A Sermon
Presented by Rev. Merlin T. Batt
Intentional Interim Pastor
St. Matthew’s United Church of Christ
Maiden, North Carolina
Fifth Sunday of Easter
May 6, 2007

Scripture Lessons: Acts 11:1-18; John 13:31-35
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Our Gospel lesson this morning takes us to Jerusalem some 21 centuries ago, to a room where Jesus is having a last meal with his disciples. He will soon walk across the Kidron Valley to pray, and there in an olive grove be arrested and taken away to be tried, sentenced, beaten, and crucified. Immediately after supper, one of the twelve men in Jesus’ inner circle, Judas by name, excuses himself from the table and leaves the room to do his infamous work of betrayal. It is a scene familiar to us all.

Breaking the tense silence after Judas’ departure, Jesus says two things to his remaining followers – something about himself and something about them. First, Jesus says, cryptically and paradoxically, that what is about to happen to him – and what he means here is his being put to death – will be an event in which both he and God will be glorified.

Then Jesus turns his attention to his friends at the table. He tells them that soon he is going away and they cannot go with him, but he leaves them with the following instruction. Actually it’s more than mere instruction; it’s  a commandment. He says to them, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another.” And then in the same breath he clarifies what this love for each other should look like. He says it’s an even-as-I-have-loved-you kind of loving. In other words, Jesus commands his followers to love each other completely, steadfastly, selflessly, and sacrificially – the way he loves them.

Now, fast-forward a dozen or so years. The setting is once again a room located in Jerusalem. Many of the same people who had shared in the last supper with Jesus are there now, along with some others. But the circumstances are quite different. Those gathered are the church in Jerusalem, or at least part of the church. Jesus’ brother James is the leader of the congregation. They have come together to meet with Peter, who had just arrived from the coastal city of Caesarea and about whom they had heard some very disturbing news.

Apparently Peter in his enthusiasm for the Lord had violated a powerful taboo – that is, he baptized a Gentile, a non-Jew, and then, making matters worse, he proceeded to share a meal with him, the fellow in question being a man named Cornelius, a Roman military officer participating in the universally despised occupation of Judea. Church leaders in Jerusalem had gathered to criticize Peter – to call him on the carpet, so to speak, make him answer for his cavalier disregard for the tradition which required Jews having nothing to do with Gentiles.

Now, what’s wrong with this picture? Jesus commanded his followers to love each other as he loved them, but his church no sooner gets under way  than they’re at each other’s throats – separating into theological camps, arguing and criticizing one another.

Reminds me of an e-mail message I received on Friday morning from Tom Ehrich, an Episcopal priest living in Charlotte. He wrote this,

Twelve years ago I thought I had a great novel within me. So one summer, after leaving the bruising arena of parish ministry, I wrote…My novel was awful. Worse than awful, it was shallow. I didn’t begin to go deeply enough into why we do what we do. Why are people so hurtful to one another? Why does the religious arena consistently bring forth the worst in people? How does faith become what Agent 007 would call a “license to kill”?

I am ready to try again…For the question remains – if anything, recent explosions of religious extremism and toxic divisions within Christian denominations make it larger than ever – why does a faith founded in sacrifice of self, boldness in love, and radical openness become so smug, so corrupted by power, so resistant to the very values that Jesus died trying to embody?

As we see upon close inspection, the controversy in the church at Jerusalem was about this very thing. Peter was trying to get the church to understand something God had revealed to him in a startling and powerful way about insiders and outsiders, but the leaders of the church wanted no part of what he was doing and saying. They were committed to nip this Gentile-outreach thing in the bud.

You see, the early church was a purely Jewish affair. Of course, Jesus was a Jew. The disciples of Jesus were all Jewish. The earliest church was exclusively Jewish. In order to be a Christian, one had first to be Jewish. Males had to be circumcised, and everyone, male or female, had to observe the Jewish dietary and ritual laws. It was understood by everyone at first that, when it came to membership in the Christian community, “Gentiles need not apply”! And this in spite of what Jesus had said to his eleven disciples as he left them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

But it took a while before this radical command of Jesus got put into operation in the church. Actually, it took two dreams, two God-inspired dreams, to get the ball rolling. The first dream came to Peter while he was staying in the coastal city of Joppa. He dreamt that he saw a large sheet lowered from heaven by its four corners. Held inside it were animals of every possible description (now remember, this was a dream, and all things are possible in dreams!).

