his honor for the royal bedchamber with two women in tow–his foster-mother and her daughter! Shocked, Dunstan followed in a fury and, probably scolding all the while about how Christian kings shouldn't follow the chaotic lustful ways of the Danes, dragged the startled teenager back to the hall to continue the feast with his knights. The episode, no surprise, led to Dunstan’s exile and flight for his life.

 

The North rose in rebellion on Dunstan’s behalf. When the dust settled, Eadwig was dead, his brother Edgar was king, and Dunstan was Archbishop of Canterbury. The coronation service which Dunstan compiled for Edgar is the earliest English coronation service of which the full text survives, and is the basis for all such services since, down to the present. 

 

With King Edgar’s patronage and support, Dunstan re-established a dozen or so monastic Abbeys throughout England.  Around 970 he presided at a conference which drew up a nation-wide rule for monastic houses based on the rule of St. Benedict. For centuries thereafter the Archbishop of Canterbury was always a monk.  Monk-bishops became a fixture of the Church of England.  Benedictine spirituality became a hallmark of English Christianity, and, after the reformation, of the Book of Common Prayer.

 

In his old age, Dunstan retired from politics, concentrating on running Canterbury Cathedral’s school for boys, raising academic standards and minimizing corporal punishment. On Thursday, Ascension Day, in 988 CE, he told the congregation that he was near to death.  He died two days later, on Saturday, May 19. 

For St. Dunstan and all musicians, artists, scribes, tech people, and teachers,  Thanks be to God. 

 

All Things New (Easter 5 C)

 

“All Things New”
Easter 5C
15 May 2022 8:00 a.m. and 10 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of St. Mark the Evangelist, Medford (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.

 

This week we saw a sad event for our close siblings in Christ, the United Methodists.  They are no longer United.  Their denomination split in two over the question of inclusion of Gays and Lesbians. Though they announced an “amicable split,” a “friendly divorce,” I fear they are just putting on their best face hoping they can avoid the scandalous spectacle we Episcopalians and “Anglicans” have given the world over the last two decades: bitter mutual reproach and costly law suits over properties and trademarks that have deeply wounded the body of Christ. 

 

Schism and mutual anathema have always been a feature of Christianity, and the Judaism from which it sprang, unfortunately.  That’s why the New Testament talks so much about the importance of unity and mutual love.  Schisms result from a very high-quality problem.  They come not from apathy or casual indifference to faith and its demands.  They come from people who care all too deeply about trying to do what’s right. 

 

Today’s story from Acts tells about the first great conflict among the first Christians: how, or even whether, to include gentiles in what had been an all-Jewish affair.   It is part of a retelling of that conflict found in Acts chapters 8-15.  Since the story has much to say to us today, let me review it for us. 

First, there is the unusual and one-off case of Philip privately sharing the Gospel with the Ethiopian Eunuch (Acts 8:26ff).   This guy is not only a gentile, but also has a physical impairment that the Scriptures specifically taught should prevent full participation in the worship of God’s people (Lev. 20:20).  The culmination of the story is the Ethiopian Eunuch’s simple question, “Here is water.  What is there that possibly keeps me from being baptized?”  In the new economy of grace in the wake of the resurrection, what scripture taught as an insurmountable impediment is no longer an obstacle at all.   

 

Then in chapter 9, we meet a fire-eating Jewish legalist named Saul who has been persecuting his fellow Jews who identify as Christians because in his view they have abandoned Scripture and monotheism.  On his way to arrest some of these, he encounters the risen Lord on the road and becomes a Christian himself (more on him later).  

The real turning point is in Acts 10.  Cornelius, a Roman Centurion, is senior NCO of the Italian Cohort, a famous military unit known for its harsh suppression of anti-Roman nationalists, including at times Jews.  Yet he is a believer in the one God, one who has not converted to Judaism by being circumcised, or observing Jewish the dietary laws.  Cornelius prays, reads scripture, and gives to the poor.  In a dream, an angel tells him that his faith and alms have drawn the attention of God, who wants him to go and find someone named Peter, living near the beach in Joppa.  He sends messengers to set up a meeting. 

