Sunday
August 5
A Building Block for a Common Hope
By Marsh Chapel
Click here to listen to the full service
Acts 10:1-17, 19-24, 27-30, 33-36, 44-48; 11:1-3, 15-18
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Our Summer Preaching series is entitled, “Toward a Common Hope”. This Summer we find we preach against the tide: given the other preaching of division, exclusion, and isolation that surrounds us, the idea of a common anything is a hard sell. And while hope is vital if we are to live, and to know what we hope for in detail is essential, hope also requires common action, if it is to be fulfilled hope in the world.
Nowadays our problem is often that we don’t know what to hope for or know the hope we could have. The chaos just keeps coming, so there is no stability on which to stand or from which to act. We are so busy and scheduled that it is more than enough to make it through the day. And often our personal, national, and planetary news is so dire that our hope feels crushed even if we were able at one point to have it. How do we recognize our hope, encourage one another, and find allies in hope that will help us make the changes that will expand our hope, so that we can go on?
Our story from the Book of Acts recounts one way that a group of people recognized a hope that they did not know they had, and recognized new allies even amongst many differences. The story also describes an action that we can take to recognize our help us recognize our hope, recognize our allies, and take one action that is a building block for our present and future common hope.
The Book of the Acts of the Apostles is known in some circles as The Book of the Acts of the Holy Spirit, and our story this morning is also known as “The Gentile Pentecost”. It begins with visions: Cornelius, a Gentile, sees and hears an angel who tells him to send for Simon Peter, a Christian believer of Jewish heritage, so that Cornelius can be recognized for his devotion and generosity before God. Simon Peter, also Jesus’ disciple and a leader in the growing Jesus movement, has three visions, all the same: a sort of sheet is lowered from heaven that contains animals both allowed and forbidden to eat by Jewish dietary laws. A voice tells him to get up, and kill and eat any of the animals. Peter refuses to do this in obedience to the dietary laws, and then the voice tells him, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” This dictum is further reinforced for Peter when the Holy Spirit tells him to go with Cornelius’s messengers without hesitation, for the Spirit’s own self has sent them. Peter invites the messengers in for the night, and then goes with them to Cornelius’ home, where a mixed group of Gentile family and friends has gathered.
In Cornelius’ and Peter’s day, this behavior was counter-cultural. Roman officers did not usually seek to emulate the religious practices of those toward whom they were given military orders. Nor did they usually invite complete strangers of a different social class and of a populace under Roman rule into their homes amongst family and friends. As for Peter, Christian believers of Jewish heritage did not mix with Gentiles in their personal or religious lives, and while Cornelius was a good guy, he was also a slaveholder and an officer of the army that occupied and subjugated Israel. Neither Cornelius’s nor Peter’s behavior is within the norm. Both of them go beyond that: Cornelius welcomes Peter and his companions warmly, describes their meeting as being in the presence of a God who is God to them all, and he and his family and friends are willing to listen to what Peter and his companions have to say as words that God has commanded them to bring. Peter for his part has taken his vision and the Spirit’s speaking to heart, and begins his teaching with the words, “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.”
The story of the Gentile Pentecost continues as just that, a time of sign and wonder that echoes the first Pentecost. To the astonishment of Peter’s companions, the gift of the Holy Spirit is poured out upon all the Gentiles in the room – they begin to speak in tongues, and glorify and praise God for the good news of Jesus Christ that Peter has brought to them. This sign is enough for Peter to decide to baptize Cornelius and his family and friends, and for them all to visit together for several days. Very unexpectedly, they all are now allies in the common hope they have together in Jesus Christ. This story marks the beginning of fulfillment, not just of Cornelius vision and Peter’s vision, not just of the sign and wonder and hope of a Gentile Pentecost. It marks the fulfillment of God’s hope, and of God’s vision of inclusion for the Church’s expansion into all the world.
And, the story of the Gentile Pentecost is also a story of conflict. The apostles and believers of Jewish heritage in the Jerusalem church had not attended the celebration in Cornelius’ home. They had not had visions, they had not heard voices, they had not seen the sign. They criticized Peter for visiting with Gentiles and eating with them. But when Peter told them all that had happened from his vision on, including the Gentiles’ baptism, the ones who criticized were silenced. They were silenced by the enormous new thing that God had done, by a hope that they didn’t even know they had. And then, “they praised God, saying, ‘Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.’”
