I have a big announcement I need to make.
This week the church leadership decided that we’re selling off our building and all its contents, so we can be a virtual church — online only for us, folks. That’s right. The organ is going. The hymnals? You might as well grab one as you leave for a souvenir. We’ll auction off the stained glass if any of you want it in your homes. Aaron — our church drummer — gets first dibs on the drum set. Baptisms will all be done remotely. You can be in the comfort of your own bathtub or by your kitchen sink, and I’ll administer the sacrament over FaceTime. Sure, it’s a big change, but think about how our reach will go far beyond this corner of Ottawa County.
How are you feeling? Shocked? Uncomfortable? Unsure? Upset?
Good. That’s how I wanted you to feel.
Because — no — the session had no such discussion and is doing no such thing. Take a couple deep breaths. This is all a thought experiment. (And before you worry that this will be on a future agenda, you can relax about that too.)
But I want you to hold onto those feelings because they reveal something about us. They show how our identity is on some level wrapped up in the way we do things, and if we started monkeying too much with your expectations, it would unsettle your world. We join a faith community because, on some level, we feel at home. It’s safe and comfortable. It’s predictable.
Yet, change is very much a part of life.
I can remember in the early 2000s, Jess and I still had a home phone, one cell phone that we split, and a slow dial-up connection to the internet we’d use to check our email once a day. Online shopping was just starting up, and I can clearly remember us rejecting it because it wasn’t safe — some hacker could steal our credit card. But then, we started dabbling in it. OK, we’ll type our information super quickly and buy something, but only when we can’t get what we want from a store. And then things like Netflix needed our card for recurring payments so they could ship DVDs to us. And then Amazon got bigger and easier.
Soon, we adapted to the change. Now, it’s almost too easy to shop online. A couple of clicks and I can have a birthday present show up on my doorstep? Why wouldn’t I do that?
Change presents a challenge to us, but it also is one of the constants of the church.
It’s actually one of the gifts of Christianity that it is adaptable. Christianity adapts to its culture and environment. It speaks the local language. It learns the local customs. It strives to be faithful to God wherever the church exists. As Presbyterians, we are part of the Reformed church. Change is in our very name, right?
As Presbyterians, we have a Constitution. I’m guessing that many of us have never read it (sort of like few of us have read the United States Constitution). It’s a shame that we don’t know these documents well because in both of them we have a solid footing on which to understand how we are constituted for our life together — as a church and as a nation.
Part of our church constitution is The Book of Order. Its very first pages affirm that faithful change is part of the very makeup of the church. We have these doctrines and standards passed down through time by which we live, but we also recognize that God is always reshaping our understanding of those and of the world around us. We hold to this statement that emerged from the Reformation itself over 500 years ago: “Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei, that is ‘The church reformed, always to be reformed according to the Word of God’ in the power of the Spirit.”
Just a couple of pages earlier in our constitution, there is a beautiful and challenging section on openness. I think it’s worth our time to hear these words together. (After all, how often do you have the chance to hear The Book of Order in worship, right?)
“In Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all creation, the Church seeks a new openness to God’s mission in the world. In Christ, the triune God tends the least among us, suffers the curse of human sinfulness, raises up a new humanity, and promises a new future for all creation. In Christ, Church members share with all humanity the realities of creatureliness, sinfulness, brokenness, and suffering, as well as the future toward which God is drawing them. The mission of God pertains not only to the Church but also to people everywhere and to all creation. As it participates in God’s mission, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) seeks:
“a new openness to the sovereign activity of God in the Church and in the world, to a more radical obedience to Christ, and to a more joyous celebration in worship and work;
“a new openness in its own membership, becoming in fact as well as in faith a community of women and men of all ages, races, ethnicities, and worldly conditions, made one in Christ by the power of the Spirit, as a visible sign of the new humanity.”
Our story for today comes from the book of Acts, which is an account written by Luke sharing how the early church took shape. The first nine chapters of Acts cover the earliest days of the church in and around Jerusalem. At this point, it was basically a movement among Jews, who believed that Jesus was the promised Messiah. Acts shifts pretty dramatically in chapter 10, where the Holy Spirit works to reveal to Peter and others that what he believed about the gospel was too narrow. Over the course of chapters 10-11, Luke thinks this story is so important that he tells it three times.
