5-19-19 Readings & Sermon

A reading from Acts.

Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God.

So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, saying, Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?

Then Peter began to explain it to them step by step, saying, I was in the city of Johba praying, and in a trance I saw a vision.

There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners, and it came close to me.

As I looked at it closely, I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air.

I also heard a voice saying to me, Get up, Peter, kill and eat.

But I replied, By no means, Lord, for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.

But a second time the voice answered from heaven, What God has made clean, you must not call profane.

This happened three times.

Then everything was pulled up again to heaven.

At that very moment, three men sent to me from Caesarea arrived at the house where we were.

The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us.

These six brothers also accompanied me.

And we entered the man's house.

He told us how he had seen the angel standing in his house and saying, Send to Joppa and bring Simon, who is called Peter.

He will give you a message by which you and your entire household shall be saved.

And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them, just as it had upon us at the beginning.

And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.

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?

When they heard this, they were silenced, and they praised God, saying, When God has given to the Gentiles, then, excuse me, then God has given to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.

The word of the Lord.

Praise the Lord from the heavens.

Praise the Lord, all you holy angels.

Praise the Lord, sun and moon.

Praise the Lord, heaven of heavens.

Let them praise the name of the Lord.

The Lord made them stand fast forever and ever.

Praise the Lord from the earth.

Fire and hail, snow and fog.

Mountains and all hills.

Wild beast and all cattle.

Kings of the earth and all peoples.

Young men and women.

Let them praise the name of the Lord.

The Lord has raised up strength for the chosen people and praise for all the loyal servants.

And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

And I heard a loud voice saying from the throne, See, the home of God is among mortals.

He will dwell with them as their God.

They will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them.

He will wipe every tear from their eyes.

Death will be no more.

Mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.

And the one who is seated on the throne said, See, I am making all things new.

Also he said, Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.

Then he said to me, It is done.

I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.

To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.

The word of the Lord.

At the Last Supper, when Judas had gone out, Jesus said, Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him.

If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and will glorify him at once.

Little children, I'm with you only a little longer.

You will look for me, and as I said to the Jewish leaders, so now I say to you, Where I am going, you cannot come.

I give you a new commandment that you love one another, just as I have loved you.

You should also love one another.

By this everyone will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.

The Gospel of the Lord.

Please be seated.

There's a subtle detail missing from this reading.

Translations sometimes don't really always do it justice, but many of you probably know that our Jewish brothers and sisters, particularly when they're in the synagogue, pray with what we call a prayer shawl in Hebrew, a talit, like this.

Now, this talit has 613 strands on it.

Those, each strand represents a commandment from the Torah.

That's Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.

613 mitzvot, that means commandment, so that you'll know how to live with one another essentially and have greater joy.

There are 365 dunes, one for each day of the year.

And there, you'd think there'd be a quarter of one in there.

There's 248 don'ts, and the tradition says that's a don't for every bone in your body.

You have 200A.

The tradition says 248.

Among those don'ts are things you cannot eat and cannot touch.

You cannot, for example, eat swine or a swine product of any kind, including, well, hairyboo uh gummy bears, because they're made from pig's feet.

You have to look for the kosher kind.

You can't have a crawfish boil unless there are no crawfish in it.

You can only eat swimming things with scales.

Many of you know this already.

So kosher, koshrut, and Hebrew food balls come, in fact, they're on the prayer shawl itself.

613 mitzvot, you become a bar mitzvah, a son of the command, when you know all 613.

So today, Peter is up praying on the roof, wearing his prayer shawl with the strands that remind him what he cannot eat and cannot touch.

And down from the sky comes a talet, a large sheet.

The translator has done you an injustice.

It's a prayer shawl.

And on the shawl are exactly the things that the tassels tell you not to eat or touch.

Fruit bats, sloths, reptiles, swine.

Kill and eat Peter, and he says, No.

Tassel 147.

Never have I eaten such things.

It happens three times.

Finally, God says, Tassel 614.

Nothing God has made is unclean.

We make a mistake of thinking this is about food.

It really has very little to do with food in the story or in our lives.

The easy takeaway is eat whatever y'all want.

But we miss the fundamental basis for this, which goes back to when you were in elementary school and people had the cooties.

If they had the cooties and touched you, you now have the cooties.

How could you decudify?

I don't know that such a process exists.

