Acts of Revolution

Preacher: Dr Sarah Mortimer
The Fifth Sunday of Easter

10.30am

Choral Eucharist

Acts 11:1-18; John 13:31-35

Acts, says the theologian Willie Jennings, is a book of revolution.  And we miss its revolutionary nature at our peril.  For it is a book about the overturning of the old order and the creation of a new, of the breaking through of the Holy Spirit, as the work of God continues in the world.  The old imperial forces are disrupted and a new community is knitted together, casting aside borders and boundaries and human hierarchy.  The imperialism of Rome is challenged, it is being overthrown; and the diaspora of Israel is being remodeled into a Church for all nations.

But if Acts tells of revolution, that revolution is hardly the Acts of the Apostles.  From just the title, we might expect a story of heroic deeds, of men who create their own destiny, who rewrite the rules through the force of their lives.  And yet, in the book of Acts, the agency of the Apostles seems to be seriously limited.  The nominal stars of the story so often seem passive, journeying chaotically through the Mediterranean, wrestling with the problems and crises of this new age.  Even St Peter, so central to the life of the community, finds himself lost for words at times, and here in today’s reading he can scarcely explain his reasoning or argue with his critics.  Instead, he simply describes to them what has been happening, the work not of him or his colleagues, but rather of the Holy Spirit.

For Peter, it seems, has been taken by surprise by this revolution.  He had lived alongside Jesus, he had seen the risen Christ, he had been baptised with the Holy Spirit – yet still he was learning the meaning of God’s love.   We meet him in chapter 11 fresh from his vision and his encounter, where the voice from heaven had ordered him to set aside all the laws about purity and cleanliness so important to his own sense of community.   For Peter, those rules and customs had served to frame his life within the history of God’s people, a people now dispersed and scattered but unified in their laws.  To be faithful to the law was to hold on to his identity, to preserve one’s own space – and that was so important in a Roman Empire whose surface tolerance barely masked its ideological ambitions, its insistence on assimilation.  To set aside the law felt like stepping outside the space of home, risking the loss of identity, the erasure of history.   And how much more so, when Peter finds himself sent to Caesarea, to the house of a Roman centurion – straight, it seems, into that cold, unfeeling space of empire.

What Peter finds, of course, is that the Holy Spirit is in Caesarea too, that the centurion and his household share in the gifts of God, in words of praise and thanksgiving.  Peter comes to teach and to tell, but soon finds himself listening and learning, staying with his new friends to eat and sleep and talk together.  He has not lost or abandoned his heritage but is finding it anew, in a community built now not on law or custom, nor on imperial privilege and protection, but held together by the Holy Spirit and by shared prayer and praise.  Peter cannot perhaps explain this to his critics, but he offers them the evidence of his experience, of the new community which cannot be a cautious or closed diaspora but into which all are invited.  This is the new order revealed in Acts, an order the Apostles begin to glimpse as they find themselves drawn outwards, into the lives and loves and homes of others.

The Apostles are not the agents of this transformation, but they recognise what is at work.  It is a continuation of what they have learned from Jesus, when he told them to love one another as he had loved them.  This, he had said, was the true hallmark of a community’s identity, by this people would know who were Jesus’s disciples; only this bond of mutual love could truly hold them together – whatever the pressures of culture or empire, and even through physical absence.   When Jesus had said these words to them they had been huddled together, wary of the darkness outside, but now they were finding that the love that united them could not be contained.  Instead, it led them outwards, to new people and new encounters, to strangers who soon became friends.

The revolution taking place in Acts is dramatic, of cosmic significance.  And yet it is also quiet, understated – a meeting of Roman and Jew to talk and to eat together. Sociologists and historians associate revolution with mass movements, with changing social and political structures – often through violence and conflict.  But the events in Acts are often small scale, the sharing of goods with those in need, the moments of unexpected hospitality, and of openness to the presence of God.  Even fleeting conversations can have life-changing meaning, when people find through the gospel the willingness to love and be loved,.  Though love and grace they are knitted together one by one into this new way of being, into this Church.   And so the Church and the community grow, through the unstoppable force of a thousand acts of kindness and grace - acts done by the Apostles, for the Apostles, and by men and women on the edge of the narrative but no less crucial to it.

For Acts is a book of hope for all of us, inviting us to share in this ongoing process of transformation, of peoples and communities brought together through the flow of God’s love.    Peter and his friends, old and new, learn to see their lives as part of God’s story, a story told in the Old Testament and continuing into the present, a story carried by the scriptures, by the community, by the Holy Spirit.    As they find their place in that story they allow it to unfold, breaking through global boundaries of culture and empire, even as it brings neighbours and families closer together.   In our world of borders and barriers, of aspirations to imperialism old and new, that story must still continue, as God calls all God’s children to live in love together.  And we too must discover that those stiff structures of containment and oppression can and will give way, when people have the courage to step over and across them with the grace that God gives. The Apostles’ revolution is also our revolution, a revolution that will not end until that final reconciliation of all things. 

And if we wonder how to recognize the revolution, how to know if we are part of it, then we need only turn back to Jesus’s words in John’s gospel, to his great command of love. It is a command whose power is revealed so fully in the cross and resurrection, but which is reflected too in every moment of genuine openness and care. For it is when we have love for God and for each other that we live as Jesus’s disciples, and that we too come to share in the revolution.