May 2, 2004
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the University Baptist Church, Seattle, Washington
Fifty or sixty years ago, a person like me probably would not be standing here preaching the sermon this morning. There would have been normative boundaries and understood barriers that kept people apart and separated from appreciating and enjoying each other’s gifts and lives. And for the most part, everybody would have understood this reality and never question it. We all knew our proper places. It’s like San Francisco is very far away and different from Seattle.
At a Pastoral Leadership Conference held in the SF Bay Area a few years ago, I met your pastor, Tim Phillips. And every time our paths crossed, we dreamt about an opportunity for me to preach at University Baptist. Only when we were outside of our particular local situations whether it was at a pastoral leadership conference or at last year’s biennial in Richmond, Virginia, we were then able to break free of our perceived boundaries that kept us in our particular places.
I thank Tim and you for extending your invitation to me to bring the Good News of Jesus Christ on this first Sunday in May and to bring San Francisco closer to Seattle. I look forwarded to being in fellowship with you and praise God for granting me this opportunity to share this morning.
Peter’s Dream
In our Scriptures for this morning in Acts 11, we hear that Peter was summarizing step by step what has just happened to him. He had a dream too. He had this amazing dream that he couldn’t believe at first. While he was hungry and wanted something to eat, he felled asleep and saw the heaven opened up and something like a large sheet was lowered down by its four corners. But inside this sheet were four-footed creatures, beasts of prey, and reptiles, and birds of the air—all the things that Peter thought were profane and unclean to eat. Christ told him that what God has made clean, you must not call profane.
Afterward Peter realized that the dream was not really about “unclean animals,” it was really about “unclean people.” The Gentiles, thought to be unclean, outside the promises of God, are brought into those promises. This is a part of God’s plan that cannot be thwarted. We can’t hinder God’s plan either.
What we have here is that the Jerusalem church authorities questioned why Peter went to Joppa and Caesarea outside of Jerusalem to fellowship and eat with the “uncircumcised” Gentiles. Perhaps the church thought that the good news was just for them. Perhaps they thought that it was enough for the living Christ to transform the lives of just a few people and gather them into a congregation of like-minded souls. So they criticized Peter saying, “Why did you go to the uncircumcised men and eat with them?” It’s like, “What were you thinking about, Tim, when you invite Don Ng from San Francisco to preach this morning?”
Easter is not over. The living power of God continues to break down boundaries, leap over walls, defeat deadly restrictions. The world might want this, but Tim and I don’t want to be strangers.
With Peter’s testimony, the church in Acts must be dragged, kicking and screaming, into evangelism and mission. Peter reported everything that happened to him step by step—first it was the dream he had and then he reported that there were three men sent by Cornelius, a Roman, Gentile, army officer and even a member of the occupation forces in Jerusalem who also received a visit from the Holy Spirit.
When Peter was speaking with Cornelius and his household, he witnessed the Holy Spirit descending upon this Gentile just like the disciples experienced at the beginning of their commission. Peter wondered if the same Holy Spirit has come to Cornelius that came to them, then how can he hinder God’s plan? So Peter ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. When Peter’s hearers heard this, they were all amazed about their growing church, “God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.” (Vs. 18)
On Strange Ground
Our church in San Francisco is almost 125 years old. Next year, 2005, we will have a big celebration. We have this old brick building built with “clinker” bricks—burned bricks from the 1906 SF earthquake and fire. With all of this history and a heavy-looking building, you can say that it’s very easy for us to be hunkered down, to keep house with those that we already have rather than to reach out to those who do not have.
The church in Acts is the church of every age, our age as well as Peter’s age. Though it’s the nature of the church to reach out, it’s also our nature to hunker down and put up boundaries to keep only some people in.
At our church, we also like things to be the way they are. But what we see in Peter’s dream and how God has revealed himself to Cornelius, a Gentile; the church finds itself on strange ground. It is only when we find ourselves willing and open to move into unfamiliar and strange places would we remain faithful in being Christ’s church.
When he was in a strange city, Peter had a strange dream that was from God. He went to the Gentiles-strangers and the uncircumcised, not of his own design, but through the leading of God.
When the women went to the cemetery on the Easter morning with familiar and common spices to keep the dead in its place, they met a stranger who is the Lord himself. On the road to Emmaus, the two disciples didn’t recognized Jesus and even thought that he was the only stranger in Jerusalem who did not know what had happened in the past few days. On the beach when the disciples had resumed their fishing jobs, they thought that Jesus was a stranger until he performed another miracle for them.
It is easy for us to assume that we already know Jesus in our lives. We have been going to church all of our lives. But it seems that when we are meeting the stranger, like Peter did with Cornelius, we see God’s good news is for the whole world.
We naturally want the familiar, but God is calling the church to be on strange ground. The Easter message is calling us to go beyond what we are used to, hunkered down in and to go outside to strange places filled with strange people. You see, God has also promised them the living Christ and salvation too.
Good News to Strangers
At our church in San Francisco, we are constantly trying to reach out to the stranger. As largely comprised of Chinese Americans with great emphasis on family traditions, we can easily become too close knitted in only inviting those who are like us, who look like us, and believe like us. One of the gifts from God that we celebrate is that our church is bilingual and bicultural where we value and celebrate both English-speaking and Cantonese-speaking members. Most of us can’t fully understand what the other is saying. But this built-in “strangeness” enables us on an ongoing basis to see that God is working in the lives of others as we believe that God is working in us too.