Some of the animals in the sheet were forbidden to Jews as food. It said so right in their Bible - Leviticus, chapter 11 – camel, rabbit, pig, vulture, ostrich, sea gull, gecko, lizard, and many, many others. But in this dream a voice spoke to Peter, “Rise, Peter; kill and eat.”

Good and faithful Jew that he was, Peter protested vehemently: “No, Lord; for nothing common or unclean has ever entered my mouth.” You see, from Peter’s perspective, the Jewish dietary laws were not simply a matter of etiquette or mere ethnic custom. They were a matter of survival and identity for the Jewish people, and they were a matter of faith as they were commanded by God, the God of Israel. These dietary laws marked out this people as the people who belonged to the one, true Creator God. No wonder Peter is baffled when he hears the voice command him to eat what he was taught from birth to consider unclean and therefore forbidden. The voice said, “What God has cleansed you must not call unclean.”

What Peter would soon understand about his dream is this: the dream was not really about unclean animals. It was actually about unclean people (outsiders, Gentiles), one of whom was named Cornelius. And that brings us to the second dream. At the time Peter was having a dream in Joppa Cornelius was having his own God-inspired dream in Caesarea. This Roman military officer dreamt that God instructed him to send some men to nearby Joppa, and bring back a certain Simon who is called Peter. 

Being a devout man, a man of prayer, Cornelius obeyed what he heard in the dream. He sent for Peter who, when the three-man delegation from Caesarea arrived at the house where he was staying in Joppa, believed that the Holy Spirit was behind all this, so he dropped what he was doing and at once went with them to the home of Cornelius.

Once there in Caesarea, in the home of Cornelius, one thing led to another, and before he knew it, Peter found himself convinced by the Spirit of God, no less, that he should proceed to baptize Cornelius, to make this Gentile outsider a Christian. And this Peter did against the grain of his lifelong Jewish self-understanding, and against the rules of the early church regarding who could be welcomed into the family of Christ.

What happened to Cornelius after the baptism convinced Peter of the rightness of his radical action. He saw clear evidence of the Spirit’s coming into Cornelius’ life. Essentially, this is what Peter told James and the other church leaders in response to their harsh criticism. He said to them, “I remembered the word of the Lord, how he said, ‘John baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ If then God gave the same gift to them as he gave to us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could withstand God.”

The room suddenly became quiet. You could hear a pin drop as the radical truth spoken by Peter sank in. Until that moment, the church in Jerusalem assumed that the good news of Jesus Christ was just for them and for those like them. Perhaps they thought it was enough for the living Christ to transform the lives of a few people and gather them into a congregation of like-minded souls, a community of Jews who believed Jesus was the Jewish Messiah.

But what those church leaders began to learn on the day they angrily confronted Peter was that the risen Christ wants to have the whole world; that Christ intends to claim all realms as his own; that he purposes to expand the Christian movement beyond the bounds within which it began; and that his Spirit is intent upon breaking down boundaries, leaping over walls, and undoing deadly restrictions - doing away with the distinction between insiders and outsiders. And what we see again and again in the Book of Acts is that the church had to be dragged kicking and screaming into its worldwide mission of proclaiming the Gospel of King Jesus, and inviting everyone and anyone to join the company of Christ’s people.

The first crisis faced by the early Christian church – whether or not to confine the Gospel within Jewish boundaries – was faced squarely and courageously. While the change of understanding didn’t happen overnight everywhere, the Spirit of God finally prevailed – the doors to the church were flung wide open, and the Gospel was proclaimed everywhere, regardless of ethnic or national identity. Please notice this: the fact that we Gentile Christians are gathered here this morning to worship in the name of Jesus Christ, the Jewish Messiah, is testimony to the Spirit’s victory.

