Acts 11:1-18
SERMON “My God”
My predecessor at the church I served on the coast of Maine climbed Blue Hill Mountain hundreds of times, at least once a week during his decades serving that congregation. He was a bit of a Transcendentalist, a bit of a Unitarian, and certainly carved from the same cloth as Henry David Thoreau.
His familiarity with the mountain led, no doubt, to deep natural knowledge, complementing his undergraduate training as an arborist. I am guessing that those hikes also led to transcendent moments, frequent epiphanies of the sort narrated in our Opening Words, adapted from Annie Dillard’s 1977 essay “Holy the Firm.”
Blue Hill Mountain was most certainly a “thin place” for the late Rev. Rob McCall, as was Puget Sound for Dillard, drawing on the Celtic tradition of recognizing places where the mundane and the holy are close to one another.
Traditional Christianity, orthodox with a lower-case “o,” appreciates these magical spaces as examples of God’s glory, and the most mystical of the traditional theologians might even dare to use the word “holy,” but there would be a warning label attached.
For them, what passes for holiness in nature or art must always be partial, for particular humans and cultures claim to be the gatekeepers, messengers and managers of the transcendent, so that direct experience is always suspect.
We see this in claims of religious exclusivity. God spoke to Abraham, and chose the descendants of Abraham and Sarah as a solely preferred people out of all of the homo sapiens in the world, God being himself (always “he”) just an immortal and omnipotent instance of homo sapiens.
God spoke to Moses. God was incarnate in some unique way in Jesus. God sent an angel to speak to Muhammad. Each tradition claims exclusivity.
God’s grace is dispensed through celibate male priests who can trace their authority from bishop to bishop all the way back to Peter in Rome according to that communion, and other communions that claim apostolic succession, including both the Anglican and the upper-case “o” Orthodox.
Direct revelation, God injecting God’s self into creation, is the only way humans can pretend to control what is uncontrollable, the only way we can make God as petty and self-centered as we tend to be in our finitude, the theological equivalent of drawing arbitrary lines on a map and calling them borders. We stick things in boxes with labels and pretend we know what’s what.
The thing is, that is us, not God. God is not about boxes. At least my God is not.
We come to the thin places, the thin moments, and that is good and true, but the product of that encounter with the holy is a combination of the mysterious “not us” of creation and Creator and the mystery that is us, for we are mysteries to ourselves most days, entangled in time and space.
The prophet is not an empty vessel channeling the holy. At best, she or he is an active partner in interpreting the holy impulse into language and context, at worse is a charlatan, claiming divine sanction for selfish acts. Jesus uses the language of fields, fisheries, and flocks because that is what he knew.
In today’s reading, Simon Peter is in a thin place, even in the midst of many people, a vision of food that was not kosher, a baptism of the Spirit rather than of water, a path for those who were not Jews to follow Jesus without the complexity of Jewish cultural practice, the cleanliness code, the sacrificial economy of the Temple.
Jesus was most certainly a Jew, and an observant one at that, though he understood that the parts of the Law and prophetic tradition that spoke to compassion and justice must always take precedence over the parts of that tradition mired down in legalism. He challenged institutional authority and even imperial authority and we know how well the authorities responded.
Paul was advocating for Gentile followers of Jesus, though the religion he was inventing was about Jesus as a sacrifice, not about the things Jesus actually said and did. We can’t ignore Paul’s Christianity, nor can we allow ourselves to be trapped by it.
Jesus healed the sick. Jesus forgave sinners. Jesus pursued restorative justice. Jesus challenged the rich and powerful.
He instructed his followers to do as he had done. And as best we can tell, he interacted with and changed the lives of non-Jews all the time. Gentiles are healed. They flock to his message of a good God and a kingdom not of exploitation and violence, but of love and justice.
Between these three men, Jesus, Simon Peter, and Paul, we get a religion that spread like wildfire across the Roman Empire, outlasted the empire, and sadly, sometimes metastasized into an empire of its own.
Our tradition has given us Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel and Handel’s Messiah, but also the Sack of Constantinople and the Reichskirche.
Our own United Church of Christ tradition gave us continuing testament, the idea that God is still speaking, the right of Christian conscience, where we each are empowered and challenged to figure out what we believe for ourselves, gave us the ordination of the first woman since the Apostolic Age in 1853, and the first openly gay minister in 1972, but also produced the Salem Witch Trials and the overthrow of the Hawaiian Monarchy.
Peter’s vision and Paul’s success at the Council of Jerusalem allowed Christianity to spread, but Christianity is not some abstract thing floating out in the ether. It isn’t even a book, as central as that complex book might be. Christianity is people and all of the ways people interpret and live the tradition or reject and denounce it.
Atheist fundamentalism defines Christianity as an ancient, primitive, and dangerous superstition.
Christian fundamentalists define it as death-prevention, a damper on their existential angst.
Christian nationalists define it as both temporal and eternal kingdom, and pursue an earthly jihad as terrible as any pursued by the Taliban.
For many at the margins, queer folks and women and abuse survivors, Christianity is one more terror in a terrifying world.
What is it to you?
How can we articulate the things we find in this time we set aside for one another and mystery? How can we explain the thin spaces in worship and in community, controlled by neither bishop nor priest, where something in us is called and changed in a continuous act of transformation? Our ancestors called this process sanctification, not quite accurate since we are already made of stars and God-stuff, already each holy in our own way. For as the heavenly voice said to Peter, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”
I’m not certain about my own answers, and sure can’t dictate yours. What I can do is live the questions, with you, with holy mystery, with love, this day and always. Amen