The Sixth Sunday After Easter, Year B
The Rev. Joshua Rodriguez-Hobbs
Acts 10:44-48
I spent this past weekend at the Two-Hundred and Thirty-First Annual Convention of the Diocese of Maryland. Diocesan Convention is important, but whenever I mentioned to any of you last week that I was going to convention, you all said the same thing: "I'm sorry." I can understand why convention has the reputation it does. When the whole diocese gets together at events like Convention, we like to make ourselves feel important. We pull out the pomp and circumstance and Robert’s Rules of Order, and we pass resolutions in an attempt to make ourselves feel relevant. Statistically, fewer and fewer people come to Episcopal churches—or any churches, for that matter—each year, but you wouldn’t know that at a diocesan convention, because we are so busy saying very important things using proper parliamentary procedure. It’s a collective exercise in refusing to be be vulnerable or face hard realities.
Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on diocesan convention, though, because our reading from the Acts of the Apostles this morning is about a time when Peter refused to be vulnerable. Now you wouldn’t know that from the reading, because the lectionary only gives us five verses of a story that takes an entire chapter of Acts to tell. It starts like this: an angel appears to a man named Cornelius and tells him to send messengers to a man named Peter, who will come and preach the Gospel to him. This is unusual, because Cornelius is a Roman centurion, a gentile. Up until this point, Peter and the other apostles have only preached to other Jews. But Cornelius sends messengers to Peter.
Right before the messengers arrive, Peter has a vision where a voice from heaven tells him to kill and eat some non-kosher animals. Peter refuses, because he has kept kosher his entire life, and in keeping kosher, he dedicates his life to serving God. The voice tells him not to call unclean what God has made clean, but Peter refuses two more times before Cornelius’ messengers arrive. When they do show up, Peter invites them into the house and is a gracious host. He’s happy to be a host, because it means that he’s in charge.He agrees to go with these men to meet Cornelius. But when he gets to Cornelius’ house, Peter suddenly has second thoughts about being a guest. He tells Cornelius, “You know, I really shouldn’t be here.” He’s right—observant Jews weren’t supposed to go into gentiles’ houses and eat gentiles’ food. But Peter suddenly remembers the vision, and he laughs and says, “But God has told me not to call you unclean.” With a little prompting, Peter begins to preach to Cornelius and Cornelius’ family and friends, beginning his sermon, “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.” However, the rest of the sermon is about how Jesus came to preach good news to the children of Israel, and the children of Israel alone. Peter doesn’t ever say that gentiles are acceptable to God.
This, for the record, is where our reading finally begins. The Holy Spirit interrupts Peter’s sermon and falls upon Cornelius and his family and friends, who begin to prophesy and speak in tongues, just like the apostles did on the Day of Pentecost. Peter has to admit that God finds gentiles acceptable, which he’s said plenty of times already, but doesn’t seem to have really believed. So Cornelius and his family are baptized, and Peter finally agrees to be their guest. He gives up control and accepts hospitality, rather than giving it.
For Peter, just like for us, being vulnerable is hard. It’s threatening. Personal confession, it is so much easier for me to offer to pray for you, than to have you offer to pray for me. That would require me to be vulnerable, to be ministered to, rather than to minister. That would upset the stable boundaries that I depend on, boundaries that are demonstrated and enforced by the collar I wear every day. But guess what? God didn’t make those boundaries. We did. God isn’t the one who cares about those boundaries. God wants us to be vulnerable, open to the new things that Holy Spirit is doing among us.
For all we attempted at convention to focus on our own importance as a diocese, rather than being honest and vulnerable, moments of vulnerability crept in. This year, the Rev. Becca Stevens delivered the keynote address to the Convention. Becca is the founder of Magdalene House and Thistle Farms, an amazing ministry based in Nashville, Tennessee that provides housing, training, and jobs for women who have been victims of human trafficking and struggle with addiction. Becca gave this wonderful keynote address, and afterword took questions from the floor. I always groan when questions come from the floor at Convention, because they’re rarely questions; they’re attempts to prove how much smarter the speaker is than everyone else. But this year, a delegate stood up and asked “Do you have resources in California?” He went on to admit that his daughter who lived in California was in active addiction and living on the streets. It was a moment of profound vulnerability, the kind you don’t often see in church. Bishop Sutton stopped everything and lead us in prayer for this man and his daughter, remembering them by name before God. As I look back on this past weekend, that was the moment when we were most truly what the church is called to be. It wasn’t when we debated resolutions. It was when we recognized the gift of vulnerability that was given to us, and met a beloved child of God in the midst of real need.
As wonderful as it is when the church ministers to the vulnerable, I think what’s even more necessary is for us, as a church, to be vulnerable. In our story from Acts, we are not Cornelius. We are Peter, the safe religious insider who is sure he has all the answers. But he doesn’t. We don’t. Only God has all of the answers, and we aren’t God.
What would it cost us to be vulnerable? What would it cost us to become a community where we all can admit our flaws? What would it cost us to respond to one another with grace in the face of imperfection? What would it cost us to lay aside our obsessions with perfection?
Make no mistake, it will cost us something. It cost Peter something to become vulnerable. He had to lay aside his old certainties to follow the Holy Spirit. We will too. But in the face of the need that exists in our city, in our world, what else can we do?
Even after his resurrection, Christ still bears the scars of the crucifixion. Why do we believe that we, who follow Jesus, have to hide ours?
Amen.
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