A New Kind of Humanity--April 24, 2025

A New Kind of Humanity--April 24, 2025

Peter began to speak to [the people]: “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)

Long story short, the resurrection means God is making a new kind of humanity, not defined by a common language, culture, skin color, geography, ethnicity, or nationality, but gathered in the risen Jesus.

Now, that might seem to be a pretty big leap.  How do we get from "The tomb of Jesus of Nazareth the Jewish rabbi was found empty three days after his death" to "All tribes, ethnic groups, and nations are being welcomed into the people of God now"?  Even if you remember hearing these words read this past Sunday in worship (as many of us did this past Easter), it might not seem obvious.  So let's follow Peter's train of thought and see what's going on, because it really is an astonishing claim.  To hear Peter (and honestly, the rest of the New Testament) tell it, the resurrection of Jesus is not just an amazing one-time miracle for Jesus, but in fact the beginning of a whole new creation... and a new kind of humanity.

This moment from the tenth chapter of Acts is one of those "Aha!" epiphanies for Peter--yes, the same Simon Peter who had been a fisherman before Jesus called him to be a disciple, the same one who had denied even knowing Jesus on the night of his arrest, and the same one who had been rehabilitated to become a leading voice after the resurrection and the Spirit's outpouring at Pentecost.  Peter had been led by the Holy Spirit to bring the news of Jesus to a Roman centurion named Cornelius, someone who would have been ethnically non-Jewish (he was from the "Italian Cohort" and was Gentile) and also an officer in the army of the enemy occupying empire.  Peter practically had to be dragged kicking and screaming into this arrangement, because he had been taught from his childhood on up that there were good and righteous people like him, and there were unclean and unrighteous people like THEM, just as there were clean and unclean foods. But when he finally gets to Cornelius' house and tells the whole household the story of Jesus' death and resurrection and the growing community of his disciples, the Holy Spirit descends on Cornelius and his whole family, and they all come to faith in Jesus and are baptized on the spot.  And in that whole scene, Peter realizes that God had been the One orchestrating the whole meeting, and that it had been the Holy Spirit provoking him to share the story of Jesus with this Gentile foreigner, even in spite of his resistance.

That leads to the literal exclamation on Peter's lips: "I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation everyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him!"  And then he proceeds to trace all the steps of that realization--how he had witnessed Jesus' ministry, healing, and preaching "peace," how Jesus had been put to death, how he rose from the tomb, and now how he had been sent by the Spirit to bring the invitation to everyone the Spirit sent across their path that they could be a part of the Jesus-community.  And that's when Peter gets it: the same Spirit who worked throughout Jesus' life and ministry was now the same One actively leading him to Cornelius, and surely the Holy Spirit knew full well that Cornelius was one of "those people"--those outsider Gentiles with the "wrong" background, language, culture, nationality, and heritage.  It was the Spirit of God who had empowered Jesus and then raised him from the dead who was now reaching out to include all kinds of people in the disciple-community, so who was Peter to argue with the Holy Spirit?

And that's really when it began to dawn on the whole early church that the resurrection of Jesus was actually the beginning of a new kind of human community.  Once it was clear that the God of resurrection was the same One gathering in outsiders along insiders to become followers of Jesus, they understood that the church was meant to be different: we were a community defined, not by the sameness of our DNA or a common set of geographic borders, but from all tribes, nations, cultures, places, and peoples.  Belonging did not require same-ness any longer, and there was no language requirement or color line for membership.  It was downright revolutionary, and it was happening, right before Peter and Cornelius' eyes.

This is the community we have been brought into: the church is a people that includes every culture, speaks every language, recognizes no national borders, and honors every ethnicity, race, skin color, and hair texture, because God has it in mind gather folks from everywhere.  Unlike the empire of which Cornelius was a part (and thus unlike every empire ever since), the community called church doesn't require one group to dominate everyone else or to put itself over all the rest. The church is designed by God to be genuinely diverse, inherently inclusive of people from every nation and language, and committed to the equity of welcome to all those whom the Spirit draws.  It is a foretaste of the new creation where every nation under heaven finds a place at God's table. It is meant to be the beginnings of a new way of being human--together.

Any time we reduce the Easter story to being just good news for Jesus, or tell ourselves that the promise of resurrection life is just for "me and my group," we sell the Gospel short and miss what Peter finally realized.  The good news of Easter doesn't end with a Sunday morning, but pushes forward into God's future, in which all peoples from all places will find that they belong.

Who might that lead us to welcome today?  Who might we need to make the effort to invite and include?

Lord Jesus, make of us your new humanity, as we are, while we trust we will become your new creation.