“Jesus Doesn’t Love Just Me”

Acts 10:44-48

Today’s text cannot be understood apart from the verses in Acts 10 that precede it. Those verses tell us about how the Holy Spirit was working on two different men in two different places at two different times. The men were Peter, the leader of that infant church in Jerusalem, and Cornelius, a Roman centurion described by the text as “a devout man who feared God with all his household…” Peter was Jewish. Cornelius was a Gentile.

Peter was in Joppa. Cornelius was in Caesarea. Cornelius was instructed by an angel, appearing to him by the power of the Holy Spirit, to send some men to Joppa to get Peter. Meanwhile Peter was taking the most important power nap in history. During his nap he dreamt of unclean foods, foods that the Lord God, speaking through the Spirit, instructed him to eat. Peter, good Jew that he was, refused three times to do so. After each refusal God spoke these words, “What God has called clean, you must not call profane.”

Still puzzled by this dream, Peter greets the men sent from Caesarea, and answering the call of the Spirit, accompanies them to the home of Cornelius. Finally Peter understands the meaning of his dream. He is to preach the Gospel to these Gentiles, for they have been declared clean by the Lord. He preaches. Then the events described in verses 44-48 take place.

As Peter spoke the Holy Spirit fell upon the listening Gentiles. They immediately began speaking in tongues and extolling God. Then Peter asks, probably in a tone that is more of a command, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” Then he really did order that they be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Afterwards those baptized invited him to stay with them a few days. They wanted to hear more about Jesus.

Peter had experienced what many of us would call a major paradigm shift. He was called by God to not only think outside the box, but to climb all the way out it. Peter had assumed that only Jews could become Christians. He considered them as unclean as those foods the Lord invited him to eat in his dream. But God was telling him to ignore the conventional Jewish wisdom of the day, to ignore his religious training and life-long beliefs. Travel with Gentiles. Enter into the house of a Gentile. Proclaim God’s Word to Gentiles. Baptize those Gentiles and receive them into the church. And Peter, obedient to the Spirit of God, did just that.

The text says that, “The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles…” Astounded may be an understatement. They were totally flabbergasted and confused. This should not have happened. Gentiles baptized by the Holy Spirit? Impossible. Gentiles invited into the family of God? Unbelievable. This could not be. There wasn’t supposed to be a “Gentile Pentecost.” It was wrong, wrong, wrong!

Accept that God said it was right, right, right! The household of Cornelius were not the first Gentile converts to Christianity mentioned in the New Testament. That honor went to the Ethiopian eunuch, whose conversion is described in Acts 8. But what transpired between that eunuch, the Apostle Phillip, and God on that Wilderness Road transpired pretty much in private. It was a much quieter, less exciting event than was what today’s text describes.

Whatever, from that moment on Gentiles were welcomed into the church. There were bumps along the way. According to Galatians Peter even had second thoughts. Be that as it may, from time forward the Jews no longer had a monopoly on Jesus. Jesus didn’t love just them. As the song most of us learned a long time ago says, “Jesus loved the little children, all the little children of the world.” Not just some – all!

That’s all history. The power of Pentecost has taken Christ’s Church far beyond its Judaic roots in Jerusalem. That power has taken the Gospel all over the world. Gentiles stopped being a minority in the church centuries ago. Each and every one of us is a Gentile. As different as we may be from one another, in the eyes of Orthodox Judaism we are all Gentiles. We are all people, who in the earliest days of the church would have been considered unclean: dirty, profane, beyond redemption.

Whatever, the church stopped agonizing over whether or not folks had to convert to Judaism in order to be Christians in the First Century. It really doesn’t matter whether this, that, or the other world religion considers us to be infidels. In Christ, we are the family of God, his chosen and elect, as the hymn puts it “from every nation.”

But sometimes we behave too much like a family. We have family feuds that split and divide us. We fight over doctrine and practices all the time. Sometimes some of us actually consider ourselves to be, if not the only real Christians, then definitely superior to other brothers and sisters in Christ.

For several weeks a few of us have been gathering on Sunday nights to study the Letter to the Hebrews. Just so you know we don’t consider ourselves superior to those who do not attend. We are not the righteous remnant of Grace Presbyterian Church. Our study guide is Looking Forward in Faith, by William Carter.

The good Pastor Carter writes that, “The Christian community is never considered superior or special by the writer of Hebrews. Only Jesus Christ is superior. The hallmark of the community is faithfulness to the vision of Jesus Christ. The claims of present-day Christian groups to some form of superiority because of a belief or practice are unacceptable… Only obedience counts… [not] some particle of it that suits the whims or personal aspirations of self-proclaimed religious leaders.”

The superiority/inferiority dance that goes on between and among Christians will not end until the Lord comes again. Until that day we can only trust the Holy Spirit to lead us beyond our doctrinal and other squabbles. And to remember what Jesus said about loving one another. Pastor Carter continues, “Repeatedly we are reminded that it is more important to love one another than it is to agree with one another or even to have the right doctrine. For the early Christian community, nothing was as important as the fellowship of believers. Whenever we have neglected to remember that fact, we have suffered losses and divisions in the Body of Christ.”

We are to love one another – and – welcome the stranger in our midst. Pastor Carter has something to say about that, too, “The same love we extend to members of the household of faith must also be shared with those who are outside the faith… churches need to open their doors to strangers. I remember a stranger who wanted to worship on Easter Sunday in a friendly small town church who went away sadly because no one had spoken to him. The world is full of lonesome strangers whose only hope is Christian charity.”

If only our sinfulness, usually unconscious and unintentional, were confined to unfriendliness. Sometimes we Christians can be downright mean: to each other as well as strangers. And there have been times through the history of the church when we have, intentionally or not, mistreated people who differed from us. We’ve fallen right back into that Judaic trap of considering others unclean.

One final quote from Pastor Carter, “Some persons are mistreated because they are unlike us, some because we are rude or indifferent, and others because we are part of a society that expects us to show contempt for certain other people.” There are churches in India that still adhere to that ancient Hindu practice we call the caste system. Churches go so far as to make those of a lower caste us a different door and sit in a different section.

Before we go and get all self-righteously indignant, let’s remember that in the not too distant past some American Christians behaved the same way. If you were the wrong color or of the wrong social class, you were directed to a separate set of pews. Why? Because your color and social standing made you unclean in the eyes of the culture, and therefore unclean in the eyes of a church that could not or would not stand over against the dominant culture.

As the pastor of Grace I’m happy to say that I have never observed such behavior here, be it intentional or unintentional. Color, nationality, and social class are pretty much irrelevant. And although we are not all on the same page theologically, I have never observed anybody here claiming to be in possession of a superior doctrine. I think we all share the Apostle Paul’s thoughts about how we are handicapped by the reality that we can now only look through the glass dimly.

That’s a good way to go. Let’s keep heading in that direction. For there is no person whose doctrine, social standing, or even behavior gives them the right to claim superiority as a Christian or as a human being. Amen.