Vision. Voices. Signs. It’s a bit different now. We who have been kicking around in the faith for a while now would love to have regular, obvious visions, voices, and signs, with clear directions to recognize what to hope for, tips on how to encourage each other, and ways to find allies. And that is not to say that we don’t have visions, voices, and signs now more intermittently, or that we may not yet have them. And, they are no longer frequent. John Wesley, the founder of my faith tradition of Methodism, wrote that the reason we do not have these things is that we do not have the faith to receive them. And, even if we don’t have visions or voices, or signs, we still have intuition, gut, imagination, hunch, mother wit, feeling, no such thing as coincidence, hairs on the backs of our necks, and so on. And, if we don’t have even these, we all still have one gift from God, can take one action. We can practice this gift, this action; with it we can be in cooperation with the Holy Spirit; it can be a building block for a common hope and for that hope’s fulfillment in the world.
Because the larger story of the Gentile Pentecost is actually made of a series of stories. And in each of these stories, the one thing that everybody does … is listen. They listen to the voice of the Spirit, they listen to the unknown languages, but most of all they listen to each other’s stories. And in that way they all hear the Spirit and the unknown languages, and all the stories become part of everybody’s common story. They listen in the broad sense, not only or even with ears, but with an open heart and a willingness to understand. They listen in a way that anyone can do to receive whatever communication that might come to them from another person – with respect and full attention and by any means necessary. Even if they cannot understand the language, listening to it allows for translation, and carries significant meaning. Each of the smaller stories in the larger story – of the Spirit, of Cornelius and of his family and friends, of Peter and of his companions, of the apostles and uncircumcised believers in Jerusalem – all these and all of our stories only have meaning if someone listens to them.
This is not the kind of listening that many of us so often do, not the kind in which we nod our heads and make encouraging noises while all the while thinking not of what the other person is saying but of what we want to say instead or in response. Neither is it the kind of listening that demands lockstep ideological purity all the way through all the issues. Instead it is the kind of listening that allows us to welcome our allies where we find them. Kenneth Elmore, Associate Provost and Dean of Students at Boston University, noted in an interview given at the School of Theology that if we have one point of agreement with a person, no matter our other differences, we have an ally on that one point, and it is from that one point that we can move to find other points of alliance. This is an important thing to remember in our time that so promotes division and discord: if the apostles and believers of Jewish heritage had listened to Peter and his companions only with the demand for continued ideological purity, there is a good chance that many of us today would not be listening to this service of worship. There’s nothing wrong with criticism and disagreement. They are often a consequence of the Spirit’s work, and they often open up discussion and creativity as the demand for ideological purity does not. In the church we are all both Gentiles and believers of Jewish heritage at any given time.
My friend Lucy is a Methodist minister. She tells the story of a time in the middle years of her ministry. At a conference she was paired for a conversation with a woman who turned out to be a Native American tradition bearer for one of the tribes in New England. While she and Lucy were much of an age, in many ways they were very different. Aside from the differences in faith tradition, Lucy is very white, and privileged by any of the world’s standards. Her Native American companion, as became clear in their mutual telling of their stories, while privileged in many ways, by many of the world’s standards was not. Some people would see them as natural adversaries rather than as colleagues or allies. And yet they shared profound similarities that deeply moved both of them. The elders in both their traditions were beginning to die, so now they themselves were becoming the elders. The responsibility for carrying their traditions lay a bit heavy on both of them. Had they learned their traditions well enough? Were they skilled enough in the ways necessary to help pass their traditions along to the next generation? Were they skilled enough to help their communities face the challenges and use the gifts of their traditions as well as those of the present day? They found that the joys and sorrows of their callings were much the same, as were the personal challenges and growth they had experienced. And they found a common hope in the goods they wanted for their communities and in the resilience and adaptability of their traditions. Neither was converted to the other’s belief system – there was no thought of that. Further conversations might have revealed areas of profound disagreement and even conflict between them. And yet in that time as they listened deeply to each other’s story, they unexpectedly realized that they were allies, each working in her own way and in her own community to fulfill a common hope of inclusion and peace. In they listened and then talked together they both found encouragement and strength for their own hopes for what might be possible. There were no plans for follow-up: it was not that kind of conversation, and really did not need to be. Lucy has never seen her colleague and ally again. And, she often thinks of and prays for her and her community, and even sends money to projects Lucy knows may support their common hope. Their time together was a time of mutual inclusion and alliance, and Lucy considers it a blessed touchstone in her life. As we read in the Gospel of Luke, “The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good, for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks.”
To listen is to take action, and the act of listening is a building block for a common hope. To listen to the truth of another person that brings us joy, to listen to the truth of another person that may make us uncomfortable, allows us to cooperate with the Spirit in its work of inclusion. As we listen to God and to one another, even in the midst of disagreement and division, we can discover what to hope for or the hope that we could have. We can find allies on just one point. And with a common hope and allies, we can begin to fulfill our hope in this place and time. As we read in the Gospel of Luke, “Then pay attention to how you listen.” Amen.
—Rev. Victoria Hart Gaskell, Chapel Associate for Methodist Students
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