May 5, 2024
Easter 6, Year B
Epiphany, Winnipeg
Acts 10:44-48; John 15:9-17
One of my closest friends is someone I couldn’t stand from the moment I first saw him. The feeling was mutual. We were both fresh out of high school, in our first year at Camrose Lutheran College. I took one look at him and just thought he was too weird. So were his friends. He took one look at me and thought I was just too normal. And so were my friends. That set the tone for the year and we watched each other from a distance and everything he did just convinced me that I was right and he was weird and everything I did convinced him that he was right and I was one of those awful normal people.
At the start of our second year of university somebody introduced us. After a year of having nothing to do with each other we ended up in the same room with a mutual friend, and we said our first words to each other, and the connection was immediate and a deep friendship began right there. The friendship has never wavered – honestly, it hasn’t – and although today distance and circumstances keep us from seeing much of each other at all, our friendship is strong and we can barely remember a time when we weren’t in each other’s lives. It turns out we’re both weird. And on an off day, we’re both kind of normal.
There’s something divine that moved and brought us together. I don’t mean that God said, “These two are destined to be pals.” It’s more like God said, “These two can’t stand each other. Let’s get them in the same room and see what happens.” And the two of us were brought into the ancient tradition of God bringing together what nobody thought could be brought together. God’s been doing that for years now. Thousands of years.
A few minutes ago we heard a word from the book of Acts. If you’re not familiar with what’s going on in Acts, here it is in a nutshell: After Jesus had been raised from the dead, and after he had gone up into heaven, the people who were his followers were left behind to sort out what to do next. They weren’t left all on their own though, because Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would be given to them, and that Holy Spirit would draw them together from all over the place and keep on making them into a community. Over time this band of people who follow the way of Jesus would grow from a small group of Jews in Palestine into a worldwide community of people who follow the way of Jesus. Even in Winnipeg.
Now the story of the growing early church is often told as a story where are these people are converted and become followers of Jesus, but that’s not all there is to the story. Maybe the thing we really need to know is that all along the way the ones who are converted are the ones who already believe.
It’s like this: Peter, who you will recognize as one of Jesus’ disciples right from the start, has grown up as a good Jewish male, and he’s gotten this idea that he should not mix with Gentiles. Now we need to remember that that is not and it was not a widely held Jewish belief. Somehow Peter and his friends had gotten that into their heads, though, and the thought of having Gentiles join them as followers of Jesus just wouldn’t have occurred to them.
But one day Peter gets a message from God that begins to convince him that his world can’t be divided into good and bad and in and out and clean and unclean. And around the same time there is someone named Cornelius, who is a Gentile and a commander in the Roman army that occupies Peter’s homeland. That’s two strikes against Cornelius, as far as Peter was concerned. Cornelius the centurion has a dream and God says, “Go and find Peter and have him visit and talk to you.” So Cornelius finds Peter and invites him to come to his Gentile household. So Peter goes. And Peter talks. And as Peter speaks the Holy Spirit is poured out on everyone who hears him speak, and they all start praising God. Jews and Gentiles together. And Peter and his first companions are amazed that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles. Even on the Gentiles!
Do you see what happened? Peter has been converted. The companions who came with him have been converted. It’s like the Holy Spirit takes Peter and his friends and Cornelius and his companions and throws them into a room together and their world just opens up. The Holy Spirit falls on Peter and opens up his world into a world that even includes “those people.”
That kind of thing has happened all throughout the story of our faith, you know. There’s a story where a Gentile woman asks Jesus to heal her daughter, and Jesus says he can’t heal the daughter of a Gentile woman. But she disagrees, and Jesus heals that daughter. The men who followed Jesus can’t believe the women when they tell them that Jesus is risen from the dead – surely the Spirit hasn’t fallen on the women?! But the men are changed, and they get the message. Well, the Spirit is still working on some of them….. Those first Christians who are in the room when Peter eats and preaches with Romans are astounded, practically out of their minds, when they see that the Spirit can even reach Gentiles. And what’s happening all along the way is that the Spirit is falling on the believers and cracking open their hearts and prying open their eyes so that they can see that even Gentiles can follow the way of Jesus with them.
And as the story moves along beyond those 28 chapters of Acts and this word of Jesus spreads beyond Africa and the Middle East and Asia and up into Europe, someone will probably be astounded that the Spirit can fall on those barbarians to the north, or on those Germans. And they were astounded that the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on those Vikings! And on those Celts!
And these days? Some of us were astounded to see that the Holy Spirit could fall on a woman and she could be a preacher. That was only a few decades ago….. We scratched our heads in wonder and argued like we were out of our minds – all of us did – when we saw that the Holy Spirit fell on that man who married a man and those two could also follow the way of Jesus with us. Or when a woman who was once called a man could preach. Or that the Holy Spirit could live and breathe among indigenous people who still practiced traditional ways, and they too would join in and be a part of this community of people who follow the way of Jesus. And we once might have thought that that sort of thing could never happen.
We see something happening along the way: When the Holy Spirit breathes among God’s people, we are changed from being a community that builds walls and barriers that keep people out and keep us in, and we are changed into a community that takes down walls, opens doors and always includes more. It’s hard work for the Holy Spirit to do, because we can be so stubborn and sure of ourselves, but God’s Holy Spirit is still at work to open our eyes to see God present where we might never ever have expected. To see God’s Spirit poured out on people we never would have expected. To open our eyes, to open our hearts, to open the church.
And to be honest, that probably means that the Holy Spirit is even falling on those of us who call ourselves liberal or progressive or sensitive, and the Spirit never stops working to pry open our hearts to include and to see that people who don’t agree with us are followers of the way of Jesus too. We all need our own conversions. We all need our own arms opened.
Last week we heard Jesus call himself the vine, and all of us are the branches. He talks about all of us branches bearing fruit, and it turns out that the fruit that grows from this vine is love. Not sappy love and warm feelings, but love that says strangers are welcome, love that makes peace between enemies, and love that even loves an enemy…just like Jesus washed the feet of one who would betray him, and then he said, “There. Now love like I have loved.”
This love that Jesus gives makes us into something new. Jesus calls us friends, and makes it clear that he will give his life for his friends. Jesus loves us and gives his life for us and says “You are not my servants, you are not my slaves, you are not my minions or my troops or my workers, you are my friends.” And in the same move Jesus makes us into something else new. He calls us friends. Not pals, not inseparable buddies, not people who want to go on long vacations together or share a hobby or watch hockey together. Those are all good things, sure, but that’s maybe not what Jesus means.
Imagine Jesus in the room with Peter and Cornelius. And he whispers to the crowd so quietly that nobody hears but everyone gets the message. They are now friends, which simply means that there is not one group better and one group worse, one bunch in charge and one following orders, one group right and one group wrong. There are just, in that room, Jews and Gentiles brought together by the love and by the Spirit of Jesus, who has loved us all. There are just, in this room, people with roots everywhere – roots among Jews and Gentiles, roots in Europe and Africa and Asia and everywhere – who are brought together by the love and the Spirit of Jesus. People from every place on every spectrum you might see. There are weird people, and even some normal people….or just all of us with the weirdness we have, known or unknown, like two people at a little college who didn’t like each other until they met, and the Spirit made something new of them.
It's astonishing and really such a great thing, that the Holy Spirit has been poured out, even on us.