ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

Easter Day 2007 - The Vicar's Letter
Fr Alan Moses
Adapted from the sermon preached at High Mass on Easter Day

Commentators don't expect preachers to pay much heed to the story of Tabitha in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 9.36-42) and most of the time they don't. Her story is sandwiched between the great events of the Conversion of St. Paul and the Baptism of Cornelius - which is a conversion for St. Peter. Tabitha or Dorcas is the only person in the New Testament who is given the feminine form of the Greek word Disciple. On Easter Day we had our very own Tabitha to be baptised as a disciple of Christ, so her namesake should get more than a passing mention.

The Tabitha in Luke's story is raised from the dead, but she is also an example of the revolutionary effect, the discontinuity and transformation that the gospel of the risen Christ brings; this feminine disciple in a world where relations between men and women were not ordered that way. But this new religion is one of faith in the Christ whose resurrection is first proclaimed by women; by Mary Magdalene in today's Gospel, by her and Joanna and Mary the Mother of James and other women in St. Luke's Gospel which we heard at the Vigil Mass last night. The men of course "thought it was an idle tale and did not believe them". This too is the gospel which is preached in the Temple not by theologically-trained priests or rabbis but by uneducated fishermen. This is the religion in which a widow, in a world in which widows were the most vulnerable and dependent of people, seems to have shaken off dependence and run her own welfare agency.

While he is staying in Joppa, Peter receives another summons. It is from a Roman centurion named Cornelius. Luke tells us, "He was a devout man who feared God with all his household; he gave alms generously to the people and prayed constantly to God". He was one of that considerable group of gentiles attracted to Judaism by its belief in one God and its strong moral sense.

Cornelius had a vision in which an angel instructed him to send for Peter. While his messengers were on their way, Peter was having a vision of his own. In it he saw all sorts of creatures and was instructed to kill and eat. It was not a vegetarian vision - but more importantly, for St. Luke and us, it was not a kosher one either. Peter protests that nothing unclean has ever passed his lips. The voice in his dream will have none of that and says to him, "What God has made clean, you must not call profane." To make sure he got the message, it was repeated twice more. Peter tends to have to be told things more than once, but he's hardly unique in Church history for that.

While Peter was puzzling about what all this might mean, the messengers arrive. The Spirit instructs him to go down and speak to them. The next day, he goes off with them to Cornelius. Peter says to him and his household, "You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean."

Peter's vision has not just been about unclean animals and food - it has been about unclean people. It was to show him that the holiness of God's people no longer needed to be protected by rules. They no longer needed to be safeguarded from the spiritual contamination which came from eating and drinking with Gentiles.
Cornelius then tells him of his own vision:
"So now all of us are here in the presence of God to listen to all that the Lord has commanded you to say."
Peter then begins to preach what will turn out to be a baptismal sermon about Jesus - a summary of the faith.
After our passage has ended, Luke tells us that the Holy Spirit, who clearly thought that Peter had gone on quite long enough, interrupted him by descending on all who heard the word, just as at Pentecost.
The Jewish Christians who had come with Peter were astonished - this was the Holy Spirit breaking all the rules, trampling over convention. Then Peter said, "Can anyone withhold water for baptising these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?"
Peter had begun his sermon with a stunning statement:
"I now know that God shows no partiality, but In every nation any one who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him".
It is difficult for us to grasp just how shocking, disturbing, revolutionary this was for Peter and to his Jewish Christian companions.
Peter then sets out to justify what he has done and it is no easy task. First of all he is no trained rabbi with an armoury of proof texts and precedents at his finger tips. And then, something has happened in Jesus which breaks through that world which looks back to what has been done before.

This idea that God shows no partiality is not supported by reference to any text. God had sent Jesus to preach peace to Israel - but how does this help with Cornelius who was not a Jew?
The clue, the breakthrough, is to be found in what seems no more than an aside, in a piece of rather complicated Greek syntax:
"He is Lord of all."
This becomes the basis for including the Gentiles within the reach of salvation. Peter is not reading some new idea into the story; rather he is penetrating more deeply into the meaning of the affirmation that Jesus Christ is Lord. He is being led further into that meaning. A vision of the Lordship of Christ, ruling both heaven and earth, judge of both the living and dead, is the basis for all Christian efforts at mission and inclusiveness; a mission which breaks out through the boundaries of Judaism almost before the first Christians have realised what is happening. There cannot be a Lord who is Lord of only part of creation.

This affirmation of Christ's universal lordship, and its consequences, is a theological statement gleaned from the experience and faith of the apostle, not something to be proved from the law and prophets and tradition. Peter's sermon struggles with the new perception of the movement of the gospel he has just received. He is out on a limb, on shaky ground, without tradition or scripture to back him up. He has no proof text to justify himself.

Later in the story, Luke has him repeat the whole exercise of explanation and justification with the church in Jerusalem. This might seem to be labouring the point if the decision has already been made, but it shows us how difficult it was for the church to come to terms with. Peter would make a start, Paul would drive the whole process much further, so that it became irreversible - even upbraiding Peter for not being bold enough in accepting what it meant.

This is the way things often are in the Church. If Jesus is Lord, then the Church has the adventurous task of penetrating new areas of his lordship - it has to expect surprises and new implications of the Gospel which cannot be explained by any basis other than our Lord has shown us something we could not have seen on our own, even if we were searching the Scriptures.

This does not mean an undisciplined flight into fancy, into our own bold new ideas, or chasing the latest cultural fashion. It does mean continuing to penetrate the significance of the scriptural witness that Jesus Christ is Lord, and to be faithful to divine prodding. Faith is often our attempt to keep up with the Spirit of Christ who has gone before us, not just to Galilee but to the ends of the earth.

Sometimes we seem appallingly slow to get the message. This year we are celebrating the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. That means it took Christians 1800 years to realise that slavery was wrong; that it was incompatible with the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Spirit of God did come to people like William Wilberforce, as to Peter in his vision, to show them that in Christ there could be neither slave nor free. Extraordinarily too, and I sometimes think we do not grasp just how amazing it is, the Spirit of the risen Christ came to slaves and showed them that whatever horrors they had suffered at the hands of Christian slave-traders and owners, they were just as much God's children and the heirs of his promises. Christ was for them and no one, not even slave-owners and the states which supported their "property rights" could stop that.

In the baptism of Cornelius and his household we see the power of the resurrection breaking through; we see people grasping its consequences and acting on them. It is because people did and have done that down the generations and to the ends of the earth, that we gathered on Easter Day with the Crawford household to baptise our very own Tabitha, and to eat and drink, and as a congregation of Gentiles - "lesser breeds without the law" , and even the descendants of former slaves - and all of us former slaves of sin, in that solidarity with fallen Adam which St. Paul speaks of - as disciples - feminine and masculine - in union with the new Adam - to eat and drink with the Risen Christ, to share table-fellowship with him and with each other - in his Eucharist.

Yours in the risen Christ.

Alan Moses