To put it simply, Peter is praying in Joppa when the Spirit gives him a vision of a blanket lowering from heaven filled with all sorts of animals that a kosher Jew would not eat. Peter is a faithful Jew, so he responds to the vision saying he cannot kill and eat these animals because he has to be obedient to God’s Word. The voice cuts to the chase, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane” (10:15). Peter has this vision repeated three times to establish that God is serious about this change. As I said, change is hard, but it’s what we do when we respond faithfully to God.
Men sent by a Roman centurion named Cornelius — that is a gentile — come to Peter from Caesarea Maritima, which is about 35 miles from Joppa. You know you’re serious about something when you’re willing to walk a couple of days each way to make it happen. Because he’s had this vision, Peter agrees to go with the men, and together they walk the 35 miles back to Caesarea.
Once there, Peter shares the gospel with a house filled with non-Jews, and he witnesses the Holy Spirit come over the gathering. Luke reports that the Jews with Peter were “astounded” that this could happen because what they accepted as true about God turned out not to be so! This household of gentiles is then baptized in the name of Jesus.
This is the work of God, and it has challenged their assumptions and beliefs about God. Make no mistake. Peter and Cornelius are not heroes. They are simply people willing to respond to the gracious calling God has for them. God is the actor — the “gracious and prodding One who makes bold promises and keeps them, who finds a way even in the midst of human distinctions and partiality between persons.”
So, word of this unexpected repentance of non-Jews makes its way back to Jerusalem. Peter has some explaining to do. That’s what he does in the passage we read a few minutes ago. Whenever there is a change — particularly when that change challenges our assumptions about the world, we want answers. So, the believers in Jerusalem sent word to Peter, “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?” For those of us not concerned with the same kinds of ritual purity, perhaps we need to reframe this question a bit. Eugene Peterson’s Message paraphrase of the Bible puts it this way, “What do you think you’re doing rubbing shoulders with that crowd, eating what is prohibited and ruining our good name?” In other words, “Why in the world would you think God loves those outsiders too? We didn’t think God included them.”
You see, something essential to Christianity — especially when the Spirit moves us in a way that is unexpected — is that we are accountable to God and others. Peter hasn’t gone rogue. He’s still accountable to the community, and so he tells them the story of his vision, of his experience in Caesarea, and of how the Spirit descended up on these gentiles. Peter is able to present them with his experience and the Spirit’s confirmation of this new movement — one that you and I are the heirs of by the way (we were once outsiders but for the mercy of God calling us too).
We are still called to a new openness today, and it is one that is always accountable to God and the discernment of the community. It’s one of the gifts of the Presbyterian church; we believe that God works through groups. So, one of our challenges — whether it’s a new direction or it’s a personal conviction — is learning how to hear the voice of God through the voice of others.
I’ve been saying this a lot lately, so I’ll say it in a sermon so more of you hear it. We have to be very careful that we don’t simply take what we assume to be true about the world and then “baptize” that idea as though surely Jesus simply agrees with us. In every area of life, we need to hold our convictions up to the light of Jesus’ message, and I suspect many things we assume to be true about the world would be be found wanting in the life and message of Jesus. I bet Jesus would have a lot of conviction — and comfort too — for all of us.
The second thing I’ll point out is that these surprising additions to the church are not included simply because of who they are. No, they’re added because they heard the message of repentance that leads to new life through faith in Jesus Christ. The Spirit is moving in their lives, calling them to repentance. They are simply responding to that movement. So, when the earliest Christians are learning the stunning news that God has welcomed the gentiles too, they go through the hard work of learning how to welcome the outsider because that is the challenging call of the Spirit moving in their world. It’s not simply because the early church realized it had left out some folks; no, it’s because they saw the evidence of the reality that God had moved surprising people to repentance.
In the words of another pastor, “God’s redemption may reach father than what makes us comfortable.” But that doesn’t mean that God isn’t working in those spaces that challenge our preconceived notions.
Friends, God is always calling to us for a new openness. It’s a faithful openness that is grounded in scripture. It’s a faithful openness that is attentive to the Spirit speaking to us through the voices of others. It’s a faithful openness that looks at the wider church and asks, “Lord, how can we best be your body in this time and place?”
We are the church reformed, always reforming according to Scripture. May that be true for us in this small outpost of God’s reign even now.
