Acts
10:34-43
I’ve long wanted to start a sermon
this way, and now I finally have the chance:
“A rabbi, a priest, and a minister walk into a bar. The bartender sees them and says, ‘What is this,
some kind of joke?’” Okay, so they have
their little prank and walk right back out onto the street, laughing so hard
that they don’t notice a truck with a brake problem is heading straight for
them, and within seconds they are standing together in front of the pearly
gates, having arrived as a group. St.
Peter greets them and explains what happened, but that they are each expected
and welcome. He calls three cars to
carry each of them to their appointed dwelling.
The rabbi’s car arrives first and it’s a Bentley, with all the fenders
and chrome polished up. This is followed
by the other two cars, which arrive at the same time, both respectable Buick
sedans. They turn to St. Peter, a little
bit embarrassed to ask, but they do. Why
did the rabbi get a Bentley when they got Buicks? Peter says, a little apologetically, “Please
don’t take it wrong. It’s no reflection
on you. It’s just that your friend has
some family connections.”
Let’s go back to the Peter who knew
Jesus face-to-face. Let’s go back to the
book of Acts, where God had to send him specifically to see what was happening
with a Roman centurion named Cornelius.
Cornelius
“was a devout man who
feared God with all his household; he gave alms generously to the people and
prayed constantly to God.” [Acts 10:2]
He
felt drawn to the God of the people his army was there to watch and to control. But he was not Jewish. There were all sorts of cultural and professional
obstacles to his conversion, like the fact that he was an officer in an army of
occupation, and that conversion would require circumcision.
In
the gospels, we see Jesus respond to other people like this man. Luke tells about another centurion who
“had a slave whom he
valued highly, and who was ill and close to death. When he heard about Jesus, he sent some
Jewish elders to him, asking him to come and heal his slave. When they came to Jesus, they appealed to him
earnestly, saying, ‘He is worthy of having you do this for him, for he loves
our people, and it is he who built our synagogue for us.’” [Luke
7:2-5]
Jesus
did as he was asked. He started over to
the man’s house, but was met ahead of time by messengers from the officer who
said that he didn’t need to come, just to give the order, and he knew the
servant would be healed. Jesus remarked,
“I tell you, not even in
Israel have I found such faith.” [Luke 7:9]
Within
the religious community, those raised to have a consciousness of God and a
sense of God’s will, however imperfectly we may understand or follow, there can
be an expectation of faith. That doesn’t
mean, though, that it might not be found elsewhere, where there are people whom
God draws close even as they wait to discover who is behind that constant hunch
or persistent desire to know the truth that sets people free.
We
must never forget that that process began when God chose one man and then his
family and then the nation that they became; that one man being Abraham, to
whom God made promises that were kept when he protected him in his wanderings
and his people Israel, to whom God’s promises were kept when he stayed with
them through their days of prosperity and their days of exile. Part of those promises was that through them
the other nations of the world would be blessed; and that was kept when Jesus
was born among them, grew up and lived following the Law faithfully, and when
he died his resurrection was discovered because his own followers returned to
the tomb to observe the practices that Judaism dictated with respect to the
dead.
What
astonishes the people of the New Testament isn’t that God has been and is faithful
to Israel. What astonishes them is that
the gentiles – Cornelius and his household and the rest of us – get to jump
in.
Edgar
Lee Masters wrote a series of poems called the Spoon River Anthology in
which he imagines walking through the graveyard in a small town and having
people speak about their lives as he passes their tombstones. In a poem called “The Village Atheist” he hears
these words:
“Ye young debaters over
the doctrine
Of the soul’s immortality,
I who lie here was the
village atheist,
Talkative, contentious,
versed in the arguments
Of the infidels.
But through a long sickness
Coughing myself to death
I read the Upanishads
and the poetry of Jesus.
And they lighted a torch
of hope and intuition
And desire which the
Shadow,
Leading me swiftly
through the caverns of darkness,
Could not extinguish.
Listen to me, ye who live
in the senses
And think through the
senses only:
Immortality is not a
gift,
Immortality is an
achievement;
And only those who strive
mightily
Shall possess it.”
Well,
no. It is a gift. It is a gift through Jesus, who was more than
a poet. But everyone must come to that
on their own, which is where the striving mightily comes in – and God bless all
those who follow that path. It’s part of
God’s sense of humor that we so often have to exhaust our own efforts before we
discover that salvation never comes that way, but always by God’s grace, like
when Peter learns that those outside the Chosen People are also chosen. Righteousness comes from salvation. Salvation doesn’t come from righteousness.
The Roman Catholic theologian Hans
Kung asks a good question. He asks, “What
does it mean to be truly a child of God and so truly human?” This is, in part, how he answers:
“It means … that all our
moral exertions and pious practices are inadequate to put in order our
relationship with God and that no achievements of ours can merit God’s love.
It means relying
completely on this Christ and believing that God wants to help in particular
the abandoned, irreligious, lawbreakers, ungodly, and out of sheer friendliness
puts in order our relationship with him.
It means then seeing in
the dark mystery of the cross the very essence of the grace and love of that
God who does not judge men in a human way according to their deeds, but simply
accepts, approves, and loves them from the outset.”[1]
The
gift of faith is both given and chosen.
The scriptures reveal that over and over. It is both given from outside
and found inside. That is why God’s love
for all his children can be seen even in the lives of those who may themselves
be unaware of the grace that they receive and at times live out. God has always done and is still doing more
than we will ever be aware of.
“Then Peter began to
speak to them: ‘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. You know the message he sent to the people of
Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ – he is Lord of all.” [Acts
10:34-36]
There
really is so much good already there, wherever we look. There is good where we expect, and good where
we never think to find it, because Jesus Christ is Lord of all.
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