May 5, 2024 – Sixth Sunday of Easter – Communion Sunday
Rev. Gary Percesepe
Those in worship last Sunday will understand how we are still living in the “afterglow” of bearing witness to two young parents and their ‘ohana as they presented a little girl named Keawala’i for baptism. There was a beautiful and symbolic parallelism in that act of baptism which seemed to speak across the generations as two young adults expressed their conviction that there was a future of faith for their little girl, and an aging congregation embraced the twin hopes that Keawala’i– the child and the church–would grow in wisdom and stature and favor, equipped to face the challenges of a world that is no friend to faith.
As I am coming to learn, in Hawaiian language tradition, words are alive and have mana; a name signifies an entire way of seeing the world. When a Hawaiian name is bestowed, a connection is made, a story is told, a history is preserved, someone or some place has been honored, and a fervent hope has been expressed.
There is another important parallelism in our reading from Acts, as we hear the Ethiopian eunuch’s question, “What is to prevent me from being baptized” echoed by Peter when he asks: “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” Peter’s question was prompted by the first big controversy that engulfed the early church: Can Gentiles be granted entrance to the church, or must they first become Jews, forced to follow the hundreds of Jewish laws regulating religious life? Peter, the Jewish leader of the early church has a vision; the Holy Spirit makes clear that there must be no human boundaries imposed by the inner circle of the church’s leaders: humans do not get to decide who is in and who is out. In an astonishing statement, Peter, prompted by the Spirit, blurts out that God shows no partiality, and he and the other leaders of the church must not call profane what God has called clean!
This week I had a deeply moving conversation with Thom Probst, a Vietnam vet, who shared that when he was still in military uniform he visited a church in California and was made to understand at the door of the church that he was not welcome inside. That ought to make us angry, not only because it is a fundamental failure of hospitality, but because it is theological heresy: When will we ever learn that the church does not belong to us, that it is Christ’s church, and we were never appointed as gatekeepers, because we are guests ourselves and not the host. The host is God, for this is God’s table and God has made it clear that everyone is invited to the table. We need always to ask ourselves: Whose church is this? The only possible answer is: This is Christ’s church; we are called to the table as guests.
It should be a cause of rejoicing that this week American Methodists at their global convention voted overwhelmingly to remove a 52-year-old declaration from their official social teachings that deemed “the practice of homosexuality to be incompatible with Christian teaching.” Many had been praying for the church to come to the realization of what the Spirit revealed to Peter, God does not show partiality, God does not prefer some people more than others, some lives do not matter more than others.
The Holy Spirit can be disruptive, more a wild goose than a tamed dove. The church holds in tension two tasks: 1) To pass on the tradition from one generation to another; and 2) To be open to the winds of the Holy Spirit by which the tradition comes alive in each generation.(1) As Yale historian Jaroslav Pelikan reminds us, tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.
It won’t matter what we believe if we practice our faith without love or true friendship. Which brings us at last to our reading from John’s gospel.
In the ancient world there were rigid class distinctions. The social world was configured like a pyramid, with wealthy rulers at the top, kept in power by the military in the middle, ruling ruthlessly over everyone else at the bottom. This was the arrangement of ancient Greece and Rome, a fact we should not forget when we speak of the Western origins of democracy in Athens; up to100,000 slaves occupied Athens, an average of three or four per household, with the richest having as many as 50 – slaves were half of Athens’s population.
So, when Jesus tells his disciples that he does not regard them as slaves but as friends, this is a radical statement. Aristotle makes it clear that there could be no friendship between un-equals. Women were regarded as property of men, useful for childbearing, but real friendship existed only among men of virtue, meaning that women, children, and slaves were completely outside the circle. But Jesus makes it clear that the gospel has overturned that arrangement, because humans were created for companionship and friendship with God. “I have called you friends,” Jesus says, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.” The disciples are invited into the ultimate circle, the circle of the Trinity, where they are deeply loved and accepted. How then can we exclude anyone?
In the Zoom Room, we heard two remarkable stories. Richard shared how a friend he had known for years became so exasperated with him over a political disagreement that she took his hand and twisted it, bitterly rejecting their friendship. It hurt to hear that story. Sadly, such stories are common in an America that seems to have lost its mind in a bloody sea of red and blue states.
But within minutes we heard another story by Kahu Bob, who shared that he came to know the truest sense of friendship when he came to this church for the first time. Kahu Alika wisely advised him not to tell anyone that he was clergy. People were to know and love Bob as just another member of the church, treated the same as anyone else. And then Bob tugged the strings of my heart when he said that the people of Keawala’i—some inside that very Zoom Room–had carried him. Quite literally, they carried him to and from the bathroom. This is friendship. This is love. This is the laying down of one’s life for one another. The early church was known as a place where people loved one another. The world testified of the early church, saying: Behold, how they love one another!
When we love one another and are willing to carry one another we show ourselves to be friends of God, but more than that, we live lives that answer the deepest hopes and prayers of Jesus Christ. Amen.
(1) I am indebted to church historian Rosemary Reuther Radford for this insight.