Sermons

Acts 10:1-36, 42-48 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn
Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – August 10, 2014

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that we open our hearts to each new member of your family and all that they bring to our community. In the name of the Living Christ we pray, Amen.

As you know, this has not been an easy summer. Much of my attention has been focused on my husband’s family and his father’s passing. It was interesting to see which of the lessons my family learned when my grandfather passed a few years applied here, and which didn’t. Despite the universality of death, every family processes these losses in their own way. My role as a daughter-in-law was very different from my role as a granddaughter.

When we’re growing up in our own family, we are usually blissfully unaware of how different other families are. No matter how unusual or dysfunctional our family is, as children we generally accept our circumstances as normal and just the way things are. The older we get, the more we may notice that our friends’ families aren’t quite the same, but I’m not sure the depth of that truth hits us until we’re trying to make our own families.

In any given family, there are lessons that are explicit, things our parents teach us intentionally, usually by repeating the same phrases over and over. Things like “there’s no crying in baseball” or “talk it out”. In my family, it was “the dictionary is your friend” and “you can call the daisy a dandelion, but no one will know what you’re talking about.” I wonder if any of you have lessons like that that were drilled into you as a child. What are the phrases that have stuck in your mind and heart? These kinds of lessons are the ones we’re aware of. When family comes up, we don’t have to think too hard before saying “My father taught me…” or “My mother always said…”. But there is a lot more we learn from our families, most of which is harder to notice. We may not recognize some of what our parents taught us, because they may not have realized they were teaching it. These subtle lessons are things like how loud we are when we fight, how we talk about money, who decides how we spend our time, or how openly we communicate affection. Our understanding of normal is constantly being shaped just by the way things are done, whether we talk about it or not.

These invisible lessons are the ones that become important when two people decide to share their lives and become a family of their own. People often move toward marriage thinking that their relationship is just between the two of them. I love you, and you love me, and because of that, we can do anything. You and me, babe. And in one sense, this is lovely and wonderful and true. And on the other hand, it is terribly incomplete. Every person, even your beloved, carries at least a living room full of other people around inside them. And those other people will come out. Whether it’s about how to organize the kitchen towels, or whether to close the bathroom door, or what time dinner is supposed to be, or whether you open presents Christmas Eve or Christmas morning, inevitably, the influence of your beloved’s family will emerge, even if your beloved doesn’t realize that’s what’s happening. We all come from somewhere, and if we’re going to combine our life with someone else’s, we are going to have in-laws. Often couples will decide they’d like to have that lovely passage from Ruth read at their wedding. “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” No doubt the writer of Ruth thought that the big deal part of that was Ruth swearing her allegiance to the God of Abraham and Jacob. But the hard part is definitely the third line: “your people shall be my people.” And what’s more, Ruth wasn’t saying this to her husband; she was saying it to her mother-in-law! This may, in fact, be the most appropriate reading for a wedding there is, although we rarely play that angle up.

The truth is that a marriage combines not just two people’s lives, but two families, making a whole new family. But the two previous families don’t disappear. Instead, we get in-laws. And in-laws can be pretty weird. Because most of the lessons we learned from our own families about how to live life were unconscious, we don’t realize how differently people can approach the world until we’re trying to do it alongside someone who was brought up differently than we were. What, exactly, constitutes cleaning the bathroom, and how often is it supposed to be done? Which cupboards should be for dishes and which for food? Where is it appropriate to trim your toe nails? I had a roommate in seminary who used to make me say, “She’s spacey about things I didn’t even know you could be spacey about.” Usually when I said this, I was thinking about how she would walk away from the refrigerator without closing the door. It’s stuff like that that helps prepare you for marriage.

But here’s the thing about in-laws: If you have one, you are one. The differentness goes both ways. There is no reason why the way your family seasons the chicken is inherently better than the way your in-laws do it. They are just two different ways of seasoning the chicken. Two, I might add, of a hundred different ways to season chicken. You might even discover theirs is tastier.

So what does any of this have to do with church? Who are the in-laws in church? Would anyone venture to debate whether a marriage is more disruptive to a family’s culture than Peter’s extravagant welcome to Cornelius and his entire household? The thing about church – if we are going to use the family metaphor at all – is that we’re constantly gaining new in-laws. Every time a new family or even just one new person starts participating with a church, the culture of that congregation shifts slightly. At least, let’s hope it does.

We have all seen the movies where one spouse’s family supposedly welcomes the newcomer but then requires the hapless newlywed to conform to all the family traditions without even explaining them fully. It may make for good entertainment, but it’s not a healthy way to be a church. If a church is going to welcome newcomers, we must be willing to allow them to change us. For there is no reason to join a church if you’re not going to be allowed to make a contribution. And as new people contribute their gifts and share their ideas, things change. If we don’t welcome those changes, we’re not really welcoming the people who bring them.

The story we heard from Acts 10 is one of the more dramatic changes in the whole history of the church. Up to that point, there was no indication that the church would be anything other than Jewish. Sure, Jesus had had some eye-opening encounters with Gentiles, but nothing to indicate they would become part of the inner circle. And suddenly, here’s Peter saying, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people?” while he’s standing in the middle of a house full of the uncircumcised. We can only imagine the craziness and chaos that question unleashed. Who knows what sorts of strange foods those folks were going to bring to church dinners? Who knows how they might dress?

We may think that Peter’s situation is not particularly comparable to ours, since the apostles were still trying to figure out what the church was exactly. It’s been around a while by now, so in theory, we’ve figured out how it works. Indeed, there are a few different kinds of in-laws we may receive here at VLM. Some will be folks from other Disciples churches. They may be the hardest to assimilate, because they are just as attached to their way of being Disciple, whether it matches ours or not. We will have to struggle to open our minds to the possibility that their former congregations might have had good ways of approaching certain things. Others may come from different Christian denominations. They may find certain Disciple practices confusing or strange, but they will most likely eventually realize that they’re in a new tradition now and come to appreciate what’s distinctive about our way of doing things. In the process of negotiating those differences, we may be surprised what we can learn about ourselves when pushed to explain why we do what we do. And we may discover that we’d like to try new ways of doing things.

In these times, however, it is most likely that the new folks walking in our doors will have little to no previous experience with how to be part of a Christian church. It is situations like these when we’ll be most tempted to just show them how to do it just like we do it. But this is also where we have the most opportunity to learn from the new people in our family, and it may be that the things they have to teach us are lessons coming straight from God. If we believe that God is still speaking, as our UCC sisters and brothers put it, that God is still active in our world, then we must remain open to what newcomers can teach us, especially those who never thought they’d be part of a church community.

Peter was convinced of his own righteousness; he knew how to faithful and follow God’s law. Three times it took, before he could let down his guard and let God show him a new way. How many times will we be pushed to try something new before we’ll come to understand that God shows no partiality? How long will it take before we’ll open our minds to a different approach or our hearts to a new way of understanding how God works in our world? Let us rejoice in the power of the Holy Spirit that is constantly making us anew as the Body of Christ! Alleluia and Amen!