Acts
10:34-43
There
was a Roman officer named Cornelius who was what first-century Palestinian Jews
called a “God-fearer”. That is, he was
someone who was not Jewish, and not about to convert, but who recognized the
truth that there is one God and saw in the moral precepts of the scriptures a
way of life that is worth living. In
modern terms, Cornelius was (and I really dislike this phrase, but I will use
it anyway) “spiritual but not religious”.
Peter, on the other hand, was religious in the traditional sense, which (I hasten to add) includes being "spiritual". Peter had been praying and had a strange vision of all sorts of
non-kosher animals and heard a voice saying,
“Get up, Peter; kill and eat.” [Acts 10:13]
That understandably disturbed him and he
questioned what was going on. "Religion" (which is a disciplined form of spirituality) teaches not to trust every stray thought that goes through your head, and puts people into a community that can help them discern what is real and what is imaginary. He returned to prayer, and heard the same voice a second time, saying,
"What God has made clean you must not call profane.” [Acts 10:15]
"What God has made clean you must not call profane.” [Acts 10:15]
That was weird, but a little easier to handle,
and it came to make sense when messengers suddenly appeared outside, saying,
“Cornelius, a centurion, an upright and
God-fearing man, who is well spoken of by the whole Jewish nation, was directed
by a holy angel to send for you to come to his house and to hear what you have
to say.” [Acts 10:22]
So, what does a traditionally religious person
say to the “spiritual but not religious” type?
That’s
a situation that I (and probably you) face with some regularity. A widely-publicized report pointed out three
years ago:
“Religiously unaffiliated people have been growing as a share of all Americans for some time. Pew Research Center’s
massive 2014 Religious Landscape
Study makes clear just
how quickly this is happening, and also shows that the trend is occurring
within a variety of demographic groups – across genders, generations and racial
and ethnic groups, to name a few.
Religious ‘nones’ – a shorthand we use to refer to
people who self-identify as atheists or agnostics, as well as those who say
their religion is ‘nothing in particular’ – now make up roughly 23% of the U.S.
adult population. This is a stark increase from 2007, the last time a similar
Pew Research study was conducted, when 16% of Americans were ‘nones.’ (During
this same time period, Christians have fallen from 78% to 71%.)”[1]
This group would include not only unaffiliated
seeker-types like Cornelius, but those who are either indifferent or outright
hostile toward religion. In real-life
terms that means your adult children who may go to church with you on Easter to
humor you, the coach who thinks there is something wrong with parents who do
not want soccer games scheduled for Sunday mornings, or the neighbor who wants
to express condolences at a viewing but is nervous about attending your parent’s
funeral. The “nones” are the people who
show up for a baptism and take pictures and think that what they’re witnessing
is some kind of naming ceremony. They
are the ones who RSVP for a wedding but only attend the reception.
They
are also going to be the people who are most critical when a clergyperson is
found to be misappropriating funds, or a Sunday School teacher is caught in an
affair, or someone is turned away because of their ethnicity or social status
or sexuality. They are the ones who will
hear only the loudest voices, the ones that catch the media’s attention. They rarely hear about or see the daily,
quiet service of people who do not waste time blowing their own horns.
How
do we, the Church, reach them?
First,
hear what Peter was told.
“What God has made clean you must not call
profane.” [Acts 10:15]
Don’t write them off. Human beings are all made in the image of
God; God’s image, mind you – not yours or mine.
What we are called to do is to honor that which is good in them, not to
impose our own vision. For that matter,
the criticisms that they offer may sometimes be a round-about recognition of
our own highest ideals, a reminder of the sort that we often need.
Then
do not be afraid to speak of the good things that come to us through Jesus,
because those are what the world in general needs, too, of
“how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the
Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who
were oppressed…” [Acts
10:38]
Those two things, especially – doing good and
healing – those are aspects of Jesus’ ministry that no one will ever be able to
deny, disrespect, or demean. They are
also aspects of his ministry that continue to guide those who live by his
Spirit to this day. Good works, as a
form of proclamation, will never be enough.
Without them, though, you may never get a hearing. With them, the Church earns the voice that
God gives us to speak about the rest of Jesus’ life.
In
an elementary, direct kind of example: there was an inner-city church that
wanted to do some good for the neighborhood, both for the body and the soul,
and decided that every Friday night they would hold a pizza dinner and a prayer
meeting, but they went back and forth on whether it should be prayer and then
pizza or pizza and then prayer. If the
prayer came first, they thought, then it might seem like people had to meet
some requirement to get something to eat.
If it came afterward, then it was something that was, like the food,
offered freely on behalf of those who really wanted to be there. So “Pizza and Prayer” began, and continued
for quite awhile.
Doing
good leads to healing. By “healing” I
believe we can include both the physical healing that Jesus did and the healing
of the human heart that comes when the unloveable are loved and the enemy is
forgiven. It also includes the healing
of the ways of the world that bring on so many troubles and hurts that we take
for granted as “just the way it is”, but that truly could be prevented.
Some
people have a specific gift of healing.
There are doctors and nurses and pharmacists and researchers and all
kinds of people who are part of the medical scene. Their gifts are from God. There is also the parent who has that amazing
ability to kiss a scraped elbow and make it all well, and the neighbor whose
chicken soup does what only chicken soup can.
There
are those who heal the broken soul by being the one person who stays around
when everyone else has had enough of Old So-and-So. That is not at all easy, and requires extra
grace from God. It means following
closely the example of the one who heals all of our souls, and you know what
happened to him to bring that about.
Bishop Reuben Job described this kind of healing when he wrote,
“The truth is that my gift of goodness may be rejected, ridiculed, and
misused. But my desire to do good is not
limited by the thoughts or actions of others.
My desire to do good is in response to God’s invitation to follow Jesus,
and it is in my control. I can determine to extend hospitality and
goodness to all I meet. I can decide to
do good to all, even those who disagree with me and turn against what I believe
is right and good. And the reward for my
doing good is not cancelled or diminished by the response to my acts of
goodness. I will have the reward of
knowing I did what was right and pleasing to God. I will still be identified, known, and loved
as a child of God. What could be a
greater reward than this?”[2]
There
are those who ask, “How do people come to be this way? What is it that wounds them so deeply in the
first place?” Social workers, often
lawyers (yes, I said, “lawyers”), journalists, artists, and many others are
called to the kind of healing that Jesus did when he confronted the evils of
public life. He gave the poor and the
powerless a place at the table, and he wasn’t afraid to speak up for them when
they feared the rich and powerful. He
also showed respect to those who used their wealth and position responsibly and
invited others to do the same.
Can
you imagine what the world could become if – no, make that “when” – the love of
Jesus, doing good and healing, enters the life of those who are seeking God and
even the life of those who don’t realize they should be seeking? It would become no less than what it should
be. And where it would go from there? That is up to God, but rest assured that it
would be very, very good.
[1]
Michael Lipka, “A Closer Look at America’s Rapidly Growing Religious ‘Nones’”
(Pew Research Center, May 13, 2015). http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/13/a-closer-look-at-americas-rapidly-growing-religious-nones/
[2]
Reuben P. Job, Three Simple Rules: A
Wesleyan Way of Living” (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2007), 40-41.
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