Fifth Sunday of Easter
May 2, 2010
Acts 11: 1-18
Story to Live By
There are many ways to represent the Christian faith. One can think in terms of doctrines and principles, of propositional statements and immutable truths. This is the stuff of creeds and confessions, and we Presbyterians are good at that stuff. We like words – the more and the longer the better.
There’s nothing wrong with this way of approaching the faith. There is a need for what the Reformed tradition calls "the life of the mind in service to God." Careful thought is a welcomed antidote to the muddled thinking and downright silliness that clutters the public square these days. Three cheers for creeds, confessions, and multi-syllable words.
But there is a danger inherent in too much thinking about the faith. We serve not an abstraction, but a living God – the Triune God who became flesh and dwelt among us. Our faith is not in creeds and confessions; those are just words. Our faith is in Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, the person from whom we learn not only who God is, but also who we are.
To put it another way, we Christians are part of a story, a narrative. It’s the story of God’s love affair with the world, from the moment of creation right up to the present day. We tell that story to our children so that they can live it with us, and in a way we enact it every Sunday when we attend to scripture and gather round this Table for a meal of bread and wine. Not only does this story inform us, it also forms us. Week after week, year after year, as we hear the story, enact the story, eat and drink the story, we ourselves become the story.
We call this story "The Gospel of Jesus Christ." "Gospel" means "good news," and the essence of this good news is that God is for humanity – for us and not against us. Just how far God is willing to go to show God’s love for the world is revealed in the story of Jesus. His life, his encounters with ordinary people, his death on the cross, his resurrection to new life, his departure from this world and at the same time his continued presence in this world – all of this is the good news that makes us who we are.
Last Tuesday I sat in a crowded County Commission chamber for five hours and listened to people speak for and against a proposed human rights ordinance. This ordinance would, among other things, protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people (LGBT for short) from discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodation.
As I listened to people speak – especially people who identified themselves as Christians – it occurred to me that the principal difference between the Christians who were for the ordinance and the Christians who were against the ordinance is the story they were telling.
Leaving aside the arguments – the creeds and confessions, you might call them – I heard at least two stories behind all those words. I’m sure I won’t do justice to either story, but here’s what I heard.
The first story – the "con" story goes something like this: God loves the world and everybody in it – so much that Jesus came into the world, died on the cross, and was raised to new life. His death and resurrection reconcile us to God, provided we repent, believe, and accept Jesus as our personal Lord and Savior. God loves lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people, too, but unless they repent of their freely chosen lifestyle, accept Jesus, and live as straight people, even God can’t save them.
Choices are important in this story. According to this story, people choose to be homosexual. It’s a "chosen lifestyle." So, as far as the proposed ordinance goes, people who choose to be gay or lesbian don’t need protection from discrimination. If society is going to protect them, we might as well protect smokers who choose to smoke or overweight people who choose to eat too much.
One man even told the Commission, "I’m fat and I’m ugly. Why don’t you adopt a law to protect me?" I think he was trying to be funny.
To sum up the first story, God loves us all, but God requires us all to be straight, professing Christians.
The "pro" story goes something like this: God loves the world and everybody in it – so much that Jesus came into the world, died on the cross, and was raised to new life. His death and resurrection reconcile us to God. In the light of that good news, God calls us to repent, believe, and follow Jesus, who is not only our personal Lord and Savior, but also the Lord and Savior of the whole world.
In this story, we don’t know why some people are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered, but we know that God loves them with a particular love, for God especially loves the poor, the oppressed, the fearful, and the marginalized. Just look at Jesus, and you can tell: God draws the circle of salvation wider than any of us can imagine.
Speaking for myself, I grew up as a child of the first story. I used to think it summed up the gospel pretty well. Then I met some lesbian and gay people who didn’t fit the profile. The love they showed for each other and for their neighbors looked to me like the same love my Sunday School teachers taught me to sing about. The covenants they made with one another seemed as genuine – and as fragile – as the covenants I had presided over in services of Christian marriage.
Most telling for me, in the early days of the AIDS pandemic, I watched gay men die. I saw their partners care for them right up to the end, and sometimes I was asked to preside at their funerals. "His own church rejected him when he came out," the story usually went.
After a few of those funerals, the story I grew up with didn’t sound like good news anymore. It had a version of Christ in it, but it wasn’t the Christ who was present in those hospital rooms or at those gravesides. Then I began to study the scriptures, and discovered that the passages I thought were all about the evils of homosexuality weren’t about that at all. They were about violence and the abuse of hospitality and what happens when people treat other people as objects.
It was like that day in seventh grade when I got my first pair of glasses. I went to the high school football game that night. At one end of the field was the scoreboard. It had always been there. I knew where it was and that it had little lights on it, but it had never occurred to me that people in the stands could read the numbers and letters formed by those little lights. I suppose I thought that people nearest the scoreboard read the information, and passed it along to their neighbors.
Not only that, did you know that trees have individual leaves? It’s true. If you put your glasses on, you can actually see those leaves without climbing the tree. I thought I’d tell you, in case you didn’t know.
Once I started reading the Bible with a new set of lenses, I found all sorts of new things. Well, not new really. They were always there. I just hadn’t seen them.
Did you know that there was a time when Christians didn’t want to share the gospel with people who weren’t Jewish? It’s true. I’m not making this up. It’s all right there in today’s reading from Acts.
Peter was snoozing on a rooftop in Joppa. (He tells the folks in Jerusalem he was praying, but actually he was snoozing.) He had a dream about a huge tablecloth coming down out of heaven, laden with wonderful things to eat. Not just fried chicken and potato salad a la the First Pres picnic, but also lobster and shrimp and pork chops and pickled pig’s feet – stuff Peter wasn’t allowed to eat because it’s not kosher.
"Dig in," came a voice from heaven.
"Lord, I can’t eat this stuff," Peter said. "It’s not clean."
The voice said, "What God has made clean, you must not call profane."
One thing led to another, and before Peter knew it he was in the home of a Roman named Cornelius who didn’t know kosher from cornflakes. The Holy Spirit had got there ahead of Peter and the whole house was full of Gentiles behaving like holy rollers – speaking in tongues, shouting out praise to God.
Peter preached the gospel to them, and before he had time to check his Book of Order, he found himself baptizing Cornelius and his whole household. Then, of course, after all that church, they had to have dinner, and there was Peter, sharing table fellowship with LGBT people – Loved Gentiles Baptized Together – LGBT.
The Missionary Council back in Jerusalem got wind of this, and summoned Peter to headquarters. "What were you thinking?" the Council wanted to know.
Peter told them the whole story -- pig’s feet, Holy Spirit, baptisms – the lot. "If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?"
There’s not much you can say to counter that, is there? The Council didn’t think so either. They fell silent. After a long pause, somebody started singing the Doxology and they all concluded, "Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to new life."
Notice that wording. It’s important.
Not, "God has given even the Gentiles a chance to get themselves saved."
Not, "God has offered even the Gentiles the opportunity to become just like us."
But, "God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to new life."
What you decide about this pending human rights ordinance is up to you and the Holy Spirit. As you think and pray about it, however, consider the story that has formed and is forming you.
Is that story good news? Does it reveal the Triune God? Is it really faithful to scripture? Whatever you conclude, be assured of this: The story we live is one the world hears.
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