What's your lens?

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another (John 13:34-35).  (Easter 5C: Acts 11:1-18, Revelation 21:1-6, John 13:31-35)

This is an emotional weekend for me: my middle son, Joey, is graduating from high school, and those of you who know me well will not be surprised to find that at any given moment you’ll see me breaking into tears of joy because I'm so proud of him, or tears of excitement because I'm so happy for his next step in life at Doane University this fall, or tears of despair because he'll be moving away to his dorm room and I'll miss him so...SO…this weekend my brain is overflowing with all the great memories of Joey throughout the years. Like many kids, Joey loved bugs and spiders when he was younger. For his 5^th birthday, he got a bug science kit that included these great, giant, green goggles that made him look like a praying mantis—they had prismatic, multi-faceted lenses so that he actually saw the world through a bug’s eyes.

Each of us sees the world and understands the world through our own lenses, lenses that have been shaped by who we are, what we have been given, and the cultural framework that surrounds us. We each have a viewpoint, a starting point, a set of assumptions about how the world runs and how the world is, and that starting point determines quite a lot about how we interpret what we see and hear and read…even about how we interpret the Bible. To use the fancy seminary word: we have a hermeneutic lens, and all of our thinking and interpretation and understanding is filtered through that lens. Today’s reading from Acts is about the hermeneutic lens Peter and his fellow leaders had in the earliest days of the Church—about a key battle among the Christian leaders over what the church would become—or not become. You are sitting together in this room today because of the outcome of that great battle.

This meeting took place somewhere between 10 and 20 years after Jesus’ resurrection, and the argument was over the hottest issue facing the newborn church: No issue was more debated by early Christians, no issue was more important to them, than whether their new faith was intended only for Jews and Jewish converts, or if it was to include Gentiles who did not convert. The “circumcision party” in our reading was insisting that true followers of Jesus must also be observant Jews. Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, the Son of David—all Christians must follow the Jewish purity laws, the Jewish dietary laws, and, if they were men, they must be circumcised.

It is critical in understanding this text that we don’t dismiss Peter's accusers as old-fashioned, closed-minded, religious conservatives—these people had already taken the risk of following Jesus. They were honoring and following centuries of religious tradition they feared Peter was casually throwing away. Peter was ignoring some of the most ancient and most important Jewish law and tradition, tradition handed to them by God that was part of the very definition of who they were, of what made them Jews, of what defined them and demonstrated that they were called out as God’s special people. Peter had ignored the rules separating Jews from Gentiles; he not only entered the house of unclean Gentiles, he sat at their tables and broke bread with them! Nothing in Peter’s accuser’s worldview, no aspect of their hermeneutic lens, would allow them to find a way to make sense of this outrage, this violation, this abomination. And, don’t forget that in our reading, Peter, in his dream, three times states this same objection to God. Just like them, everything about Peter’s understanding of who he was as a person of faith and everything he knew about what God required was filtered through the hermeneutic lens called “Ancient Jewish Tradition.”

Few boundaries were more rigid and honored than the boundary between Jews and Gentiles. Through centuries of persecution, slavery, wandering, and difficulty, Israel had remained faithfully itself by carefully distinguishing between those who were part of the covenant those who were not. Their survival as a people, as they were carted off to foreign lands, and occupied by various conquerors, was accomplished only by the faithful honoring of these boundaries. And here was Peter, the rock on which Jesus said the church would be built, flaunting those boundaries. Those confronting Peter had to be saying, “Is nothing sacred? Is there nothing in our faith that doesn’t change?” I’m sure we all have said that to ourselves sometimes, too. If everything else in our lives and our world is built on shifting sand, we need our faith, our God, to be unchangeable, right?

