They're Not Like Us! 5/19/19 Easter 5C

5/19/19   Easter 5C

They’re Not Like Us!

Rev Dr Rebecca L. Kiser

Before reading text:

This past week’s conference for the Vital Congregations Initiative was a wonderful and moving experience of vision and hope for the larger church’s mission and ministry into the future.  We worshipped, we praised, we wept, we ate together, we fellowshipped with people both like us and different from us.  Like us, because they praised God and prayed like Joyce and I, and were Presbyterians like Joyce and I; different, because to the outward eye and ear we differed in ways that often divide people in our country and world.  Like I experienced at the NEXT Church conference as well, people of all colors and differing first languages gave visual evidence to the unity of the Spirit, and displayed hope of how Presbyterian worship has a promising future.  In fact, the very diversity of people encourages and invigorates our witness and our worship.  I came back tired in a good way - we were enlivened, excited and full of hope that this process, planned in a large part by the next generation of church leadership, can lead all of us in a deeper relationship with God’s Spirit and listening for the next new thing that God is doing in the church. 

And that goes real well with the 2000-year old text of the burgeoning new church growing and spreading the gospel in early Jerusalem and that region, which is also about how God, through Jesus Christ and the Spirit, is both attending to God’s faithful worshippers as well as doing an unexpected and new thing.  Its worship of God, which is the same; yet full of surprises and changes that are different, and that challenge old assumptions, old boundaries.  It was already different that God was incarnate, ie “en-fleshed” and walked among us in Christ Jesus, and then it was surprising that Jesus was raised from the dead.  Now it is almost shocking to these believers who had early on followed God and believed in Jesus, that God was again confounding expectations and reaching to the population of the whole world instead of just the chosen, the Jewish nation. 

Listen for the word of God as we read together Acts 11: 1-18.  And I mean together - get out those pew Bibles so we’re all in the same translation, and find the Acts of the Apostles just after Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.    The events we will read about actually take place in the prior ch 10 - then after the surprising events and the apostle Peter’s responses, he gets called on the carpet and tells the whole thing again in ch 11. Let’s read:

Acts 11:1-18

11Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God. ²So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, ³saying, “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?” ⁴Then Peter began to explain it to them, step by step, saying, ⁵“I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners; and it came close to me. ⁶As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. ⁷I also heard a voice saying to me, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’ ⁸But I replied, ‘By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’ ⁹But a second time the voice answered from heaven, ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’ ¹⁰This happened three times; then everything was pulled up again to heaven. ¹¹At that very moment three men, sent to me from Caesarea, arrived at the house where we were. ¹²The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us. These six brothers also accompanied me, and we entered the man’s house. ¹³He told us how he had seen the angel standing in his house and saying, ‘Send to Joppa and bring Simon, who is called Peter; ¹⁴he will give you a message by which you and your entire household will be saved.’ ¹⁵And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning. ¹⁶And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ ¹⁷If 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?” ¹⁸When they heard this, they were silenced. And they praised God, saying, “Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.”

Up until this point, Jesus’ followers were all faithful Jews.  Well, there were those who converted, and those who recognized the depth of the Jewish faith and honored it.  But by and large, Jesus, who was a good Jew and never changed, was acclaimed by his followers to be the Messiah that they expected and longed for.  This new sect was from within Judaism. The apostles were all good members of their own faith tradition, with the addition that they saw Jesus as the fulfillment of their people’s long hope, which was surprising enough.  Not everybody in the faith tradition could go there.  And the claim of Jesus’ resurrection was astounding and weird enough that others obviously had some difficulty with it, too. 

Now, however, something happens that makes for a major change within the standards of the Jewish faith.  All though their history, Jews have had nothing to do with Gentiles, ie everybody else who’s not Jewish.  Part of keeping their faith tradition from being diluted was to keep their ethnicity pure as well.  Of course there were certain exceptions along the way, but racial purity and ethnic purity was a big value within the tradition.  Gentiles had different ways, Gentiles worshipped false gods, not the God of Abraham.  They were unclean, and basically anathema.

