See, I am making all things new. Well, good. Because what the world mostly looks like to me right now is as ancient and intransigent as sin. It’s certainly as old as the Bible, with its evil rulers, genocidal wars, broken families, betrayed friends, enslaved foreigners, desperate poor widows, idolatrous rich fools, ruined cities, and desolate, burned-up vineyards. And any “new” things mostly seem to have emerged as higher-tech ways to hurt one another. I mean, the nations aren’t smashing children with rocks anymore, we have drones for that, but what about the part about mourning and crying and pain will be no more, are we there yet?
Sometimes in my despair I forget God’s trustworthy and true promises, because they’re at the same time too simple: If you’re thirsty, here’s the water—and too outlandishly demanding: All you have to do is love one another. And, honestly, because they require me, as they required Peter, to lay aside my ideas about purity and decent order and who God’s people are, and watch as the old world crumbles, and accept that when God says “all,” God means all.
As the Orthodox theologian Demetrios Constantelos points out, “The Spirit is an ever-present reality, such that revelation is never finished but always active, unveiling things and invisible realities, making intelligible incomprehensible mystery, building bridges over fortresses viewed in the past as islands in themselves, tearing down walls perceived as impregnable. It is the Spirit which moves where it wills, whose presence and operation is everywhere and all-encompassing. The Spirit of God may not be where one would like to see it and it may be where one refuses to see it. Thus it is impossible to define the boundaries of God’s people.”
Today’s reading is from the book that followers of Jesus, flattering our own importance, like to call Acts of the Apostles. Really? The apostles are kidding themselves—as they have been doing consistently throughout the Gospels, and as I’m constantly tempted to do—if they think they A) know what’s going on and B) are in charge. We don’t and we aren’t: This is the Acts of the Holy Spirit. As experienced, with varying degrees of joy, foot-dragging, resistance, and utter bewilderment, by the apostles.
The acts in Acts take place in a fraught time, as a new movement is expanding and evangelical fervor is spreading among the people of God. In the light of Jesus’ resurrection, questions of authority are shaking up religion, arguments about doctrine and boundaries are multiplying, and old rules about who belongs and who is an outsider to the faith are being challenged. And into all this social and religious turmoil, an angel of the Lord appears to Peter, letting down a sheet full of forbidden food, telling him to eat and saying, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”
Acts is often interpreted as being a heroic story about the holy disciples going out to evangelize and convert all kinds of Jews, gentiles, heathens, and foreigners, and bestowing the Gospel upon them and bringing them into the fold of correct belief. But this story suggests it’s the Spirit who is evangelizing and converting the apostles, hammering at their certainties and stretching their understanding of God by giving them relationships with strangers—often with the very people they believe to be sinners, unclean, or even enemies.
It’s like the relationship we hear about earlier in Acts between Philip and a social and sexual outsider, the Ethiopian eunuch (someone that today we might call Black and queer) whose demand for baptism converts Philip to the immediacy and universality of God’s presence. Or like the relationship Peter enters into with uncircumcised Gentile strangers who bring him home to eat with them, after his trippy vision of that sheet coming down from heaven. His fellow believers are scandalized, but Peter knows what he heard. “Who was I that I could hinder God?” Peter says to his friends. “The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us.”
Not make a distinction between them and us? That seems almost humanly impossible. It’s too destabilizing to seriously consider the relevance of our own purity codes, our own ethnic/ religious/gender divisions; it’s too frightening if all the worldly boundaries we’ve carefully created are going to be swept away by the Creator of the world. Here we are, just trying to get by, to get safe, to get control; to defend our homelands and defend our religions; to decide who belongs and who should be cast out. We’re just down here on Earth, convinced that we’re doing the right thing.
And suddenly, hello, here’s the Holy Spirit, come to blow everything open. The Spirit reveals Christ, crucified and risen, and the abundant life he offers. But abundant life following Jesus, as all disciples must learn, is not necessarily comfortable or even safe. It is not entirely manageable. A life abundant means one with more joy and also more loss; more suffering, more peace, more conflict, and way more complications. And life abundant requires abiding with and loving other people— all the other people Jesus loves.
