In the name of the Risen Jesus. Amen.
Let’s say that I’ve booked a table for you tonight at your favorite restaurant – doesn’t matter where, I’ve taken care of the reservation, flight, and hotel. So if you want to go to Rome, Paris, New York, wherever, we’re ready for you. I’ll even pick up the bill for dinner. The catch is that I get to choose who you have dinner with. And who is it that would make you say, “Thanks, but no thanks. Not worth it”? Maybe a former boss that you can’t stand, someone you used to be married to, the kid who bullies you in school, a political figure who repulses you?
For whatever reason, we all have people that we don’t want to break bread with. And maybe you’re a better person than I am and are thinking, “Not me, I’m willing to sit down with anyone.” Well, maybe that’s the case. But before the main course arrives, you’ll be thinking “This really isn’t worth it.” This sense of moral outrage, disgust, and division isn’t a new phenomenon. Peter and the apostles lived in the same world of having to deal with annoying and flawed human beings that you and I live in.
For us, the divisions are generally around preferred parenting styles, politics, and the choices we make as consumers. For Peter, the issue was different – it was about the purity of identity. We heard Peter’s compelling testimony to the Holy Spirit’s power to transcend boundaries and assumptions, and he was immediately challenged on this. The other believers said, “Why did you go and eat with them?”
We do love our rules, don’t we? And this isn’t just about people being closed-minded, legalistic, or rigid. Because even the most open-minded people are only open-minded if you are open about the things they are open about. It can be so hard for us to break out of the realm of rules and traditions. Look, I’m up here wearing clothing that no one wears anywhere else, leading prayers that are centuries old, and credentialed by an ancient and often bureaucratic institution. I’m not anti-tradition, at all. Rules, standards, and traditions are all very helpful guardrails that keep us from getting too far away from community or from becoming too extreme in our viewpoints and actions. Tradition gives us our identity; it is what makes us, us. And rules so often keep us safe – whether it’s rules about what is safe to eat, or how fast to drive, or what sort of medicines to take.
So please, don’t hear Peter’s, or my, words as saying that we can just eliminate the rules and reject tradition. Not at all. The issue is that sometimes we follow the rules more than the rule-giver. Sometimes we focus on keeping the tradition while forgetting what the tradition is all about. Sometimes we end up serving God instead of knowing God. And sometimes, the rules that we follow, the boundaries that we draw, the traditions that we keep become barriers to the movement of the Holy Spirit. And when that happens, we lose the thread. When we no longer allow ourselves to change our minds, or try new things, or welcome greater diversity, we end up rejecting the movement of the Holy Spirit. And that’s when our rules and traditions become impediments to the Gospel and must be rejected.
That is what we read about in Acts. Peter says, “The Holy Spirit told me to go.” Beloved, when the Holy Spirit tells us to go, go we must. It doesn’t matter that the Holy Spirit was telling Peter to go outsiders, to those their rules called “unclean.” If the Holy Spirit told Peter to go to them, and eat with them, and baptize them, but the rules said that isn’t allowed, then what needs to change are the rules, not the command to “go.”
Peter wasn’t supposed to eat with Gentiles, but the Holy Spirit nudged him to transgress that boundary, and he did. Today, we’re having a parish picnic and so we get to follow this command of the Lord – eat. Isn’t it great when the Holy Spirit tells us to eat? So, eat up, and who knows what holy conversations the Spirit will stir up as we gather in beloved community.
Those around Peter accused him of breaking the rules, of extended grace where it shouldn’t be extended, of welcoming those into the faith who weren’t seen as pure enough, or like us enough, to be included. And so Peter says, “What else was I supposed to do? Who am I that I could hinder God?”