That what Peter thought, too. Peter, remember that he had betrayed his faith and denied Jesus three times during Holy Week—he wasn’t going to do that again. Three times in his dream, he was told to eat from that disgusting picnic blanket, covered with every revolting, unclean creature his faith forbade him to eat, or even touch. Three times Peter did what he thought was the faithful thing, responding, “By no means, Lord!” For nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth!”  But the answer Peter got from God was not what he expected: “What I have created, what I have made clean, made good, made beautiful, you are not to call profane.” Peter heard the voice of God, and suddenly, his hermeneutic lens was refocused. Although religious tradition played an essential role in the lives of ancient Jews, and in our lives, it does not—it cannot—restrict God from building upon and moving beyond that tradition…God is still at work, and God's purpose extends far beyond the boundary of human tradition. Peter saw that God’s plan from the very creation of Israel, in the calling of Abraham in Genesis 12 and 22, was that through Israel all nations—everyone—would be included in God’s promise of salvation, in God’s re-created holy New Jerusalem, (Gen 12:3, 22:18), where God dwells with us, where God will wipe away every tear from our eyes. Peter saw that God is always making all things new. Peter tells this vision to his accusers, saying, “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” (11:17). The miracle in this story isn’t Peter’s vision—it’s that Peter and the leaders in Jerusalem were open to seeing with new eyes the height and breadth and depth of God’s love. The Holy Spirit gave them the ability to listen and to change their hermeneutic lens to be a little more in alignment with God. The miracle is that in that moment, suddenly what for Peter and the Jerusalem council was a “them”—the unclean, foreigner Gentiles —became an “us”—part of the one body of Christ. 

As Christians today struggle with issues of who to include and who to exclude, of where to draw boundaries, we will find, like the leaders in Jerusalem did, that we need to reset our hermeneutic lens. But what lens can we use? How can we be sure we’re following God, and not just giving in to the secular culture around us? Today’s Gospel reading tells us how. Remember how often Jesus told his disciples that his way was the way of little children, not the way of learned theologians and hell-raising preachers. “Little children,” he says today, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.” This commandment is not about what you believe; it’s about how you live. Theologian Karen Armstrong says that faith is not mostly about belief, but about practice. “Religion,” Armstrong says, is not about having to believe or accept certain difficult propositions; instead, religion is “about doing things that change you…”and that change the world.

In Jesus’ words instituting the Eucharist, he says, “Do this in remembrance of me.” That’s what we do every Sunday. Jesus comes to us when we come to the table, without those who are not like us, sometimes even with those we don’t necessarily like, and we hold out empty hands, and we acknowledge our common emptiness and poverty of spirit and sin, and we receive a gift together, obeying Jesus’s command. We share the cup, and we eat, and Jesus becomes our life.

I keep using this crazy term, “hermeneutic lens,” not because I want you to show off how smart you are after when you leave church today, but because I think it is so very important for us all as Christians, so very important for the life of the world today. Just look around you in the world, and you can see how the hermeneutic lens of those who call themselves Christians determines how they interpret Scripture and understand God: You can see the tragic results of those who call themselves Christians but whose hermeneutic lens is the lens of anger and wrath and power, or of those whose filter is tribalism and fear, or of those who filter is legalism and conformity. My beloved friends, as followers of Jesus, our hermeneutic lens must be the filter of love. The goggles we need to see the world are not Joey’s green bug-eye goggles—and not goggles of tradition or anger or fear or tribalism or legalism—no, as Christians we must wear Jesus-shaped goggles. The lens of our Jesus-goggles helps us recognize in others—even in others that tradition says should be excluded, the same Spirit that is working in our own lives. Jesus-goggles allowed Peter and those leaders in Jerusalem to see that they were not throwing out God’s law—they were fulfilling it—by welcoming untouchable people like us as sisters and brothers. From the first laying down of the law, way back in Leviticus 19:18, God had always commanded Israel to “love your neighbor as yourself”—Jesus in his life, ministry, death, and resurrection showed them, and shows us, what that really means. Jesus hands us his goggles, and says, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (13:35).

My prayer for us all for this week is that we’ll take and wear those Jesus-goggles, that the Son of God who leaped over the boundary between life and death will help us leap over all the hurtful and sinful boundaries we try to draw, that the Holy Spirit will surprise us with where it shows up next, and that the love of God will continue to keep working in us, transforming us to better follow Jesus’ new commandment of love. My prayer is that as we walk out into the world today, “they’ll know we are Christians by our love.”