The following sermon was delivered on Sunday, June 28th. It is based on Acts 11:1-18.
As I have grown older I have come to understand something that has helped me live my life and understand the world around me. It isn’t a terribly popular opinion but I am convinced that God is not in the business of making your or my life any easier. Churches with Pastors who are on TV don’t agree with me and every time I see one of those talking heads look straight into the camera and say that if you believe enough and you do enough then your life is going to be super I just don’t buy it. God is not in the business of making your life easier, better, richer, fuller, yes…easier? No. Easy isn’t a word that I would use to describe life in God nor would it be a word that I would use to describe faith and while Jesus describes his yoke as easy I don’t think that the 2009 and the Ancient Israel definition of easy line up. Today easy means having the dry cleaners pick up your shirts, clean and press them, drop them off, and automatically bill your checking account. Easy means having a robot that vacuums for you and returns to its docking station to recharge. There was no automatic withdrawal or vacuuming robots in Jesus’ time. When Ancients thought of easy they were thinking of something else.
Proof of this is never hard to find. Take Jesus. Jesus, God’s Son, fully human fully divine, comes and walks amongst us telling us “you have heard it said, but I say unto you.” Jesus takes the world that we know, the world that we can operate in just fine; Jesus takes that comfortable flow chart we use for everyday-living our and throws it out the window. Through Jesus we learn that God is not a fan of the easy how-to formula. Rather through Jesus we learn that God is most interested in relationships and community – two of the absolutely hardest, heart-breaking, infuriating things on Earth. Because God favors depth over shallow, the worthwhile over the instant, the journey over the destination, and love over the status quo we are instructed to live our lives seeking after love and truth and grace which lie at the very foundation of both healthy relationships and strong community. We do this despite the tried and true survival techniques that seek to champion easy, stress-free living. We follow God and live with each other in perhaps the hardest, most challenging way possible: in relationship and community with each other.
I bring all this up…all this about God not out to make our lives easier and God desiring relationships over formulaic living… because for me our reading for today illustrates all this so beautifully. Peter’s recap of what took place in Caesarea and beyond gives us a glimpse into what living in God’s will entails for those who take living in relationship with God seriously. For as many times as we have thought we knew what was right, what was the Will of God, and who is in and who was out…for as many times as we found comfort and security in our formula, our checklist for being right with God… God steps in and says “if I say it is good it is good” and now we are forced to reconcile the fact that where the Spirit of the Living God blows truth will be found. So it is with the Spirit of the Living God. Where God’s Spirit dwells it dwells and no formula or rulebook is going to countermand that. The truth is that If God is going to make things ok that previously were off limits then that means that you and I are going to have to start paying a whole lot more attention to what the Living God is actually saying and a lot less time dwelling on what you thought God should have said.Not only is this not easy but it is also dangerous. Dangerous because at the very core of this reality is the fact that what you have been taught, who you were taught to stay away from and the places that you have never sought to go could very be and, in the case of Peter, were very much the places where we might be told to go. Peter goes to show that following the Spirit of the Living God takes us to places where the rules that you grew up with, the laws that were handed down to you and the framework through which you have lived your life will not only no longer apply but will not be shared by the people that you meet once you get there. Yet you, we, us have been sent there by the same God who sent Christ which so happens to be the same God who sent those who came before us.
Friends, the truth is that no matter who we are now, at one point we were the people in the house waiting for Peter’s words & the not faithful on the road with Peter. It is too easy to forget that we all started off as Gentiles and not the established, accepted church that we may see ourselves now. The reason that we are who we are is because at some point in history the Spirit of the Living God directed people into the not-so-easy, into the hard business of forming community and building relationships with people like you and me. They came from far away places or right around the block. They were both male and female, young and old, rich and poor and at some point God sent them into our very own Cesasera and when the time was right and the Holy Spirit was sensed in our midst we became their brothers and sisters too. For we were in that house before we got to this church.
In closing I want to challenge all of us to not end up like Rip Van Winkle. You remember Rip, don’t you? Went to sleep up in the Catskills one day and King George III picture was hanging up on the wall. When he woke up and came down from that hill it was George Washington’s mug hanging where the King of England’s painting once resided. Reflecting on this story Martin Luther King writes that for those who are not awake to what is going on in the world and for us our churches, we risk sleeping through a great revolution. The spirit is leading a great sea-change in the way that the church is to reform in the years to come. Certainly all this talk about the Holy Spirit leading a revolution can seem very esoteric, and I understand that, but I confident that it is time that we start becoming a little more fluent in the language of the Spirit. The Spirit is not out making the world an easier, more comfortable place to be. The Spirit is leading a revolution of community; challenging the cultures and whole societies understanding of who is them and who is us. We must strive to stay awake. Slumber at this crucial hour means that when we finally do wake up to the world around us we will stand there and stare at the newly hung picture of the church of Jesus Christ and be forced to admit that we do not recognize it.
Note: Reference to Martin Luther King taken from the chapter entitled The World House from his landmark work Why We Can't Wait
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