God's Unconditional Welcome
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Fifth Sunday of Easter by the Rev. Holly Huff.
It’s hard to overstate how dramatically Peter’s vision changed the Church. All these supposedly unclean animals dropped into his lap on a picnic blanket, and the voice of God telling him to eat without distinction becomes the pivot point as the disciples receive God’s invitation to take the Gospel to the Gentiles. Who is this message of Jesus for, anyway? Is it meant to stay with insiders, or has it been given to all peoples of the Earth? And if so, the love of God is far wilder, more expansive, and all-embracing than the first disciples have yet dared to imagine.
So key is this scene that we get it twice in a row, back to back: chapter 10 in the book of Acts, then again in Chapter 11 as Peter recounts what he has experienced to the believers in Jerusalem. He is going back to tell them of an earth-shattering experience has had. Yes, this story has theological implications, but he doesn’t start with abstractions. He tells them a story. I was praying in Joppa, when I saw a sheet with all sorts of non-kosher animals, hoofs, claws, scales, and all, unfold in front of me, a cornucopia of meats a law-keeping good Jew would never touch. “Get up, Peter, kill and eat,” he hears. “Never, Lord!” That is typical, earnest, forthright, beautiful Peter right there. And God can work with that, calling him to a different horizon: “No, what God has made clean, you must not call profane.”
The vision repeats three times and as it fades Peter hears a knock on the door. Men sent to him from Cornelius, a Gentile, yes, and worse, a Roman centurion has sent for Peter to come and stay in his house. Just crossing the threshold of this man’s door would make him ritually unclean. But Peter perceives the connection between the vision he has seen in prayer and the person who now appears before him, this person God has made in God’s own image, who is not to be called profane, and he goes with Cornelius to Caesarea, stays with him, enters, his house, and yes, eats with him, sups at his non-kosher table. “The Spirit told me to go with them and not make a distinction between them and us.” And what Peter experiences there in the Gentile centurion’s house, and what he recounts to the skeptics in Jerusalem is grace. “The Holy Spirit fell up on them, just as it had fallen on us in the beginning.” This is the same grace Peter and the other disciples have experienced and known in following Jesus, the radical welcome they have received. And Peter is amazed to see God pour this grace out palpably, visibly on those who hear about Jesus now. “If 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?” “Who was I that I could hinder God?” Peter recognizes that the Spirit is stretching his understanding, massaging the limited rigid fixed way he expects God to show up—to the right kind of person, who follows the rules, in the right expected proper circumstances—who am I to hinder God? This story says “The Love of God is broader than the measure of the mind”, as the hymn says, and as Peter speaks, as a witness to the love and wideness and wildness of God’s mercy, the truly dazzling expanse of divine hospitality and salvation, the everlasting arms which reach out for all God’s children—as Peter recounts this, his hearers also experience grace.
Honestly, what a beautiful and miraculous thing: self-righteous criticisms lobbed around a contentious church meeting, and Peter tell this story and the nitpicking is silenced and turns to praise. (Sidenote, vestry is at 6 o’clock on Tuesday.) They have heard the good news, as if understanding it for the first time, because they recognized it is good news for all people, not just God’s chosen few, not just the good or obedient or those especially capable of contorting themselves into the confines of delineated “morality”—but Good news for all people, just as they are. And this good news transforms us, changes us, makes us Good.
Peter’s story shows us that God is a god of impartiality, of welcome and generosity. God doesn’t play favorites, but radiates divine love like the sun on the just and the unjust. Mercy waters the earth, falling like rain on the righteous and sinners alike—and what a relief this is, since we are all in need of God’s mercy. Peter’s audience recover themselves from shocked and grateful silence, and praise God with changed hearts, saying, “Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life!” Let all peoples praise the name of the Lord, who made all things clean and is making all things new, who gives water freely from the spring of everlasting life.
The message of grace given so freely, milk and honey without price, God’s love for all people does come as a disruption for the part of us that so badly wants to earn God’s love. We like the system of achievement and merit, hoping to get ahead and say we earned it. Expansive, impartial love shining like the sun on the deserving and undeserving, burning up any concept of worthiness or deserving, is a threat to that fragile ego and self-image! Much sturdier to confess our faults, our need, our dependence on God and open to grace. Only people who know they’re sinners can accept mercy. Lord Jesus Christ son of the living God have mercy on me, a sinner. So understanding that God’s mercy is wide enough to embrace all people—whoever they are, regardless of whether they’ve kept the law—means opening your heart to that God’s love for you is also impartial, unconditional, nothing to do with whether you’ve been “good” either. Who am I to hinder God?—who loved me into being, who sustains my every breath, and is offering grace to me, water from the spring of life, free of charge, all metrics of earning and deserving dissolved away. We cast out in other people what we despise in ourselves, and undergoing grace, submitting to that torrent of unconditional love shows us our interconnectedness. Starting to accept that we are truly loved regardless of who we are and what we have done leads us into extending true compassion without judgement to others. And vice versa—learning to love other people without imposing demands on them to be different than they are teaches us slowly to love ourselves in the same way, not just what we’ve decided are the good bits, our admirable qualities, but knowing and trusting that it is all held and made and loved and being worked for good. “What God has made clean, do not call profane.”
Our deepest desire, the desire within all our twisted pursuits for power, money, affection, esteem, is for the love of God, the love that made us, the love for which we were made. That love is our beginning and our end, Alpha and Omega. And we can pursue this desire as a possession, as if love were something to be chased and possessed, clutched onto tightly as if we owned it, as if we earned it. Or, we can follow our hearts’ yearning for the love of God with Jesus as our model, recognizing that love is a gift, a gift to give away, just as Jesus gave himself away for us. “This is the new commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” It’s a new commandment not because love is new—all through the Old Testament of course the law points always to love—but because for Christians this love that fulfills the law is centered now on the way Jesus has loved us. The love he embodied, the sacrificial love of the Good shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep, love that does not try to possess and grasp and own but gives itself away with open hands. Jesus is for us the face of God: “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.”… “Abide in my love.”
What Peter and the disciples are learning as they see the way of life opened to all people, even those they thought were beyond God’s favor, and what all of us are learning, slowly, drop by drop as God works to transfigure our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh, is that love is not a scarce resource. It won’t run out. There is enough. We lose nothing when we understand that God’s unconditional come-rain-or-sunshine love extends to our neighbor; in fact we are transformed and opened up to give ourselves away. Love is not a possession but the one thing we have to give, modeling ourselves on the giver of every good gift who has shone upon us all. “The glory of the Lord will be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.” God’s dream for the world is a just community ligamented by love and mercy, not fractured by distinctions the partial judgements borders between inside and outside, have and have not. “Do not call profane what God has made clean.” “The spirit told me not to make distinctions between us and them.” “Who am I to hinder God?” All of us, the family of God for whom Christ gave his life, knit together into one body.
During this Easter season, living in the love of Christ who died and rose again, let’s look for vision like Peter’s. Ask God to widen our horizons, to show us how God’s love is being extended, how all our partial distinctions are fading out. And to see the love of God being poured out across boundaries we impose on it, see all of us invited and gathered at this table, where the love of God meets us in bread and wine, Christ’s own body given for the life of the world. Amen.