As you know, there are a lot of people who feel like the rules of the Church have excluded them and make them feel unclean and less than: single parents, those who are divorced, those with criminal records, those with lots of tattoos, those who can’t spell the word “Episcopal,” those who don’t have a permanent address to list on our welcome cards, those who are neurodivergent, those who are in the grips of addiction, those who are transgender or uncertain of their gender, those who don’t speak English with the same fluidity that many of us do, those who aren’t sure what they believe, those who grew up in traditions very different than ours and don’t know what a Prayer Book is, those who know what it is to walk into a room and be the only person with their skin color. Sometimes it is intentional, but most of the time it is unintentional, that our traditions, norms, assumptions, expectations, and rules prevent us from extending the message of God’s grace to a hurting, anxious, and adrift world.
I mentioned in last Sunday’s sermon that a new book called “The Big Relief” has helped me to think about the Grace of God as relief – relief from the pressure to always be on, to always get everything right, to follow all the rules, and meet all the expectations. Grace is the relief of knowing that we are not defined by our mistakes, that there is always hope for restoration and redemption, that we are loved, dignified, and blessed by God not because we’ve deserved it but because God is love and loves us unconditionally and limitlessly. Grace is the relief from having to make our own meaning, discover our own truth, or make our lives worth something. Instead, Grace relieves us to enjoy the gift of life without fear or reservation, because love really is making all things well and love really is the greatest of all things; it is the pearl of great price that makes even the poorest person rich.
On this Children’s and Youth Sunday – this message of Grace is what I want to make sure comes across to our younger members. There are so many social rules and norms that you all are having to navigate. It can feel like you’re always being judged. You all are dealing with technology that we, adults, have given you and we don’t even begin to understand. You are living in a culture where things change so fast, and you’re always connected and it’s so hard to know what is true and right. You have influencers and advertisers constantly trying to get your attention, your likes, your money. And the way the entertainment industry and social media work, you receive the message that you have to constantly keep trying to be good enough, but you’ll never get there.
What I want you to hear is: that’s a bunch of garbage. Each of you are so precious, so valued, so awesome, so loved. The truest thing about you, the deepest part of your identity, the thing that the world can never take away from you is that you are God’s chosen and beloved child, forever and always and no matter what.
Yes, you’re going to make mistakes, but the Church is a place where you are already forgiven and we’re always so excited to have you here, no matter what. No matter what the rules of social media say, no matter what others say about you at school, no matter what grades your teacher gives you – you are enough. And, on that point, I’m not just talking to our young people – Grace declares that you are enough, and so is everyone else you encounter. What God has made clean and loved, you must not call profane or not enough.
Perhaps you’ve noticed a lot of new stores popping up around town. A lot of them have interesting names: Flora Distro, Rawganic, Apotheca, Crowntown, Higher Ark. Now, before the rumors start to fly, I haven’t yet visited any of them. These are cannabis dispensaries – and, really, they’re cutting into our market as the Church. We’re supposed to be in the relief business, but, sadly, the Church for too long as been in the burden and boundary business. We’ve focused too much on the rules of belonging and resource accumulation, and we’ve forgotten that the Church is a place where it’s okay to not be okay, where you don’t have to have things together or figured out to belong, where it’s perfectly acceptable, even preferable, to be lost. And we’ve forgotten that our purpose isn’t to maintain and preserve a tradition, it’s to give away the Good News of Grace. In other words, we’re supposed to be dispensary of relief. But because we seem to be out of stock on relief, people are looking elsewhere.
In that book I referenced, David Zahl writes, “You can find community at a bar. You can find self-realization in therapy. You can find tradition in Nepal. You can find wholesomeness in Utah. You can find political exhortation, well, everywhere. What you find in the Christian faith that you cannot find elsewhere is… the Big Relief of God’s saving grace – which is to say, the gospel of Jesus Christ…. Things may look different than they have in the past, but wherever the church embraces its role as a dispensary of grace, delivering the goods week after week, life abounds. Communities that keep their focus vertical – that is, on the God who dispenses relief – invariably flourish.”
Beloved, we have been given the greatest gift in the world – the relief of knowing that we are loved by God. And the best thing to do with this gift is to give it away lavishly. By dispensing this love, letting it flow through our lives, we’ll find just how abundant and amazing Grace is.