You could inoculate yourself.

Circle, circle, numb my cooti shot, right?

How quickly and how fully that worked is really hard to know.

But folk back in the day believed that the animals were point sources.

They were vectors for not some kind of germ like microbes, but for spiritual uncleanliness.

Therefore, people who interacted with said animals became point sources themselves, so you couldn't touch them.

And if you wanted to really be safe, you didn't enter their household and you didn't even let their shadow fall upon you.

Peter says, God, I've never been with an unclean animal or person or anyone who had to do with unclean stuff.

I've kept myself pure.

And God says, friends, you got it all wrong.

And I want to suggest to you, by the way, this is not a criticism of Judaism.

You may need to know that every Shabbat, every Friday night, if you go to a Jewish home, you are to be invited.

They cannot deny you hospitality.

This is important to know.

What I want to suggest to you is rather than this being anti-Judaism, it's a reminder that people are to be included, particularly at meals, and that there's a way we can live under hoods sometimes that end up pointing.

And when we live under these hoods, we mistake cleanliness for godliness, and all of that is idolatry.

And the proof for Peter is in the pudding.

He talks to a centurion named Cornelius, an unclean man, he's not circumcised, he's eaten unclean food his whole life.

God is not supposed to indwell Cornelius with the Holy Spirit until he repents and changes, and God is not bound by Peter's limitations.

God fully enters Cornelius, and Peter has to decide.

Was it a fluke?

Or is his category wrong?

Does he have to change the way he sees the world?

And I wouldn't suggest that might be our invitation today.

Very few of you, I think, have limitations about what animals you are willing to eat.

Now, you may not like mustard, or you may say lamb is too gamey for me.

However, I think very few of you would say if somebody eats any lamb, I won't let their shadow fall on me.

But I think if we're honest with ourselves, we struggle with the point of the story.

I used to wrestle in high school, and once in my junior year, I wrestled this other kid from an opposing school, and he clearly had done something to cultivate body odor.

I mean, he had nourished it, fertilized it, possibly with real fertilizer.

He was the smelliest person I'd ever encountered.

There was something unnatural about it.

Never mind that he beat me.

When I got home and took a shower, I didn't wash once or twice.

I washed three times.

Now listen, that antibacterial soap assured me that all the germs were gone.

But there was something supernatural about that smell.

I could almost taste it for weeks.

We've got stuff like that.

We're not as rational as we like to think we are.

If I put a roach on top of your hamburger, would you just replace the bun or would you dispense with the whole burger?

Completely irrational.

Completely irrational, and yet it comes back to what we say is clean and unclean.

Your stomach has a much easier time digesting a roach, by the way, than any kind of frog, especially poisoned dark ones.

However, we'd rather eat a frog than a roach.

This is the kind of cootie category people were operating from.

And the kind of category, quite honestly, that if we don't do a sober inventory of ourselves, we are operating from us from today.

Curious thing, when you don't touch somebody because they're unclean for any reason, be it moral, intellectual, political, or spiritual, you block yourself from the very thing that would overcome the gap you put between them.

Several studies of late have said the surest way to build a bridge with a stereotype is to hold hands.

Forty seconds at least.

And if you really want it to work, you'll interlace your fingers because more surface area means more oxytocin and dopamine and serotonin.

The chemicals that keep us apart are adrenaline and cortisol.

Those are the wind you up, attack you.

And I'm positive our story today is about the Holy Spirit overcoming the obstacles we put in God's way.

And I think it's very important because this is one of the few weeks when we get to visit, I think, the most understood, most misunderstood book in the scriptures.

The book of Revelation.

The apocalypse.

We misunderstand it so much that we don't realize apocalypse means to unveil.

It does not mean to occlude or obfuscate.

It does not mean to express a deep system of code so that you have to know the Kabbalah.

It means to show you the inner reality of things, things that are deeper even than words.

And so many of you know that the best-selling fiction series of all time is not Harry Potter.

Instead, it is the left behind series.

In those books, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and God is happy to burn it up.

People get punished left and right because they're bad, and God loves nothing more than to inflict pain upon bad people.

There's something like a rapture.

Good people escape suffering because, after all, when you have the right beliefs, God wants to make you rich.

This is a mythology we deeply buy into, and this passage today, don't you see, undermines the whole thing.

