Clinical pastoral education, or CPE, is one of the most challenging experiences for someone who is training to be a chaplain, or a deacon, or a priest. I’ve talked before about the summer I spent up at Rockingham Memorial Hospital, day after day walking into the rooms and the lives of complete strangers, offering a listening ear and maybe a prayer as they were moving through the challenges of cancer or addiction or surgery or childbirth or hospice. Sometimes those conversations come to the surface again at unexpected moments, and when I was thinking about our reading today from Acts, a few of them resurfaced, both of them involving prayer.
And the first memory that came to mind was of a conversation with a young- to middle-aged man. As with most of the patients I visited, before I left, I asked if he would like to pray. He said he would, and then I asked the question I usually asked next – “what would you like to pray for?” – and instead of thinking over that for a moment or two, as most did, and mentioning perhaps his injury, his recovery, his family, going home again, he began to pray – he didn’t even give me a chance to start. And instead of praying first for himself, he started by praying first for me.
The second conversation that I remember was with a much older man, a man who’d seen a lot over the years. I learned from a nurse that he had suffered a great deal in younger years, during segregation. He was tired, and he was kind. He told me about the church he went to, and told me the name of his pastor – he gave me his pastor’s name and phone number. And after I prayed for him, he asked if he could pray for me. And by the end of his prayer, I was crying.
It was a strange and wonderful and moving thing, finding these roles reversed, receiving care and calm from patients I was hoping to give calm and care to.
CPE is one of those places where we met, over and over, people we might never have met or known otherwise. Our paths then, unexpectedly, cross in the hospital, or the nursing home, or the halfway house, wherever that CPE training is happening – the patient or resident is there because they are sick or injured, because they are trying to heal in spirit or in body, or because they are at a point that, short-term or long-term, they need help with their day to day. We meet on common, neutral ground, in a place where whatever other differences there are between us, whether political or religious, economic, social, ethnic – they aren’t so important, and we have an opportunity to put
the greatest commandment into practice – to love one another as Christ loved us. Those words that we heard in today’s Gospel.
But I wanted to look back at Acts, and today the story we hear in Acts is actually the end of a story that’s told over chapter 10 of Acts. And it’s important to know what happens before this moment, this moment when a bunch of Gentiles, of all people, experience the Holy Spirit and get baptized by Peter.
First of all, the book of Acts is a book of upheaval; it’s about the overturning of expectations and social norms and religious convention, 2,000 years ago. Theologian Willie James Jennings says: “The book of Acts speaks of revolution. We must never forget this.”
The book of Acts tells the story of Jesus’ followers in the time after his death, resurrection and ascension – their work of ministry in a complicated empire, where the Romans are in power, and the Jewish people are splintered and in conflict, especially over the idea of this upstart Jesus as Messiah. The disciples are spreading a new Gospel that declares that everyone is equal and beloved in God’s eyes and that we are to love one another as God loves his son, and as God’s son loves us. They’re spreading a message of love in the middle of an Empire that’s all about power and conquest and slavery and wealth. Acts, says Jennings, is a revolution. It’s an interruption in the comfortable life and society that the most powerful people of the first century – and perhaps the twenty-first century – have set up for themselves.
In today’s story, Peter is at the house of Cornelius, a Roman centurion who’s described as “a devout man who feared God with all his household; he gave alms generously to the people and prayed constantly.” One day, an angel visits Cornelius, and tells him to send men to Joppa to find Jesus’ disciple Peter and to invite him to his home.
Meanwhile, Peter is also having strange visions of his own, in which a voice from heaven is telling him to eat food that he would have traditionally considered profane or unclean. The voice tells him, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” It’s ok to break these old rules of what is acceptable, and who is acceptable, and what and who are not, that voice seems to be saying.
And so then these men that Cornelius sends show up, and Peter and his friends are invited to visit a Gentile – in a time when Gentiles and Jews did not associate with each other. But he goes with the men to Cornelius’ house, where Cornelius explains this vision of the angel that sent him to find Peter. Peter tells Cornelius the good news of Jesus’s resurrection. And suddenly Cornelius and all his people – Gentiles, all of them –start to speak in tongues, inspired by the Holy Spirit.
So three significant things are happening in today’s reading from Acts:
One. The Holy Spirit fell “even” on the Gentiles. God didn’t wait until they were baptized either. God just said, “I love you.” And then the Gentiles spoke in tongues and extolled God.
Two. Yes, the Gentiles are baptized – after they’re visited by the Holy Spirit, not before.
Baptism didn’t make the Gentiles acceptable to God. It confirmed them as already beloved, and named them as part of this new community of human beings focused on Christ’s commandment of love, and the promise of God’s kingdom, where all would be free.
Three. And this might be the most important thing. “Then they invited him to stay for several days.” It’s the very last sentence – you almost overlook it. The Gentiles asked Peter, someone whom they may have seen as at best an enemy and at worst an enemy in another time, to stay a few days. This was the transformation of relationship that the Holy Spirit made happen. The invitation became possible, the relationship became possible, because of the love spoken by the Holy Spirit before and in baptism. The invitation to share common ground.
Peter may have been sent to preach the Gospel to the Gentiles, but in the end their roles were reversed. The Gentiles reached out to Peter. Peter is invited, not the other way around. Peter preaches and baptizes, and those who were once strangers, even enemies, respond by inviting Peter into their home, into their lives. Peter is met by love. And whatever divisions existed before the Holy Spirit drew him and Cornelius together – they are broken. As Willie James Jennings puts it, “We are the boundary and the border God has transgressed.” In other words, whatever walls we put up, the
Holy Spirit leaps right over.
This is what Jesus was talking about in the Gospel today. Love one another as God loves me and I love you, Jesus said – what Jesus is talking about through his entire life. Love past the divisions. Love past the differences. Be models of that love in the world.
The preaching and the teaching and the baptizing are important, but they mean nothing without the actuality of love – otherwise they are the resounding gong and the clanging cymbal.
One of the wise voices of this congregation – some of you may know her – Betsy Gaffney – said to me a few days ago: we can’t have peace without having love first. And she said, you know, every Sunday, we pass the peace in church, but wouldn’t make as much sense to pass love instead?
How can we truly have peace if we do not extend love first? Can we love those we do not know, those we do not like or trust? They and we are loved by God, completely and without reservation.
As another wise voice in this congregation – Father AJ – said in his sermon last week:
“…our job is not to change the world. Our job is to love the world.”
If Acts, the book of Acts, is a revolution, then the revolution in today’s reading isn’t Gentiles speaking in tongues or being baptized – the real revolution is the Gentiles inviting Peter to stay – the revolution one person’s invitation to another, the acceptance of the invitation, past divisions, past differences – the trust that that required and that it offered – and the relationship that it made possible.
The revelation of Christ’s love prompted the transformation of a relationship between
people who not long before that, 2,000 years ago, would have turned their backs on each other – it opened up the possibility of friendship, it opened up the possibility of peace. Walls will not keep out God. The Spirit is not bound by the roles and conventions of society. Love is already there. All that is left is to give, and accept, the invitation.
Amen.
Preached by the Rev. Cara Ellen Modisett at Trinity Episcopal Church, Staunton, Virginia, on May 5, 2024, the Sixth Sunday of Easter.