 

Meanwhile, Peter takes a noon-day nap and has a dream of his own where he sees a giant picnic cloth.  On it is every kind of animal, most of them forbidden as food by the Hebrew Scriptures.  A voice tells Peter to butcher some of the animals and eat their flesh.  Peter is understandably reluctant, “I’ve always tried to keep God’s commandments, and I don’t want to start disregarding them now. I try to keep kosher, like Scripture says.  Those creatures are unclean. They’re disgusting.   I can’t eat them.  You’re testing me, right?” 

 

Place yourself in Peter’s position.  Think of something you have always been taught is wrong, is condemned in scripture, and you find revolting. The dream is telling you to go ahead and pursue this. 

Relentless, the voice replies, “Don’t call unclean what God has declared clean.”  This happens three times, and Peter wakes up, disturbed by the nightmare.  Right then, the messengers from Cornelius arrive.  The synchronicity is too great for Peter to ignore. 

Peter knows that even meeting with Cornelius is a contaminating act according to strict interpretation of scripture. His ‘kind’ is “unclean.”  It’s the written Word of God that makes the distinction.  But Peter, shaken by that dream, agrees to meet Cornelius.  It turns out Cornelius  wants to know about Jesus and how he came back from the dead after being put to death by, who else, Roman soldiers.    

Peter begins his explanation to Cornelius and his companions, with “I’m beginning to understand that God doesn’t play favorites.”  He goes on, “no matter what nationality, anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to God.”  As Peter continues telling about Jesus, the Holy Spirit falls on those gathered, even on the gentiles (Acts 10:45), Astounded, Peter declares, “can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” So he baptizes them without first requiring them to become Jews.  Unlike Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch, this group baptism is done in public. 

 

In today’s reading from Acts 11, other Christians hear of this and react in horror.  “But, but—you have to be circumcised and observe Torah to be part of God’s people!  That’s in the Bible!  What you have done, Peter, overturns everything we know about clean and unclean, proper and improper, moral and immoral, holy and profane. Shame on you!” 

 

Peter does not react by arguing or trying to shame his accusers in return.  Nor does he simply ignore them, hoping they will somehow go away.  He takes the initiative and goes to them, and takes time to explain things, as the story tells it, “step by step.”  Wisely, he simply tells them his experience—something that no reasonable person will argue with—and says what has happened to him to change his mind from where he once was and where those criticizing him still are.  He honors their own concerns by being 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 he adds: “But the voice of God said, ‘call nothing unclean that I have made clean and nothing profane that I have made holy.’” 

 

Peter then tells his accusers what finally convinced him to baptize them without benefit of circumcision or keeping kosher: the Holy Spirit clearly had fallen on those gentiles, just like it had fallen on the Jewish Christians on the day of Pentecost. God was already active in their lives, just as much as in the lives of Jewish believers.  The critics see the point, and accept Peter’s decision in the matter. 

 

After today’s scene, the Book of Acts continues the story:  Saul, now going by his Roman name Paul, goes out in several different far-flung places to explain about the risen Lord.  He succeeds beyond anyone’s wildest expectations, especially among those gentiles who liked to listen on the sides at Synagogue.  Large congregations of Gentiles become the mainstay of the Church. 

 

And so in chapter 15 of Acts, the Church must meet and figure out in Council how to manage the new reality, Gentiles as Christians.   They are clear in accepting the newcomers as gentiles and not requiring them to become Jews even as they ask that they respect a few basic standards they believed were imposed by God even on Gentiles just after the Great Flood. 

 

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.  And here’s the thing:  the Book of Act sees such inclusion as the inevitable, direct consequence of Jesus’ resurrection.    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.   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, even when enshrined in holy writ.    

 

In this, there is a moral for us today.  Quoting scripture can get in the

way of following God.  When someone says “the Bible says,” we need to reply, “and what else does the Bible say?”  We need to put ourselves inside the Bible narrative, and ask, “what is God calling us to do here and now?”   We need, instead of seeing the Bible as a rule book and a compendium of answers, to focus on the questions the Bible encourages us to ask.  We need to remember the words of Jesus: “God … is God not of the dead, but of the living” (Matt 22:32). 

 

The resurrection of Jesus changes everything 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 in 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, us and explain gently, “step by step,” what has led us to see God’s hand at work in our fellow human beings.

 

It is a matter of faith in our risen Lord. All things made new! In Christ, there is no white or black, slave or free, male or female, Jew or Gentile, gay or straight, cis or trans, conservative or progressive.  In Christ, we are one body, because we eat one bread, and drink one cup. 

 

In the name of Christ, Amen.