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Acts 11:1-18
Psalm 148
Revelation 21:1-6
John 13:31-35
Acts 11:1-18
In this passage Peter recounts for the leaders of the Jerusalem church the events that led up to his preaching the Good News to Gentiles. The story has some important parallels with the story of Paul’s conversion in Acts 9. Like Paul, Peter finds his life redirected by a vision from God; in this case the vision of “something like a large sheet coming down from heaven,” and a voice which invites him to eat. Just as the voice from heaven informs Paul that it is Jesus whom he is persecuting, so now for Peter the voice from heaven informs him that he must not call profane what God in Christ has made clean. More significantly, perhaps, Peter’s new visionary understanding is corroborated by a companion vision given to someone else: just as Paul’s vision was confirmed by the vision of Ananias, so Peter’s vision is confirmed by the arrival of men from Cornelius, sent to find Peter on the orders of an angel. Peter’s new understanding of the inclusion of Gentiles into the church is made concrete in the relational and missional context provided by Cornelius’s household. That the full inclusion of the Gentiles is truly God’s will is established when the Holy Spirit comes on the entire household—prior to their being baptized with water, it should be noted—and Peter realizes that Cornelius and the others are truly his equals in the faith. The passage is a powerful witness to the basic gospel principle that God wants all people to be included in “the repentance that leads to life,” and the church plays gatekeeper to its peril. The vision and work of the Spirit is made manifest only in the relational and missional contexts of expansive social connection; as Peter recognized that in Caesarea, so the church must continue to recognize that today.
Psalm 148
The psalm depicts the entire Creation as a single coordinated choir of praise, in which all creatures and all ranks of creatures contribute their own unique forms of praise to one universal hymn. 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. A process-relational interpretation can celebrate this vision of Creation-as-choir; and can perhaps bring to it an even deeper and more far-ranging appreciation of the the subtle and deep interconnections between creatures in ecosystems and biospheres and planetary systems and stellar neighborhoods—societies and societies of societies of occasions of praise. Can this vision of the psalmist help us to see our place in the universal choir as a place of ecojustice, environmental care, and creaturely joy?
Revelation 21:1-6
The promise of “a new heaven and a new earth” in this passage has sometimes been taken in the sense of a fundamental discontinuity between this present creation and the creation of God’s ultimate purpose. In some circles, it has even been interpreted to mean that we need not be concerned about environmental stewardship of this earth, because God will one day give us another. But it is important to see that this promise is directly related to the vision of the entire present cosmos as a choir of praise given in the psalm. John’s vision of the New Jerusalem is the climactic moment of his 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
As the Eastertide celebration moves away from the Feast of the Resurrection itself, the gospel lessons turn attention away from resurrection appearances and toward reflection on what modes of presence the Risen Jesus still has in and with the faithful community. This gospel passage, taken from Jesus’ farewell discourse at the Last Supper, points in this direction when Jesus says “Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’” Yet 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.” And that love must be made concrete and actual precisely in the kinds of social networks described in the other readings of the day: in expansive and inclusive communities of faith, in work for ecojustice, in celebration of the vast and intricate diversity of life, in hope that motivates action toward realizations of justice and peace. The love of Jesus which is the continuing presence of Risen One in the faithful community can only be revealed in such societies of societies. This is the “glorification” of God, made manifest in Jesus, which continues now 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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