It’s been hard for me, in these frightening and ugly times, to think about Jesus’ commandment in anything but the most romantic terms. “Love one another”—yeah that’s fine for Sundays, or even for the quiet morning hours before I turn on the radio and hear new waves of cruelty lapping against the foundations of my community. But then I get up from prayer, and walk out in my neighborhood, past a scruffy street altar for a local teenager shot by the police; past the homeless guys with their blankets and tarps camping in the shadow of a brand-new expensive apartment building; past a pair of frightened Mayan women and a brace of armed guards at the immigration office, and I feel a little sick to my stomach, and afraid, and enraged about being made afraid, and horrified, and lost—all the feelings.
But the love Jesus talks about in today’s Gospel is not really a feeling. It’s about dragging all of us, together, into the mercy and the life of God, so that we might be one. And there’s no way that can happen without us finding ways to abide with, eat with, act with, other people.
And Peter’s story is a reminder of how rough a challenge that can be. The Spirit forces us to re-evaluate not just random rules about which kind of reptiles are edible, but to change our minds about who the people of God really are. That is the good news:“The Spirit of God may not be where one would like to see it and it may be where one refuses to see it. Thus it is impossible to define the boundaries of God’s people.”
Honestly, though, defining the boundaries—of who’s in, who’s out—is what I personally spend much of my time doing, especially when faced with weird or scary strangers. And it’s central to what the Christian church has done since its beginning: Kill the Jews, burn the heretics, stiffen the entrance requirements, kick out the trans kids, muzzle the women, build a fence around the communion table, and make sure all the doors to every sacred building stay locked.
Can we bear to live without boundaries, with the walls torn down? Can we be faithful Christians and Christian nationalists at the same time? Can we decide as a tribe which other tribes are deserving of God’s grace? Can we continue to ask Jesus, as if hoping for a waiver, who is really our neighbor, and if everyone really means everyone?
For the last several years, I’ve spent a couple days a week working with a team of nurses who offer vaccinations and wound care to people living on the streets, in some of the saddest and most abandoned parts of our city. We see young men half-dressed, literally asleep on their feet, bent over double from fentanyl; unsteady girls whose arms and faces are covered with sores; we see old ladies in wheelchairs and old men, toothless, wrapped in dirty blankets. We see a lot of dogs. My own job just involves calling into every tent—“Hi, it’s the nurses, anyone home?” — and approaching every homeless encampment or sidewalk cluster of dope dealers to ask people in English and Spanish how they’re doing. I see if they want a flu shot or Narcan or a granola bar, I chat as a nurse cleans an oozing wound or wraps a leg with gauze or vaccinates someone for monkeypox. It’s pretty unskilled work, but it’s busy, and as I register the vaccinations and dig around in our rolling cart for bottles of water and keep an eye out for anyone who seems to be really sick, I see a lot of familiar faces. And as we catch up on what’s been happening—overdoses, arrests, hospitalizations, a new puppy— sometimes people not only take a snack from the cart, they offer me something: a sip of their soda, a messy, melting ice-cream bar, a doughnut from a huge bag of day-old pastries. Their hands are almost always filthy, I’m not always hungry after seeing the fourth ulcerous wound of the day—but “unclean” isn’t really the point.
The point is: The home of God is among mortals.The point is: Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. When God says all, God means all.
And the point, I begin to understand, is not about me becoming nice enough to find a way to eat unclean food, or good enough to condescendingly welcome a few uncircumcised strangers into my tribal fellowship. It’s so easy to be the generous, privileged donor, extending a hand to, in that dreadful phrase, “the less fortunate.” But the challenge is to let myself be loved, to absorb the generosity of strangers, to stand still for a moment and receive from someone else.
Receiving the repentance that leads to life means surrendering to being loved, by God and by all kinds of other dirty people. My salvation doesn’t come from performing good deeds or observing religious rules or deciding that I know who belongs. It depends on understanding that exactly like the Gentiles, the disciples, the sickest addict, the kindest nurse, I’m just one more of God’s hapless, helpless, clueless children, blown together by the Spirit who is busy tearing down every wall we try to make. All around me there is suffering, and all around me there is love, pouring forth from strangers.
I’m so very thirsty. And like everyone else, I am here on Earth always being given water, as a gift from the spring of the water of life. Let me receive that water.
The good news, the gospel of Jesus Christ, is not escape from the suffering of the world, but solidarity in suffering—and solidarity in sharing this love he pours into our hearts, love meant for giving away. It is solidarity with the poor, the reviled and persecuted; with criminals and the ugly, frightened parts of ourselves; it is solidarity with the whole blessed, beloved, human family.
Because: See, I am making all things new. God has come to dwell in us as our God, and we will be his people. God has come to dwell with us as our God, and we will be his peoples.