Easter 5C - "'Please Don't Hinder Me' Love Jesus"

Acts 11:1-18

The headline was pure “click-bate.”  One that promises to be followed by a blockbuster article that is spine-tingling, earthshaking, and downright unbelievable.  

Admit it.  All of us have clicked on such a headline in great anticipation only to discover that what followed was highly disappointing to say the least. The New Yorker magazine used to call these articles “The Department of Anti-Climax.”

Even knowing all this I always fall for these kind of grocery store tabloid headlines and one caught my eye this week because of its theological relevance. It trumpeted “Sinner meets newly elected Pope at Vatican.”

As a good solid Lutheran, I thought to myself that there is not much news to that.  Sinners meet with the Pope every day.  All of us bear that label, even the Holy Father himself which, I am pretty sure he would admit.  We are all at the same time both saints and sinners. 

Never-the-less, a headline such as this begs for a deeper dive.  Was it a convicted murderer? Was it an spy convicted of espionage?  A repentant jewel thief wanting to confess and return the precious diamonds he stole?  An often indited politician? No, it was none other than Jannik Sinner, an Italian tennis player who had just reached the quarter finals in the Italian Open.

The BBC website, the one with the clever headline reported. “Sinner presented his racket to the Pope and asked if he would like to "play a bit" - but the leader of the Catholic Church looked up at the lights in the reception room and jokingly responded: ‘Better not.’”1

Obviously, the reason the editors of the website thought the headline would be so eye-catching was obviously the juxtaposition.  Holy person. Sinner. Get it?  Not supposed to be associating with each other, right?  Knee-slapping, “fooled you”, comedy thanks to our otherwise buttoned-up friends at the BBC, right?

But maybe they have stumbled onto something?  Maybe they have discovered a question that has troubled not just the church but religious folk since the beginning of time.  Who should we associate with is the question posed in today’s reading from the book of Acts.

Here we have the human condition on full desplay.  As Dr. Dan Clendenin wrote recently.

If you want human approval, you privilege your own In Group over every Out Group.  You limit God's love to your own tribe and claim to be the sole inheritor of the divine promise. Given our propensity to justify ourselves and to scape goat others, the Jewish purity laws lent themselves to a moral hierarchy between the ritually "clean" who considered themselves to be close to God, and the "unclean" who were shunned as "dirty" sinners who were far from God.  Instead of expressing the holiness of God, ritual purity became a means of excluding people who were considered polluted or contaminated.2

 That was the issue before Peter and the church and while it may seem a trivial matter for these early followers who were trying to build a community it was a thorny issue.  It was a matter of history, identity, who they were and who they wanted to be.

Dr. William H. Willimon, a former United Methodist bishop, who knows about the troublesome issues of history and identity, reminds us in his commentary 

We must not read this story from the safe vantage point of a majority religion where broad-mindedness and tolerance cost the majority nothing, but rather read the story as it was first heard – from the minority point of view, people for whom a bit of pork or a pinch of incense or a little intermarriage was a matter of life and death for the community. The dietary laws are not a matter of etiquette or particular culinary habits. They are a matter of survival and identity for Jews.  And yet can it be that these laws are being supplanted? No wonder Peter is left baffled.3

 “This is a story of expansion and inclusion on steroids.”4

Peter, in his preaching, has been attracting all sorts of people. 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.”5

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!” 

A battle is brewing 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? 

Peter is “called on the carpet” for eating with outsiders and his response to his accusers is outstanding.

Dr. Willie Jennings in his commentary writes of this moment. “Peter must explain the inexplicable.  He must suture together a known faithfulness with an unknown faithfulness. Nothing has changed, but everything has changed.”

Jennings goes on to compare what Peter is facing with Jazz. “There’s a break. The band stops, the soloist must then improvise. Some pressure – and yet delight – right?”6 “Peter brings them to the break, but the Spirit of God carries the tune, holding it in silence. God has been keeping time beautifully and faithfully with Israel and now expects hearers to feel the beat, remember the rhythm, and know the time.”7

Peter begins by telling them that he once felt exactly the same way they did.  He tells them that he never would have thought to going to outsiders either but he had this vision.  And, he tells them that, he certainly on his own, would never have associated with any outsider 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.”8

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! {Can you hear the first notes of the Jazz riff starting?} 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?”9

“Who was I that I could hinder God?”10

It is at this point the whole tone of the meeting changes. It goes from a minor to a major key.

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 one person, obviously a Congregationalist, turns to another and says in only a whisper. “You know, I think he just may be right.”

Another, a future Lutheran, leans back in their chair and says with a slight smile, “We’ve never done it that way before, but Peter just may be on to something.  Maybe, maybe,” the person says in a halting almost stuttering voiced caused by even considering this new idea that is being presented, “You know, I never thought of it that way. Maybe we should try this.”

Then one person, a future Pentecostal or at least a Baptist, begins to clap with the rhythm of the message. Slowly at first before he is joined by another woman, probably a United Methodist who has left some room in her life for the change the Spirit just might be bringing about, and then two more people, even and Anglican and a Presbyterian, 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. 

As Dr. Walter Bruggemann, the Bible Scholar of all Bible Scholars, once wrote: “The reason the text continues to be urgent is that the church finds endless ways to resist... to reject the spirit and set up distinctions.”11

And here is what my former pastor Shannon Kershner said about that when she was the Senior Minister at a place that served not only Chicago’s best and brightest, but folks who carried everything they owned in their backpacks.

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.12

Jesus arms are always wide open. 

Jesus arms embrace tennis players named Sinner and a Pope who fashions himself as "quite the amateur tennis player” as well.  

No click-bate here.  This is the real deal.

Jesus’ really long arms embrace us all. 

It is a song that was written for all of us who have experienced that love and its chorus contains the same refrain that was sung by Peter and echoed the lyrics he had been given by Jesus, “Please don’t hinder me.”

So, let’s not.

___________

1. “Sinner Meets Newly Elected Pope at Vatican,” BBC News, May 14, 2025, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/sinner-meets-newly-elected-pope-at-vatican/ar-AA1ELRqi?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=b9a50982c57a4e7594b9c59a4db6f919&ei=22.

2. Dan Clendenin, “The Francis Effect,” Journey with Jesus, May 11, 2025, https://journeywithjesus.net/lectionary-essays/current-essay.

 3.    William H. Willimon, Acts (Louisville, , KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 96.

4.     Clendenin, loc.cit.

5. 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. 

6. James  C. Howell, “What Can We Say?  Easter 5,” James Howell’s Weekly Preaching Notions, accessed May 17, 2025, https://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com/.

7. Willie James Jennings, Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (Louisville, KY: Presbyterian Publishing, 2017). 118

8. Acts 11:12.  (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]

9. Acts 11:15–17  (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible]

10. Acts 11:17b. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version Updated edition]

11. Walter Brueggemann, “Blogging toward Sunday (Acts 11:1-18),” The Christian Century, April 29, 2007, https://www.christiancentury.org/blogs/archive/2007-04/blogging-toward-sunday-1?

12. Shannon J. Kershner, "Hindering" Sermon preached at The Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, April 24, 2016