Sermon: A perfect world?

From Wellington Cathedral of St Paul

A perfect world?: 1 May 2010: am: The Very Revd Frank Nelson

• Psalm 148
• Acts 11: 1 - 18
• Revelation 21: 1 - 6
• John 13: 31 - 35

There’s a new add on television. It begins by showing life in a perfect world – the perfect plane trip, where the toilet is always vacant when you need it, the person in the seat next to you keeps to herself, the hotel at the end of the trip is all you’d dreamed about… And then flips into a caricature of reality. The implication is that the product on offer is perfect! I found myself thinking of that ad when reading this morning’s readings. Revelation 21: 1 – 6 gives us a picture of the perfect new world. Acts 11 – at least the start of it, gives us the flip side.

New table companions, a new world, and a new commandment – they’re all there in the readings today!

As we work our way through the three books of the Bible selected for the Sundays of Easter we could be forgiven for thinking that the lectionary compilers had in mind that advert! The Gospel takes us back to the night of Jesus’ arrest. After Judas disappears into the night, Jesus gives his disciples a new commandment. Actually it’s not new at all – the gist of it is buried in the Old Testament in Leviticus 19:18 – love your neighbour as yourself. What is new, of course, is the setting, the context. Jesus has just washed his disciples’ feet, he is about to be betrayed by Judas, denied by Peter, arrested and executed. And he says: Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him! Strange words for someone whose mission is about to turn to custard.

St John knows, and we know, that the Christian Gospel takes all that in its stride, and overturns every expectation with the events of Easter. God is indeed glorified in the perfect obedience of His Son, and we are invited into that glorified presence, and so into the new world of Revelation, through the love shown to us by God in Jesus. It’s made possible when we obey the New Commandment: I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.

Acts chapter 11 shows us that this is not always so easy. It’s a bit like the reality check of the perfect world portrayed in the advert. Peter has to face the music when he returns home and word gets out that he has met with uncircumcised men and even eaten with them! For the second time in the Book of Acts we read the story of Peter’s encounter with a large sheet filled with every creature on earth. This new community that Jesus inaugurated through his death and the new commandment to love one another was proving to be a little difficult – especially for those erstwhile circumcised men who had stayed in Jerusalem. They had not shared in the dramatic events in Caesarea. How could they know what it was like to see the change wrought on those Gentiles by the Spirit of God? So they criticize and call Peter to explain himself.

There is a new Peter in Acts 11. The old Peter, the Peter of the Gospels, would surely have lost his temper. The new Peter explains patiently, step by step, what happened. How he was in Joppa when he experienced a remarkable vision that shook him to the core. How he was told to break every dietary law he had ever learned. How he went with the emissaries to Caesarea and met Cornelius and those with him. How, while praying with them, the Holy Spirit had come upon them in exactly the same way as it did on the Disciples – the very people now taking Peter to task. To their credit, today’s reading from Acts 11 ends with Peter’s critics praising God and saying: Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.

In the mid seventies, when the Charismatic Movement swept through the mainline churches, a little song became very popular. Based on John 13: 34 we sang: A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another, as I have loved you… We heard the words at the end of today’s Gospel reading. As I have loved you – there’s the rub of those few words. How do we love as Jesus loved? Peter, as we have seen, struggled. It was an enormous step for the first followers of Jesus, strict Jews everyone, to open their ranks and welcome in people they despised. Doing business with strangers and foreigners was one thing, but sitting down to eat together quite another.

Before we get too indignant with Peter and those stay-at-homes in Jerusalem, think how difficult we sometimes find hospitality in our Cathedral. Two Sundays ago we had people here dressed in strange robes, wandering around as if they owned the place, sitting in ‘our’ seats and reading Shakespeare. Last Sunday we again had heaps of people we never normally see on Sunday – even a guest speaker who only comes on ANZAC Day! We lost our normal service of Eucharist, the Girl Guides arrived to hand out leaflets and do our sides-people out of a job, there was no collection to bank on Monday morning. Goodness, whatever is going on? Why do these people want to come to our place? And in a couple of weeks time we will again have to accommodate changes when we host the Organ Donors Service. (Though perhaps that is alright because it is at a different time and really only affects the Dean and one or two others.)

Love one another as I have loved you. Love your neighbour as you love yourself. But Lord, who is my neighbour? A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road…. so likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan …. And Jesus said, I give you a new commandment, love one another as I have loved you.

Peter’s explanation of his vision and experience at Caesarea with Cornelius and the Gentiles, Jesus’ new commandment, and even that mysterious book called Revelation with its vision of a new earth and a new heaven, challenge us, the Church, to the core of our being. How are we to be a community of love that lives in such a way that we witness, by our example, to the Gospel of Jesus Christ?

Failures there are aplenty – child abuse that makes the headlines, the murmurings of one unhappy person to another about goings on of the vicar or warden or worship leader (the sort of thing that C S Lewis so eloquently wrote about in Letters to Screwtape), the snide comments (often economical with the truth) that go unchallenged. There’s no shortage of failures.

But Jesus says again and again: I give you a new commandment. Love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

Please God it should be so in our Cathedral, our Diocese, our Church.