Whether We Like It Or Not

Whether We Like It Or Not--May 9, 2019

Then Peter began to speak to them: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ—he is Lord of all. That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” [Acts 10:34-43]
The news of Easter is not a sales pitch or a bargain to be struck. It's a declaration of something that is already true, done and accomplished.

Listen to Peter on the subject if you don't believe me. Peter doesn't sound like he's selling anything. There is no deal proposed, no tit-for-tat, sign-on-the-dotted-line move to "win" Cornelius or make him a notch on a spiritual bedpost. In fact, there doesn't seem to be any talk of what "I get out of the deal" for believing in Jesus until the very last sentence.

Instead, Peter presents the news of Jesus first and foremost as a story of what God already has done. Jesus did these things—healing, doing good, dying, rising—and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Whether you like it or not, Jesus has been sent by God for the sake of "peace," Luke tells us. Whether we can believe it or not, he is alive again. And whether we completely understand what it means or not, he is Lord, and has brought about the upside-down rule of God in which the last are made first, the poor are the blessed, and the dead are raised. Peter's first move is not to sell Cornelius a religious product or dangle the carrot of heaven or wave the stick of hellfire in front of him. In fact, that is never Peter's move in this speech. There is no looming question, "If you were to die tonight, Cornelius, where would you wake up?" And there is no pitch for Cornelius to make Jesus his personal Lord, since Peter seems to believe that whether we like it or not, Jesus is already currently "Lord of all" by virtue of his resurrection.

This is all quite different from so much of the talk out there floating in the religious airwaves about how to share the Good News. Peter tells it like it is--Peter seems to believe that the universe is a different place already because of what God has done in Jesus, and his role is to invite Cornelius into the movement of what God has done. And in particular, what God has done is to mend the world's broken places through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Peter knows already that Cornelius is a man of some faith--that he has been a prayerful person and was clearly seeking more about God. So Peter takes that and runs with it, not trying to prove that there is a God, nor to prove that Jesus is God, nor to prove that the Scriptures are infallible, but to carry on with the story of the God Cornelius already knows something about. It's a rather different sermon than on the day of Pentecost or back when Peter was in front of the authorities earlier in Acts, which means that there is no cookie cutter formula for sharing the Good News. There is no simple 1-2-3 formula or recipe or set of directions, and there is no requirement that the Good News be packaged like a deal in which "you do your part" so that, in response, "God will do God's part." (This is because, to be honest, God isn't so cheap or needy as to try and strike a bargain as if God needed something in return--deal-making, it turns out, is something of a sign of weakness and need compared to unconditional giving.) Instead, there is this wide open invitation to be a part of the motion God has already begun, to be a part of what God has already done.

Reading through this whole sermon and knowing that the very next thing to happen in the story is the pouring out of the Holy Spirit on those who were gathered to hear Peter, you almost have to wonder where all the familiar trappings of evangelism are—where is the invitation for Cornelius to pray and invite Jesus into his heart? Where is any talk of repentance? Where is any mention of the responsibilities of church life? Why hasn't Peter tried to close the deal with a promise about going to heaven when you die? And why isn't there a single mention of making Jesus your personal anything? Unless perhaps all those staples of popular religion in our day miss the point—if we really do believe that faith is God's gift to us, and if we really do believe that we are received into God's new community completely by God's grace toward us, then it shouldn't surprise us that God doesn't wait for someone to sign on the dotted line first to become a believer. It is God who acts first, to pull Cornelius and everyone else in the room to faith. It is God who gives the Holy Spirit—not just when we've prayed a prayer or asked for the Spirit or felt sorry for our sin—but as a pre-emptive first strike on our walled-in and insulated selves. It is God who sent Jesus and raised Jesus, it is God who set up this meeting between Cornelius and Peter, and it is also God who kindles faith in Cornelius rather than wait around for him to get it right or to ask for it first. That is precisely what it means to say that God is Lord of all, anyway.

Now in all fairness, often Lutherans like me live under the impression that since we don't "do evangelism" the way the popular religious voices on television and the radio do it, then we must not care about evangelism at all. We sometimes assume that since we don't do the altar call or talk in the language of "making Jesus your savior" that we must not really be interested in sharing the Good News of Jesus with others who have never heard the story and have never learned the news that God has loved us to the point of death and invited us into a new relationship and new community. But perhaps Peter's example tells us that there are more possibilities than the radio religion would allow. Perhaps Peter's example gives us a new—and yet really ancient—way of sharing the Good News, a way that is centered in what God does rather than in what we do. Perhaps Peter would dare us simply to retell the story of our faith, the story of what God has done for us, the same story that invites us to be part of what God is doing, and the same story that holds out the promise of what God will do.

God of all nations, give us the capacity to see your Spirit reaching out to all in this day, and give us an awareness of your generosity so that we will share your Good News as a free gift to be received—the way you have meant it to be—rather than a deal we must sign up for.