Sermon: Petals of the gospel-flower
Text: Acts 11:1-18
In today’s story, Peter baptizes a Gentile and his whole household and accepts them to the Christian Jewish faith community. Now he has to face all those in the community who take issue with his actions - but can he persuade them to accept Gentiles into their midst?
The Gentile was a man named Cornelius, a Roman officer, in the Italian Cohort. He was a generous, religious man, dwelling on the fringes of Palestine and at the margins of Judaism, fearing God. His conversion will probably cost him his position and entail many social difficulties; at the time the Jews and the Jewish Christians, including Peter, shared a cultural presumption that all Jews are forbidden to visit, eat, or associate with anyone of another race. In today’s story, the real issue that the objectors have is not so much with the baptism of Gentiles but with Peter’s willingness to physically, face-to-face, sit and eat with the Gentiles, in the community’s “Table Fellowship”, a communal meal with mandatory attendance. The newly-baptized ones are now free to join the table which had previously been limited to the righteous few.
In response to this confrontation, Peter, describing the visions he had when he was in a trance three days before, shares the instruction he received by Heavenly voice: God commands the Gospel-following community to “Not call profane what God counts clean.” We must not stand in God’s way; the gift of the Holy Spirit should be poured out on all peoples, “Without terms.” Quoting from 2 Timothy, “We must not be overcome by the spirit of fear, because we would be given the spirit of power to do the work of God.”
One thing I would like us to note is that this morning, we’ve only heard Acts Chapter 11, yet the whole story begins at chapter 10 when Cornelius, the Gentile hero of today’s story, receives instructions from an angel who tells him to travel to meet Peter. With God, this Gentile-outsider initiates and creates something which transforms Peter’s mind and heart and the practice of Jewish Christians at the time. They are moved to accept all races (the circumcised and the uncircumcised) into the kingdom life through baptism. I wonder what this story of conversion and the spirit of transformation can teach us about answering our call to live the kingdom life.
Stephanie Spellers distinguishes three different stages of becoming a church that embraces God, the Other and the Spirit of Transformation this way: Invitation, Inclusion, Radical Welcome.
First, being an Inviting Congregation, which is just as important as the other stages. (We need inviting practices!!! We must truly be inviting with all that we can strive to do: warm Sunday morning coffee, friendly greetings, intentional evangelism, to draw new people, to help new people come inside, etc. We can’t exaggerate the importance of this amazing job), Stephanie says, yet it has its own limit: assimilation. The tricky thing about this part is, by using the logic of invitation, we quickly find ourselves locked into a pattern of reaching out to people who will appreciate our institutions and practices as they are, or who, at least, seem willing to subscribe to them. In this approach, we may grow, and by most measures observers would call us healthy and successful, yet we still need to ask ourselves whether we have answered the call to live as the whole body of Christ.
Spellers defines the second way of becoming a church that embraces God and embraces the Other as being an Inclusive Congregation. Whoa! I was amazed, when I first read her excellent analysis to see that there are more steps beyond Inviting! You see, the inviting congregation’s plan largely draws those who reflect the cultural identity of the existing church community. An inclusive congregation will begin to explore what it means to welcome those outside their cultural group (as defined by factors like race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and age) Yet, very often, congregations will be inclusive - but only on “terms.” These inclusive congregations may open their doors to marginalized groups, but that invitation usually goes out to certain, “acceptable” members of the marginal group, often the ones who share the dominant group’s class, culture, or aesthetic values. For example, from Spellers’ book, “Black Ivy League graduates, gay bankers, young classical music lovers, articulate homeless people, and so on.) These members are trusted as leaders. However, other, more marginal, representatives might not get that welcome. This helpful analysis encourages us to wonder, “What are our ‘terms’ of relationship we might hold in our life and church?”
If the Inviting Congregation’s limit is with assimilation, the Inclusive Congregation’s limit is with incorporation. The inclusive church offers marginalized people or ‘differences’ a place inside, but still on “terms” that allow the church’s power structures and cultural identity to remain essentially unchanged.
Then, what makes a Radically Welcoming church?
Spellers says, “The movement from inviting to inclusion to radical welcome is the move toward cultivating (a) mutually transforming relationship.” It’s important to note: The terms and power have shifted.
In a community that lives Radical Welcome, people on the margins, people with privilege, those who have been in leadership positions, those who have just started coming, those who bear the social attributes of the dominant culture or those who do not, all are invited to open themselves to conversion - in truth, to be open to experiencing continuing, constant and ever-transforming conversions, like in today’s story of Cornelius, Peter and the core members of the Christian Jewish church. They’ve re-written the “contract” (all terms are removed; circumcision and race, no more a requirement.) to welcome Cornelius, (important!) beginning with the initiation of Cornelius as he requests his baptism and acceptance.
God is big. God has always and will always be bigger than our current understanding of God. Saying yes to Jesus means that we have agreed to rewrite the terms of the contract. Speller says our mainline churches shouldn’t be like this: providing us with security, stability, control, beauty, comfort, familiarity, pain alleviation, intimacy, family, home while in exchange, we attend worship faithfully, contribute our money and various talents, join in service to those in need, and offer devotion to Christ. That’s a fair picture of a standard ‘good’ church- but the deal is off if the church pushes or challenges us to live values that compromise our current way of life. We need to begin to live as if ‘It is not the church of God that has a mission, but the God of mission who has a church.’ With Radical welcoming, our sense of what is possible, what is normative, what is essential, and what is holy for Christian life will find a new common ground - and grow.
This is not an easy journey, and there’s no real guarantee of us giving it an enthusiastic welcome. Because change is hard, in any place: life, church, workplaces, especially if the change means the changing and the shifting of the ground under our feet. We would most like to avoid, with all our might, being truly vulnerable and sharing or speaking about something so ‘personal’ and ‘intimate’ as fear and pain. Making change – even when some of us think of it as a simple change – can cause others personal pain. When we engage with work that brings about adaptive changes and possibly others’ resistance to follow, we need to always remember to greet others’ fear with the same compassion that we’ve learned to bring to our own fears. Adaptive change doesn’t mean that with the necessary change, your self will disappear. You will not disappear. You, all of us will be embraced, with compassion.
In the journey of becoming a church that embraces Otherness as our new identity, and also in the personal journey to really know and embrace the otherness within ourselves and others, we begin to recognize our distinctive Christian call: We need to take up the vocation of healer in this journey (and we must) to help to initiate and facilitate conversations and conversions about fear, hope and gospel-based transformation. There’s not just the wounded, nor just the healer. “Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It is a relationship between equals.” (Pema Chodron) In the horizontal circle of the faithful, we need to be steadfast and compassionate to ourselves, to our own ‘shaky and tender place’ and that of others’. We need to stay present and faithful to one another, with compassion, and to heal, not to hurt.
The story of God’s love in Jesus is like the bud of a fragrant flower, fully ripe but as yet only in the process of opening fully. Each individual has a different and unique interpretation of the Gospel we hold in common and the kingdom life. Each interpretation opens one petal of the gospel-flower. As each petal of the flower opens, we come to behold the loveliness of the blossoming flower and smell its fragrance. … Only through a process of a multicultural, or multi-voiced, opening up shall we discern that love in all its fullness. (Radical Welcome, p. 81)
We, in our uniqueness, distinctiveness and togetherness, are the petals of the gospel-flower. Only by allowing ourselves, a petal, to be folded in with other petals can we live the life of a gospel-flower – beautiful, blossoming, blessing, embracing one another, embracing the Sun, as God, in our center.
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