The Rev. Noah Van Niel
Christ and St. Luke’s
May 15th, 2022
Easter 5: Acts 11:1-18; Ps 148; Revelation 21:1-6; John 13:31-35
(You can view the full service here. The sermon begins at 22:40)
We have a sign outside the front of our church. No doubt you’ve seen it. It says, “Welcome home. You Belong.” Before I even accepted the call to serve here it was clear that this message was more than just a slogan for this parish. It is a core aspect of this community’s identity. Good. I am proud we have this sign. But it also makes me a little sad. Because the need to proclaim this message means somewhere along the line Christians forgot one of the first and most important lessons they ever learned.
The Acts of the Apostles tells the story of the earliest days of the Church. In fact, some people refer to it as the “fifth Gospel” because it was written by the author of the Gospel of Luke and continues his story almost uninterrupted. Like any start up the early days of the church were full of excitement, adventure, and surprise which makes it a fun book to read. It starts with Jesus’s ascension and then the subsequent arrival of the Holy Spirit. As the disciples are filled with that new Spirit they start hitting the streets of Jerusalem, proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ. Peter, having come a long way from his denial of Jesus, becomes the disciples’ chief spokesperson. He’s preaching and teaching all over town. But, important to note, he is talking exclusively to his fellow Jews. This makes sense. The disciples were Jewish. Jesus was Jewish. The whole idea of The Messiah was a fulfillment of the prophecies of the Hebrew Scriptures. So naturally the disciples focus their early evangelism efforts on their fellow Jews. But then things start spilling over.
Peter is in Joppa, the major port city on the coast of the Mediterranean. And while there he has a strange vision. A big sheet coming down, all sorts of animals walking, crawling, flying around. He is told to eat them. He resists. Many of these animals would have been unkosher; to eat them would have been a violation of Jewish law. They were animals outside the boundaries of his faith. They are “unclean…profane.” But the voice from heaven insists: “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” This happens three times, and while puzzling over what it means, Peter was called upon by some servants of a Roman soldier, named Cornelius.
Now it sounds like Cornelius was a good guy, but he was definitely a Gentile not a Jew. And according to the laws of his people it was unlawful for Peter to associate with, let alone visit a Gentile like Cornelius (Acts 10:28). But fresh off this vision, where he learned not to call anything unclean or profane, the Spirit now tells him to go with them, and “not to make distinctions between them and us.” So, Peter accepts the invitation. And he travels the thirty miles north to Caesarea, where Cornelius lives. When he gets to Cornelius’ home, he begins to preach to those who have gathered. And as does, the people get it, they really get it. They get the power of the message of the Gospel: that God is love and has come to you so that you might come to Him. The Holy Spirit falls upon them and they begin speaking in tongues and praising God. And Peter and his companions are amazed at what is happening. And they go ahead and baptize them, remaining with them for several days. The Gentiles are now being welcomed into the faith of Jesus. This is a pivotal, glorious day.
But when Peter gets home to Jerusalem, he has some explaining to do. The other apostles and believers call him in to criticize what he has done and demand an explanation for this transgression. And so Peter recounts everything that happened. (This was our first reading this morning). And as he pleads his case, he basically says, “It just happened. They got it. They understood. The Spirit was there and they were feeling it! ‘If 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?’” This silences the critics, and turns their grumbling to rejoicing, because what was becoming clear was that God was doing a new thing and the Spirit was pushing the message even wider than they had imagined it could or should go.
This is so often the case, isn’t it? The Spirit is always a step or two ahead of the institution. Even when the institution is still a small (but growing!) rag tag group of fishermen trying to figure out how to start a religion. The Spirit is not waiting for them, the Spirit is just doing it. It is pushing them outside their zones of comfort and familiarity and trying to break open their community so that those who are outsiders might also be welcomed in. And despite the slow reaction time of the Church –it takes years for them to completely sort out the inclusion of Gentiles into their community of faith—it is with this Spirit of inclusion unleashed, that the church really starts to flourish. Because now the whole world is open to receive the good news of Jesus Christ and to be welcomed into the family of those who come to him in faith and live by the law of love.
But somewhere along the way, Christians replaced the question of who should be included in the church, with the question of who should be excluded from it. And in so doing, we, the Church, became the very ones who hindered God. We can debate exactly when it happened—the truth is it has happened again and again in different times and different places for different reasons. But every time it does, every time someone is excluded from the family of faith, it flies directly in the face of what Peter says in Acts 10:34: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” The Church has failed, time and again this test of inclusion. And that is because it works against our nature. We are quick to close off the boundaries of our hearts and our communities. This tribalism is part and parcel with our humanity. Which is why it is all the more important to remember that God calls us to transcend that impulse to exclusion, and keep the doors of our hearts open and our boundaries flexible so that we can grow. God is always calling us to live in a way that is more loving, more accepting, more open than we want to be because that is the only way we become more than what we are. Growth in the life of faith, growth in a community cannot and does not come from stagnancy and surety. It comes from staying open to the new. Even when it hurts, even when it’s uncomfortable, even when it requires the death and resurrection of our assumptions and understandings. This is the work of the Holy Spirit. And that means part of the work of the Christian life is to constantly grow our circle of caring, to expand who we welcome and incorporate into our community so that the church, and we as individual members of it, might be changed. Because we are not complete until we are complete. And every person brings with them the benefit and blessing of their experience and existence, which we are lacking without them. The Spirit is always pushing our boundaries of welcome and inclusion outward. That is how the church grows, and how the church thrives. It is how we grow, and it is how we thrive. That was as true in the first century and it is today.
Our proclamation that everyone belongs, is deeply scriptural, and deeply Spirit-driven. It is foundational to Christian faith. Our banner is a testament to that. And while it stands as a beacon of welcome, an open invitation to people, especially to those for whom that Holy Spirit of welcome and inclusion has been painfully absent in their experience of the Church, it also stands as a constant challenge to those of us inside these walls. A challenge to make it true. So that anyone—anyone—who walks through those doors feels and knows that they are welcome here. Because we are better for having them with us. I’m sad that banner needs to be up. But I’m glad it is. Because it ensures that we will never stop asking “Who belongs?” and never stop answering, “You belong.”