“Tradition, Law and Love” – April 28, 2013 Sermon
April 28, 2013
Scripture
John 13: 31-35: When Judas had gone out, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
Acts 11: 1-18: Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God. So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, saying, “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?” Then Peter began to explain it to them, step by step, saying, “I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners; and it came close to me. As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. I also heard a voice saying to me, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’ But I replied, ‘By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’ But a second time the voice answered from heaven, ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’ This happened three times; then everything was pulled up again to heaven.
At that very moment three men, sent to me from Caesarea, arrived at the house where we were. The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us. These six brothers, fellow disciples, also accompanied me, and we entered the house of the man, Cornelius. He told us how he had seen the angel standing in his house and saying, ‘Send to Joppa and bring Simon, who is called Peter; he will give you a message by which you and your entire household will be saved.’ And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning. And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?”
When the apostles and believers in Judea heard this, they were silenced. And they praised God, saying, “Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.”
Sermon: Tradition, Law and Love
by Rev. Doreen Oughton
A couple of months ago my car was giving me a bit of trouble. It still drove, but I was nervous about taking it too far, and I had to go into Boston, so I borrowed a car (thanks Ellen Orsi). It’s an adjustment, isn’t it, to drive a different car? You have to adjust the seat, you don’t know where the lights are, how the radio works, let alone the wipers. And this is true, if I recall, even when you get a nice new car. (It’s been quite a while since I’ve had one of those.) Often new things and new ideas are exciting and offer wonderful possibilities, but at the same time, they often demand a learning curve, which we may or may not be so eager to embark upon. I was reluctant to get into listening to music on an MP3 since I liked my CDs just fine. I was nervous about learning a new technology. Even when you see the potential for wonderful things, it’s easy to let fear, or even laziness, keep you from trying it. Another example is that I keep reading about how seminaries and churches have to learn to do a new thing if they are going to be relevant in the years to come, and I feel nervous, maybe even a little resentful. I had a great seminary education – why do they need to change it? I think churches are wonderful just the way they are, right? At least my experience of church, which of course I think is much better than the way church was done 100 or even 50 years ago.
Change is such a paradox, isn’t it? It’s wonderful, it’s scary, it entails loss. We long to hold on to some things, and we long to move on to other things. But no matter what our longings are, we are always going to have to move on to other things, because everything changes, everything, in some way. The theme of change – “a new thing” – runs through the scriptures for today. The responsive reading from the Book of Revelation talks about how there will be a new heaven and a new earth, how God will do a new thing. Jesus issues a new commandment to his followers, knowing that things will be changing so drastically for them. But this commandment, love one another, it doesn’t really sound new, does it? After all, the Book of Leviticus tells of a commandment given through Moses that says, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus is talking to the disciples here, telling them to love one another. This isn’t new like his statement to love their enemies. But Jesus claims it is a new commandment, and I think that what makes it new is Jesus himself. Jesus says to love one another as he has loved. The previous commandments, the 613 that were given to the Israelites through Moses were given from on high, if you will. They were given by a God who is distant, a parent-type figure. The command to love neighbor as self was sort of a summary after a long list of how not to treat your neighbor – don’t lie, cheat, steal, covet, etc. But with Jesus it is different. Jesus is one of us, a brother, someone who has lived and suffered, been frustrated and rejoiced. His relationship with the disciples has been intimate and personal. The love that Jesus gave, and the love he commands from his disciples is this personal, intimate, all-embracing, sacrificial love. And that is a new thing indeed.
Then we have the story from the Book of Acts. I love this story. I just love Peter, how he struggles to deal with all these new things. He’s always been the enthusiastic one – ready to step off the boat, even if he then sinks. He gets excited about new things, but then tries so hard to get them to fit in with what he already knows. We all do this when faced with something new. When I got into Ellen’s car, and the wipers didn’t turn on the way they do in my car, I wasn’t completely lost. I’ve driven other cars and knew the controls would be somewhere on the steering wheel or dashboard. It is an important part of the learning process – to observe and reflect on previous experiences and develop ideas of how this new thing fits in with the old things.
So Peter has this dream of being told by God to eat of unclean foods. Remember that as a Jew, Peter has been deeply conditioned to be repulsed by these foods. He has learned that these foods are an abomination to God. And yet here is God’s voice telling him these foods have been made clean by God, that Peter now ought to eat. And so Peter reflects, perhaps, on other surprising encounters with God and Jesus. And Peter has had many of them – the transfiguration, walking on water, stilling of the storm, anointing by the fire of the Spirit, speaking and being understood in many languages. And so he knows that he is being prepared for something, and it would be best to go with the flow.
And then we have the circumcised crew in Judea, learning that Peter has gone and done something new – eating with and baptizing Gentiles. This doesn’t make sense to them. Like Peter, they have been conditioned to see this as an abomination. It breaks all the rules of being a faithful Jew. They, perhaps, are not as enthusiastic about this new thing as Peter might have been, and they are calling him on the carpet. Perhaps they are worried about being further persecuted and judged by other Jewish sects. Perhaps they have been trying to show them that this Way they are promoting is not so different from other Jewish sects. It’s not such a tremendous stretch that they can be written off as fringe elements. And though they bring Peter in to demand an explanation, they are actually interested in what he has to say. They have not let their fears take over. They listen to his step-by-step explanation. And at the end of it, they let go of their criticisms and praise God.
I’m struck in this passage how people are being prepared for something new. God takes time to prepare Peter for meeting Cornelius. God speaks to him in the dream, letting him know that the things Peter learned were unclean can now be understood as clean – not just food, but people, Gentiles. God takes time to prepare Cornelius for the meeting with Peter. In the chapter before this one, God sends an angel to Cornelius to relay the message that Cornelius’ prayers and alms have come before God, and that he is to send for Simon Peter to hear what he has to say. Cornelius has been so primed by God that he falls to his knees when Peter arrives, ready to worship him. But Peter knows he has not been called to be worshiped, but to share the good news of Jesus Christ, and he does so.
Peter takes time to prepare the people in Judea for a new thing. He lays everything out, step by step, his dream, the vision of Cornelius, his experience of the Spirit coming upon these Gentiles. He cues the Judeans to remember their experience of receiving the Holy Spirit, reminds them of the words of Jesus that John baptized with water, but they would baptize with the Spirit. He gives reminds them of previous experiences with which to understand these new experiences. And he finishes with a question he says he posed for himself, but which he is also posing for his listeners – “Who am I to hinder God?”
Sometimes the structures we create to help us make sense of things become instead an obstacle to new things. We don’t always take the time to listen, observe and reflect like the Judeans did when questioning Peter. We dismiss something out of hand if it doesn’t fit into the structures we’ve established, especially when it comes to the ways we have been conditioned. We have been conditioned to believe in the survival of the fittest. We have been conditioned to believe that certain people, certain relationships, certain worship practices are out of bounds, even abominable. But isn’t it possible that God is doing a new thing, that we are called by Jesus to a new understanding of love. Are we listening attentively? Are we noticing the ways we are being prepared to receive and live new teachings? Who might our angel messengers be that are helping to prepare us?
There is not judgment about the old things. God doesn’t mock Peter for having believed the food was unclean. God says, “I have made it clean.” It was fine to have avoided those foods, and perhaps even table fellowship with Gentiles for all those centuries that the Israelites did so out of their belief that it was God’s will. But now there is a new teaching, a new way of doing God’s will, and for Peter, it meant reaching out to the Gentiles, bringing them into the covenant, including them in Christ’s salvation. Because Christ so loved us, we might just be able to learn and live a new way of loving. May it be so.