But we’re not off the hook, friends! Yes, we see that it is in the nature of the Gospel to reach out, but it is our human nature to hunker down, to keep house with those we already have, rather than to reach out to others with the good news of Christ and a warm welcome to come along with us to follow him. Churches mistakenly assume that outreach will take care of itself if they have an attractive, eloquent preacher and a list of programs designed to meet religious consumer needs. A certain kind of growth may happen this way in some settings, but it’s not the kind of life-transforming outreach envisioned by the New Testament, the kind of outreach modeled on one person telling another about Jesus Christ, or as one British Christian defined evangelism, “one beggar telling another beggar where to find food.”

Rev. Kenn Ward is a Lutheran minister in Canada. He’s also a journalist, and in one of his published articles he tells about a dance at his high school when he was in his early teens. I think you’ll be able to relate to this. I surely can.

The boys stood on one side of the gym and talked, nervously looking over at the girls who were standing on the other side of the gym doing the same thing. There was one girl in particular who caught my eye.  The evening was winding down. Finally, with palms sweating and a mouth so dry that I was afraid that I could not speak, I slowly and anxiously crossed the floor to where she stood. And when I got there finally, I asked, “Will you dance with me?” – but I realized in my anxiety I had asked the girl standing next to her!

Ward then comments that those feelings of anxiety and confusion sum up how most Lutherans feel about talking about their faith with other people. “We know it’s a good idea,” he says. “We think it should come naturally. We even suspect that it might be a lot of fun if we could muster up the courage and go over and say something. But much of the time we just think about it and somehow never cross the room.” Now, I have a strong hunch the problem is not confined to Lutherans. What do you think?

Several years ago, Adele and I went to L-R to hear Rev. Tony Campolo speak. Tony’s an American Baptist minister, activist, and evangelist. One of his favorite projects is getting recent college graduates to commit a couple years of their lives in service to Christ – a kind of Christian “Peace Corps”. Those who sign up are taken to some of the poorest cities in America. They live in neighborhoods where most people are very reluctant to go. Local churches in the neighborhoods serve as their base of operation. In most cases, these churches are barely hanging on to life, with only a few loyal older members keeping the church doors open.

Tony says that, during the week, these young people fan out into the community, two by two, block by block, knocking on doors. Many of the residents, if they are at home, refuse to come to the door. But those who do are greeted warmly in the name of Christ.

The young visitors identify themselves with the church in their neighborhood. They do not ask to go in the house or apartment, but simply tell the resident they would like to pray for them, and so they ask what the resident would like to have them pray about. The residents are usually quick to tell the sincere young visitors what they are concerned about.

The visitors, then, offer a simple prayer, and when they leave, they tell the resident that these prayer needs will be taken back to the church where a group will pray regularly for them. And they keep their promise – the church prays - and what’s more, they find practical ways to help their neighbors meet their pressing needs about which they are praying. They do all they can to be an answer to the prayers they offer on behalf of their neighbors – help find a job, locate counseling resources, provide food, arrange childcare so a parent can work, and so on.

The results of this simple act of friendship and ministry are truly amazing. These once dying churches begin to grow. The wall between outsiders and insiders is broken down. People are brought to a relationship with Christ. Their lives are transformed, and their neighborhoods are never quite the same again.

This is but one of many ways that the good news of King Jesus can be shared by people who really want to love one another as he loved us, and who are serious about doing away with the distinction between insiders and outsiders.  Friends, here’s the thing: King Jesus does intend to take back the world for which he died. And guess who is meant to help him?

Let us pray:
Lord Jesus Christ, push us out beyond the safe confines of our cozy congregation, and prod us to leave the comfort of people just like us. Make us part of the great adventure of the Good News which leaps like wildfire over boundaries and barriers, dissolving the walls between outsiders and insiders, and making family out of strangers. Lord, show us how to go about doing this in our time and place, and give us courage to follow your leading, even among people we don’t want to meet and places we would rather not go. Amen.