Monday, May 3, 2010

Fifth Sunday of Easter Year C 2010

What God Has Made Clean

05 Easter C 10
May 2, 2010

Acts 11:1-18

Psalm 148

Revelation 21:1-6

John 13:31-35

It amazes me how difficult it is for me to change how I feel about something or someone. In fact, I would say it's impossible. My emotions seem to have a compulsive power, even though I know they don't represent reality or fact. There are times, though, that I become convinced that how I feel about something is connected to facts and reality, even when it isn't. This is the greatest trap of all.

It may be our culture has taught us to trust our feelings above all other things. We are trained, day in and day out, to assess our feelings, to ask ourselves if we are happy, if we are getting what we want and what we need, to put everything we spend time doing to that test. Is it making me feel good? This seems to be the ultimate question in a consumeristic society.

But I have learned the hard way that my feelings can't be trusted, that chasing what I feel is right and good for me or even for others can often be deeply wrong. My salvation does not come from within. It comes from God, through Jesus Christ, in the gift of the Holy Spirit. I can trust the Holy Spirit. I can't trust Mike. And you can't trust Mike either, by the way. But you can trust the Holy Spirit.

In whatever culture we belong to, there are all kinds of distinctions that are made. We are taught to stick to our own, to stay close to those we "belong to." Those outside of that circle are of no concern, or at least of less concern, than those inside it. Moreover, we are taught that we can be compromised by spending time with outsiders, that we will lose our purity or identity if we don't keep the boundaries clear. All of us, whether we are Jewish or not, have an idea of what is unclean for us, what is dirty for us.

I think at least one of the most basic issues causing the decline of the church in the Northern hemisphere is our growing inability to simply stay in the sandbox with our neighbors, to simply stick by them, stay faithful. We're always looking for someone to push out of the sandbox, or else we're looking for a new sandbox. Either way, we give up on each other, we give up on partnership, we give up on community.

This passage teaches us that, if we pay attention to the leading of the Spirit, it will almost certainly lead us to those we would not ordinarily relate to. And if we don't pay attention to the Spirit's leading, the Spirit will find whom she will find, and may in fact abandon us.

The book of Acts has been called the Acts of the Holy Spirit. It's probably the bible's premiere book on the subject. And one of the chief markers of the identity of Christ's Holy Spirit is faithful community. The Spirit seems most interested in drawing people together around the table of Jesus Christ, and keeping them there. The Spirit seems interested most in building a bigger and bigger sandbox, and keeping people together within it.

It's the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ that gives us all our energy and power and distinctiveness and purpose. In this story from Acts, Peter remembers the word of the Lord, who said, "John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit." The purpose and intention of the Holy Spirit is primarily creative. God's Spirit is the breath that animates life and growth and newness. Whatever it is that may be wrong with us or with our community or with our world is fixed not by our efforts or ideas or opinions or power, at least not finally, at least not completely. But anything may be made whole through the infusion of God's Holy Spirit.

We in the Disciples tradition have a few slogans that address this issue. One of them is "In essentials, unity, in non-essentials freedom, and in all things, love." Unfortunately, these days I think the essentials have come into question. We have plenty of freedom and plenty of love, but in the essentials, I don't think we are unified.

Without unity in the essentials, we can't be the church. Giving up this essential unity, even for the sake of a good thing like diversity, ultimately undermines the church and robs it of its energy. It is essential for example that Jesus Christ be the center of everything we believe and do as the church. I would submit that few rank-and-file Christians could tell you much that is accurate about Jesus Christ, much less articulate how he is actually the Lord of their lives. Instead, I think we tend to follow charismatic individuals who appeal to what we feel we need or want, and justify it all in the name of Jesus. We can have all the liberty and charity we want, but without the unity in this essential, we cease to be the church and become instead just another human institution, without the Holy Spirit.

But when we come to believe Jesus Christ is alive, we receive God's Holy Spirit, and we are transformed. We see what we could not see before, we hear what we could not hear before, we do what we could not do before. Our feelings no longer rule us. We are ruled instead by God. This is how God makes us holy. And one of the many things that we can see and hear and do, that we couldn't do before, is to share this same Holy Spirit.

Peter's dream writ large has to do with the cleansing of the whole creation. It has to do with the ways in which we draw lines between what is holy and what is not, what is of concern and what is not, who is acceptable and who is not. And it is about the spiritual process, the path of Christ, toward a greater and greater presence of God in and through all people and things. It's a pivotal story in the book of Acts, because it points to the whole story, the story of the spread of the Holy Spirit, like some spiritual flood, pouring out into Jerusalem and spreading throughout the Roman empire.

God doesn't condemn the unclean. We do. It is true that there are things that have not been suffused with God's Spirit. But this is not because they can't be. It is because we haven't suffused them.

What God has made clean, we should not call profane.

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