Are You Wearing Your ID Badge? Easter 5C

Scripture: Acts 11:1-18 and John 13:34-35

Who is a Christian? What are some significant traits of a Christian that would make you observe of another person that he or she is a Christian?
In other words, exactly what makes a Christian different from other people?

When I was growing up it seemed to me that people defined who a Christian was by what he or she didn’t do. My parents taught me that a Christian didn’t gamble, smoke, dance, or drink or go with girls or boys who did. We couldn’t go to movies, unless it was a Disney cartoon. In fact, we couldn’t play real cards, though Rook was okay. I remember my parents clipping the curtains together on our windows when we played Rook just so no one walking by might look inside and see that we were playing cards. Of course that person would have had to be ten feet tall to look into the windows of the home we lived in at that time.

Yes, there were some things that Christians did do that also defined them as being one of the followers of Christ. Let me remember, now. Oh, yeah, you went to church everytime the doors were open for any worship service, bible study, prayer group, or committee meeting. And, if you weren’t there, then everyone else prayed for you to get right with God, because you must have some kind of sin in your life that was keeping you away from God and the church. If it was your job then they would pray for God to get you a new job that allowed you to be a better Christian.

Christ gathered his disciples together on that final night with them to hold that last supper with them before he was arrested and crucified. Normally someone would greet you at the door, help you remove your shoes and then wash your dusty and dirty feet. It was a sign of hospitality and comfort when you entered the home of another. This was the duty of a servant, a slave in the household, to care for the grimy feet of the travelers who had come into the home from the dusty street. But not a single one of those disciples would lower himself to wash the feet of the others. That would have said to the world that the one doing the washing was inferior and that the other disciples were superior to them and to put it bluntly, none of them were going to go there. If you recall they had had already had disagreements about who was going to be the most important person in Christ’s new Community when he established it. Christ had told them that it wasn’t going to be that way in his new Community, that the first would be last and the last would be first, that they should be servants to each other and stop wanting the most important positions of authority for themselves. But they didn’t learn the lesson, because their hearts weren’t ready for the truth of what Christ was trying to explain to them and to demonstrate for them by his words and his actions.

So he gives them another lesson by what he does for them that evening. They won’t condescend to wash each other’s feet, so he takes off his outer garments and wraps a towel around his waist and taking a basin of water he goes to each one of them and washes their feet. Their Master Teacher becomes their servant taking care of their needs in a loving, kind action of comfort and care. Then he gets up and dresses himself and turns to them and says: “A New command I give to you. Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples.”

How would you have felt had you been one of the disciples in that room that night when Jesus washed your feet and then said these words?

You have to be careful what you pray for. If you ask God to give you patience then don’t be too surprised when God finds ways to test your patience with other people just to see if you are using the resources God wants you to tap into to actually be a more patient person. And if you are a pastor writing a sermon on loving others then get ready to have everything you believe about loving others tested during that week. Perhaps God is saying, “Well, Ray, it’s pretty easy to write out what you should believe, what you should tell others they should believe, but maybe, Ray, just maybe, it’s better if you live out the lessons that you need to preach on, just to be sure that you’ve learned them well enough to teach them to others.” Don’t you just love God for being that way with us?

I’ve had my patience and my love tested this week by some pretty difficult people, no body any of you know, so relax, I’m talking about you. I work a retail job and interact with the public, most of whom are very loving and very kind toward retail clerks and salespeople. Now, most of the time I enjoy my retail sales work and I get to meet a lot of interesting people, however, every once and a while, someone comes in who tests my desire to be patient and kind and loving. God sent several of those to help me with this week’s sermon. I won’t bore you with the stories, but suffice it to say that God impressed upon me that love is more often an action I take, something I do, and not necessarily something I feel. The feeling may come later or never at all, but the loving action creates life and hope where it might not have existed before.

Love changes situations. Love changes people. Love changes the world. What kind of love actions did you take this past week that changed the world for someone else?

We pretty much know when someone else isn’t treating us in a loving manner, or at least we know when we aren’t feeling the love flowing from someone else toward us. But do we usually realize when we aren’t being loving toward another person, or do we excuse our unloving behavior toward others with logical reasoning that allows us to excuse ourselves from following this commandment of Christ to love others exactly in the same way as Christ loves us?

The first Christians had this kind of a problem. They thought they knew what it meant to love others, but they discovered that God’s kind of love, the very kind of love God wants us to share with others, went way beyond anything they had ever imagined for themselves.

They had been with Jesus when he walked on this earth and demonstrated for them just how wide God’s love was as he welcomed those who were outcasts from society into his life and cared for them in amazing ways: the handicapped, the diseased, the widows, the orphans, prostitutes, and even tax collectors who were in league with the Roman Empire to oppress the people, even healing the male servant, some would say lover, of a Roman commander, a non-jew, the very person in charge of making sure that the people stayed under the military rule of Rome. Jesus crossed every boundary line that you could imagine in taking God’s love directly to persons that others thought didn’t deserve any kind of love, much less acceptance by God. People knew who was in and who was out and how things worked in society until Jesus came along and turned their world upside down with his radical thinking, subversive speech, and his revolutionary actions. Jesus was upsetting the status-quo and it’s no wonder they set out to kill him as a danger to society.

