Acts 10: 34-48 (links validated 4/9/24)

In his book, The Kingdom of God Is a Party (Word Publishing, 1990) Tony Campolo describes a teacher named Miss Thompson. Each September, she greeted her students by saying, “I love you all the same. I have no favorites.” But she wasn’t being completely honest with them. Teachers don’t just have favorites. They sometimes also have students they struggle to like. Teddy Stallard, writes Campolo, was one of Miss Thompson’s least favorite students. He sullenly sat slouched at his desk with his head down. Teddy always answered her questions in monosyllabic “yes’s” and “no’s.” So when Miss Thompson marked his papers, she enjoyed putting X’s next to his wrong answers and writing “F’s” at the top of his papers. At Christmas Miss Thompson’s students brought her presents. All but Teddy’s were wrapped in brightly colored paper. When Miss Thompson tore open Teddy’s brown paper wrapping, a bracelet with most of the stones missing and an almost-empty bottle of cheap perfume fell out. The other students giggled at the tacky wrapping paper and gifts. Miss Thompson at least had enough sense to snap on the bracelet and dab some perfume on her wrist. Holding her wrist up to the other children she said, “Isn’t it lovely?” The other children, taking their cue from the teacher, all agreed. At the end of the day when the other students had left, Teddy came over to her desk and quietly told Miss Thompson, “All day today you smelled just like my mother used to smell. That’s her bracelet you’re wearing. It looks very nice on you… I’m really glad you like my presents.” After Teddy left, Miss Thompson broke down, wept bitterly, and begged God to forgive her and give her a new attitude. The next day Teddy and his classmates had what Campolo calls “a new teacher.” While it was still Miss Thompson, she cared in ways that the old teacher didn’t. She reached out in ways that the old Miss Thompson didn’t. Miss Thompson especially nurtured, encouraged and tutored Teddy when he needed extra help. By the end of that school year Teddy had caught up with a lot and even exceeded some of his classmates. Some years later, Teddy sent Miss Thompson a note: “As of today I am Theodore J. Stallard, MD! … I wanted you to be the first to know. I’m going to be married on the 27th of July. I want you to come … [and] sit where my mother would have sat. You’re the only family I have now. Dad died last year. Love, Teddy Stallard.”

having worked with college students for over a decade now, one (of many) joys has been seeing some of the most beautiful examples of sincere generosity that has been mind-blowing to me. Like when on a Midnight Run where we were bringing food, clothing, and toiletries to homeless men and women a couple of years ago in New York City and seeing the students hugging and praying with these strangers was beautiful itself… but even going beyond that, this one night in particular when we happened to be on a stop in Midtown Manhattan and by that point had run out of some supplies… which often happens… we have no idea how many people we’ll encounter and so the objective is to do the best we can. This one homeless man very patiently was standing on line as those before him were being shown what was still available in terms of coats, sweaters, boots. One of our students saw him standing there and went over and asked was there anything in particular that he was looking for, and he simply asked for new socks. Of all the things that we had left at that point, that was the one thing we were out of… At that, this one student said “give me a minute, just stay here” and then bolted before I could stop him and ask what he was doing, where he was going, reminding him we had a schedule to follow and blah blah blah – before a word was out of my mouth, the kid ran down to a department store that was still open and bought a package of socks for this person. I think this is the first time I’ve ever shared that story, I was just blown away on so many levels by the whole experience...

In “Christus Paradox” Sylvia Dunstan captured the ironies of Christ’s simultaneously being God and Servant in ways that go along with what we have been thinking about here in terms of the odd—yes, the paradoxical—nature of Jesus’ birth, life, death, and even resurrection. You, Lord, are both Lamb and Shepherd. You, Lord, are both prince and slave. You, peacemaker and swordbringer Of the way you took and gave. You the everlasting instant; You, whom we both scorn and crave. Clothed in light upon the mountain, Stripped of might upon the cross, Shining in eternal glory, Beggar’d by a soldier’s toss, You, the everlasting instant; You, who are both gift and cost. You, who walk each day beside us, Sit in power at God’s side. You, who preach a way that’s narrow, Have a love that reaches wide. You, the everlasting instant; You, who are our pilgrim guide. Worthy is our earthly Jesus! Worthy is our cosmic Christ! Worthy your defeat and vict’ry. Worthy still your peace and strife. You, the everlasting instant; You, who are our death and life. Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia. You, who are our death and our life.

