Who Is Your Cornelius? - Sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Easter Year C

 Who Is Your Cornelius?

Easter 5C

May 15, 2022

Good Shepherd, Wells, MN

Acts 11.1-18

Ni Wa joined us in worship one Sunday morning and she continued coming each week. After a while she would come forward for Communion, hearing that “all are welcome” and trusting it meant her. Not long after she started worshiping, she asked to meet with me and I heard more of her story. She had emigrated to the US from Asia with her parents and attended a Catholic high school. Beyond that, she didn’t know much about Christianity, but she had been going through some personal struggles and decided to try out our church. She’d found a home and now she wanted to be baptized. She was.

Now, when I attended seminary, it was stressed that baptism was the entry point into the life of the church and that Holy Communion was the sacrament that strengthened you in that life of faith. That’s what I continued to believe until another pastor suggested that it could be the other way. When I heard that, I reacted skeptically to the idea. This is, until I met Ni Wa and realized this was exactly how it happened for her. Now, my theology didn’t change, but how I understood that theology underwent a profound shift.

Peter, a Jew, has a similar experience in our reading from Acts 11 when confronted with the Gentile Cornelius. Acts 10 narrates the encounter fully while we have here in Acts 11 the “Reader’s Digest” version. Peter is responding to criticism from his local church about consorting and eating with Gentiles, something forbidden for Jews. (Apparently, gossip traveled fast in the early church.) This story is important for two reasons. First, the combination of the two chapters inaugurates the mission to the Gentiles. Second, it shows the early church handling its first controversy.

I love the book of Acts, which someone said should not be called the “Acts of the Apostles” but rather “The Acts of the Holy Spirit” because the Holy Spirit is the main actor in the book, mentioned 43 times. That’s a lot of mentioning. Acts narrates how the focus shifts from the early church as Jewish to Gentile, from Peter as a central figure to the Apostle Paul, and how the Gospel spreads from Jerusalem to Rome and beyond. But what I really enjoy is how the early church is figuring out what it means to be church in light of Jesus’ life, ministry, death, and resurrection. In other words, they are making it up as they go along.

The story is instructive for us because the Holy Spirit is still on the move today, doing new things in a changing world and the church is continually called to make it up as it goes along, all under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Notice how Peter relies on scripture to help explain his actions along with the presence of the Holy Spirit. But the heart of his explanation involves telling of his encounter with the Gentile Cornelius. This was not some abstract, hypothetical theological question the apostles debated around the tavern table. This was an encounter with a real live person who had their own experience of God, whose presence Peter could not ignore.

We are continually being presented with “Corneliuses” who challenge our assumptions of who God loves and what we believe to be the way things are, just as Ni Wa did with me. So, who is your Cornelius and where is the Holy Spirit prodding you to open your heart a little bit more? It’s not a matter of if the Holy Spirit is bringing someone into your life, but a matter of when the Holy Spirit does so. And when we are presented with a Cornelius, can we say with Peter, “Who am I to hinder God?” The Holy Spirit is moving. Thanks be to God. Amen.

My written sermons often preach differently "live." To watch the video, click here.