600 years before Jesus their nation had been defeated in battle by a foreign power and their most educated and able people carried off to another country to become the servants and workers for their oppressors. They realized that they were going to be absorbed into that society until nothing was left of their own unique identity and so they made some changes in their religious law and practice. They formed the first synagogues bringing together as few as ten men or families to make a worshipping group. They made laws that said you couldn’t eat with anyone other than people like yourself from your own group and made more laws about what food you could eat and couldn’t eat. They made laws about who you could marry and couldn’t marry so that the bloodline of your family would be true and not contaminated. Keeping the laws became a sign of who you were and what you were and everyone knew you by what you did or didn’t do. These changes to the law and the religious life of the Jewish nation meant that they have survived as a separate, identifiable people throughout most of their history and into this day. The idea was there that the only person who could worship God and serve God was a Jew. No one else could do this, unless he or she first converted to being a Jew.

But when Jesus came that all began to change. Jesus opened up the idea of who was acceptable to God and Jesus demonstrated by caring for Jew and Gentile alike that God would no longer allow such arbitrary human rules to prevent God from taking care of God’s human creation, no matter who that might be, or where they might live, or how they might light live their lives. Jesus ended the divisions between people.

So you would think that after living with Jesus for three years, after listening to him teach, seeing him care for everyone without question, that the disciples were a group that opened their arms and hearts and welcomed everyone into their new little church? But you would be wrong. That’s not what happened. They continued to believe that the only persons who could truly worship God and serve God were Jews. And therefore only Jews could become Christians. Nobody else could be a Christian, a follower of Christ, unless he or she were a Jew or converted to being Jewish, abiding by all the rules and regulations of what it meant to be a complete Jew.

But God has a way of shaking up our misconceptions and attitudes. So God blesses Peter with a dream in which God sets food down all kinds of forbidden foods in front of Peter on a picnic blanket and says to Peter, “Take and eat.” But Peter, being the good Jewish boy who has learned all the lessons his parents had taught him says to God, “No, thank you. These are the foods I’ve been taught that we can’t eat. To eat such food would be a sin against you, God. I couldn’t do that. I love you too much God to sin against you by breaking the rules.” And God says, to Peter, “If I have made it acceptable, then you, Peter, have no business calling it unacceptable.” But Peter keeps refusing to take the food that God is giving to him.

Have you ever done that to God? Told God you knew better than God does what you need in your life, what you need God to do for you, what you want from God? We get very arrogant and self-inflated by ourselves to the point that we feel we have a right to tell God just how wrong God is and how it would be so much better for us and everyone else if God would just do things our way for a change. But God has an ingenious plan and a imaginative purpose for all of us. If we just get our selfish selves out of God’s way then God can bring about a miracle for others through us and even for us.

This isn’t so foreign to our experience now or over the last 50 years. I’m a child of the 50’s and 60’s who was taught to sing “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.” I was taught that song by people who also thought it was wrong for those same little red, and yellow, black and white children to be in the same classroom or same church Sunday School room for fear that they might grow up and intermarry with each other. In other words, “Only good white children could really serve God.” Not so much different from Peter. And in many ways, it isn’t so much different today as we exclude those who don’t measure up to our standards from our churches and from our loving embrace. We make decisions about loving others every day: I’ll love her, but not him. I’ll accept him, but not her. Jesus didn’t leave the decision about who to love to you and me. Jesus just said, “Love each other like I have loved you.” No exceptions. No exclusions. Obey me. This is my commandment to you. Love each other.

After his vision, there comes a knock on his door and a messenger has been sent from Cornelius, a gentile, a non-jew, who wants to know how to become a Christian. An angel of God has told Cornelius to go and ask specifically for Peter. Peter, having been prepared by God with the vision of God’s definition of acceptability, goes with the men and preaches and teaches to them and low and behold they believe in God and become followers of Christ in the same way that Peter has seen Jewish persons become followers of Christ. There is no difference between them, for a follower of Christ isn’t defined by his or her ancestry or former religious background, but only by his or her relationship to God in Christ.

More specifically, a Christian, a follower of Christ, is defined by his or her ability to love others like Christ loved us. Peter learned to love others like Jesus loved them regardless of who they were, where they came from, or how they currently lived their lives. Peter learned how to cross the same boundaries that God crosses to claim God’s precious creation for God’s self. God will not allow anyone to be outside of God’s gracious love.

Margaret Guenther, director for the Center for Spirituality at General Theological Seminary says that like the rest of us in this age of required identification cards and badges she carries an ID card with her picture on it so she can be identified. Like you and I, without the ID card she can’t rent a video or cash a check. But she goes on to say, “As Christians we identify ourselves, too. We put crosses on our buildings or wear crosses on chains around our necks. Yet according to Jesus, we don’t need these emblems. We have a permanent, universally valid ID card (a badge if you will)—we can be spotted anywhere Christ people if we love one another.”

Do others see Jesus in you today? Are you wearing your ID Badge of love?