When I was appointed executor of my mother’s estate, I discovered over and over that I had to prove my right to her inheritance. I knew about Power of Attorney and notary publics. But I had never heard of the “Medallion Signature Guarantee.” That’s the highest level of authentication, absolutely necessary for the transfer of certain kinds of funds. I had to go to banks with all kinds of proof that I was who I said I was and that, therefore, I had a right to those funds. As I read this story of Peter and Cornelius, it struck me that the gift of the Holy Spirit is God’s “Medallion Signature Guarantee.” He is the final proof that we are God’s children and heirs to the riches of Christ (cf. Ephesians 1:13,14 and Galatians 4:4-7).

Once there was a rich man. He met and fell in love with a young maiden. She was lovely in form, and lovelier still in character. He rejoiced when he saw her. Yet he grieved also, for he knew that he was not like her. His face was hideous, and his heart was cruel. Nevertheless, he greatly considered how he could win her hand in marriage! Eventually, he hit upon a plan He went to see a mask-maker, to whom he said: “Make me a mask that I shall become handsome. Then, perhaps, I may win the love of this noble young woman!” The mask-maker did as he was asked. The man was transformed into a handsome figure. He tried his hardest to become a person as lovely in his character, disposition, and behavior towards this beautiful woman and others as his newfound appearance, at least superficially, would have suggested that he be! Thankfully, all of this was sufficient to win the heart and hand of the fair maiden. He asked her for her hand in marriage, to which she responded, “Yes!” and before you know it, they were married. Ten years of happiness followed. But the man knew he was carrying a secret. He sensed that true love could not be founded on deceit!...

A number of years ago the church I serve twice annually shared fellowship and worship with the folks from a Baptist church. Much divided our congregations. Ours is, after all, a largely white, Reformed church in the suburbs. King Emmanuel is a largely black, urban Baptist church. Yet, by God’s grace, members of both of our churches realized that the Spirit had fallen on each other’s churches. Much like Peter stayed and ate with the Gentile Christians, members of our church regularly ate and worshipped with the members of the Baptist church. We tasted and experienced appetizers of the glories of the new creation that we’ll get to share with people from every background...

In his book, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, David M. Kennedy writes about how during WWII Americans and Japanese hated and vilified each other based on racial stereotypes and thus fought a “war without mercy.” The Japanese thought Americans were “decadent” and “self-indulgent.” Americans had no stomach for war, the Japanese believed, and would, after Pearl Harbor, “immediately sue for peace” to Japan’s great advantage. Besides, the Japanese thought of themselves as racially pure and of one will. Americans, by contrast, were in the eyes of Japanese “a contemptibly polyglot and divided people . . . riven by ethnic and racial conflict, labor violence, and political strife, incapable of self-sacrifice or submission to the public weal.” All because Americans were infected with the “detestable Western virus of individualism.” Americans, for their part, thought the Japanese were “servile automatons devoid of individual identity.” Meanwhile, “wartime cartoons and posters routinely pictured the Japanese as murderous savages, immature children, wild beasts, or bucktoothed, bespectacled lunatics.” Kennedy observes that national pride issuing in stereotypes of the “other” and war-making on this basis is an ancient phenomenon seen, for example, among ancient Greeks, who thought of themselves as cultured aristocrats and thought of everybody else as mere “barbarians.”

Olive had a great capacity for friendship. A whole group of us came to rely on her generous spirit, her openheartedness, her humour, and her direct and obvious faith. She drew us out of ourselves, increased our confidence, and empowered our faith. One day she complained of a violent headache – and within a few weeks an aggressive brain tumour killed her. We, her friends and her family grieved over her loss...

As for baptism, there is probably no better representation of what it signals than the most spectacular scene in a film full of stunning sequences. Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), wrongly convicted of killing his wife, and consequently twenty years an inmate lifer in the hellhole Shawshank penitentiary, has understood at last that he is morally responsible, though he did not pull the trigger, for his wife’s death.

("Not everyone agrees with the things Rob Bell has been saying lately about heaven and hell and the like. But there is one thing Rev. Bell has said in just about every T.V. interview I have seen him do with which I completely agree and with which probably every sensible person would agree: you can't force love. Not even God can force his love onto someone...")

"If you connect Acts 10 with Luke 24—and both are possible readings in the Year C Revised Common Lectionary for Easter Sunday—then the portrait of Peter that emerges is rather striking. In Acts 10 Peter has been sent to Italy of all places. But once you are an Apostle, a "Sent One," you never know where you might end up..."

["In his memoir, Open Secrets, Richard Lischer employs a most lovely image at one point. In the church he first served following his graduation from seminary, the wine chalice used for the Lord's Supper was a fairly large goblet made of a shiny silver. Each time when he presented the wine, he would lift the cup up high over his head...")

("There is no single feature to the Christian church that reveals our unity with Jesus and all Jesus' people than the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. In his recent memoir Open Secrets, Richard Lischer employs a most lovely image at one point. In the church he first served following his graduation from seminary, the wine chalice used for the Lord's Supper was a fairly large goblet made of a shiny silver......")