That’s the point of the dream Peter has - as a Jewish man, observant of the Law, he can’t eat those unclean animals.  But in the dream, God says three times that, “If I say they’re clean now, don’t disagree with me, and don’t call them profane.”  We can only imagine how shocking this dream must have been to Peter.  What?????  Peter has been praying, and this happens in his prayer!!!!   Then these Gentile guys are knocking at the door and asking him to come with them to a Gentile house and preach to them.  Ah ha - Peter makes the connection - God’s Spirit wants him to go with these Gentiles.  He doesn’t know why, but it seems God prepared him for this, and he decides to follow it.  He takes some Jewish brothers with him.  They all see God’s Spirit fall on the Gentiles, and these Gentiles show the same signs as Jewish believers.  So Peter does the next thing, which is to offer them baptism, and eats with them, accepting them as members of Jesus’ church.  Its radical!

Peter and his friends break a lot of traditional rules here - rules they’ve considered God’s will for centuries.  Peter isn’t just some rogue, non-observant and rule-breaking wild kid freaking out the grown-ups.  Peter walked with Jesus for the three years, and learned from Jesus.  Peter has been in prison for his faith, and he preached the powerful sermon at Pentecost from which many Jews from around the Mediterranean came to believe. And this same Peter ate with Gentiles and baptized them!

Word gets out, and Peter gets called on the carpet to explain himself.  Its of God, he says. God is the one who declared the boundaries broken, I just followed in faith.  God’s vision of what God is doing far exceeds Peter’s vision, or anyone else’s.  Who am I to hinder God?

Well, our early Christian ancestors in faith wrestled with this for more years, trying to figure out whether Gentile converts should follow Judaism, and to what extent.  There was a lot of confusion about how this new step worked.  Were Gentile converts, like, 2nd class believers?  Just how far are these traditional divisions broken?  What does it mean that we who follow Jesus have become a new family, across racial, ethnic boundaries?  Or across any boundaries? 

They’re not like us! But they worship God through Jesus.  They don’t know our history! And they have a different history! But they worship God through Jesus. They eat different foods and have a different culture!!!! But they worship God through Jesus. They’re not white! They’re not Americans!!! They’re not conservatives! They’re not in our political party! They don’t dress like us!  They don’t sing like us! But they worship God through Jesus.  But this is the way WE do things, and we’re right!! But they worship God through Jesus, too.

See, following Jesus is the game changer here - other distinctions don’t matter - following Jesus becomes the mark of this new family, this church.  The rest is fluff - although sometimes its hard to see that or admit that.  They aren’t capitalists!  They don’t know the cues of Southern charm!  They not fluent in Western history!  They don’t know our hymns!  Friends, that is all non-essential - that is all fluff.  Seeking to follow Jesus and live in Jesus’ realm - that makes them our kin, our family, and not 2nd class, either.

 

Friends, change happens. God had a bigger picture in mind.  And still has a bigger picture in mind, even now - we never see the whole of it, never get all the nuances and how it works out.  I guess we just can’t see it all at once, which is why we say “reformed and always being reformed” as our Presby motto. This Jesus thing is more than a personal salvation so we get to heaven when we die - that’s too small a goal for what God is doing.  Jesus died for the world and was raised for the world; Jesus lived as a human and cared for the well-being of humans, and directed a way of living that can actually save our world - our volatile, threatened world, our divided and polemical world - our world where angers erupt over who’s in power and who rules - and that values basically the total opposite of what God’s realm values. 

We, my friends, are called to witness, by our love for one another in Christ, that there is another way to live - a way of respect, a way of caring, a way that doesn’t pit one kind of person against another, a way where the least are cared for and provided for, where even the seemingly more powerful can do the just thing for the good of all, where humility and care for the whole wins over just taking care of #1.  We Christ-followers, united in Christ’s family, are called to show God’s love for the world by our love and our getting along; by sharing in the world’s abundance in care for one another so that all have enough.  We are not just our race or skin color - we ARE the church of Jesus Christ and therefore kin to one another -  and through this faith, and through living into the kindom of God, there IS hope and salvation for the world.  We are to be such witnesses. 

