I was fortune enough to spend the early summers of my life on the New Jersey shore. I turned five the first time my parents rented a house for July and August in Ocean City. I had an older brother and a younger sister at the time. My sister was in a play-pen most of the time, but my brother and I learned to swim in the ocean under the watchful eye of the college-age lifeguards. For me it was the beginning of a love affair with the ocean that is ongoing.
After the Second World War ended, my parents bought a house that was right on the beach. These days it would be called a "fixer-upper." Our next door neighbor in Philadelphia was a carpenter, and my father engaged him to put the house into good condition. The only heat in the house came from a fireplace in the living-room, which meant that we closed the house up at the end of September. On Memorial Day weekend, we would go to Ocean City to open up the house for the summer. I can still remember the stale musty odor that greeted us when we opened the front door after the long winter. My siblings, by then numbering five, and I would race around throwing open all the windows and the two doors on the back of the house that led onto the beach. The breeze from the ocean would come flooding into the house, replacing the mustiness with fresh salt air. I can almost smell it as I speak.
The five verses I just read from the tenth chapter of Acts describe something that happened at the conclusion of a long story. As you know, Jesus was a Jew, and his first followers were all Jewish. A short time after Jesus' death and resurrection, a Roman centurion named Cornelius who lived in Caesarea, sent one of his soldiers and two other men to Peter, one of the twelve apostles, who was staying with friends in Joppa on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea.
Peter had had a vision that this man, a Gentile, unclean to Jews, would be contacting him. In the vision Peter understood God to be telling him that the old designations clean and unclean were no longer valid. Cornelius's men asked Peter to go with them to Caesarea to the home of Cornelius. Because of his dream or vision, Peter went with the men, explaining when he got to Cornelius's home that he didn't usually associate with Gentiles, but God had prompted him to make an exception.
Cornelius and Peter had a good visit, with Peter telling Cornelius, his family and neighbors, the whole story about Jesus. I assume Peter talked about Jesus' emphasis on love rather than on religious law, but whatever Peter said, Cornelius and his household, which included more than his immediate family, received Peter's message with open hearts and open minds.
Our lectionary reading tells us that while Peter was still speaking, God's living Spirit fell on Cornelius and those assembled with him, just as that same Spirit had fallen on the Jewish disciples earlier on the day of Pentecost. The Jewish believers who had traveled to Caesarea with Peter "were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles...."
The last part of our lectionary reading tells us that Peter said, "Can anyone withhold water for baptizing these Gentiles who have received the Spirit in the same way we Jews received it?" Peter directed that they be baptized as Christians, and they asked Peter to stay with them for several days, presumably to help them understand the faith into which they had just been baptized.
Now one would expect that church headquarters back in Jerusalem would have been thrilled that membership was growing, that the good news of God's love was being received by a widening circle of people. But that's not what happened. Way back even then, before there were cell phones and email, there was a lively church grapevine, and news traveled fast. When Peter got to Jerusalem, he was met with criticism for eating with outsiders and admitting them to church membership. Peter explained what had happened, and to their great credit, the Jerusalem Christians changed their minds and attitude—something that's never easy for most people. The text tells us, "They praised God, saying, 'Then God has given even to the Gentiles the change of heart that leads to life.'"
It's like the windows and doors of the early church were thrown open so that fresh air could come in and stir things up, make everything vibrant and new.
I don't have to give you a long list of the ways many churches keep their spiritual doors and windows shut tight, resisting the cleansing winds of the Spirit that inevitable call for change. I've told some of you about the woman in Great Britain whom I asked what her church was doing to attract some of the many young people filling the sidewalks of the neighborhood, most of whom had no experience in formal worship. She almost shouted to me, "Let them learn our ways first." Not much fresh air there.
I think it's great that a teenager is our liturgist this morning and that a high school student was our soloist two weeks ago. But we can keep working to make our worship more friendly to people whose taste in music and liturgy may be different from what we are used to.
On the April Sunday evening when I was in Paris, I stayed after the 6:30 mass for the first showing of a DVD the Cathedral of Notre Dame has produced. Its title is "Notre Dame, a Living Church." It makes the case in words and pictures that there is a worshiping, serving community thriving at the heart of the French capital, that Notre Dame is more than a monument, more than a museum, more than a tourist attraction. It is a place where the Christian faith is being celebrated and discussed, even questioned. I thought it was an encouraging step in the direction of re-vitalizing a venerable religious institution that is seeking to be open to the movement of God's Spirit in 2009 and beyond.
I just finished the book I mentioned last week, Acts of Faith, by Eboo Patel, the thirty-something American Muslim, as he calls himself. He is working with young people in Chicago through his Interfaith Youth Core [sic]. He argues that while there are passages in the Qur'an that have prompted people like Osama bin Laden and the nine-eleven terrorists to act with violence and hatred, there are passages that call for harmony and community among people with significant differences. He himself is a man of peace, a Muslim who is committed to teaching young people the ways of understanding and mutual respect. He has been influenced by such window-openers as Walt Whitman, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., and Desmond Tutu.
He quotes Mahatma Gandhi as saying, "The tradition you were born into was your home, but it should be a home with the windows open so that the winds of other traditions can blow through and bring their unique oxygen." He finds inspiration in people like Nelson Mandela, who after years of unjust imprisonment invited his jailers from Robben Island to stand beside him when he was inaugurated as president of South Africa.
After reading Eboo Patel's book, I know I need to open some windows of my soul to let in some new understanding of Islam, and I need to update my thinking about Judaism, Buddhism, and the other religions of the world.
After this morning's coffee hour, I will make some observations up on the fifth floor about Presbyterian Polity, or the way we govern ourselves as Presbyterians. Our Book of Order makes these significant statements about openness:
The Church is called to a new openness to the presence of God in the Church and in the world, to a more fundamental obedience, and to a more joyous celebration in worship and work;
To a new openness to its own membership, by affirming itself as a community of diversity, becoming in fact as well as in faith a community of women and men of all ages, races, and conditions, and by providing for inclusiveness as a visible sign of the new humanity;
To a new openness to the possibilities and perils of its institutional forms in order to ensure the faithfulness and usefulness of these forms to God's activity in the world....[G-3.0401 a, b, c]
You and I know that parts of The Presbyterian Church resist such openness strenuously. We also know that such resistance is weakening, not as fast as we would like, but definitely weakening. And while I can get angry about resistance to the change that will open fully the doors of ordination to lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgendered people, I need to keep looking at myself and asking Where do I need to let the winds of God's Spirit blow through my life to shake me out of old ways of being and doing?
It's easier to let fresh ocean breezes into a closed-up house on the beach than it is to let go of what is familiar and comfortable but no longer useful to God and to our growth toward life in all its fullness. What do you need to let go of? What windows and doors do you need to open?