Baptism of Our Lord, Year A: In God there is no Partiality

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark

Baptism of Our Lord, Year A

The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & rector

When Peter declares to the Gentiles, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality,” it’s easy to miss that what we are experiencing in these lines is a conversion no less significant the conversion of Saul. It signifies a profound shift in Peter’s whole way of seeing and being in world, one that gives a glimpse into where God was calling the nascent church in its earliest days and where God is still calling us as faithful followers of Jesus today.

You remember the story. Peter goes up onto the roof to pray. He’s hungry and wants something to eat. While the kosher meal is being prepared he falls into a trance and sees the “heavens opened and something like a large sheet coming down, being lowered by its four corners.” In the sheet are all kinds of animals, and reptiles and birds of the air, and he hears a voice saying, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat.”

Now Peter has observed the law his whole life. He’s kept kosher and has never let anything “unclean” pass his lips. This command goes against everything he’s learned, everything he’s practiced, and perhaps most challengingly, against every aspect of his identity as the faithful, pious person that he’s cultivated his entire life. Peter replies almost automatically, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane, or unclean.” But the Lord is having none of it and says to Peter again, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” Just to make sure Peter gets the message, this happens three times. Poor Peter. Everything happens in threes with him!

Needless to say, Peter is deeply puzzled by this vision. His whole idea of God, himself, his community is thrown into question and turned upside-down. Before the vision, Peter had a pretty clear idea of who was in and who was out, who was clean and who was unclean, and he was pretty certain about where he stood in that system of accounting. Now, all of that has been thrown out the window. Peter thought he had God and God’s ways all figured out, only to have that carefully curated picture of God shattered.

But God’s not done with Peter. In this state of confusion and puzzlement, Peter gets word that an angel of the Lord has appeared to Cornelius the centurion and wants him to meet with Peter. To our ears, this seem innocuous enough, but in the context of Jews and Gentiles in the first century, this kind of encounter is strictly forbidden. Remember, Peter, like many early Christian converts kept the Jewish law. Even to enter the house of a Gentile, let alone one aligned with the persecutorial Imperial powers of Rome, would have meant ritual impurity for Peter. “You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile,” Peter says, “but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean. So when I was sent for, I came without objection.”

This is the pivotal moment. Peter is standing at the threshold of the Centurion’s house. His old way of making sense of God, himself, and the world is one side of that door and a whole new way of seeing and being lies on the other side. Notice too, that when Peter has his vision, it’s animals that are not to be declared unclean. Now, Peter says, “God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.” Already, the vision is working on Peter, seeping into his bones. What started as an inkling that maybe a bacon cheeseburger might be ok in God’s eyes has taken on startlingly profound implications. This isn’t just about diet. It’s about people. All people without exception tossed together in the large sheet of God’s belovedness for all God’s children.

You have to love Peter’s willingness, his faithfulness, his courage in taking that step through the doorway of the centurion’s home. I picture in almost cinematically—a close-up on Peter’s dusty sandal in slow-motion as he lifts his foot across the sill and sets it down inside. Then we jump cut to our gospel for today with Jesus coming up out of the Jordan river when the heavens were opened and he sees the Spirit of God descending like a dove. And a voice from heaven saying, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

In baptism we die to our old ways of making sense of the world, and rise to new life in Christ. We die to the dream of self-sufficiency. We die to those old stories that we’re not enough, that we’re unlovable. We die to the human-constructed world of partiality where God loves some people more than others. And we rise to new life in Christ, the life of God’s impartiality, the life of God’s gamboling gratuity, the life of God’s deluge of mercy that washes indiscriminately over everyone—black or white, gay or straight, rich or poor, republican or democrat.

That’s why I think that while Peter was surely baptized before his encounter with Cornelius, the moment when Peter’s baptism became a living reality for him was when his foot crossed the threshold of that unclean Gentile’s home. That’s the moment when everything changed for him. That’s the moment when he died to the old way of making sense of who God was, who he was, and his relationship with others and rose to new life in Christ where no one could be declared profane or unclean.

I have to wonder about Cornelius, though, as well. What happened when he heard Peter proclaim God’s love for everyone without exception? Certainly, Cornelius dies to the life of thinking of himself as an outsider, someone excluded from God’s love and mercy. That whole story of himself drops away when Peter as the embodiment of Jesus’ boundary-crossing love steps into his house. But what happens next for Cornelius? When Saul is blinded on the road to Damascus the immediate result is that he is weaned of the murderous violence that came to define his life. Remember that line from Acts about, “Saul still breathing threats and murder and against the disciples”? Remember how Saul literally checked coats and passed out stones at the martyrdom of Stephen? Remember how Saul persecuted God in the name of God and how that whole way of organizing his life collapsed on the Damascus Road?

I wonder if something similar doesn’t happen to Cornelius. We never find out. But it’s hard to imagine that he’s not weaned of the life of sacrificial violence that centurions represent in the Gospels. It’s hard to imagine Cornelius experiencing the deluge of grace that Peter pronounces upon Cornelius’ house, and then turning around to exclude, cut off, or scapegoat anyone after that, isn’t it?

This, I think, is where the rubber hits the road in terms of the life of discipleship. This is where the promises we make in the baptismal covenant today demand to be integrated and embodied in our lives. It’s all well and good to say that in God there is no partiality. But who among us could say the same thing? The fact is we live in a world of partiality. We live and structure our lives by a subtle unspoken calculus of clean and unclean, insider and outsider, those on top and those on the bottom. Hearing our reading from Acts today demands that we look inside our hearts with a gentle, but unflinching honesty and to see and name clearly for ourselves (and perhaps others if we’re really brave) where our lives are limited by partiality. Who have we quietly dismissed as profane? Who have we quietly pronounced unclean? Sometimes it’s others—racial groups, political groups, people of different sexual orientations, people of different countries of origin. But sometimes, the one we’ve quietly dismissed as profane, the one we’ve quietly pronounced unclean, is ourselves, isn’t it?

I remember a story of the first time the Dalai Lama came to America and met with huge audiences in Madison Square Garden. Someone asked a question about the problem of “self hatred.” The Dalai Lama turned to his translator and they began a passionate back and forth as the translator tried to get the Dalai Lama to understand the question. Finally, the Dalai Lama understood, looked at the questioner, and began to weep, tears of compassion rolling down his cheeks. The word “self-hatred” simply wasn’t in his vocabulary.

And “self-hatred” isn’t in God’s vocabulary either. The Baptism of Our Lord is the day when we remember that in God’s eyes we are each a beloved son, a beloved daughter, a beloved child. The Baptism of Our Lord is the day when we recall for ourselves and for our community—“No matter what the politician, the TV preacher, your income, your diagnosis, your documents, your relationship says about you, you’re a beloved child of God.” That’s what we’re called to step into on this day. That’s the threshold of big bedsheet blessedness we are called to embrace and be for others. No exceptions