Its a high calling of the church. Unfortunately, it seems to me that we Christ-followers have wimped out on the hard stuff, and let ourselves and our church instead share the same divisions that the rest of the world has.  We don’t live up to the deep wisdom of Jesus’ teachings, where the God of the universe tells us about how things were designed to be.  We haven’t valued that wisdom, and instead find ourselves quibbling over the fluff, spending our energy on disagreements - and not keeping God’s big vision in front of our eyes. I don’t know what to do about this, because it seems that each of us have to learn it ourselves, individually, and over and over again in each generation.  And each of us seeks to live for Christ in the midst of surviving, suffering from our own wounds and problems, being influenced by the hate and competition around us, and led by our noses by things that glitter but are not gold.  Although God has extended grace to us and forgiven us, it takes most of a lifetime to learn to live into who we are in Christ.

The church as a whole is gradually seeing more of God’s vision, as God expands our circles of caring, and our comprehension of the enormity of God’s grace, only it seems to take generations for each step, and we can grow weary.

Let me share with you a transforming moment I had some years back that might speak some to our current situation in 2019.  I was newly divorced, and working for the Presbytery of Eastern VA in hunger advocacy, and preaching some Sundays when asked.  One of our downtown churches was closing its doors, selling its building and its artifacts, and I decided to attend their last service and offer my support to that brave pastor and congregation who saw the writing on the wall and made a hard decision.  The presbytery would have a final celebration there the next Sunday afternoon, when other clergy and friends could attend - this was the last time they worshipped as a church.  I walked down the halls, looking into rooms that spoke of an earlier architecture, halls that had once welcomed many post-WW2 families and children of the baby boom, and it hit me that it wasn’t only this particular church that was dying.  No, it was a whole era that was passing, the era of traditional families, the era where just about everyone went to church, and that the larger church had influence speaking to our nation.  The whole era when we white folks didn’t think too much about other races because we were dominant, although we didn’t  acknowledge it; the era when we spoke of America as a Christian nation and shared many values with other nice people. - or thought we did.  An era when people expected a better standard of living than their parents in each generation, and hard work paid off - or at least we thought so. 

I sat in that sanctuary and felt the world that I grew up in slipping away like water, and wondered what in the world would come next.  I was already in mid-life, and the world had irrevocably changed.  I was not prepared, and had no vision of what was ahead.  So I prayed like crazy.  I trusted that God was still in charge, and would continue to be; I trusted that God’s Word would endure in some form, because the faith we have is true, and God’s Spirit always does surprising and wonderful new things.  I wondered if people of my generation would be able to make the necessary changes in time.  It would probably be the next generation after mine, I thought, not raised and embedded so much in the traditional form of church like I had been.  I prayed for them.  And I prayed that I would not be an impediment to what God was doing, or be too stuck in my ways to see what was coming, and could help be a bridge to it. 

That has been my prayer since my mid-life, as I watched the world get weirder and weirder, and further away from the world I thought I was getting.  Maybe every generation feels this way, I don’t know.  I have tried to be faithful to what I believed God was saying in my heart, have continued to work in a faith that is shrinking and floundering across the country, and have tried to teach and preach what God was showing me.

I saw the first glimmerings of possibility that have moved me just this year, both at the NEXT church conference and even more at this Vital Congregations Initiative. This generation of church leaders and clergy aren’t afraid to call it like they see it, and name what has been happening, and call for better.  They are calling for our local churches to re-enter the scriptures, and re-open our hearts to God speaking.  They are asking our congregations to re-engage in our own spiritual practices and seek the Spirit’s wisdom.  They are asking us to look at our environments and our communities, and ask God to show us where our resources can match to human need.  And do it.  We Presbyterians may not be as numerous as in past years, and our finances may not be as robust - but those things have never stopped the historical  church before.  Those Presbyterians in the pews may be older - but we are still alive and we are still God’s own.  Our call is still to follow Christ and witness to God’s love. 

Change happens.  Yet, we worship a God who is new every morning, who is surprising and creative, a God of life.  And God is still speaking, still acting and still calling.  I hope we at Indiantown Pres will give it our best prayers and efforts, listening for God and expecting God to be working.  Pray for your leadership here as we set a course for this process and call us all to engage in following a new vision.  AMEN.