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| 'Holy Spirit Coming' by He-Qi |
There is nothing harder on God’s
green earth than changing your mind.
Unless, perhaps, you’ve decided
you want to try to change someone else’s
mind.
And the one exception to both the
above seems to occur when the Holy Spirit gets involved.
The entire book of the Acts of
the Apostles might be understood as a continuous narrative of people changing
their minds. It begins after the resurrection, with Jesus ascending into
heaven, and continues with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Ask anyone in our
Monday evening Bible Study: we immersed ourselves in the book of Acts for the better
part of a year. Anyone who was part of that immersion experience will tell you:
the Holy Spirit is really the main character in the book of Acts, and the
Spirit goes about changing hearts and minds beginning in Jerusalem, and all
throughout Judea, to what was known, in the first century, as the ends of the
earth.
Today’s story from Acts occurs roughly
a third of the way into the book, but it is a turning point, on which all the
rest of it depends. It actually begins at verse 1 of chapter 10. And it reads
like a film script.
Scene 1: Close up on Cornelius: a
Centurion, an officer in the Roman army. He’s not a Jew, though he respects and
worships God, prays with passion and conviction, and is generous towards the
poor and needy. Through the magic of special effects we see that he has a
vision: an angel of God tells him to send for Simon Peter, Jesus’ disciple and
follower. Cornelius sends two slaves and another religious soldier from his
cohort off on the mission: bring back Simon Peter.
Scene 2: Meanwhile, Simon Peter
is off having a vision of his own, though it is decidedly more trippy than
Cornelius’. Simon sees a sheet being lowered from heaven, and it contains all
kinds of animals, birds and reptiles. It comes with a command, also from
heaven: “Get up, Peter, kill and eat.” And Peter, who is a Jew, and was raised
a Jew, and knows perfectly well what both scripture and tradition have to say
about all the non-kosher foods in front of him on that sheet, says, “No. Way. I
know what’s clean and what’s unclean. I know what’s Godly and un-Godly. I will
NOT eat them, God-I-Am.” To which the angel replies: “You are not the
boss-of-God. You do not get to tell God what is clean and what is unclean. Now,
knock it off.” I’m paraphrasing, of course.
Scene 3: The people sent by
Cornelius arrive—we can see them out the window, even as Peter is trying for a
third time not to eat those non-kosher foods—and Peter gets a heads up from the Holy Spirit
that they are there, and that he should go with them. He offers them
hospitality and they spend the night. The next day he goes with them: they
journey to the home of Cornelius. Traveling montage, as the scene goes back and
forth from the travelers to the eager Cornelius, waiting at home in Caesarea.
Scene 4: This is where a little
comic relief gets thrown in, as Cornelius, overcome with joy to see Peter,
starts out by falling at his feet to worship him. Peter quickly puts an end to
that. Then they have one of those exchanges people sometimes have in the movies
when they’re falling in love. “I swear I had a dream about you.” “Really? Well
guess what. I had a dream about you!” Only they’re not falling in love with one
another, but with this new thing that the Holy Spirit is doing in and through
them both.
Scene 5. Peter preaches one of
the most important sermons in Christian history.
When I studied preaching in
seminary, it became clear to me that sermons can serve many functions. There
are sermons that are meant to encourage, and sermons that are meant to
instruct. There are sermons to inspire and sermons to motivate and sermons to console.
But at the heart of each and every sermon there is one fundamental purpose:
conversion. That word, “conversion,” comes from a Greek word that literally
means, ‘turning around.’ Every sermon seeks to persuade the listeners, in some
way, to turn around—to see things differently, to get a new vision, a new view,
however subtle or dramatic. Every sermon in the book of Acts seeks to convert
its listeners, to turn them around so that they are ready to receive the
gospel, the message of Jesus.
Peter begins, “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” [Acts 10:34-35]. As it is presented in the
book of Acts, this is one of the most important sermons in history. This is the
sermon that makes the difference between a world in which Christianity remained
only a small minority sect of first century Mediterranean Judaism, and a world
in which Christianity flourished, growing like one of those mustard seeds
described in the gospels.
A seminary friend wrote about
this sermon this week.
“I now know that God shows no partiality.” It was a shocking
declaration then. Truthfully, it may be just as shocking today for those
who have been on the business end of Christianity’s judgment stick—and for
those who have wielded it.[i]
“I know now that God shows no partiality,”
said Simon Peter, the Jewish fisherman from Galilee—thus declaring a departure
from his religious training and tradition and the scripture that had formed his
faith.
There is nothing harder on God’s
green earth than changing minds, unless, of course, the Holy Spirit is
involved. And then, as now, all bets are off.