The resurrected Christ doesn’t tell us to believe and now you are immortal and live forever. The Christ tells us to go and tell others about what we have witnessed. Peter may have only wanted to keep Jesus among the few selected disciples, but Christ comes to him with a dream to include everyone. The Jerusalem church may have thought that only Jews can become Christians, but the Holy Spirit descended on Cornelius and his household just like it did on the disciples.
If our faith doesn’t go and tell the Christian faith, then we are not sharing the good news to the stranger. We are not a church on strange ground and perhaps too hunkered down for our own good.
One of the major impediments to evangelism today is our lack of faith in the church. We are in danger of failing to sense the great wonder of the church in the world in which we live today.
We are a group pf people, gathered not as the world gathers, on the basis of race, gender, social class, or economic condition. But instead, look at us—we are a church made up of friends who were once strangers. This is a wonder.
In a society where there is great loneliness, a group of people who have gathered to feel someone else’s pain more than their own, could take responsibility for people who are not in their immediate family. This is a strange and miraculous thing. What we do here is not happening all over town. Sometimes congregations don’t realize what a gift they have. Here’s a group of people who care for and about another. This gift, the gift of this congregation, the Body of Christ gathered here, ought to be shared. You love the stranger enough to invite me to share with you this morning.
There’s a story about a young, single parent mother who brought her son to Sunday school every week. The pastor asked the mother why they come so faithfully. The mother said, “He is smart enough to realize what is going on here.”
“What do you mean by that? The pastor asked.
“The other day he said to me, ‘Mom, I like going to Sunday school, because it is the only time an adult ever relates to me who is not paid to do it. In school, at soccer practice, everywhere else, somebody is paid to look after us. In Sunday school, it is done for free, it is done for love.’”
Sometimes it takes a child like that to remind us of what a wonder the church really is. In the simplest, most ordinary ways, the church is a sign, a signal, and a witness that something is going on in the world, something odd and strange, something different and wonderful.
Think about why you come to church on Sunday. It’s the only place you go during the week where:
*You are asked to ponder about matters that are deep, important, and demanding.
*You are encouraged to take responsibility for someone beyond the bounds of your immediate family.
*Your children are loved and adopted by people who are not even your children’s relatives.
*You are known by your first name and you are missed when you are absent.
*You are treated as valuable worthy human beings, despite your income or your address.
*There is always talk about our individual and social failures, our culture’s weaknesses, and our sin.
*You hear us talk about things that are usually avoided in most of our everyday speech and daily relationships; namely, God.
*You participate in beautiful music, in a beautiful setting; made available to you simply for the love of God.
*You receive Christ’s forgiveness for your sins and full acceptance back to a loving community who welcome you just the way you are.
When we do this strange and miraculous thing that we call the church that is not happening all over town, to whom in Seattle is God calling you to share the good news of Jesus Christ? Who needs to share the same kind of wonderful gifts, services, and challenges that we receive week after week.
I know that at our church in San Francisco, we are called to share Christ with those who have less than we have, to those who are outcasts and lost in life, to those who are caught up with chasing after the American dream only to wake up with a nightmare, to those who not Asian American so that our church can become more like the Body of Christ where both Peter and Cornelius can worship together.
Receiving the Stranger
There’s a World War II story in France that you might have heard before about some soldiers who brought the body of a dead comrade to a cemetery to have him buried. The priest gently asked whether their friend had been baptized Catholic. The soldiers did not know. The priest sadly informed them that in that case, he could not permit burial in the church yard.
So the soldiers dug a grave just outside the cemetery fence. And they laid their comrade to rest. The next day the soldiers came back to add some flowers—only to discover that the grave was nowhere to be found.
Bewildered they were about to leave when the priest came up to speak to them. It seems that he could not sleep the night before, so troubled was he by his refusal to bury the soldier in the parish cemetery. So early in the morning he left his bed, and with his own hands, he moved the fence—in order to include the body of the soldier who was buried only the night before outside the cemetery.
There may be times when truth demands that we build some fences. But God’s grace and mercy for all creation demands that sometimes the fences that we build be flexible.
One of the perhaps unconscious reasons why I accepted your invitation to preach at University Baptist today is because it was on June 12, 1930 that my father, age 17 and his brother, age 16 first arrived in America by landing on the President Grover Cleveland in Seattle. He was a stranger in a foreign land. The fence of immigration was made more flexible to welcome my father to his new country.
With the power of the Holy Spirit who comes to people transforming strangers into friends, we are no longer strangers anymore but friends in Christ. Easter is not over. The living power of God continues to break down boundaries of racism, leap over the walls of ignorance, and defeat the deadly restrictions that separate us from being sisters and brothers in Christ Jesus who died on the cross so that we all may have eternal life. Let us be a wonderfully strange church in the name of Christ for the whole world!
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, push us out beyond the safe confines of our cozy congregations. Call us like you called Peter to go outside his circle of friends and to invite the stranger to come in. Restore to us the great adventure of the good news to tell others about the love of Christ and how he makes family out of strangers. Give us the courage to follow your leading, wherever it takes us, even among people we don’t want to meet and places we don’t want to go. Lord, it is in these new and strange places will we find you there. Amen.