My four and a half year old daughter and I were on our way to the grocery store and she was asking me questions about one of her favorite subjects. "Are we going to see Granny in heaven?" (Her only grandmother had died when she was just two, but with videotape and pictures, she knows what her granny looked like and says she remembers her.) "Yes, honey, when we die we will see Granny in heaven." "And then," she continued, "Will we come back to our own house?" "No honey," I replied, "We will stay with Jesus and Granny forever." She sat up straight and said in her most shocked voice, "You mean we're gona' stay dead?"...

Dr. Bruce Harding is a very gifted church musician who lives in Vancouver. One day, a few years ago, he called a taxi to take him to the airport. He asked the driver where he was from and when told that he was from Nigeria, Harding asked the driver, “what tribe?” After the answer was given, Harding began to sing one of the hymns from More Voices , “Alleluia, Praise to God” which was written in Yoruba “Aleluya Y’in Oluwa” The man’s head almost did a 180 and he looked into the back seat at this balding white skinned, red-head singing the songs from HIS homeland! It was probably the last thing expected to happen while driving his taxi on a Vancouver morning - so far from home. They sang the song together, along with “Come, O Holy Spirit Come” from Voices United, also in Yoruba, Wa wa wa Emimimo . It was a time of deep spiritual connection.

I knew my mother was mad at me whenever I got a cold meatloaf sandwich for school lunch. Do you remember school lunches? Do you remember how you could tell where everyone fit in the scheme of things just by observing what they brought for lunch? There was protocol to all of this, you know. It wasn’t about just a bunch of kids eating lunch, what it was really about was opening up your insides for everyone to see. The school lunchroom, after all, was the precursor to the Jr. High post-gym class shower, where everyone would see your everything or lack of everything, as you shook and shivered beneath a cold leaky drizzle of water wishing you could be anywhere else doing anything else --- even eating a cold meatloaf sandwich. No, lunch time at school was not usually the most pleasant of experiences. It could be more like exploratory surgery than necessary sustenance. And although no one ever really said it out loud, everyone knew where you stood in the scheme of things just by seeing what you brought for lunch. The best lunches always had the small snack size bag of Doritos or Ruffles, a bright yellow banana with no brown spots, a couple of Chips-Ahoy chocolate chip cookies, and a sandwich neatly wrapped in Saran Wrap, not wax paper or tin foil. Ham, bologna, salami, roast beef --- these were all okay. Last nights leftover pot roast was not (neither was last nights left over meatloaf). Peanut butter and jelly was okay as long as your Mom understood the jelly/bread issue. American cheese, Swiss cheese, these were okay. A couple of fish and some homemade bread loaves would’ve been completely out of the question. If you came with a good lunch, the right kind of lunch, it said something about you...

In “The Revelation,” a short story by Flannery O’Connor, Mrs. Turpin has quite a vision. While sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, Mrs. Turpin has a conversation with another patient about people who are below her on the social ladder, white trash and black n-word. A young girl overhearing this patronizing blather, hurls a book at her and calls her an old warthog from hell. Back home, nursing her head and her wounded ego, Mrs. Turpin considers whether God might be sending her a message about her attitudes. As she sprays down her hogs, she argues with God. “Why me? Who do you think you are?” That’s when she received her vision, “The Revelation.” The rays of the sun form a kind of bridge, and on that bridge is a “vast horde of souls marching into heaven.” In that horde are “whole companies of white trash, bands of black n-word in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics.” It is only at the end of the procession that she sees people who like herself “had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right….” She and her ilk were marching behind that vast horde of undesirables “with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior.” In her vision, Mrs. Turpin sees her social ladder turned upside down with the least taking precedence over the best.

Forbid water and withhold water are definitely combative. In engineering terms, the community of faith might be seen as building a dam. That's the subject matter of William Gropper's mural for the Department of the Interior. Created for the Works Progress Administration, the mural shows the massive amount of work undertaken to build projects like the Grand Coulee Dam and the Davis Dam. Human workers are frozen in heroic poses as they exert physical effort. Industrial machines like cranes lift and place segments of the dam that have been constructed elsewhere. Time, energy, labor and money are being invested in the creation of this dam...

Over the holidays I watched the movie The Two Popes. It’s an imagined dialogue between Pope Benedict and the current pope, Pope Francis. The film envisions how these two men, who are nearly polar-opposites, might have influenced each other, and how the Catholic Church could have been shaped through their dialogue. At the height of the sex abuse scandal, Cardinal Borgolio (the Argentinian Cardinal who later takes the name Pope Francis) asked to retire from his position as a Cardinal. Benedict summons Cardinal Borgolio to Rome and a funny, feisty conversation unfolds as they wander through the gardens of the Pope’s summer residence. Benedict dressed very pope-ly, Borgolio dressed quite simply, utterly different men, Borgolio’s explains his hoped-for resignation. “It seems to me,” Borgolia says, “our church is moving in directions I can no longer condone, or not moving at all when the time demands movement...

