What can we say May 15? Easter 5

    Acts 11:1-18. Fun, isn’t it, watching Peter and then Paul adjudicate circumcision as a profound theological issue, which for us is a matter of mere preference for new parents? For Jews and Christians in their day, the circumcision question wasn’t some archaic oppressive rite. It was existence, identity, come down literally from God. Peter is, by a dream no less (Acts 10), marshalled by God to change some things, to introduce what was un-introduceable. 

Willie Jennings puts it beautifully: “Peter must explain the inexplicable. He must suture together a known faithfulness with an unknown faithfulness. Nothing has changed, but everything has changed. Peter must lay his body across the line between circumcised and uncircumcised and give witness to its transformation into a bridge.”

   Jennings, considering Peter’s words: “Here, powerful word is presence in weakness.” Peter and his early Christian fellows, we must recall, had no Bible, no theological textbooks, nothing but Peter’s private experience. Methodists, who adore their quadrilateral, must admit that experience is so dicey, as it can be the foundation of much nonsense and meanness. “Yet Peter shows us its proper use, to confront the cult of the familiar – of family, faith, nation, and story.” Jennings’s comment is fascinating, and spot on, I think.

   He goes on to compare what Peter is up to with jazz. There’s a break. The band stops, the soloist must then improvise. Some pressure – and yet delight – right? “Peter brings them to the break, but the Spirit of God carries the time, 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.” How often does Scripture speak, not merely of God doing a new thing, but even of a new song? In this instance, we hear “a word of celebration that a lover and  their beloved have been brought together, the God of Israel and the Gentiles.”

   Psalm 148 occurs regularly in our lectionary – and such a great text, pivotal for St. Francis of Assisi and countless saints through history! I preached on this a while back - and wrote a book imagining Conversation with St. Francis. What is praise? How can we fixate on God not for what God might have done for me lately, but for what is always there?

   Revelation 21:1-6. An easy text, I think, speaking of a new heaven, and a new earth. A few notes for preachers: first, redemption is of all of creation, not merely individual souls! – which implies we have a responsibility now for all of creation, not just me and my heavenly destination. Notice it’s even a “new heaven.” Isn’t the long-existing heaven more than sufficient? God is renewing literally everything, including his own abode!

   Which is… everywhere, as we know but never quite realize. No temple in the New Jerusalem, since God is accessible all over the place. If God is conceived as moving from one place to another, though, the direction is always one way: toward us. Richard Rohr: “Revelation told us that the story of God’s work has never been about escaping Earth and going up to heaven. It has always been about God descending to dwell among us.”

   Revelation envisions our future as a city. Many people, connectedness, a corner shop, neighborhoods, streets where you can stop and visit. I wonder if it’s more like a small town – huge, as lots of people are there, but small, as in everybody knows everybody’s business, in a good way, and everybody is ready to chip in and help, love, encircle.

   How lovely that the writer’s most fabulous image for our intimate, eternal life with God is “a bride adorned for her husband.” Not just pretty – but for God. I think of St. Augustine’s insight on the purity (aspirational!) of the church: “Whenever I have described the Church as being without spot or wrinkle, I have not intended to imply that it was like this already, but that it should prepare itself to be like this, at the time when it too will appear in glory.”

   How cool that the heavenly vision is proclaimed in “a loud voice.” Mustn’t be missed! There’s a real “See!!! Told you so!!!” element here, isn’t there? Preachers, without dissing anybody, are wise to point out to our folks that God says “I am making all things new,” not “I am continuing the life you know.” So much well-fathomed blather about heaven is that we get to keep on keeping on. If we love golf, we’re golfing. If we love shopping, we keep shopping – as Tammy Faye Bakker put it, with a credit card with no limit. But heaven isn’t the endless continuation of the best life we know now. Don’t ding people for hoping for such! Just tease them with the real promise that what’s coming will put out most terrific day or activity entirely in the shade.

   I only recently have thought of the Alpha and Omega language, not merely as beginning and ending, and thus the totality of things, but as real Greek letters in a language you may learn in seminary. Being a Christ person involves a genuinely new and different language and way of thinking!

    John 13:31-35. Jesus gets ever more mystical as John proceeds. It’s all about glory – not fame and acclamation, but transparency to the glory of God, which for Jesus will be crucifixion. In the 4^th Gospel, that is his glory, his crowning moment, the full revelation of who he and thus God is.

   Jesus’ focus, in his teaching here but in his very being, is this “new commandment.” But is it new? – to love? Love is as old as time… So is this a new way to love? A new model or pattern for loving? Kara Slade, in her new The Fullness of Time, calls Christ “both the explainer and the explanation of what love is.” Her book is a dense, profound exploration of the intersection of science and modes of time with both Karl Barth and Søren Kierkegaard, whose Works of Love she rightly suggests “is intended as a disturbance of any easy assumption on the part of the reader that they already know what love is.”

   He, like all serious-minded Christians, rejects love as “preferential.” For us, love is a command, an invitation, a liberation, not a mood or an impulse or anything so transient. Slade’s collision of science with Jesus style love is spot on when she cites the naturalist (and recently deceased) E.O. Wilson looking at giving up your coat, or turning the cheek, or loving the enemy as “unnatural.” Indeed. Cutting against the grain of evolutionary thinking, not in terms of how we got here biologically, but what we are to be about morally, we don’t celebrate the survival of the fittest. We embrace the unnatural. We are odd. We love, not at all like everybody else.

   Love is a command – something to ponder, always. Then, as Raymond Brown reminds us, “Love is more than a commandment; it is a gift.” Indeed – and ponder that. Not just the gift I receive so I feel loved. The gift that then gives, the power and grace to be one who loves, not preferentially, but unnaturally.