Easter 5C: Stepping through Doorway--Seeing with the Eye of Love

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark

Easter 5 C: Acts 11:1-18; Psalm 148; Revelation 21:1-6; John 13:31-35

The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector

Each year during Eastertide we listen to the story of the Acts of the Apostles—the birth of the early Church. Acts is sometimes dismissed as a little too fantastical. There are mass conversions, people are raised from the dead, prison walls tumble down, and the Holy Spirit whisks Phillip away in a manner that would make any fan of Star Trek teleportation jealous. Amidst all the oddness, however, is a very import message for the Church to hear and live from if we are to grow into what it means to be an Easter people—a people who live without slavery to the fear of death, a people who live from abundance instead or scarcity, a people who know, name and proclaim God’s unconditional love for all of God’s creatures.

In a very basic sense, Acts is a story of what it’s like to see with the eye of love—to ourselves as God sees us and to see others as God sees them. Meister Eckhart, the 14^th century German Dominican preached in one of his sermons, “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.” Somehow, being an Easter people includes the invitation to see and be in a new way. Learning to live a Jesus-saturated life, a life with Love at its center (or on the throne as Revelation would have it) means that more and more we see with the eye of love, the eye of unity, the eye of undivided oneness where everything and everyone are seen, honored, and served as integral members of the sacramental tapestry.

Needless to say, seeing with eye of love is not something that comes naturally, or easily to human beings. It’s the work of grace perfecting our nature that our lives might become more and more like the one we call Lord, the one we follow after tripping down the way of love. Left to our own devices, we create divisions, build walls, and enforce boundaries. We declare some people insiders and some people outsiders. We pronounce some people clean and some unclean. And the moment we do that, the moment we create those kind of divisions, it becomes that much easier for us to dismiss a person or group of persons, to wipe our hands and declare “I have no need of you.” Having declared someone unclean, it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to that person not really being a person at all, but something expendable, so much trash. That’s why Jesus’ death on the trash heap outside the city walls is so telling for us. Jesus is cast out, thrown away with all the other junk that’s thrown away. Jesus is human garbage in the eyes of the authorities. Casting out, declaring people unclean, dehumanizes them and perpetrates a culture of violence, a culture in the thrall of death.

The first Christians were no different. Acts actually documents what we might call the first real church dust-up over whether Christians have to keep kosher and observe the Jewish purity codes (including circumcision), or whether Gentiles could also be a part of the nascent community. Initially, Peter was one of the folks who thought that it was improper to allow non-observant Gentiles into the body of Christ. Peter thought that being a Christian meant following the Jewish law and avoiding contact with people who were unclean to avoid becoming contaminated, ritually unclean. But God had other plans for Peter, for the Church, and us! While at prayer, Peter is given a vision of a sheet being lowered by its four corners with a smorgasbord of animals contained within it. The Lord says, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat.” And Peter, good observant Jew that he is, is rightly horrified. That goes against everything Peter has known. He replies, “By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has every entered my mouth.” And then we come to one of most important phrases in all of scripture—“What God has made, you must not call profane.” It’s so important, that God repeats it three times. These are God’s marching orders for the Church—“What God has made, you must not call profane.”

No sooner does Peter receive this world-upending vision that restructures his whole way of seeing and being than God asks him to live it out in practice. God is not content with Peter having some kind of abstract notion that everyone is created in the image of God. God wants Peter to embody this insight in the nitty-gritty relationships of his ordinary, daily life. God wants Peter to live this vision out not only with his lips but in his life, and so he sends him to the home of a gentile Centurion. It’s hard for us to comprehend how radical this would have been for Peter. His whole sense of himself, his whole sense of that it means to be a religious person, is at stake. Emboldened by the Spirit, by a power that speaks to him from outside is narrow framework of who’s in and who’s out, Peter goes as it dawns on him that there is “no distinction between them and us.”