Pastor Wayne Reece tells an inspiring Easter story of his last year of seminary, back in 1960.1 He was going to school, and he was already pastoring a four-point rural parish in the Texas Panhandle. It was the Saturday before Easter. His sermon was all prepared, a weaving together of some of his own Easter reflections sprinkled with wonderful quotes from theologians of the day. In the evening he was at one of four the churches, preparing with several youth for an Easter sunrise service. One of the young men needed a ride home to another of the small towns he served, Tioga, which Pastor Wayne gladly obliged. But on the way home he ran out gas in the middle of nowhere. It was now dark, and this was still new and unfamiliar territory to him, especially at night. It was 1960, so there were no cell phones. He decided to start walking. It seemed like forever — but on checking his watch, it was only 35 minutes — when he came upon a Texas roadhouse with loud country music blaring, surrounded by pickup trucks and motorcycles...

Philip was a pleasant child — happy it seemed — but increasingly aware of the difference between himself and other children. He had been born with Down Syndrome — which partly means he learned more slowly than other children. Philip attended Sunday school, a third grade class. Those 8-year-olds learned, laughed, and played together. They really cared about each other. But because of his differences, Philip wasn’t as readily accepted by his classmates. Philip didn’t want to be different. He just was. One year their Sunday School teacher planned a marvelous lesson the Sunday after Easter. He had collected ten egg-shaped containers that panty hose sometimes comes in. Each child received one. Then the children were assigned to go out in the church yard and find a symbol for new life, put it in the “egg,” and bring it to the classroom. They would then mix up all the eggs, open them up, and share what they had found...

In her book A Little Handbook for Preachers: Ten practical ways to a better sermon by Sunday, Mary S. Hulst encourages preachers to approach the biblical text with a posture of humility every time we preach. She invites preachers to come to the text with questions. In a word of caution, that I think is particularly fitting for Easter Sunday, she writes, Asking questions reminds us that we don’t know everything. Some of us have been reading or teaching Scripture for years, and it can be so tempting to turn back to answers we’ve found before, which can leave us bored with the passage because we do not expect the text to say anything we haven’t heard before...

In a sense, the world was much smaller in the first century than it is now. Experts estimate that the world’s population in the first century was around 200 million. Today it’s about 7.7 billion. Peter, Cornelius, and other first-century folks didn’t know that North and South America (and many other places) existed. But in another sense, the world is much smaller now than it was then. Modern travel makes it possible to get to the other side of the world in a matter of hours. Modern technology allows us to communicate with someone on the other side of the world immediately. In first-century Israel, the wall between Jews and Gentiles was high...

The great preacher Fred Craddock told about his first student church, in East Tennessee. It was during the time that Oak Ridge was just booming, with all kinds of building activity with the atomic projects there. So there were construction people who had come from everywhere to turn this little town into a thriving city. Craddock pastored a beautiful little church nearby - a nice white frame church, very classic building with very nice people. Just lovely people. And here were all of these newcomers to the area. They were living in tents and trailers and all kinds of temporary housing. Many workers had their families with them, they had little kids with them. Craddock suggested to the church board that they reach out to these folks. They had come from everywhere and here they were nearby. It looked like this was the church’s mission. “Oh, I don’t think so,” said the board chair. “They won’t fit in. After all, they are just here temporarily, living in trailers and all.” Craddock said, “Well, they may just be here temporarily but they need the gospel and they need a church.” “No, I don’t think so.” There was discussion about this and in the end there was a resolution for the board to vote on, a resolution moved by a relative of the board chair. The resolution essentially said, “Members will be admitted to this church from families that own property in this county.” The vote was unanimous except for the pastor, and Fred Craddock was reminded that as pastor he was not a board member and could not vote. Well, years later Craddock was teaching at Candler School of Theology at Emory University, in Atlanta...

("A few years ago a man came to see me and asked for baptism. I asked him for his reasons and he told me that he first came to our church to bring a parcel to someone. He was a convinced unbeliever, a man in his forties. He came in a little before the end of the service so he had to endure a little of it. He stood at the back and he suddenly felt 'the overwhelming presence of God,' a presence that was objective...")

always good insights!

always good insights!

always good insights!

(scroll down for these reflections)

always good insights!

Scroll down the page for the narrative video.

Scroll down the page for this resource.