May 13, 2012
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
We live in a world of boundaries. Our ancient ancestors thought boundaries were necessary to keep out the Huns when they built the Great Wall. Boundaries can mean different things to different people. There is a wall going up dividing Palestine and Israel. Israelis argue that the wall is to keep people safe. Palestinians argue that this wall keeps them from their jobs, their olive tree fields, their families. We have our own boundaries in the U.S.—the US/Mexican border.
But some boundaries are more subtle. Boundaries are a part of our identity and help us know who we are in relation to other people. If you see someone wearing the Blue and Gold, you’d know the person is a fan of Cal or the Black and Orange, you are now in the land of the Giants! We have a subtle boundary or maybe it’s actually quite explicit when our church name is the “First Chinese Baptist Church.”
Some boundaries aren’t immediately apparent. Sometimes you need to understand cultural contexts to spot them—from clothing to the cars we drive to the neighborhoods in which we live—there are all sorts of boundaries that help us to figure out who we are and help us to figure out how we relate to others. In Marin County, a BMW means “basic Marin wheels!”
Some boundaries are natural. Mountains are pretty effective borders, as are rivers and oceans. The western boundary of California is as ragged as the Pacific Ocean and its eastern boundary is as arbitrary as a straight line. But some boundaries are just literally lines in the sand.
Boundaries are not all bad. They keep us safe like the pedestrian crosswalk on a busy San Francisco street. But they are illusory to a degree. We might, for example, feel safer with a big fence running along the length of our southern border, but the reality is that borders don’t keep everything out. Despite our best efforts, swine flu made it across!
Peter and Cornelius
The short lesson we read today, Acts 10:44-48, a mere 5 verses is set in a larger context of the entire book of Acts. In Acts 1:8, the risen Jesus declares, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” So we see that Chapters 1-7 focus on Jerusalem and Judea, Chapter 8 on Samaria, and Chapters 9-28 on “the ends of the earth.” Acts narrates an ever-expanding mission of God covering new territory. It embraces first Jewish, then Gentile, then all people for God’s purposes. We’ll see that God is at work in bringing Cornelius, Peter and the Holy Spirit together.
In Chapter 10, the Gentile Cornelius has a vision to send for Peter, while Peter has a vision that all foods are clean. Cornelius sends his agents to Peter’s house to take him to Cornelius where they share hospitality and exchange their accounts of their respective previous visions. Peter preaches and the Holy Spirit is poured out on these Gentiles. Peter baptizes Cornelius, ate with the Gentiles and then had to explain to his Jerusalem critics what has happened.
Cornelius, a Gentile and a centurion in the Italian cohort, is introduced as a devout man who feared God. The description of “fearing God” is repeated to describe Cornelius to indicate that there were a group of Gentiles who were not full converts to Judaism, but who nevertheless participated in synagogues and followed the teaching and practices of Jewish traditions. Cornelius and his household faithfully represented this group when he practiced almsgiving and prayer, which are pleasing to God. Above all, despite his terror as a Roman soldier who kept the peace, he was open and receptive to the interventions of God and acted accordingly in summoning Peter.
Meanwhile, Peter, who has been the main leadership figure in the opening chapters of Acts when the mission of Jesus was spreading among the Jewish people, is now instructed by divine intervention—three times—that God has made everything clean. Initially, Peter resisted this vision to customary lines of cultural and theological divisions. But through God’s intervention, Peter came to understand God’s plan when he preached and said, “God shows no partiality” (10:34). God is the one who sends, anoints, and ordains. Jesus Christ is the judge of the living and the dead and is the agent of God’s forgiveness.
It was almost like God told Peter you can’t just stay in Acts 1-7, you have to go to Chapter 8 and 9 until the very end with chapter 28—to the ends of the earth.
For Peter and Cornelius, boundaries helped them navigate their world. Each of them came from cultures with clearly defined boundaries and expectations. It appears that the earliest practices of Jesus followers were to keep the boundaries, the distinctions in place. If you were a Jew who followed Jesus, you hung out with other Jews who followed Jesus. If you were a Gentile, you hung out with other Gentile converts.
