Year B Easter 6
Acts 10:44-8

Sunday Sermon – May 6, 2018 from Christ Church Christiana Hundred on Vimeo.

When was the last time someone made a comment on your listening skills? Was it on a report card? Was during an argument with someone dear? To hear how God is calling us to grow, we must be good listeners: ready to hear the expected and the unexpected, the familiar and the radically new, the comfortable and the uncomfortable. The diversity in God’s Creation isn’t there to fuel one versus another; our differences are invitations to each other to grow closer to God by seeing the diversity of God.

We’re in our fifth week of our series Witness, as we work our way through the Acts of the Apostles, the band formerly known as the disciples. We’ve been following the apostles on their journey in the years following the resurrection as they spread the Good News and sow the seeds to start the Church. We are called just as they were called to witness – to proclaim our faith. When we follow their example, we know that this is not just about our words; it’s about action. In this season of Easter, we’ve heard about answering God’s call – even when it brings us back to the place of conflict, resisting temptation – especially the temptations to fear and worry, and moving forward in our call as adventurers – even when we like staying settled in one place. Our testimony of our faith to others is not just what we say to them; it’s how we live.

Our life in the Episcopal Church is shaped by two primary sacraments: Holy Eucharist, the bread we break and the cup we share around God’ table, and Holy Baptism, in which we become members of Christ’s Body, the Church and inheritors of the kingdom of God. The promises we make at our baptism govern our life together. One of these promises is “to seek and serve Christ in all people.”[1] The Main Event at the heart of today’s passage from Acts is a baptism – on an occasion where Peter is able to serve Christ in an unexpected way.

One of the great, unexpected joys of my ministry, was my year as an Episcopal missionary after college. When I was at training for my journey, one of the priests I was working with tried to teach my classmates and I about comfort; It’s a lesson that’s useful every day of our lives, and I’m really glad I listened to it. He drew an oval on the board and said, “This is your comfort zone: everything you know, everywhere you feel safe.” Then, he drew an “X” 5 inches from the oval and said; “This is one of the many experiences you’ll have when you move outside the country. Your comfort zone is going to have to grow to encompass this new item, and there will be nothing comfortable or expected about that, but you know what?” He drew a new oval on the board; once that encompassed the previous oval and the X he’d drawn. “Once your comfort zone expands, your perspective will always be bigger and what you’re capable of will be permanently altered.” It’s astounding.

At the beginning of today’s passage from Acts, Peter is preaching, something well within his comfort zone. While he knows he’s connecting with people and he can see the Holy Spirit moving through them, the people he’s connecting with are the people he’s used to connecting with, the people he expects to reach: the Jews. Peter’s seeking and serving the Christ is people who are familiar to him, whose way of life he already knows that he understands.  Suddenly, amid all this familiarity, something happens that astounds Peter: he finds his preaching is reaching people he did not expect to reach – people outside his comfort zone. Suddenly, he’s seeing that the Gentiles, too, are filled with the Holy Spirit. Peter’s suddenly found an opportunity to serve Christ in people he hadn’t even been seeking it in.

Peter had this oval that encompassed where he was comfortable seeing God, and in that moment from today’s passage from Act – that moment when we hear that he is astounded – Peter’s oval has an unexpected growth spurt, and his faith grows to encompass an unexpected way of seeing the Holy Spirit work through people. His perspective was permanently altered; his faith is permanently bigger. Because he opened himself up to listen for God in an unexpected place, in unfamiliar faces.

I’ve come to believe in my heart of hearts that the reason we’re all made so differently is because learning to understand each other helps us grow. To overcome the barriers of speaking different languages or coming from vastly distinct cultural backgrounds, we must slow down, really listen to each other, and make the effort to understand how someone who sees the world very differently than we do. This is why the experience of traveling is so important and enriching! Every new person, place, way of life, we take time to understand along our early pilgrimage brings us closer to God by helping us see Christ in our fellow humans, especially the ones most different from us. We get to know God better by exploring a new corner of God’s Creation. Whether we’re going just around a river bend like Lewis and Clark or growing deeper in relationship with another human, the richness of God’s Creation is astounding!

What Peter thought was a world of one versus another – Jew versus Gentile – was really a reminder that we’re all in this together. Encountering Christ in another person looks like a moment of tender vulnerability, a deep belly laugh, something powerful and new yet familiar, common ground: this is holy, indeed. This is living into our promise to seek and serve Christ in all people. How could Peter withhold the waters of baptism from a brother or sister after seeing Christ in them? How could we withhold that piece of the divine in each of our hearts from a neighbor, when we made a promise to seek and serve Christ in all people, no matter how short, tall, culturally foreign, politically opposing, or geographically distant?

Seeking and serving Christ is an opportunity to grow and be astounded as Peter was astounded. Don’t you just love that for all the wild and crazy places Peter’s followed God’s call we still get to Peter surprised by the Holy Spirit? It happens to all of us; it’s how comfort zones – and our faith – grow.

The Main Event in today’s sermon about Witness is our call to be good listeners, who are unafraid to be a little uncomfortable because we know that every new experience is an invitation to grow our faith comfort zone, to know God’s diversity from a grander perspective, and to be astounded at this richness of God’s Creation into which God has called us all into being and continues to call us to grow. So, slow down… and listen up!

[1] BCP 305