A Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter

A sermon preached by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, May 5, 2024. Due to technical issues, no audio recording of this sermon is available. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Eastertide is that season culminating in the shedding abroad of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, where the light of the resurrection spreads out from Jerusalem to touch, heal, embrace, and welcome home every single person regardless of race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation as friends, as beloved children of God adopted in the Son to share in God’s very life. I’ve thought of this movement of the Spirit as a kind of dilation of the eye of love that opens evermore widely and wildly to include, include, include in ever-expanding circles of care. Whether it’s Ethiopian Eunuchs, children of soothsayers, or Gentile Centurions who don’t keep kosher, the story of the church in Acts reminds us that the church is always on the pilgrim way–poor, open-handed, receptive to the promptings of the Spirit– being led into surprising encounter, meeting, dialogue with the other that something of God’s boundless, unconditional love and friendliness received from Jesus might be shared with others. All others without exception.

Today’s passage from Acts comes right at the end of the story of the meeting between Cornelius and Peter. Just a few short verses earlier, Peter has his threefold vision of the Divine Creator’s bedsheet cornucopia where he hears God speak those words that just might be the pulsing center of the entire Gospel: “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” Before this interrupting visionary experience, Peter's life was tightly circumscribed. Keeping the dietary laws was important if not entirely determinative of one’s standing before God. When Peter hears the Lord say, “Get up. Kill and eat,” and replies with a horrified, “By no means, Lord, for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean,” Peter’s very understanding of salvation seems to hang in the balance. God is pure. The world’s mess. Never the twain shall meet, right? “Wrong!” says the Lord. “I’m to be found in the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the alien in the land! I’m to be found shining forth in the same blessed bedsheet cornucopia of your everyday life! Like a surprise mayfly on the thumb! Look! See! Notice!” But more than just what passes his lips, Peter is also concerned because contact with the Gentiles was discouraged as a means of potential infection or impurity from the unclean other. It’s a high stakes world of us and them.

We should recognize this dynamic immediately having weathered a Global Pandemic these past four years. Do you remember those first days when we were allowed back outside to walk around the block? In many ways it was like inhabiting Psalm 98. What joy to feel the kiss of the warm sun on my face. The crocuses. Cherry blossom confetti. Clattering Robin song. It was as if we’d stepped into an entirely new creation seen with child’s eyes of curiosity, awe, and wonder. I for one marvelled over the newly painted bright yellow fire hydrant as if I were looking at a Cézanne. Clapping rivers, hills ringing out with joy… this all seemed to me patently obvious as a joyful participant in a spiritually-infused universe where God’s goodness, mercy, possibility and creativity were (and is still) at work even in the midst of heavy, shrouded, dark days.

But there was another side to those early days. Do you remember your first encounter with someone from the neighborhood who quickly crossed to the other side of the street while adjusting their mask? Do you remember the palpable fear of the other who was seen only as threat, only as menace, only as messenger of contagion and death? That’s the mindset with which Peter first engages with Cornelius. Setting foot in Cornelius’ house where these baptisms take place was for Peter roughly the spiritual equivalent of catching COVID-19 before vaccines were available and ventilators in desperately short supply.

Now in this country, that fear of the other (racial, cultural, political, socio-economic, religious) never really dissipated. A culture of fear and mistrust pervades. This demonic fear divides, scatters, hardens hearts, and huddles up against cast out scapegoats branded less than fully human. But the unquenchable Spirit’s work is allowing ourselves to be gathered in the communal friendship of Christ and to see in the stranger not contagion, but preciousness, gift, and the demand of responsibility. Or as Peter says, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality.” Full inclusion–the affirmation of the inherent goodness and dignity of every human being and indeed the entirety of the created order—means there is no one outside the cascade of divine love sloshing all over everything, saturating every nook and cranny.  

In place of the human-all-too-human story of the stranger as threat, as monster, as site of contagion, we get an entirely different story revealed in Holy Scripture—the story of heaven. James Alison writes 

The story of heaven is the story of how we learn not to call anyone profane or impure, so that a story is created in which there are, in fact, no impure or profane people, where not even disgusting people consider themselves disgusting, but rather where we have learnt to disbelieve, and to help them to disbelieve, in their own repugnancy.

Disbelieving in my own repugnancy… now that would have come in handy as a teenager! In light of God’s prodigal loving-kindness and covenant faithfulness we are disarmed literally and figuratively. The clenched first is unballed in radical welcome: “facts and figures give way to faces and friends.” We can no longer to stand over and against the stranger, drive them into the sea, or bomb them back to the stone age because they are our kin. More positively, when our stale old song about who the other “should” be falls away, we hear in the calling face of the other the music of the new song God is singing in Christ. “Even,” in the words of Acts, “to the Gentiles.” The learned and embodied practice of “no profane and impure” applies equally to ourselves–imprisoned as we are in inherited stories of shame, blame, and not enoughness. We practice disbelieving our repugnancy and help those whom we meet disbelieve in their own perceived repugnancy… inducting them into heaven’s story… the story of inexhaustible healing streams of God’s edgeless mercy.

Jesus tells us in the Gospel that he no longer calls us servants, but friends. And Jesus calls the disciples “friends,” because God has chosen not to be God without human beings chosen and adopted in Christ. This free act, this choosing comes before everything else, as sheer gift. Not something we have earned or deserved or merited by our good behavior. Christ chooses all and he chooses us not as servants but as his friends, fellow-workers who in friendly relationship with Christ help others “disbelieve their own repugnancy” and instead learn to practice the simple abiding in Jesus’ living, loving, liberating presence for all.

Abiding in Jesus’ friendly love, we cannot help but keep the commandments. We bear fruit that lasts rooted and grounded in Jesus, fruit that is borne not out of duty, or obligation, or an anxious need to be needed, but as self-forgetful expressions of the love in which we dwell. Fruit that is borne of the practice of gently, but steadfastly rejecting those words “profane” and “impure.” From that place of no partiality–seeing how God sees, noticing the notice of God, looking at the world with Easter Eyes–loving our neighbor happens under the power of the Spirit: one get well soon card, one phone call, one visit, one dropped-off meal, one listening encounter at a time. This all-embracing bedsheet blessedness: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality.” The stranger, the other calling us away from fearful self-enclosure into relationship, into communion, into the divine life of earth, winds, waters, and every living thing singing the Spirit’s one note song of Love. How can we withhold it? Amen.