We can Welcome All People
‘So it is with the Spirit of God.’
Our story today from Acts 10 is truly a remarkable story, a radical story, a stunning story of the working of the Spirit. It is a story rooted in the power of prayer and in hospitality, and brimming with the outpouring of the Spirit. I loved the video telling of this story by the late storyteller Michael Williams. It captures the utter surprise and shock of this story, and how it transformed both Peter and Cornelius, but also the whole direction of this new emerging church of Jesus. I love how he ends his storytelling – ‘when he got back to Jerusalem, he was in big trouble.’ There would be some explaining to do by Peter.
But let us go back to the beginning of the story first. And we really need to start with the day of Pentecost itself, found in Acts 2. I preached on Pentecost a few Sundays ago, and we noted the huge transformation of Peter that happened on that day, and between when Jesus died and Peter somehow being ready and able now to preach his powerful Pentecost Sermon to the gathered crowds. Peter was able to move on from his doubts, recklessness, abandonment, denials, fragility and insecurity to become a confident, spirit centred preacher. He was able to process and work through all his grief and fears and emerge as this new leader in the Spirit. The Spirit was moving deep in his soul. He had arrived. Wasn’t that enough already? Wasn’t everything revealed to Peter at Pentecost? But the Spirit was not done with Peter yet. So it is with the Spirit of God.
Acts 10 starts with 2 very different characters – Cornelius and Peter, and individuals that had no business meeting up with each other. Cornelius is the Gentile – a Centurion of the Italian Cohort, a man of power and influence, and yet it says a devout man who feared God, gave alms generously to the poor and prayed constantly. Peter is the Jew, who has spent 3 years with Jesus, and is coming into his own as a leader of this group of Jewish Jesus followers. He is healing and preaching, spending time imprisoned, and travelling around, sharing the good news of Christ to fellow Jews in this time of both persecution and the explosion of growth in this group of Jesus followers. They are each in their own worlds.
What unexpectantly brings them together and binds them together is prayer and attentiveness to God, to the Spirit. What keeps them together is hospitality. It says that Cornelius was praying constantly to God. He is listening. He is attentive. One afternoon, as he prays, he has a vision and sees an angel of God telling him to send people to Joppa to find someone named Simon Peter. His first reaction is terror, but he still responds and sends 3 of his people to search for Peter. All this because he was praying.
Meanwhile, the very next day, Peter is on one of their journeys and goes up on a roof to pray. He is listening. He is attentive. He too sees a vision and falls into a trance. It is this vision of the large sheet coming down with all these unclean animals he is to kill and eat. Three times, Peter always needs to hear things three times, he is told ‘Do not call unclean what God has called clean.’ His first reaction is to be greatly puzzled, but just as he is trying to figure out this vision, these 3 men arrive and Peter takes the radical step of inviting them into his house and gives them lodging, open to what might happen. He offers hospitality and food to the outsider. He is open to where they may lead him. All this because he was praying.
By the next day, the men have brought Peter to Caesarea and the home of Cornelius and his closest family and friends, and this time it is Cornelius offering hospitality and food to Peter. Peter knows he shouldn’t be accepting this gesture. As he says, ‘you yourselves know that it is improper, against the law, for a Jew to associate with or visit an outsider…but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.’ Their prayers and the Spirit have unexpectantly brought these 2 characters together. So now what? What should they do? The two of them go ahead and share their stories; share their prayers and their visions that brought them together in this one place. It is a place of mutual sharing. Then Peter gets it! His ‘aha moment’ ‘I truly understand that God shows no partiality.’ And he starts to preach again, sharing the good news of Jesus just like he did at Pentecost, but with a new broader understanding of who is all included in this. As he preaches, the Holy Spirit shows up again, and falls upon the whole group. Peter steps out in utter faith – ‘Can anyone withhold water for baptising these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?’ It is like last week’s story of the Ethiopian Eunuch – ‘what is to prevent me from being baptised?’ And Peter baptizes them all and upon the invitation from Cornelius, stays for several more days – which must have been remarkable days as they got to know each other better and realized they had more in common than they could have even imagined. ‘So it is with the Spirit of God.’
