Acts 11:1-18
Saint John 13:31-35
I love musicals even though they are all pretty much the same. Even musicals that are billed as being vastly different usually revolve around the same plot of one person meeting another person “across a crowded room” and finding true love.
Think of it!
Emile de Becque, a middle-aged French expatriate, who has become a plantation owner on a South Pacific Island, instantly falls in love with Ensign Nellie Forbush, an optimistic and naive young American navy nurse from Little Rock, Arkansas.
Tony and Maria, a modern-day Romeo and Juliet, from different ethnic groups and different gangs spy each other at a community dance and before you know it, they are staring into each other’s eyes and kissing. We all know the trouble that caused.
Even if we don’t suspect how things will turn out going in, we are usually able to make the discovery halfway through the first act. Something or someone will cause the couple’s romance to be “ill-fated.”
Even the lavishly produced musical spectacular of the year, Moulin Rouge, tips it hand early.
Christian, a young wannabe Bohemian poet joins the eclectic group of people who are a part of the colorfully diverse clique inhabiting the dark, fantastical underworld of Paris' now legendary Moulin Rouge. Before you know it, and to no-one’s surprise, he finds himself plunged into a passionate but ultimately tragic love affair with Satine, the club's highest paid star. I saw the Chicago production with my partner (Now that I have mentioned it in a sermon, I can take the price of the tickets off on my taxes) and knew from the instant that Satine, the female lead, exhibited her first little, dry, cough that when the final curtain fell, she would be center stage dead-as-a-doornail.
It wasn’t a deep-down, racking cough but rather a wee little thing that would have been unnoticeable to all but the most untrained musical theater eye and ear. I had seen the opera La Boehme far too many times to miss this tell-tale sign.
“Consumption.” I said to Lowell to which I believe he replied, “What? Huh.”
“Consumption. Tuberculosis.” I replied. “The poor girls doomed. There is nothing to be done.”
Indeed, there wasn’t. She died, as lead characters often do, “singing at the top of her lungs.”
I always thought a better song about love was the “eleven o’clock number in A Chorus Line when the dancers sing: “What I did for love.” Remember the words? “We did what we had to do... Won't forget, can't regret...What I did for love.”
That is more like it.
It is not starry-eyed and star-crossed lovers in a chance encounter on a South Pacific Island. It is not sweaty teenagers on a dance floor. It is not a heady feeling induced by a who knows what kind of smoke in a Parisian night club.
All of us who have experienced real love in our lives know it has challenges, takes work, and causes us to grow.
This is the kind of love Jesus was talking about when he gave his one and only commandment to his disciples. “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”1
You won’t find that in many musicals. It is a love so radical, so tough, that is has led more than one cynic to suggest that we would have been better off if Jesus had just stuck with the original ten commandments rather than adding this additional one. Furthermore, the context makes this command seem even more drastic.
The scholars who constructed the Revised Common Lectionary (Whom some of us believe were members of the faculty of Hogwarts!) have magically transported us back, on this the Fifth Sunday of Easter, to not only before the resurrection but before the crucifixion.
We are, once again, in the upper room with Jesus and his disciples. They have just finished their Passover Seder. Jesus, noticing that none of his friends had done this menial task, gets up from the table, girds himself with a towel and washes his disciples' feet. Then he predicts that one of those friends whose feet he has just washed will verbally betray him (Peter) while another will physically betray him (Judas).
Instead of lashing out with a real scolding for being so disloyal Jesus instead commands them to love one another in the same way he has loved them.
However, for John, “the love that Jesus commands his disciples to have for one another is specifically a love for other believers. It is a love directed at those who have believed in Jesus as the Messiah and who follow him. This group of believers include both Jews and Gentiles.”2 In other words, it is a love that is meant for everybody.
That is Peter’s problem as he goes around preaching about Jesus.
He is attracting all sorts of believers. Not only devout Jews but also Samaritans and even those who had no former religious interest or affiliation. “And it is at this point of growth, and change, and expansion that the first church faces a conflict and controversy that will either unmake it or reorganize it completely.”3
The church now, the church then, is highly resistant to Peter’s vision for a new direction.
Instead of a large sheet coming down from heaven they may have concluded that, at the time of his vision, Peter was “three sheets to the wind in a gale.’
Was God really suggesting that food groups they had long been taught to have been impure are now “kosher?” Was God really suggesting that people whom they have long avoided were now to be wined and dined like old friends?
They may have heard stories of Jesus doing that, but he was Jesus. Jesus was challenging other people’s authority now Peter is challenging theirs!”
This little battle is about who could join their movement. Was it for insiders or was it for outsiders? And what kind of outsiders? Was it for people like them, who looked like them, acted like them, followed the same religious customs, or was Peter and his friends just going to let anybody in?