One glad morning, when this life is over, I'll fly away.

I love that song.

It is so theologically wrong.

It's a great tune.

Hard to argue with a good gospel tune.

Notice the words of the text.

The new Jerusalem is not in a different dimension.

It's not in outer space.

It is here.

God would dwell among mortals.

And death, it's great.

It starts the sentence so that you see it's got a capital D.

Death will be no more.

We get this wrong.

We think God is opposed to our dying.

But I want to remind you that God in Genesis 2 made us out of clay, out of dirt.

If God was worried about us dying, God would have made us out of iridium or perhaps titanium.

You will all die one day, as will I.

God is not worried about death with a small D.

God worries about death with a capital D.

A death that is separation from God, especially experienced in separation from one another.

It is true, to my faith, that God will bring this new Jerusalem about after we die.

However, what a shame if we have to wait.

If it's that good, why wait?

Now, I've got to tell you, it is very easy for me to deal with my unclean categories amongst people I don't know.

I was lucky to hear from my dad, I've mentioned this line before, it's a great line, after he came back from being in the front lines in Vietnam, that a communist is a man trying to feed his children.

I can despise communism.

Communists are men and women trying to feed their children.

Those are not the people I'm trying to hide underneath my prayer shawl from.

All of us, frankly, have different people that we'd like to stay in our little tent secure and away from.

They might be people of different faiths, different political persuasions.

My people are people who have disappointed me.

I have a much easier time with Muslims I don't know than with people who have let me down.

So much so that I don't like to eat with people who have let me down.

Because sharing food will connect us.

And I know that.

And I'd rather not do it.

Now this isn't really about me trying to tell you my own weakness.

You've heard it.

If I decline a food invitation from you, it may not be about that actually.

I might just have somewhere else to be.

Rather, I am put to you today to consider who is in your sheet.

Who is God asking you not to consider, but to reconsider?

And because God is going to do it when we die.

The scriptures are very clear.

God will do this when we die, reconcile the world to God's self, could we in faith reach our hands?

Hand out to that other and if we had enough energy, could we even open up our fingers?

There is nothing for God.

Please join me as we pray our faith in the words of the Nicene Creator.

We believe in one God, the Father of the Almighty.

We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ.

The only Son of God.

God, through God, true God.

Through all things of the name.

For us, for our salvation, became not from heaven.

On the power of the Holy Spirit, we became heart of the buried and was made again.

For our sake he was crucified and conscious.

He suffered death and was buried.

On the third day he rose again, in accordance with the scriptures, he ascended to heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again, Lord, living in the dead, and his kingdom left.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Rosin of the Father and the Son.

With the Father and the Son, we have to worship the Lord.

We acknowledge the forgiveness of sin.

We look for the rest of the life.

The peace of the Lord be always with you.

If you're new to us or haven't done this before, in front of you in the pew are some little cards that say welcome.

And we'd be tremendously grateful if you'd fill one out and put it in the plates in just a moment so we have a record of your visit.

And again, thank you for worshiping with us today.

There are a few announcements that I'd like to go over in your bulletin, but first, today is our annual Daughters of the King Sunday.

So I'd like to call our daughters to come up here by the Paschal Candle.

And if you've ever been to a funeral here at St.

Thomas, the daughters are the ones who give hospitality to families in their grief, even if we don't know them, especially if we don't know them.

The daughters are the people who update and keep the prayer list and are vigilant to think about everybody, whether they know them or not.

And they meet monthly for education.

And so today we get to do two things.

We get to admit some new daughters to the order, and we also get to install officers.

Hello.

Okay, where are we?

It is my privilege to present Deborah Gileswick, Roberta Nutt, Bonnie Ryan, and Alison Zulliger as candidates for membership in the Order of the Daughters of the King.

We're gathered here in the sight of God and before this congregation to admit these women into the Order of the Daughters of the King.

We commend them to your earnest prayers that they may have grace to fulfill the obligations of the order and that their labors may be to the glory of God and the welfare of God's people.

The Daughters of the King is an order for women whose mission is the extension of Christ's kingdom, especially among women and girls, through prayer, service, and evangelism.

Do you desire to become a member of the order of the Daughters of the King?

Do you promise to obey faithfully the two rules of the order, the rule of prayer and the rule of service, to offer your support to the clergy for the good of the parish and the extension of Christ's kingdom?

