As has become a bit of a theme this season, the Acts reading today drops us in the end of a larger narrative. So once again before we get into the sermon part, I’m going to set a little bit of groundwork around it.
Chapter ten begins by introducing us to a new character. Cornelius was an Italian centurion who lived in the coastal city of Caesarea, a “devout man who feared God with all his household; he gave alms to the people and prayed constantly to God.” If you were here last week, some things about Cornelius might sound familiar. He was an outsider, a foreigner, and not just a foreigner but one who was close to the Roman emperor. These characteristics should disqualify him from being part of the people of God, for like we learned last week with the Ethiopian eunuch, per Temple regulation law-abiding Jews were not to associate with Gentiles. But Cornelius was in every other way a model convert. He was devout, he gave alms, he prayed constantly. Were it not for the sticky matter of his heritage, he would be in.
Then one day Cornelius had a vision where an angel of God appeared to him and told him to send men to find Peter and invite him to come visit Cornelius and his household. And I know last week it was confusing with the whole deacon Philip/disciple Philip, this is in fact disciple Peter. As in I will make you fish for people, on this rock I will build my church, denied Jesus three times, leader of the Jerusalem church Peter. That one. So Cornelius, being a devout man, did what he was instructed.
Meanwhile, forty miles south in Joppa, Peter too had a vision. In Peter’s vision, he saw “something like a large sheet being lowered” from heaven. Inside the sheet were “all kinds of four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air.” If you’re not up on your first century food purity laws, this is basically a sheet full of things a good law-abiding Jew was not to eat. So imagine Peter’s surprise when a voice said, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat.” And Peter was like, no way. “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane and unclean.” The voice called a second time, adding “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” Then, just to make sure Peter and the audience got the point, the voice called a third time. Three, remember, being the number in scripture to indicate completeness. And after this third time, the sheet of unclean snacks returned to heaven and Peter woke up. While Peter was mulling over this vision and the words the voice had spoken, the men Cornelius had sent to find Peter arrived. And with these words still ringing in his mind, Peter went with them to find Cornelius.
By the time Peter arrived in Caesarea, a whole crowd had gathered at Cornelius’ home in order to hear Peter speak and to learn from him. And after first sharing with them how God had revealed to him that no one was unclean or profane, Peter began to preach to the crowd all about the good news of Jesus. Fun fact: Peter’s sermon to the gentiles in Acts chapter ten is one of my very favorite passages of scripture. I’m not really sure why, except that it was one of the first passages I ever memorized, so I think it sits in the deepest part of my soul.
Anyway, it’s great, I recommend it. But immediately after it, verse forty-four, is where our reading for this morning picks up. And it picks up with the Holy Spirit interrupting Peter in the middle of his speaking to fall “upon all who heard the word.” And the assembled Gentiles began “speaking in tongues and extolling God.” Spoiler alert: two weeks from today is Pentecost Sunday. Which, mark your calendars, Worship and Music met this week and trust me, you’re not going to want to miss it. On Pentecost Sunday we read how the Spirit came upon the disciples and they began to speak in tongues. So the Jewish insiders who had traveled with Peter were amazed to hear this same Spirit coming in the same way to Gentiles! They didn’t eat the right food, or come from the right heritage, or follow any of the right rules, how could the Spirit be coming to them?! But Peter was like, what are we waiting for, get these folk baptized! And they were, and they invited Peter to stay with them several days, and he did, and Peter’s acceptance of their invitation was the final step in breaking down the social barrier between Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus. From here on out, as Paul wrote in his letter to the Galatians, “all are one in Christ Jesus.” Now, in full transparency, that doesn’t mean that the followers of Jesus always remembered that. One of the main conflicts in the rest of Acts will be Peter forgetting this moment of his conversion with the gentiles and Paul, gently or not so gently, bringing Peter back to a place of inclusion, but it is from the baptism of Cornelius that Jesus’ commission to the apostles to spread the good news from Jerusalem, throughout Samaria and Galilee and to the ends of the world really started to take off.
If you have ever felt like an outsider in the kingdom of God, this passage is good news for you. If you have felt too broken, too hurt, too small. Like you have done something wrong, you do not know enough, you are not enough, this passage is good news for you. Because what Peter’s vision proclaimed is that all those things Jesus did in his ministry, eating with sinners and outcasts, healing the sick and the suffering, preaching good news to the poor, welcoming both the tax collector and the man possessed by demons, the rich young ruler and the woman with five husbands at the well in Samaria into his fold, those things Jesus did were not confined to Jesus, they are the kingdom of God. It means that you are not, never have been, and never will be outside of the kingdom of God, no matter what others have said to you. Those other voices, those voices that tell you that you don’t have the right ideas or follow the right politics or love the right people or live the right life, those voice of exclusion, those voices are not God, and they are the ones who are not right, not you. The Holy Spirit has descended on you and no one can withhold from you the gift that God has bestowed. You are God’s.