Are we that different today? We tend to gather with people with whom we can identify. When we think of Peter and Cornelius, don’t think of this as just history. Think of this story as here and now.
Holy Spirit
In our passage, Peter was in the middle of giving his sermon when the Holy Spirit “fell upon all who heard the word.” It is as if, having kept the mystery of Gentile inclusion secret through the ages, the Holy Spirit suddenly becomes unwilling to wait a moment longer. God wasn’t going to allow Peter to finish his sermon and the impatient Spirit cuts him off mid-sentence.
When the Gentile believers started to speak in tongues and extolling God, Peter said, “Can anyone withhold the water of baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” They didn’t want to rush into doing something like this, but what can they do? So Peter ordered the Gentiles to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ and he stayed with these new Christians for several days. The Holy Spirit helped Peter leap over the boundaries that were in place.
When the leaders in Jerusalem got wind of the fact that Peter had baptized a Roman centurion, they were really upset (Acts 11). Peter had some explaining to do.
“Why did you go to these Gentiles and break bread with them?’ they wanted to know. After all, that which keeps Israel Israel are the dietary laws, the kosher laws that enable Israel to carefully discern between faithful Jews and these unfaithful, pork-eating, unclean Gentiles. Now, this time-honored boundary that has preserved Israel through thick and thin; this protective wall that has kept Israel as Israel, is being breached by Peter who fraternizes with these unclean Gentiles. How did it happen?
Peter’s explanation is simple: the Holy Spirit made him leapt over the boundaries. Peter told the questioning church authorities that no sooner had he told the story of Jesus to these Gentiles than the Holy Spirit descended upon them, so dramatically and undeniably that he couldn’t think of any reason not to baptize them.
While clearly it is the Holy Spirit who is the driving action in this story, Peter is the essential witness to all that takes place. He has to be present and come along willingly because the inclusion of the Gentiles will demand the conversion of the church, starting with Peter. Peter’s testimony will get the church off dead center to pave the way for the church council’s sympathetic hearing of Paul’s appeal in Chapter 15.
FCBC Leaping Over Boundaries
This is a stunning moment in the history of the church. The church marvels at the ability of the Holy Spirit to leap over all boundaries, to embrace those who are on the outside and bring them into the household of God’s grace, and to take the church to places we would have never gone without the push and pull of the Holy Spirit.
In fact, you could recount the whole history of the church, including the history of our own congregation, as a history of the pushing and prodding, the pulling and the coaxing of the Holy Spirit. When missionaries who were sent to China returned to San Francisco for rest and medical care and saw that there were many Chinese men who needed to hear the love and grace of Jesus Christ, the church leaders in New York City resisted in allocating resources to start this work. But after many letters and the Holy Spirit’s prodding, the Chinese Baptist Mission was started in 1880 to bring the Good News of Jesus Christ to these Chinese Gentiles.
When Sunset Ministry was started in 1997, there were some people who felt that we had something going pretty well in Chinatown already. Sure, we had a challenging task of seismically retrofitting these old red bricks but we were used to living within our boundaries. Why go and start another church elsewhere? But the Holy Spirit fell upon you in those days and you faithfully started a new church as well as confidently reaffirmed your historic mission in Christ in Chinatown.
Time and time again, when we have become fixed and settled in our church work, when we have too rigidly drawn our lines around the church and built walls to protect the church, the Holy Spirit has taken us by the collar and pulled us out beyond our comfort zones, thus reminding us that Jesus Christ so loved the world that he gave himself for the world, not just the church.
Why has the church spread into every corner of the globe? Why do we continue to focus and reaffirm our commitment to spread the gospel in every culture? Why do we have a missions committee that is dedicated to lead us to do mission both in Chinatown as well as around the world? It’s the Holy Spirit that enabled us to leap over boundaries.
Why is our congregation reaching out and inviting other people into our community? Why is it possible when you hear that our candidate for the Associate Pastor position on June 10th is of Cambodian American heritage to be a part of our church’s life? It is the Holy Spirit that enables us to leap over boundaries.