“The concerns ... were not trivial legalisms. They reflected essential elements of their worldview that defined their role and place as the people of God.”4
Journalist Jon Ward wrote a fascinating piece in The Christianity Today called: “Being a Political Journalist Made Me a Better Christian. He wrote:
Most people form a point of view about the world based on which groups they spend time with and which groups they are a part of. The groups they belong to shape their identity...Whatever group you are in, it will punish you for believing or saying the “wrong” things and reward you for supporting what they support.”5
Peter is being punished for just this very reason. And his response causes the room of accusers to fall silent. He tells them that he once felt the same way they did. He tells them that before all this he wouldn’t have gone to outsiders either. He tells them that, on his own, he never would have associated with anybody outside of their tribe much less gone into their home and ate with them.
But he tells them: “The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us.”6
And he continued:
“Well, I began telling them the Good News, but just as I was getting started with my sermon, the Holy Spirit fell on them, just as he fell on us at the beginning! Then I thought of the Lord’s words when he said, ‘Yes, John baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ And since it was God who gave these Gentiles the same gift he gave us when we believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to argue?”7
It is at this point the whole tone of the meeting changes.
Maybe you have been in a setting like that where someone has said something so profound and powerful that there is no good way to contradict them without seeming petty and small.
Imagine with me the way this might have played out. At first there is silence. Then the room erupts. “He’s right!” one person shouts! Another, more Lutheran like, leans back in their chair and says with a slight smile, “You know, I never thought of it that way.” One man begins to clap, slowly, and is joined by another woman, and then two more people begin to applaud. And, before Peter or even the people know it, one after another, they are standing. Peter is getting a standing ovation.
What moved them was that the same message about Jesus that moved them to follow was moving others. This thing they were a part of was unstoppable, uncontrollable, unimaginable. It was going to be bigger than they ever dared dreamed because it was going to be for all people, everywhere.
The only thing we can do is limit God.
I think a pastor whom I love, admire, and respect, The Rev’d Shannon Kershner, who serves Fourth Presbyterian in downtown Chicago is about as close to catching Peter’s vision as anyone could be.
From the outside, with its location on the Magnificent Mile, Fourth Church looks like it would only serve the best and the brightest, and it does. However, on any given Sunday there are also the least, the lost, and the lonely sitting in the sanctuary. At coffee hour there is not only the well quaffed who you would expect to be there but also people who have everything they own in their backpacks.
Here is what Pastor Kershner said when she preached on this text.
God takes our boundaries; God takes our stereotypes; God takes our rules; God takes our expectations; God takes all of that and often God looks at ... it and says, No. I don’t have favorites. Your limits, your litmus tests, your fears—none of that limits me. I embrace whom I embrace and guess what, God says, I have got really long arms.8
As you know, not all musicals end in disaster and death. Some just leave us with a question: What did I do for love?
Good-by Mr. Chips, concludes with Professor Arthur Chipping, looking back at his life and remembering that day when his liberal, modern, young wife upended the singing of the school song during a morning chapel turning it from a dirge into a rousing chorus. She started as a lone voice picking up the tempo, and was surprisingly joined by the headmaster’s wife, and finally, gradually, the students and even members of the faculty.
After his retirement Professor Chipping, Mr. Chips, while walking around campus, looks back at the school he served and loved for so long and remembers that moment and the words of the song, singing it softly to himself:
In the evening of my life I shall look to the sunset,
At a moment in my life when the night is due.
And the question I shall ask only God can answer.
Was I brave and strong and true?
Did I fill the world with love my whole life though?
That's all Jesus asks us to do for love, for God.
It is more than enough for any of us, but it comes with the promise that by this everyone, yes everyone, shall know we are his disciples, if we "fill the world with love our whole lives through.
We need to be people to do this very thing now more than ever.
________________
1. St. John 13:34-35. (NKJV) [NKJV=The New King James Version]
2. Mark Price, “John 13:31-35. Commentary 1: Connecting the Reading to Scripture,” Connections. A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship 2 (Louisville, KY: Westminister|John Knox Press, 2018): pp. 262-265.
3. Kristin Adkins Whitesides, “Standing in the Way,” Day 1, May 9, 2022, https://day1.org/weekly-broadcast/62700a5c6615fba476000180/kristin-adkins-w hitesides-standing-in-the-way.
4. Karl Kuhn, “Commentary on Acts 11:1-18,” Working Preacher from Luther Seminary, April 13, 2022, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-comm
5. Jon Ward, “Being a Political Journalist Made Me a Better Christian,” ChristianityToday.com (Christianity Today, May 11, 2022), https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2022/may-web-only/christian-journalist-faith-media-religion-news.html
6. Acts 11:12. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]
7. Acts 11:15 & 16. (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible]
8. Shannon J. Kershner, "Hindering" (Sermon, Sunday Morning Worship, The Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, April 24, 2016).
Sermon preached at Trinity Slovak Lutheran Church
15 May 2022
No comments:
Post a Comment