I don’t think we get how radical and unbelievable this story was. This should never happen. It breaks all the categories of clean and unclean, insiders and outsiders, and who belongs and who is hosting and receiving whom and who is really in charge. Peter will be in deep trouble and need to explain himself. It reminds me of the phrase Brent used last week, about ‘unlearning.’ Peter was very quickly unlearning everything he knew to be true. He was acting before thinking, all made possible because of his openness to the Spirit, his grounding in prayer. That is what can happen when you pray, when you offer and receive hospitality and enter into the real lives of people. The Junior Youth Shine curriculum notes ‘prayer is a risky business. Sometimes when we talk to God, God talks back. And sometimes what God says will change our lives, and change our families and change our communities.’ (Shine, Session 11, p.66)
Peter was doing theology on the fly. He acted first, and then had to try to sort out what it all meant – to sort out the theology later. We see this when he gets back to Jerusalem in Chapter 11 and gets all the criticism for what he has just done. ‘Why did you go to uncircumcised men, to Gentiles, and eat with them?’ Peter witnessed first to the story, to what happened, to how the Spirit was moving. And then he starts to make sense of it theologically – ‘What God has made clean, you must not call unclean… The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us’… I am remembering Janet’s sermon here from 2 weeks ago on us and them. ‘Remember that John baptised with water, but Jesus would baptize with the Holy Spirit… if God gives them the same gifts that he gave us, who was I that I could hinder God?’ All of this is about the repentance that leads to life, for all of us, Jew or Gentile.
Peter is putting it all together, sorting out the implications. He is allowing his mind to catch up to his spirit and his actions, to what he has just experienced. He is allowing the Spirit to lead and not hinder what God is doing. I find it interesting that it is only a few verses later at the end of chapter 11 that it says ‘it was in Antioch that the disciples were first called Christians.’ They needed an identity marker now that included all who followed, not just those of Jewish background. This becomes the big issue of the early church- how do these 2 groups come together. There are so many practical implications to be sorted out. This question is all over Acts and all over Paul’s letters. There is a huge church conference that happens because of this in Chapter 15, the council of Jerusalem. They have to sort this out now. There are debates and arguments, they search Scripture, and they finally land with the Spirit, to officially include Gentiles – it seemed good to the Spirit and to us. But it was the experience that came first, today’s story. They also have to live into what this really means. I notice that even as they accept the Gentiles, the uncircumcised, they stick with the food laws and insist the Gentiles refrain from animals strangled, from the blood. They can’t quite take the full meaning out of Peter’s food dream and they back away a bit from the full implications of the dream. We will hear Paul trying to sort out the food issues in some of his letters too. It will take a while to live into where the Spirit has led them. But they do allow the Spirit to lead, to radically change their identity, their vision, their future, all grounded in prayer and shared hospitality. That’s where it begins. So it is with the Spirit of God.
When I look at church history, I wonder how often we have done it the other way around. We so often start with theology, start with carefully defining what we believe and what our church practices should be. We get into all sorts of debates and questions of process or authority or church discipline or interpretation. Peter and Cornelius call us back to prayer, to listening, to being attentive, to being open to the Spirit’s guidance, to un-learning, to acting boldly first and sorting out the theology later. I love where this year and this latest worship series has taken us a congregation. We have been reading and sitting with all sorts of Scriptures and praying and seeing where the Spirit may bring us. Last week we heard the testimony of 3 of our members sharing how, like Paul, the Spirit has changed and transformed them and what they believe, often starting with their real and lived experience, and their openness to God’s next steps for them. It brought them to new places. They sorted out their theology on the fly. It was remarkable sharing! I also think about the last Sundays of our worship response time. This whole year this time around a circle in our church basement has been gaining momentum and energy and participation. Trust has grown and we are more and more open and vulnerable and real with each other, to sharing what is really going on underneath. The last 2 Sundays, people shared deeply and personally with each other around the circle, prompted by the stories and reflection shared in Janet’s sermon and the 3 testimonies, by the Acts Scriptures on the Holy Spirit and by our prayers and worship. It has felt like sacred Holy Spirit moments.