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, I receive and admit you as members to the Order of the Daughters of the King.

Now, this is for everybody in the congregation, and the words are we will.

Will you support these women in their ministry of prayer and service?

Now all of our daughters show their membership in the order by wearing one of these crosses, either as a pen or as a necklace.

So a blessing for these signs of service.

Bless our Lord these crosses and grant to your servants now admitted into this order such an abundance of your grace that they may wear the sacred symbol in the spirit of humility and with devotion to the service of the King of Kings.

Amen.

Cindy, accept and wear faithfully the cross of the order, remembering the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, take up your cross and follow me.

Roberta, accept and wear faithfully the cross of the order, remembering the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, take up your cross and follow me.

Bonnie, accept and wear faithfully the cross of the order, remembering the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, take up your cross and follow me.

And Alison, accept and wear faithfully the cross of the order, remembering the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, take up your cross and follow me.

And Deborah, accept and wear faithfully the cross of the order, remembering the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, take up your cross and follow me.

That all we thank you, do or say, and make you easy in your sight.

We ask you all for his sake, our King and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Amen.

May your love, O Lord, help the daughters live lives of love, and may your holiness lead them to be examples of virtue, that they, strengthened by your Holy Spirit, may pray and serve you all their days through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

And may the blessing of God Almighty, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit be upon you this day and remain with you always.

Amen.

The other thing we get to do today is to install the elected officers of the St.

Bridget of Ireland chapter.

In the presence of God and each other, let us here covenant with God and with one another to do the things we believe God would have us do and try to do well whatever we attempt.

Let us offer ourselves to God that God may continually work through us.

You, new officers, have been chosen by your friends to serve in a position of responsibility.

To you comes the call of leadership.

Upon all rests the obligation of cooperation.

Receiving now the responsibility placed upon you, will you agree to devote yourselves to the task that your office demands, continually seeking to be used by your Lord Jesus Christ?

To the rest of the Order.

As the members of the Order of the Daughters of the King, your duty this coming term is to cooperate with the officers you have chosen and to work together to fulfill the rules of prayer and service here in this congregation and beyond.

We declare our ability to our king, the Lord Jesus Christ, to the search and to our asking the Holy Spirit of kindness and all that we can.

Amen.

It's nice to show a symbol of appreciation for all these women doing.

And after the service, reminder, please come up for a picture.

Okay.

I just really can't underscore enough.

You may not know what you just saw, but again, these people give what I would call offensive generosity to people whose lives we celebrate at their funeral, particularly.

In moments of weakness, they provide hospitality that is so incredibly hyperabundant.

And that's the church at its best.

The church at its best.

So thank you, ladies.

Okay, there's a few other announcements.

Most of these are in your bulletin, and I just want to call them to your attention.

You've got a couple of really great opportunities to gather as a parish over some food.

So if you're a lady of any age, tomorrow night is an opportunity to join the blast dinner group.

It is informal.

You show up and you talk and you meet each other and have a great meal at Carabas.

You can come, but Mary Ruth Greenwell would like to know if you're coming so that she can make an appropriate reservation.

So you'll see her email in the bulletin.

On Tuesday is the beginning of an informal group called OnTap.

It's an opportunity to gather this time over at Beers Looking at You and Webster to talk about theological issues and again to meet one another in a more personal way.

There was a really amazing thing.

Oh, one other thing.

We are going to celebrate our graduates and bless them on Sunday, June the 2nd.

So that could be you or one of your children or one of your grandchildren.

It could be your best friend.

What we're going to do is give a write-up of what they're graduating from and what they're going on to next.

So please give that to us in an email.

You can give it to me, you can give it to Ellen so that we can celebrate the graduation of your family here on June the 2nd.

The last thing is, this is the first time that the Reverend Deacon Jenny Scott is now the Reverend Priest Jenny Scott.

And she will be celebrating the Eucharist for us today.

And if you were here on Thursday, you were either a part of, one way or another, a beautiful service of celebration that I'll speak on her behalf, hopefully deeply filled her will for years of ministry to come.

It was a beautiful sacred moment to see Jenny ordained to the priesthood.

Thank you for all who had a part of it, and of course, we look forward to receiving the sacraments from your hands.

Now walk in love.

As Christ first loved us and gave himself for us, an offering and sacrifice to God.