That I Could Hinder God

Sunday, May 2, 2010

Easter 5C

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

Acts 11:1-18

“Now 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.”

“I’m never going back into that church again!”  “Those women were talking and they KNEW that I could hear them, and they said I shouldn’t be coming because I was a sinner, living in sin, and should be ashamed of walking into the service as though nothing was wrong.”

The woman sitting across the living room from me wasn’t expressing sorrow or despair at the fact that she’d decided to not go back to ‘that church’, she was more simply stating a fact.  She had already written off the ‘women’ whom she had overheard talking as irrelevant to her life, self-righteous busybodies who seemed to ignore their own faults and failures and instead talk about hers.  She wasn’t, I don’t think, ignoring the fact that her living situation was less than the ideal, nor was she defending it as righteous.  She has had enough church upbringing to know that what she is doing falls short of the moral rules of the church, but that is not enough to make her seriously contemplate changing that same situation. 

The struggle in that situation for me was how to respond.  If I came out in agreement with the women, I would probably come across just as they did, and in addition would have been a terribly rude guest in her home, which she has graciously opened to me and my family on several occasions over the past few months.  If I defended her as being free from fault, I would not have been true to my own convictions about what constitutes an acceptable or less than acceptable relationship in the eyes of the church.  In the end, rowdy children redirected the conversation and kept us from going back to the issue.  The woman has a standing invitation to join us at either of the services we offer.

This issue, this question of what constitutes one as being a follower of Christ – an ACCEPTABLE follower of Christ – has been in question from the earliest days – from the beginnings – of the church.  It was an ongoing debate from the moment Jesus started proclaiming the Gospel – priests and scribes that we read about throughout the Gospel narratives as well as through Paul’s letters and the rest of the New Testament provided an ongoing point of contention with the thrust of the Gospel … it seems to have been a persistent and recurring argument… and if the truth be told, it is one that carries forward even into today.          

We have to face this question – time and again – because it keeps cropping up – time and again.  Even as the established religious structure of the day in first century Palestine believed it had a clear understanding of who was in and who was out, it has been so throughout the centuries SINCE then – the church has taken it upon herself to decide who is in and who is out of the good graces of God.  The problem is, I’m not sure it is or ever was our place to say who was in and who was out.  As much as I would like to point to a scripture where Jesus says “you have that say” … the examples that we have from Jesus himself go against any notion that he came to give us that responsibility as part of his great commission. 

In terms of who is to be the intended recipient of the Gospel, there is very little to bolster the idea that it is intended for ‘good people’ or ‘upstanding citizens’ … we can and have easily fallen into the trap of limiting the message for a select group – those who had stable employment, solid families, the right name, the right background, the right emotional sensibilities, the right … “you fill in the blank” … and for what were very practical reasons. 

As an institution based in a given community, our churches were for centuries the backbone of society.  Our weekly schedules rotated around the duties of the land and the responsibilities with the church.  That is a laudable effort, a worthwhile pursuit.  A necessary part of socializing a community and its members into what can become a cohesive, strong, and enduring entity.

But did we lose something in the process?  Did we lose sight of the expansiveness of the Gospel in our efforts to maintain order and discipline?  Did we stifle the movement of the Spirit in selecting who we allowed to join us in worship and then in fellowship over the years? 

The Pharisees and Sadducees and Levites had made it their sacred duty over the centuries to guard the purity of the temple, to maintain the separation of the Holy from the unclean, and the result was that … worship became … wrote, became formulaic.  You are guilty of such-and-such a sin, sacrifice such and such an animal or animals and say the required prayers, and you will once again be ‘right with God’.  What was required of you was your time and some effort, originally these were designed to bring you to a point of confession – to a point of contrition and a turning back to God, and a reengaging in the relationship that that entailed, but over the years it became more about the doing instead of the being, so you put IN the time and the effort, but your heart was not engaged.  There was very little relationship to begin with, and it only shriveled as the time went by.  

That is what was so disconcerting to them about Jesus when he came.  He knew the time and effort requirement, he knew it inside and out.  But he never lost his awareness of the other, deeper connection that God was looking for in that worship prescription – he never disengaged his heart.  And the form and the style of worship took their appropriate place in their context: a secondary place.  

Peter was raised a practicing Jew.  It would be similar to me saying, Elmer was raised a practicing Northern Necker.  I know that’s not the right term, but go with me for a minute.  His sense of what should and shouldn’t be has been a part of his environment – ingrained in everything he’s ever been taught, seen, been associated with or heard speak of – since he was BORN. 

Now, imagine someone coming along, someone with an incredible amount of charisma, authority, and presence, and they tell Elmer that, while everything he’s known all his life IS a PART of what should and shouldn’t be, there’s this critical piece missing – so critical that in fact, for his whole life, Elmer has in fact MISSED THE POINT. 

What kind of response do you think that person would receive from Elmer?  Unless he was a particularly resilient and receptive individual, I suspect that Elmer would have a hard time either accepting or adjusting to what this person was saying.   He might, in fact, react negatively or even violently to being confronted with such a radical notion. 

That was in essence the position Simon Peter found himself in when he went to sleep in Joppa.  Even having lived through those times when Jesus either told a parable or actually interacted with someone who didn’t meet the criteria that had been set out by the religious establishment, it took a vision from God AFTER witnessing the resurrection to get Peter to come to understand the import of the message that he’d been given.  And the message in the vision could not have been clearer. 

“What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

And the image is equally clear.  All those animals that had heretofore been off limits were now no longer an issue.  That means, there were no restrictions on what he could eat, whom he could speak to, sit with, eat with, share with, and most significantly, WORSHIP with. 

This was the most radical facet of the Gospel, that it was for all people – Jew and Greek, Slave and Free, Male and Female … there was no distinction made of who was worthy to receive – and follow – the Gospel and who was not.  The message of God’s love was and IS for everyone. 

Ultimately, we owe our very existence to that vision.  If it were not for that vision, and Paul’s subsequent mission work, the body of Christ could have been hindered, could have been repressed, slowed.  I’m not saying the Church would not have eventually broken out and grown as it did, but it may have been a much slower process.  We know by tradition of the persecution of the early church, and it has been made much of in movies and in retellings of those events, but it seems that that earliest conflict within the church, between those who would rather impose some sort of control – some kind of human gatekeeping action on that which cannot be controlled – the Holy Spirit - is not so loudly spoken of.  I wonder if part of that mutedness has to do with the fact that the inclination towards exclusivity resonates so deeply with us, as it has with succeeding generations of believers throughout the ages?

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

It simply means this:  This church is not ours.  As much as we are invested in it, as many hours as we put into it, meeting here, organizing, planning, holding services and programs and events, we are simply caretakers, we are conduits, we are INSTRUMENTS to be used by God as God sees fit and necessary to break in his Kingdom however that Kingdom looks. 

It’s a scary thing. We draw comfort in the familiarity of Sunday mornings. We know that we’re going to be together, and that a little bit after eleven O’Clock we’re going to hear the bells chime, we’re going to hear the prelude, we’re going to stand and sing a couple of hymns, we’re going to pray together and read scripture together, and we’re going to hear a choir special – beautifully sung – and then somebody is going to stand up and speak and read scripture.  There is comfort and safety in that routine.  But the Holy Spirit is anything BUT routine.  The Holy Spirit cannot be corralled, cannot be boxed in.  And that is going to cause discomfort, when the Holy Spirit pops over here and over there and (Oh No!) over THERE… God give us courage to welcome wherever the Spirit moves.   

Let’s pray.