Acts 11:1-18; John 13:31-35
It took an act of God–a movement of the Holy Spirit–to bring Peter and Cornelius together. It took a wild vision full of disturbing imagery and a shocking command repeated three times to a stunned Peter. It took an angel appearing to Cornelius. It took three messengers and a journey. It took the whoosh of the Spirit descending upon an entire household. All that–a vision, an angel, a journey, a whoosh–just to bring two people together.
Peter described the work of the Spirit in great detail to his friends. He didn’t say anything about having a meal with Cornelius, but we know that happened, because it was what shocked his friends the most. Only after hearing the whole story did his friends begin to see the meal not as an abomination but as an act of God.
It was a defining moment for the early church. Throughout Jesus’ ministry, all through the gospels, we hear a question being asked: is Jesus’ message meant to bring comfort and hope to his people, or is it meant for the entire world? In this story, the question is answered: It is for all people–Jews and Gentiles, circumcised and uncircumcised.
As the early church awakened to this answer, they struggled to figure out how they could be two peoples and one community. Strict dietary laws were an important way Jewish people remembered their relationship with God and experienced their own identity; that sense of identity was especially important for them since their land was occupied by Rome. The dietary laws meant that Jews and Gentiles didn’t eat together. It took a wild vision and a triple command from God to allow Peter to accept Cornelius’s hospitality. It was a meal that changed everything.
To us, this story may seem quaint. Of course God wants us to eat with everyone. An extravagant welcome is at the heart of our faith. We are Open and Affirming. We open the doors of our sanctuary to other congregations; we transformed Edwards Hall into a place of welcome for people of many spiritual traditions. We have heard the message at the heart of this story, and we are committed to it.
In this church, we may not need dramatic acts of the Holy Spirit to convince us that God’s love and God’s table are for everyone. We do need the Spirit to help us live out that message. In this messy world, we need lots of assistance from the Holy Spirit to bring us together with our siblings from different backgrounds and faith traditions. Blessedly, the Spirit is happy to help.
This morning, I want to share the back stories behind two meals that happened recently in Edwards Hall. These stories make it clear how much we need the Spirit’s help and how much the Spirit has been at work.
The first meal is the lunch that happened after our Palm Sunday parade. The idea for the parade emerged in the Board of Wider Mission about five years ago. We were reflecting on the reality that our congregation does not mirror the racial and ethnic diversity of Framingham and also on our awareness that truly ethnically diverse churches are very rare. We realized, though, that if we consider all the congregations that worship here, the Edwards Church campus actually has a lot of diversity. We began to wonder how we could do more than simply share space. Recognizing that we worship in three different languages, with four different styles of worship and probably some differing interpretations of scripture, what could we do together?
We started with a picnic on a summer Sunday. The next year, we decided to try a Palm Sunday parade. Each church would worship in their own language before or after–and we would come together for a lively and powerful expression of our shared commitment to follow Jesus. A meal in Edwards Hall would follow.
We booked a donkey and invited our sister churches–email exchanges with our English-speaking contacts, awkward before-worship exchanges with pastors whose primary languages I don’t speak. It happened, and it quickly became a tradition.
Along the way, over the years, we began to see that this wasn’t the full expression of multi-cultural unity that we had hoped. Last year, Pastor Samuel from Comunidade Crista Paraiso told me that in Brazil, only Catholic churches celebrate Palm Sunday. Here I thought we were creating an opportunity to share our rich cultural traditions, only to learn we were asking his church to do something completely new.
This year, when I sent out a reminder email, I learned that the timing was terrible for them. They typically worship from 9:30 to noon, but we were asking them to end at 11, join a parade that is not in their tradition and set up tables in their worship space for lunch.
After a few more email exchanges and an abundance of good will, we sorted out a plan. We agreed they would worship until 11:30 and we would sing outside while tables were set up afterwards. That meant their church was not part of the parade, but a table-full stayed for lunch. In spite of all our mistakes, we did share a meal together.