When Peter steps across the doorway into Cornelius’ house, a whole new way of seeing and being is unleashed in the world. The old world of insiders and outsiders, clean and unclean, those on the top and those on the bottom has toppled down. It’s no mistake that Peter recalls Jesus’ own baptism in the Jordan. It’s no mistake that we hear of the new heaven and the new earth, of the holy city, the New Jerusalem come down out of heaven in our reading from revelation. Something momentous has occurred with Peter stepping over the boundary, the dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles.

In fact, this is so momentous that the story is told twice, back-to-back in Acts. The first time, in Luke 10 it is narrated in real time. The second time, in Luke 11, we hear it as part of Peter’s report to the Church in Jerusalem. Clearly, we’re meant to be paying attention here! And when we hear the one who was seated on the on the throne say, “See I am making all things new,” we suddenly get a glimpse of what this new, trustworthy, and true creation might look like. It looks like Peter stepping into Cornelius house, going in the Spirit to the very place he’s been taught to avoid his whole life and seeing the spirit at work there as well.

Time and again in Acts, the Church is called to open wide the arms of its saving embrace. Time and again the Church is invited into the radical welcome and indiscriminate hospitality that characterizes Jesus’ life and ministry. And one of the most beautiful things about the gospels is that this growth in love, this dilating of the eye of love, is narrated in very human terms. The Church bumps up against its blindspots, its prejudices and preconceptions and, in the power of the Holy Spirit allows itself to be undone and remade. It’s as if, as the Church spreads out it repeatedly comes up against someone or some group of people whom it would like to exclude. “Really, Lord? This person too?” And the unequivocal response from God is always the same. “Yes, this one too.”

I think you see this same story of Peter and Cornelius played out in the various movements for social justice through history—women’s suffrage, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Stonewall riots, the Me Too movement, the Black Lives Matter movement. The dignity of each human being as a cherished child of God is slowly recognized and affirmed. Slowly (too slowly we might say) the eye of love under the power of the Holy Spirit continues to dilate wider and wider and wider. “Yes, you too.” Slowly, our tendency to see from the perspective of who’s in and who’s out is coming undone and something new is bubbling up. It’s the job of the Church, our job as the gathered people of God in this place to be open, attentive, alert to the movements of the spirit, to keep opening our arms, to keep inviting people to the table, to keep welcoming the stranger in the name of the one who has welcomed us from the foundation of the world.

On Monday, at our last “Go Monday” youth event for the year I was speaking to the youth about how moved I was by their witness at our Diocesan Convention. Preston Palmer got up and spoke eloquently to the assembled grey bears about how the youth in the Diocese of Utah had taken the Episcopal Creation Care Pledge: “As the Episcopal branch of the Jesus Movement, we long to grow loving, liberating, life-giving relationship with the whole of God’s Creation. Together, we pledge to protect and renew the Earth and all who call it home. Together, we are living the Way of Love and make this commitment to specific actions.”

The youth spoke of sharing our stories of love and concern for the Earth and link with others who care about protecting the sacred web of life. They spoke of standing with those most vulnerable to the harmful effects of environmental degradation and climate change – women, children, poor people and communities of color, refugees, migrants. They spoke of changing their habits and choices in order to live more simply, humbly and gently on the Earth. That what the Acts of the Apostles looks like in the lives of our youth. Peter’s stepping across the doorway towards Cornelius is being lived out by the next generation as an increasing awareness of this fragile earth our island home. Thanks to their powerful witness it’s starting to dawn on the Church that caring for the last, the least, the lost and the left behind includes the rivers, the oceans, the air, the million or so species on the brink of extinction.

John tells us that we really only have one job—the new commandment to love one another. The Holy Spirit, working through Peter and Cornelius set a whole new way of seeing and being in motion—that every person, every species, every nook and cranny of God’s good creation might be respected, protected, and nourished in the full flourishing that is God’s ultimate aim. May we, in the power of the Spirit be a people who go towards those from whom we’ve been trained hold back. May we, in the power of the Spirt, be a people who step boldly over the boundaries that divide us one from another. May we, in the power of the Spirit be a people who see that it is in welcoming and embracing the other, the stranger, that we are saved from ourselves.