How is it possible for English-speaking and Chinese-speaking, San Francisco-speaking and Boston-speaking, Cantonese-speaking and Toisan-speaking, city-dwellers and suburban-dwellers, younger and older to all be members of FCBC? It’s the Holy Spirit that enabled us to leap over all these boundaries.
Worldly Boundaries
This past week, I received our election materials to prepare for the June primaries. We live in a polarized and polarizing time, don’t we? Whether we’re observing political debates or social movements or religious groups, there’s a marked tendency to take strong and absolute positions that make little room for the point of view of someone from an “opposing” perspective. There seems to be a fear that if we open ourselves, even a little, to a stand other than our own or let ourselves see things from the other’s point of view, we might lose our way or appear weak. For whatever reasons, people and groups seem largely entrenched in either/or positions that aren’t open to compromise, dialogue, or collaboration. Sadly, we see this in Washington and Sacramento. Sadly, we see this in the church too.
It’s not just politics where polarizing boundaries occur. In many ways we organize ourselves by defining differences and placing ourselves in categories reflecting those differences. We have categories on gender, sexual orientation, mental health, race—dichotomies that don’t represent the full richness of the human experience but which, instead, serve to divide us and value some while devaluing many.
From this passage in Acts 10, we believe that the Holy Spirit is enabling us to leap over these existing boundaries in order to bring us all together like how the Holy Spirit brought Cornelius and Peter together, how their households were brought together, how the Jewish Christians and the Gentile Christians came together.
When I had my sabbatical 6 years ago in Jerusalem, I lived at this ecumenical study center, Tantur located just across the street from the security entrance and sentry to Bethlehem and the Palestine. We literally walked down the path behind our dormitory, went through the door of Tantur, went across the street to show our passports to the Israeli security people to go into Palestine. I did this probably as many as 8 to 10 times. One time when I was coming back from Bethlehem and walking back into the Tantur compound, a Palestinian man walked with me as well. I asked him if he lived in Bethlehem and why was he coming into Israel. He told me he was fortunate that he could come over to work. But while we were on the Tantur compound, this man went straight to a water faucet to refresh himself. It was always hot in June and July.
This man told me that he was most grateful for Tantur to permit people like him to cross their compound to catch a mini-bus on the other side and that Tantur provided drinking water for him to do this. I was moved by this subtle but nonetheless life-giving commitment that this Christian community, pushed and pulled, prodded and coaxed by the Holy Spirit to leap over boundaries.
Listening to the voice of the Holy Spirit is not without risks. It will certainly put you in uncomfortable situations. It will cause you to reconsider. It might even get you into trouble. But it will also help you break down the boundaries that either you have built for yourself or your society has built for you.
The question for you is this: where is the Holy Spirit calling you to leap over your boundaries? Who is out there in the community, or in this congregation, that might be waiting for an invitation from you before they can cross their own borders and live into what God is dreaming for them?
The question for us, as a congregation, is how do we listen for the voice of the Holy Spirit and live into the future that God dreams for us? If we dare listen to the voice of the Spirit, we need to be ready to be disrupted. We need to be ready to not control the outcome. We need to be ready for things to change and to be different.
When boundaries seem too hard to leap over, when the walls that divide seem to be too great for us to break down, take heart that God’s Spirit will not be limited by them as we are. God’s Holy Spirit will help us overcome. A life-giving power like the Holy Spirit is not limited by borders. Butterflies float right over the top riding on the wind currents.
These walls and boundaries that seem so insurmountable to us are not insurmountable to the Holy Spirit. God’s Spirit is calling us to leap over all boundaries.
Let us pray.
God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, bless us with your presence when we gather for worship and then prod us with your presence when we go forth into the world. When we grow weary, Holy Spirit, strengthen us. When we become comfortable and complacent in our discipleship, Holy Spirit, enliven us. When we become cowardly and cautious, Holy Spirit, stiffen our resolve to leap over boundaries. This we pray in the name of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, praying in the power and prodding of the Holy Spirit. Amen.