Sermon 5 Sunday of Easter preached at St Clare’s. Ocean View.
Each Sunday we have a set of readings. In these Sundays after Easter we have a reading from the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, a psalm and a reading from a Gospel. Have you ever wondered how they decide which reading should go on which Sunday and how reading fit together? I think what they do is try to find a theme in the Gospel reading and then find the other readings to fit into that theme. Then the same message is given in each reading. Any guesses what the message is in today’s readings? Well, I’ve spent the last few days thinking about this, I’ve come to the conclusion that the theme in today’s readings is the wideness of grace and salvation offered by God. Okay I’ve just said two theologically loaded words, so let me explain: grace is God’s free gift to us. And what is that free gift? Salvation. God saves us. Yes, God does save us. But is the salvation and grace offered by God restricted to a small group of people only? Or are the gates of salvation wide open for all?
I’m afraid to say that often we believe that God will only save people like us. Only save good Anglicans, who have been confirmed and come to church regularly. I’m also afraid to say that our faith is often xenophobic – we don’t want to worship with people foreign to us or different from our way of life. We make it worst by saying that our brand of spirituality and church is the only way to God. We say to ourselves that our culture, our ethnicity, our traditions, and all that we hold dear spiritually is the only thing God accepts. Well I’m here today to say that if we think like that, we are wrong. God is generous with grace and salvation. God reveals God-self and saves all who turn to God. You see, our ways of thinking are not God’s ways. There is that wonderful hymn that says that there is a “wideness in God’s mercy”, a wideness that far exceeds our own.
So, do our readings today show us this wideness of God’s mercy to all? Let’s have a quick look.
In the 1st reading from the Book of Acts, Peter defends breaking down the barriers between Jews and Gentiles. The Gentiles were considered inferior and unworthy of receiving the early church’s message and being offered the salvation of God. Peter tells of his encounter with Cornelius and he proclaims that all are chosen, not just one nationality or one way of worship and one sort of lifestyle.
Now this wasn’t just because Peter was a liberal or he just felt like saying it. It was the result of what God did. God gave Cornelius and his family a full portion of the Holy Spirit and so Peter affirmed those former “outsiders” as full-fledged members of the new emerging Christian movement, that we now call the Church. Their acceptance was grounded in God’s blessing. The early Church was acknowledging that diversity was and still is a gift of God and that God will be revealed in a variety of ways, according to culture, ethnicity, and personal experience. The Church today must do the same.
[Omit at 8am. Who are in the confirmation class? Put up your hands. Congregation, look around you at these young people. Are they diverse in their culture, their ethnicity and their personal experience? Yes they are and so we must welcome them as fully fledged members of our Christian movement, our Church.]
After every sermon you hear, you should be asking yourself, “What does that mean for me?” So, what is my sermon today saying to you? It is saying that we should be open to the different ways of God’s revelation to us and to others around us. We should be welcoming those who are different from us with hospitality and not with fear. We should be willing to expand our faith through meeting and interacting with others. The church must embrace diversity, embrace those who are ethnically, racially, theologically, or sexually different from us. But let me hasten to say that embracing the diversity of others does not always mean acceptance of all behaviours and opinions of other, but it means being open to the experience of others. If we believe God is everywhere and God is active in all things then there is no place where God isn’t revealed to us. Our faith will grow when we seek God in all everything. What do I mean by that? You see a movie or a TV show – have you thought about seeking God in those? Have you asked yourself: What is God saying to me in this TV drama? When you read scripture you ask yourself that, why not ask yourself that in everything you see or do? What is God telling me in this?
And this leads into this morning’s psalm 148, because that is what the writer of the Psalm asked as he or she proclaimed a world filled with praise. For the psalm-writer everything praises God. We must look at our world with that attitude: the beauty of a sunset, the sound of birds in the trees, the grasshopper sitting on a flower in our yard, our Muslim neighbour bowing in prayer, our friend, a faithful Roman Catholic praying with her rosary, your rector spending time studying God’s word, and even young children playing with toys. All things, at their deepest, praise God by their very being.
Thomas Merton a great spiritual writer once said that a tree, just simply growing in a field is praising God because it is doing what God created it to do. The tree wasn’t doing anything special; it was just a tree in the middle of a field but it was doing what God created it to do- to just be a tree. The tree praises God and God praises it. In the same way God praises us in and through doing what we were created to do. And what we are created to do? We are called to “love one another”.
And that leads us into our Gospel reading. Did you hear Jesus’ command in today’s Gospel reading? He told his followers, and tells us, to “Love one another.” The “one another” that Jesus mentioned is not just fellow followers of Jesus but all people and in fact, also all creation, beginning where we are and expanding to include all human beings and the whole of our planet.
Love is hard work and challenging, even among people we love – just ask your partner or your teenage children. Yes, there is going to be some conflict. In the course of our lives, we may even participate in forms of destruction, in order to survive, but we need to minimize our destructive behaviour towards others and towards the environment that we live in.
Do we have an example we can follow in order to live this way? Yes, our love must mirror God’s love for us. And our love must also reflect God’s love for all creation in its diversity. Our love must show the same all-encompassing love, albeit from our own limited and imperfect point of view.
Do today’s readings help us see the wideness in God’s mercy? I would say they do. They invite us to play a role in saving, by loving others – those who are Christians and those who might not be. By loving our planet we will save our planet and we will contribute to God’s world-saving quest.