This week a sister denomination
of Christians gathered for its perioding ‘big meeting,’ akin to our
Presbyterian General Assembly, which meets this summer in Pittsburgh. At their
meeting our brothers and sisters in Christ debated the following amendment to
their constitution:
“We affirm our unity in Jesus
Christ while acknowledging differences in applying our faith in different
cultural contexts as we live out the Gospel. We stand united in declaring our
faith that God’s love is available to all, that nothing can separate us from the love of God.”
One writer explained, “After some
very lively debate, this legislation passed, but not by much. In the end, only
53 percent of delegates agreed to add this very basic, very obvious, very scriptural [Romans 8:38-39]…
affirmation of God’s love.” [ii]
I bring this up, not to single
out our brothers and sisters in that denomination, not to say, Oh, aren’t they
terrible, that 47%, and aren’t we great, who know better, but rather, to say
this: what Peter said was shocking then, and it’s shocking now, deeply shocking
to our sense of who and what God is. God’s love is bigger than we are
comfortable with, and God calls us to ways of loving one another that live into
that love.
And so thanks be to God for Scene
6 in our movie: The Holy Spirit comes down. Falls on all who are present. This
includes Cornelius, and the members of his household: his family, his servants
and his soldiers. This also includes the “circumcised believers” who had
accompanied Simon Peter—those who have, you might say, their own opinions and
expectations here, those who are, like Simon Peter, predisposed to believe that
the received tradition and scripture are to be adhered to no matter what. But
the Holy Spirit comes down.
Scripture gives us some vivid
descriptions as to what occurs when the Holy Spirit comes down. One memorable
account is at the beginning of the book of Acts, and it involves nothing less
than violent wind, and flames of fire, and the ability to speak in new and
unexpected languages. In the book of the prophet Ezekiel, the falling of the
Spirit causes bones bleached dry in the desert to come together and be covered
with flesh and sinew and be filled once again with the breath of life. Another
memorable but perhaps more subtle account the one we read just a couple of
weeks ago, in John’s gospel: Jesus breathing the Holy Spirit upon his disciples
and giving them the gift and commission of forgiveness.
The Holy Spirit comes down, and
all bets are off. The Holy Spirit comes down, and nothing is the same. The Holy
Spirit comes down, and instructions from Jesus—like, “Love one another, as I
have loved you”—take on new shape and vibrancy and urgency. The Holy Spirit
comes down, and minds are changed. Conversion happens. Things, and people, turn
around.
Our popular culture, the culture
of attack ads and highly politicized news reporting, has a phrase for changing
one’s mind. They call it the “flip-flop.” You could say, Simon Peter flip-flops
on the issue of whether non-Jews may be welcomed unconditionally into the body
of Christ. He flip-flops on the restrictions he puts on Jesus’ commandment of
love. Of course, he has the Holy Spirit to blame for his change of mind and
change of heart. The Holy Spirit comes down, and all bets are off.
My seminary friend has this to
say on this game-changing moment in our reading:
What Peter did changed the course of Christianity forever. He
opened it to the whole world—to you and me, who would never have been welcome
if this vision of God’s impartiality had not worked its way through Peter’s—and
Cornelius’—active imaginations.
When Peter declared, “God shows
no partiality,” he opened the possibility that anyone—everyone—is welcome in
the family of faith. He also put us on warning: the rules were
changed for you, so that you could come in—who are you, then, to prevent God
from blessing the whole human family? Who are you to
stand in the way of God’s love?
God changed the rules for us so
that we could come in. God through the Holy Spirit—through trippy dreams and
night visions—changed the game so that you and I could be part of the family of
faith. God changed hearts and minds in order that the family of God, the body
of Christ, could be ever more hospitable, more opening and welcoming, to all
God’s children. God turns us all around, so that we can see and live and
participate in Scene 7—in which, babies and adults are baptized and welcomed.
In which the Presbytery of San Francisco finally ordains Lisa Larges, after
more than 20 years of her faithful participation in the ordination process. In
which we grow in ways we can only begin to imagine, in loving one another,
according to our God’s gracious plan. Thanks be to God. Amen.
[i] Rev. David Lewicki, “Holy
Calamity: Acts 10:44-48, ON Scripture, http://odysseynetworks.org/news/onscripture-the-bible-acts-10-44-48.
[ii] Matt Algren, “United
Methodist Church Divided on God’s Unconditional Love,” http://blog.mattalgren.com/2012/05/united-methodist-church-divided-on-gods-unconditional-love/#.T6-f178ZA7B.
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