What I learned from that day was how much work we need to do before next year. How do we bring leaders from the four churches together to plan something that works for everyone? Would we be willing to be the ones to change the time of our worship? Is there a different holiday we should celebrate instead?
The second meal is the Iftar Open Spirit held last Tuesday. The origins of this one also go back about five years. Rabbi Katy Allen from the One Earth Collaborative of Open Spirit came up with the idea: let’s invite our Muslim neighbors to a meal celebrating the breaking of their fast on a night in Ramadan. We loved the idea of offering hospitality to them after a long day of fasting.
We contacted three Muslim friends and invited them to speak. We sent invitations to area mosques. We had a great turnout–of Jewish and Christian and other good-hearted neighbors. The only Muslims were our three speakers. Why, during the holiest month of the year, would you go to a strange place to celebrate when you could gather with family and friends in your own mosque?
The next year, a week before our Iftar, the Islamic Society of Framingham held their first Open Mosque day. I met their outreach coordinator. After receiving their warm hospitality and eating their samosas, I invited him and his community to come to our place for the iftar. That year, a group of men and boys came from the mosque. A twelve-year-old boy recited from the Koran before we broke the fast.
Each year, the iftar grew a little bit. This year, something shifted. In the face of horrible acts of violence toward mosques and synagogues and churches, we have all done a lot more trying to show up for each other. At least a dozen folks from Edwards and Open Spirit attended the Open Mosque Day that happened last month.
On Tuesday night, almost 80 people crowded into Edwards Hall for our Iftar. About half were Muslim. They came from Framingham and Wayland mosques and from a Muslim Sunday School in Natick. Our neighbors in the parsonage attended, accompanied by their friends from Temple Beth Elohim in Wellesley. A young man from Albania who recently moved to Framingham showed up late; he was at his mosque in Westboro when someone said, “Oh, you live in Framingham. You should go to the Iftar at Open Spirit.”
There was no wild vision. No angel appeared. No “whooshing” sound as the Holy Spirit descended. Even so, the Holy Spirit was at work in these two meals–in the gatherings themselves and perhaps even more in the back stories that enabled them.
The Holy Spirit was at work in the Board of Wider Missions, nudging us to name our dissatisfaction that we have not lived into our vision for multi-cultural community, moving us past dissatisfaction to recognize the potential on our campus, blessing us with creativity to try something new. The Holy Spirit was there in all those awkward emails and conversations as we tried to sort out logistics. The Spirit awakened us to our well-intentioned but naive mistakes, and stirred our determination to keep learning and keep trying. Perhaps most of all, the Spirit was at work in the amazing grace that enabled all of us to gather for a meal in spite of our mistakes.
The Holy Spirit was at work in Katy’s idea, five years ago, to offer hospitality to our neighbors as they fasted. The Holy Spirit was moving through that first iftar, through the people who gathered because we wanted to learn and through the three Muslim women who patiently taught us. The Spirit was at work showing us that it is just as important, and just as faithful to Jesus’ teachings, to receive hospitality as it is to offer it. The Spirit pushed us off our own campus, out of our comfort zone to accept invitations from the mosque–and that opened the door for our friends to come here. The movement of the Holy Spirit, in the back story of Tuesday night’s iftar, was slow and patient, reflecting how long it takes to build enough trust to share a meal.
I entitled this sermon “A Meal that Changes Everything.” As Luke tells the story in Acts, the meal Peter and Cornelius shared set in motion the transformation of the early church. It was the start of a long journey, as communities of Jewish and Gentile believers tried to figure out how to be one people. The work of the Holy Spirit was only beginning: now the Spirit would do the less dramatic but equally important work of teaching people to listen and learn and respect each other.
Do our two meals change everything? Do they change anything? They do, if we see them as the beginning of something much bigger. They do, if we continue to listen to the Spirit. They do, if we open ourselves to the Spirit’s challenge to us to keep reaching out, to keep accepting and offering hospitality, to keep learning from our mistakes, to keep doing the slow, arduous and ultimately joyous work of building trust with our neighbors.
May we continue to be changed by the meals we share. Amen.