Easter 5C sermon

Easter 5C
May 2, 2010
Once upon a time, there was a man named Peter. Now Peter was a Jew, one of God’s chosen people of Israel who kept God’s laws about certain things, such as food and clothing and how they kept their bodies, as a sign of their special relationship with God. Peter had also witnessed some mysterious and life-changing events when he heeded the call of Jesus of Nazareth to leave behind his fishing business and to follow Jesus as he travelled around Judea. Because of what he had discovered through his friend Jesus, Peter dedicated his life to telling other people about who Jesus really was and how they could be a part of the salvation that Jesus offers to everybody.
While Peter was out doing this work, spreading the good news, he spent some time with a friend in another city. On this one particular day, Peter was waiting on his friend to fix him something to eat, and he fell into a trance. “He saw the heaven opened and something like a large sheet coming down, being lowered to the ground by its four corners. In it were all kinds of four footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air. Then he heard a voice saying, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’” But Peter didn’t want to; yes, he was very hungry, but some of these animals were forbidden for him to eat by the laws of his faith. When Peter protested, the voice responded, “ ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane’. This happened three times, and the thing was suddenly taken up to heaven.”
As you can imagine, Peter was very puzzled as to what to make of the vision. But then some non-Jewish men showed up at the house looking for Peter, and while he was still thinking about the vision, the Spirit said to him, ‘ Get up, go down, and go with them without hesitation; for I have sent them.’” Now at this point, Peter had to make a decision. He could continue to hold fast to the laws and the beliefs that he had followed faithfully his whole life, trusting in himself that he was right and knew the way he was supposed to proceed. Or he could heed the call of God to do something different, to trust that God knew what he needed to be doing and would not lead him astray. So he went with the men.
Well, it turns out that one of their friends whose name was Cornelius had had a vision too, a vision about Peter and where to find him, so Cornelius had sent them to find Peter and to bring him back to his home. When Peter went into the house, he was breaking some of his peoples’ most sacred laws, the laws that helped them know that they were special to God and set apart from the people of other nations. And when it came time for Peter to speak, God opened Peter’s heart, and Peter said, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” And he told them about Jesus and how to be a part of the salvation that he offers to everyone. “While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word.” Now this was amazing! Up until now, only Jews had been given the gift of the Holy Spirit. Again, Peter had to make a choice. He could refuse to believe what he had witnessed because it was contrary to what he had believed, what he had known for so long, or he could respond to God’s gift of the Holy Spirit to these people and embrace them as his brothers and sisters in Christ, regardless of their heritage. So Peter and the other believers who were with him baptized everyone in the name of Jesus Christ, and he stayed with them for several days.
After a time, Peter returned to Jerusalem, where the people there had heard of all that happened to him while he was away. And, boy, were they angry! They criticized him for going to non-Jews and eating with them while he was away. But Peter didn’t yell or argue or spout theology; instead Peter told them the story….He told them of his vision, of God’s words to him, of the arrival of the three men and the spirit’s words to him about them; he told them about going to Cornelius’s house and about his own vision; he told them about how God had opened his heart and he began to speak and how the Holy Spirit fell upon the people there just as it had fallen upon Jesus’s disciples in the beginning. He said to them, “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us…who was I that I could hinder God?” When they heard this, there was dead silence. And they had a choice. They could choose to stick to their beliefs, to their position that Peter had done wrong. They could choose to not listen to this new way of being in relationship with God because it threatened them, and they knew that they were right. Or they could give themselves over to Peter’s story and his experiences with the presence of God; they could trust that God was leading all of them in this new direction, and they could follow willingly. And this is what they did, praising God and saying, “Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.”
What Peter and the other followers of Jesus learned is that being a Christian is not about a one time conversion, from sin into new life. They learned that we are being called by God, again and again, to convert from following our own will, our own path, our own beliefs, to following God’s path, God’s will, and God’s salvation. They learned that even though they had been doing something for hundreds of years, God was calling them to do it a new way, and they had to choose to follow God’s new way. I wonder…What would have happened to the Christian movement if Peter had not allowed himself to be converted by God? What would have happened if his friends had not allowed themselves to be converted by Peter’s story?
I wonder….what would it be like if something like this happened to us today, those of us who live in a world where we are constantly subjected to the individual’s opinion of what is right, in almost every situation? I wonder…What would our lives be like if we let go of some of our certainty that we knew what was right, what was best, and allowed ourselves to be converted by God to God’s way? I wonder….What would our lives be like if we laid aside our certainty our own experience, our own voice should take precedence over all others, that we have all the answers to all the problems and everyone else is wrong (unless they think just like us), and we trusted the experience, the story of the other? I wonder…What would our lives be like if we believed that God can convert us through the stories and experiences of other people, and in that conversion, God’s love and salvation runs rampant through this world like wildfire?
I wonder…What would our homes, our work, our church, our friendships, our politics and government be like if we submitted our rightness, our will, our surety to God and allowed ourselves, our beliefs about everything to changed by God, and then act accordingly?
Would we finally be able to fulfill Jesus’s new commandment that we love one another as he has love us?
I wonder….?