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Acts 11:11-18
Psalm 148
Revelation 21:1-6
John 13:31-35
Acts 11:1-18
This passage serves as a sort of
companion piece to the story in Acts 9, the conversion of Paul, that was
read two weeks ago. Here in chapter 11, Peter is recounting to the
Jerusalem leaders his “conversion” to acceptance of the Gentiles. Both
Peter and Paul find their lives redirected by the new possibilities God
opens up before them; both experience God’s call as a new “lure for
feeling” that leads them into patterns of relationships they had not
expected. For Peter, this means accepting as “clean” things that his
training and tradition and devotion had before told him were “unclean.”
Peter learns that God’s circle of relationship extends far more widely
than Peter had previously guessed—and that, if he is truly to follow God’s
way, he must be prepared to associate with people he had always thought to
be beyond the pale. And again, as in the story of Paul’s conversion,
Peter’s new calling is confirmed by a second vision granted to another
party, in this case Cornelius: just as Peter’s vision is ending,
messengers arrive from Cornelius with the story that an angel has
instructed the centurion to send them to this very house to invite Peter
to come with them. Finally, the two visions are brought together when the
Holy Spirit comes on Cornelius’ household, just as the Spirit had come
on the apostles at Pentecost, and Peter realizes that it is genuinely God’s
will that Jew and Gentile come together in the church. The whole story is
an illustration of how God’s will works on a large scale, through many
diverse agents, who may not themselves guess what part they are playing in
the larger system, so that the right people can be brought together at the
right time in the right environment for new relationships to be formed and
new possibilities engaged. It invites us to ask what unexpected, “beyond
the pale” people God might be calling us to engage, so that new
possibilities and new relationships in the Holy Spirit might be disclosed
among us.
Psalm 148
The psalm depicts a universal hymn of
praise, in which all creatures and all ranks of creatures are united in
the shared act of praising their Creator. The psalm is arranged as if it
were a series of concentric circles of creation, from the cosmic to the
human: from heavens and heights, to angels and heavenly host, to
astronomical bodies, to seas and deeps and meteorological phenomena, to
mountains and forests, to human communities, to kings and princes, to
everyday folk. The psalm is a vision of the wide diversity of created
beings brought together in a single act of praise—each creature acting
in its own proper way, with its own distinctive becoming, yet all
coordinated in a vast Alleluia, like a choir with innumerable voices and
multilayered harmonies. We today might bring to our reading of the psalm
our scientific knowledge of the subtle and far-reaching interconnections
between creatures in ecosystems and biospheres and planetary systems and
stellar neighborhoods—we today might ask if our knowledge of the fifteen
billion year evolutionary journey of the universe might help us see the
universe as an even more wondrous place than the psalmist saw it. Can the
vision of the psalmist help us see our universe as an ever more awesome
hymn of praise?
Revelation 21:1-6
John’s vision of the New Jerusalem is
the climactic moment of the entire Revelation, symbolizing the final and
complete overcoming of all barriers between God and God’s world, the
fulfillment of all things in their complete openness and transparency to
God’s will: “See, the home of God is among mortals. God will dwell
with them as their God; they will be God’s peoples, and God Godself will
be with them.” From a process-relational point of view, the promise of
fulfillment is summed up in the promise of renewal, “See, I am making
all things new”: from each perished occasion, God fashions the
particular aim for a new occasion that can carry forward and expand the
value of the perished occasion. The constant renewal of the world, growing
in a Godward direction, informs the hope that the world can become
transparent to God, each and every creature a willing co-creative partner
in realizing God’s longing for justice and peace, right relationships of
mutual well-being. Such a “new heaven and new earth” are beyond our
vision now; but the hope of such fulfillment can inspire us to build our
communities—local and global, human and ecological—as forerunners of
the City of Peace in our time.
John 13:31-35
The Gospel readings for these last
Sundays in the Easter season are all taken from the Farewell Discourse of
Jesus in John 13-17. While John has set this teaching before the
Crucifixion and Resurrection, some commentators note that in this passage
Jesus is speaking as if he is already beyond this world, as if he is
already speaking from the point of view of his resurrected life. In many
respects, this discourse in John functions in the same way as Luke’s
account of Jesus’ special teaching to his disciples after the
Resurrection, in the forty days between Easter and Ascension. In these
selections from the Farewell Discourse, Jesus is instructing his disciples
how to carry on his ministry, through the power of the Spirit, after he is
gone, and in that sense they clearly point to the post-Resurrection
church. That is the significance of Jesus’ saying, “I am with you only
a little longer.” Although Jesus is no longer present to the church in
the same way he was present during his earthly ministry, he is still a
formative and constitutive presence in the church’s experience. “I
give you a new commandment,” he says: “Just as I have loved you, you
also should love one another.” As the quality of love revealed in Jesus
is reenacted in his disciples, so Jesus’ New Life becomes a stream of
influence in his disciples’ lives. The love that was the defining
characteristic of Jesus’ ministry is reenacted and re-embodied in his
disciples, and so comes to define them as well: “By this everyone will
know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” This
is the “glorification” of God, made manifest in Jesus, that will
continue in the community of Jesus’ followers.
Paul S. Nancarrow is rector of St. George's Episcopal Church in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. and canon theologian of the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota. He is a co-author of The Call of the Spirit: Process Spirituality in a Relational World.
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