The themes of inclusion and welcome have been prominent and I wanted to put those into our congregational context. I think back to the years 2009-2016, when we joined Mennonite Church Canada in its Being a Faithful Church Process, and on those last 2 years where we intentionally had conversations on LGBTQ+ inclusion. No one could have predicted then where those conversations and time of discernment would bring us as a congregation. This week is the 8 year anniversary of when we accepted our SJMC Welcoming Statement in worship at the end of that process, on May 15, 2016 – remember the pouring of water into various containers? The statement reads ‘Grounded in God’s universal love, we are a community of faith growing into our calling to be the body of Christ. We welcome people who are LGBTQ+ to participate in the life and ministry of our congregation.’ (https://sjmc.on.ca/welcoming-statement/) Like Peter, we had to expand our understanding of welcome and we didn’t know where it would all take us. When I think back to that time and our process, we grounded ourselves first in lots of prayer and worship – that’s how we began every session, and we surrounded it with hospitality. Remember how we sat around tables on those Sunday evenings and ate a simple meal of bread and soup together, before we engaged with each other. Eating together opened us up to respect the person sitting across for you. Then we sat in a large circle to pray, worship and send a talking stick around so that every voice was heard and respected, in a spirit of listening and attentiveness. We did a long form survey to capture even more voices. We watched a play together. We heard lots of stories and experiences, we shared vulnerably, and we let our theology catch up with where it felt the Spirit was leading us. We kept testing ideas with each other, and testing the statement that was emerging. In the end we used the phrase ‘Living into our Welcoming Statement.’ We recognized, even in accepting our statement, that we had differences, and that, as the last point said, ‘as we journey together, we welcome ongoing storytelling and conversations of listening and learning in a spirit of gentleness, grace and love.’ It feels like we are at a different place now, 8 years later, as we have continued to live into our welcoming, as witnessed by all the sharing in worship and worship response these last few weeks, and as witnessed by the quiet, and yet strong ways this statement was become owned and claimed and lived into over these years. And the Spirit is not done with us yet. So it is with the Spirit of God.
I am highlighting one area of church life that has bubbled to the surface again recently, but I could name all sorts of movements of the Spirit here at SJMC. I think about our refugee sponsorships, often started by some folks prayerfully gathering around the piano, or our partnerships with Grace Lao, Benin Bible Institute and Burning Bush Forest Church. I think about our pastoral team model of shared leadership, and the recent discernment around pastoral time complement and the calling of a new pastor. I think about our community life together and the many things that draw us closer, but also how we reach out within our broader community to bring hope and life. I think about how the Spirit has led us out of the years of pandemic. I think about both our struggles and our hopes as we look to new generations, to families, to babies being blessed, to where our future might be. I think about how Meals that Matter, prayers and conversations around a table, has taken off and become a place of meaning and engagement for our youth, when it feels like we don’t know what youth ministry looks like any more. I think about the importance of being in prayer and how vital sharing hospitality with each other is – yes our food – eating together, but also truly sharing the depths of our lives, our vulnerabilities and dreams, with each other. I think about worship and its grounding role in shaping who we are. That will ground everything and open us to the leading of the Spirit. Like Peter, like Cornelius, our posture is to be one of prayer and listening and being attentive to the surprises of the Spirit. The Spirit is not done with us yet. So it is with the Spirit of God.
Let us pray.
Holy Spirit, come with Power, breathe deep into our lives and into our world; give us vigor, life anew. You are like the wind, blowing into our lives, warming our hearts, sending us into fresh places; a gale force, rattling around and shifting our perspectives, a breeze stirring up new possibilities, a dancing flame bringing us into the unexpected. Help us to listen and pay attention. Guide us, like you guided both Peter and Cornelius. Bring us more and more into a spirit of inclusion and welcome, in a world so in need of healing and hope. Lead us through prayer, through hospitality, to share our soul’s deepest desires. Blow through our lives and through your church. We pray this in the name of one who came to us on the Day of Pentecost, and comes to us now. Amen.