You Know the Message
Sunday, January 13th, 2008 (Communion)
Epiphany 1 – The Baptism of Christ
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Acts 10:34-43
Theme: Knowing – and Living – the Gospel

34Then Peter began to speak to them: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, 35but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. 36You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ—he is Lord of all. 37That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: 38how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. 39We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; 40but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, 41not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. 42He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. 43All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”

We know the message. At least we’ve heard it enough to be able to repeat it – sometimes verbatim, sometimes in paraphrase. But we do. If we’ve spent any extended time in church – and I think it is safe to say that the majority of us here in this room have – even if it was as a young child in Sunday School, somewhere in the back of our minds there is something of a recitation we could give that would sum up our understanding of “The Gospel”.

What would that understanding be? What would it reflect? What ‘stuck with us’ from what we heard as a children, as teenagers, as young adults? What is interesting about the question is that the answer depends on when you HEAR the question. If you’d asked me this question when I was, say … 17, my understanding of ‘The Gospel’ or to put it another way, my understanding of what it meant to be a Christian would have been a fairly extensive list of things I wasn’t supposed to do. Not that I did many of them – very few if any, really. Living the gospel meant refraining from cursing, lying, stealing, cheating, ‘loose living’, smoking, drinking, staying out late at night, disobeying my parents, and generally being a good little boy – or young man, by that point.

It was a fairly straightforward proposition. It meant ethical, healthy living, obedience to authority, respect for the laws of both God and Man.

If you had asked me this question just a few years later, when I was 26 or 7, the answer would have been a little less … certain. A little less clear, even. I think I would have made the same list, but the delivery would have been much less self-assured. By that time, I’d been through some life experiences that helped me realize that the assumption that I had as a 17 year-old, that for the most part I had a handle on things, that there were some things that WERE, in fact, black and white, was one that I could not stand by so readily any more. It’s not that the meaning of the Gospel had changed, it was that my attitude towards the Gospel, and what implications my understanding of the Gospel meant in terms of living it in my daily life had shifted, and that had made all the difference.

There was a degree of internalization, a sense of ‘making the faith my own’ that took place over those 9 or 10 years that could not have happened before. I’m not saying that everyone is supposed to go through this in their early and mid twenties, I’m just saying that that was the way it happened in MY case. It can actually happen at any point in your life, if you just let it.

Questions to think about: when did that ‘internalization’ happen in your life, or has it yet? Looking back, can you say you’ve gone through a process like that, where you examine what you say you believe, and for lack of a better phrase, “put it to the test” – you got through a life event that is either deeply moving or terrifyingly traumatic and it makes you stop and reassess what you think is important.

You go through a sea change, a paradigm shift – where what you base the way you live and act changes from one thing – say, the approval of family and friends and/or society, to the approval of God.

Sometimes they are graciously in conjunction, and sometimes, sadly, they are at odds.

Peter was about to experience just such a conflict coming out of the situation we find him in in today’s passage. These words are being spoken to Cornelius, a Roman centurion – a man in charge of a hundred soldiers, a man of leadership, with great responsibilities, but more specifically, a gentile.

The paradigm shift is found in this: up until now, the predominant thought among the People of Israel was that God’s covenant and special relationship was for the sole benefit of … the People of Israel, and no one else, except those who chose to convert and become People of Israel. Peter was one of them. He was the leader of the church in Jerusalem. But here he was, being called in a vision by God to go to the house of Cornelius, a Roman and a Gentile, and share the Gospel with him.

And thanks be to God, he did. He does. That is what we are reading. You see, God didn’t ONLY send a vision to Peter, but also to Cornelius, instructing HIM to send for Peter to come to HIM, because he had something “important” to share with him.

And that important something turned out to be the Gospel, which he spelled out simply and straightforwardly in just a few sentences, summed up in verse 36: “preaching peace through Jesus Christ”.

Unpacking that phrase can become a life’s devotion … or a life OF devotion.

Is that what stuck with us from the gospel we learned or heard as children?

It doesn’t seem to be necessarily the most popular theme to pick up on, if a sampling of preaching were to be taken on any given Sunday. There are more than few voices from which we can hear of how the world is dying and going to hell in a hand basket. There are other voices from which we can hear the dissection of the meaning of the words Peter used in his sermon to Cornelius. There are still others that will go to the other extreme and make this message out to be saying that it doesn’t matter what you do in life, God loves you and would not send anyone with good intentions to Hell, so disregard that idea altogether. Jesus died for everyone, so everyone is covered – no worries.

I confess I fall somewhere in between or maybe it is more honest to say that I’d rather not even be on the same spectrum to begin with.

You see, there is an inherent mechanistic view in those positions that I don’t believe applies to the Gospel. There is a cause-effect understanding that almost completely eliminates the element of relationship that is intrinsic to the Gospel. It is almost a continuation of the Old Testament Hebrew understanding that in order to be in God’s good graces, one must perform certain tasks at certain times of the year, must refrain from certain actions, must keep from certain contacts, and, regardless of the condition of one’s heart, one’s SPIRIT, if one meets THOSE specified requirements, one is IN.

Does that sound familiar?

The good news, the Gospel we like to call it in shorthand, is that God is about the business of reconciling the world to God’s self. It is what we heard last week, and it is what we will continue to hear as the year goes on. It is the foundation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, because it was THROUGH Christ that God was working that reconciliation.

And what we are celebrating today, what we are observing this morning, is the representation of that reconciliation through the sharing of the bread and the wine.

It is an observance, an ‘ordinance’ we call it in the Baptist tradition, which connects us with other Christian traditions the world over. Granted, there are radically different understandings of what taking the bread and the wine mean, there are different ways of doing it, of offering it, of serving it. In our case we don’t use wine but grape juice. We mix it up a little and sometimes serve the little cubes of loaf bread and pass out tiny cups of juice to each person. Today, we are sharing from a common loaf and dipping the bread into a common cup before eating it. Again, the specifics are not that critical. It is the symbolism that carries the weight of the event for us. The single loaf, whether cubed or here whole reminds us that we are part of a common body: the body of Christ. The juice, whether served out of one same bottle and divided into individual little cups for health reason, or provided here inside a single cup, reminds us that we are partakers in a common sacrifice, the sacrifice of Christ’s blood shed on the Cross for our collective sins.

How will we live out the meaning of this meal – this Gospel – in our lives? I invite you to come to the table, and when you leave, to be as bold as Peter in your living out of the Gospel this week.

(Communion)