Homily: Yr B Easter 6, May 13 2012, St. Albans
Readings: Acts 10:44-48; Psalm 98; 1 John 5:1-6; John
15:9-17
A
Spirit-Led Church
If you were to take the
booklet that most of you have in your hand and start reading from the beginning,
you’d see that one of the first things that we say about St. Albans is that we
aim to be a Spirit-Led church. I’m
wondering if you’ve ever given that much thought. Do we actually want to be a Spirit-led
church? Do you want to be part of a
Spirit-led church? Have you ever thought
about how shocking and scandalous, how uncomfortable and dangerous that could
be? What does it even mean to be led by
the Spirit?
I think one of the best
illustrations of what it might mean to be a Spirit-led church is something I
heard at a conference on vital church planting that I went to in February. The speaker was a man named Dave Male, and
the image he used was that of competitive cycling. Has anyone here ever done any serious
cycling?
If you have you know, that
the key to doing well, in fact the key to surviving a long grueling race, is to
identify a leader and then to get within centimetres of that person in front of
you without colliding. In the language
of cycling this is called riding in the slipstream, or drafting. You get into the low-pressure, low-resistance
area created by the rider in front, and you’ll find that the effort required to
maintain your speed is reduced.
You literally get this close
to the person in front of you, and his or her effort makes it easier for you to
cycle. Now that doesn’t make it
easy. You still might have to work really
hard to keep up. You’ll need to focus in
order to maintain the closeness that is required. And you certainly have to trust that the
leader knows where he or she is going.
But it is essential to keep in the slipstream, because if you fall out
of that slipstream, then you’ll get left behind.
That’s an image of what it
means to be a Spirit-Led church. We need
to ride in the slipstream of God. We
need to stay close to the Spirit and follow where the Spirit leads, to get in
the slipstream and work hard to stay there.
In some ways that’s what the
book of Acts is all about. During this
Easter season you might have noticed that our first reading every Sunday has
been from the Acts of the Apostles. Some
people think that the book of Acts is the story of how the disciples of the
early church, people like Peter and Paul, how these disciples spread the gospel
throughout the world. But if you look a
little more closely that’s not quite it.
What Acts really is, is the story of how God’s Spirit spread the gospel
throughout the world and how the disciples scrambled to catch up with what the
Spirit was doing. Acts is the story of
how the disciples had to scramble to stay in God’s slipstream.
Last week for example we had
the story of the unlikely encounter between Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch,
the story of how an angel told Philip to get up and go from the big city of
Jerusalem to a wilderness road in the middle of nowhere. There, Philip encounters one solitary
individual, and again prompted by the Spirit, he overcomes racial and legal
barriers to proclaim to him the good news of Jesus. The
Ethiopian in turn carries that good news with him to the horn of Africa and today
there are more than 50 million Christians in Ethiopia. All because Philip stayed in the slipstream.
This week we get the tail
end of an even more astounding story. This
time it is Peter, the acknowledged leader of the early church, scrambling desperately
to keep up with what God’s Spirit is doing.
Today’s story from Acts is not only the decisive event in the history of
the early church, it may well be one of the most decisive moments in world
history. Unfortunately, our reading
cycle lets us down a bit today by giving us only the last four verses of an
astonishing event, the story of the unlikely relationship between Peter and
Cornelius, and the early church’s scandalous decision to admit the Gentiles as
Gentiles. So let me tell you the story.
Peter of course we
know. Peter is a disciple of Jesus and a
good, faithful Jew, circumcised, a keeper of the Jewish law. Cornelius on the other hand is a Gentile, a
foreigner. Worse than that, he is a
Roman, a citizen of the occupying empire.
Worse than that, he is a centurion, an officer of the military force
that occupies and terrorizes the Jewish people.
Remember what happened the last time Peter encountered the Roman
military? It was in the garden on the
Mount of Olives, when the soldiers arrested Jesus, took him away and executed
him. There was no love lost between Jews
and Roman soldiers.
Our story begins in the late
afternoon, when Cornelius, who is a devout man, has a vision by which he is
instructed to send for Peter and told where to find him in a nearby town. The vision fills Cornelius with terror, but
he sends a delegation to seek Peter. The
next day, as the delegation is on its way, Peter also has a vision. Peter is hungry and wanting something to eat,
and he sees the heavens opened and something like a large sheet lowered down,
filled with all kinds of creatures and reptiles and birds, and he hears a voice
commanding him to “Get up, kill and eat.”
He refuses. The animals in the
sheet were considered by the Law to be unclean and profane, and Peter as a
faithful Jew had never eaten anything unclean or profane in his life. But the vision is repeated a second and then
a third time, each time ending with the voice that says to Peter, “What God has
made clean, you must not call profane.”
And just then, there’s the
sound of men calling from the gate of the house where Peter is staying. It is Cornelius’s men, calling for
Peter. And the Spirit tells Peter to go with
them, and Peter goes, despite his misgivings, even though he knows that it’s
unlawful for a Jew to visit a Gentile.
And when he gets to
Cornelius’s house, Peter starts to tell them the good news of what God has done
in Jesus. But before he can even finish,
while he’s still speaking, the Holy Spirit falls upon these uncircumcised
Gentiles and pours out its gifts upon them.
And we are told that the circumcised believers who had come with Peter
are astounded.
It’s hard for us in our day
to get a grasp of how astounding this was.
It’s hard for us to understand how controversial it was to baptize
Gentiles and admit them as full members of the people of God without requiring
them to be circumcised. We are so far
removed from the days when the military ruler Antiochus Epiphanes tried to
assimilate the Jews by decreeing that circumcision was illegal, and Jewish
parents had their babies circumcised in spite of this decree because it was the
sign of God’s covenant with the Jewish people, and those babies were then taken
away be soldiers and killed.
My friend and colleague Gary
Hauch has written the following:
“Admitting the
Gentiles as Gentiles [that is, without requiring circumcision and adherence to dietary
laws] was a shift of seismic proportions in how the traditions were perceived
and handed on. Yet it was precisely this shift that the Holy Spirit guided the
early church to make in order for it to embody and hand the story on
faithfully.”
Peter’s decision to baptize
Cornelius and his Roman family was a complete reversal of everything that Peter
had been brought up to believe. And it
was controversial. When Peter returned
home he was met with immediate criticism.
He had acted unilaterally. He had
ignored the teaching of scripture. But
ultimately the Spirit prevailed, and Peter and the rest of them scrambled to catch
up. To get in the slipstream. To follow where God is leading.
That’s what it means to be a
Spirit-Led church. We have to get close
to God, to listen to the voice of the Spirit and to go where God is
leading. And if our reading of the Acts
of the Apostles is meant to give us a picture of what that looks like, chances
are God is more likely to lead us somewhere uncomfortable and disturbing than
somewhere comfortable and familiar.
Do you still want to be part
of a Spirit-led Church? If you do, then keep
in God’s slipstream and get ready for the ride of your life.
Amen.
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