SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER, YEAR B

(Rogation Sunday)

May 5, 2024

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Warwick, R. I.

 

Acts 10:44-48; Psalm 98;

I John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17

 

The episode in this morning’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles is sometimes known as “the Gentile Pentecost.” In response to a vision from God, a Roman centurion named Cornelius has sent for the Apostle Peter, who in turn has received his own vision from God directing him to accept Cornelius’s invitation.

 

So Peter has come to Cornelius’s house in Caesarea Maritima, the principal Roman port on Palestine's Mediterranean coast. Cornelius is one of those Gentiles known at the time as “God-fearers”—that is, people who admire the Jewish religion and believe in the God of Jewish monotheism, but who are for whatever reason unwilling or unable to make the commitment involved in converting to Judaism and keeping all the precepts of the Jewish Law or Torah.

 

The reading opens as Peter has begun preaching to Cornelius and his household the good news of Jesus Christ and his resurrection from the dead. The Holy Spirit descends upon all present. They begin speaking in tongues and extolling God, just as the original disciples did on the Day of Pentecost in the Upper Room at Jerusalem. So Peter commands that they should all be baptized: “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?”

 

This moment is absolutely pivotal in the development of early Christianity, making clear once and for all that the apostolic witness to the Lord’s resurrection is to be taken to all nations, not just to Israel alone. Henceforth the Church, the community gathered in response to the Easter proclamation, is to comprise all the world’s peoples, fulfilling the words of Psalm 98: “all the ends of the earth have seen the victory of our God.”

 

In other words: We’re all in this together. Saint John writes in today’s Epistle that everyone who believes is a child of God. And Jesus says in today’s Gospel that he calls us no longer servants but friends. The Church is thus a fellowship of all peoples, transcending divisions of race, class, ethnicity, nationality, and language.

(Incidentally, the symbolic point of the speaking in tongues is that differences in language no longer constitute the barrier to mutual intelligibility and understanding that they once did, for we’re all one in Christ Jesus. We shall have occasion to reflect further on this point in two weeks’ time, on the Day of Pentecost.)

 

So today’s readings challenge us, as our Lord puts it in the Gospel, to “love one another as I have loved you.” In too many times and places, however, the Church has failed to live up to its identity as a community where all are loved without distinction. All too often, parishes and congregations become exclusive clubs for “people like us”—those who speak and dress in a certain way, who live in certain neighborhoods, who belong to this or that political party, or who hold certain opinions on the controversial issues of the day.

 

I don’t want to belabor the point, but in our fallen and sinful human condition, we can be tempted to find our greatest comfort zones among those who are most like-minded with us, and those with whom we most readily identify. So we need a periodic reminder that the Church is a universal fellowship, where we’re called to engage in the sometimes difficult and often challenging work of welcoming and including all comers, especially those with whom we may be instinctively least at ease.

 

This challenge was the same for Peter and his companions that day in Caesarea almost two thousand year ago. As the reading from Acts puts it: “The believers from among the circumcised who came with Peter were amazed because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles.” Peter himself had to overcome enormous reluctance, even revulsion, before entering the house of the Gentile Cornelius, whom he regarded as an unclean foreigner. But we may be glad that he did, because otherwise we wouldn’t be here in this church today! Christianity could well have remained a movement existing purely within the confines of Judaism, and we Gentiles would never have had the opportunity to hear, receive, and respond to the good news of Jesus Christ.

 

We do well, then, to pray the same Holy Spirit who moved Peter and his companions to move our hearts also, that we may find the courage and strength to do whatever we need to do in our own time to welcome those whom we might be tempted to regard as foreigners and strangers. Only then can we truly begin to realize and live into our identity and mission as the Church Catholic.

 

All that I’m trying to say here is best summed up in one of my favorite hymns, number 304 in the Hymnal 1982, written by Brian Wren in 1970, and set to the early American folk tune Land of Rest:

 

         As Christ breaks bread, and bids us share,

           Each proud division ends;

         The love that made us makes us one,

           And strangers now are friends.