That is the good news. But like any good Gospel message, there is also challenge. The challenge is this. For all the ways we feel like outsiders, we must also acknowledge all the ways that we are also insiders. All the ways that we are in fact more like Peter than like Cornelius, that we need to have our minds opened so that we too, like Peter, can proclaim with clarity, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality.” In the ELCA, we are really good at serving our neighbor, but serving our neighbor is not enough. In fact, I’m willing to go out on a limb here and say that the Christian vocation is not to serve. Service is good, don’t get me wrong, but there is still a hierarchy to service. When we serve, we place ourselves in the role of those who have, and we relegate others to those who do not. I am helping you, because I have what you need.
I don’t think that as Christians we are called to service, I think we are called to something much more radical than that. If you think about the readings we’ve had from earlier in Acts, how the believers shared their possessions so that there was not a needy person among them, they weren’t serving their neighbor, they were caring for their community. Following in the model of the early Christians does not mean serving those on the outside, it means breaking down the walls between outside and in, so that there is no longer a neighbor to serve, instead there is a companion to share with.
This shift from service to community is hard because it requires vulnerability. In service, here is nothing you have that I need. But in community, we are forced to reckon with the reality that we are not the great provider, giving to you who have less. Community forces us to see how those we serve are also serving us. In fact, community forces us into the uncomfortable vulnerability of seeing how I need you as much as you need me, and maybe even more.
The mutuality of the community of believers will become clear later. Here in chapter ten, at the very beginning of Paul’s ministry to the gentiles, it was very much a Jerusalem-centered operation. The mother church in Jerusalem, which Peter was the head of, was supporting Paul’s ministry work to the gentiles. They were paying Paul’s salary, so to speak, allowing him to go out and preach the good news to those in need. But as Rome increased the pressure on Jerusalem, eventually that dynamic will flip. In Paul’s letters, he described his gratitude to these small mission communities who were taking up collections to send money back to Jerusalem to support those who had first supported them.
What this means for us is that our vocation in this place is not actually to serve our neighbor; it is to make our neighbor our friend. To get over the idea that we have something to offer the Post Addition, and instead to recognize that our very existence is tied up in them. I’ll be honest with you all, it is not some huge, generous act on our part that we allow the Woman’s Co-op to stay here, even though they just about never actually pay their rent. If Co-op left, we would very possibly be sunk. We get way more out of them in grant-writing and stories we can tell than they ever get out of us. We are not serving Co-op, rather our existence is tied up in theirs, we are community together in this place, sharing of what we have, us a building, them an opportunity for service, so that, as we read a few weeks ago in Acts chapter four, “great grace was upon them all, [and] there was not a needy person among them.”
So that’s the challenge, and it’s no small challenge. It is way easier to serve than it is to recognize our own vulnerability and really create community. But like any huge challenge scripture presents, it too is followed up with good news. And that good news is this: “While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word.” Notice what the Holy Spirit did there. It cut Peter off. Peter was in the middle of this great speech about how God accepts everyone, and the Holy Spirit went ahead and put Peter’s words into action before Peter himself even had a chance to. Peter didn’t have to live out these words, he only had to follow along where the Holy Spirit had already gone. The normal order of baptism involves water being poured over a person and then the Holy Spirit descending. But in this story, the Holy Spirit came first, and Peter coming after with the water. After all, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who HAVE RECEIVED the Holy Spirit?”
The good news for us, dear people of God, is that the Holy Spirit is not waiting for us to figure out where we are supposed to go. The Holy Spirit is already out in the world, falling upon those who are supposed to be a part of our community. Our job is not to go and find those people, the Holy Spirit has already identified them. Our job is to, follow along with the water, so to speak, to find the places the Holy Spirit already is. Now, to be fair, Peter had it a little easier than we do, if you know where the people with the tongues of fire resting on their heads are, let me know. But like Peter, getting to the right place is more about listening to the messengers God is sending. Fourteen years ago, the Holy Spirit knocked on this door when Co-op wandered into this building. And I have every confidence that the Holy Spirit is already out there working on our next great project. We need only to find where she’s gone. Amen.
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