Coventry Cathedral – Baptistery, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=54899 [retrieved May 28, 2024]. Original source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevecadman/2652744641/.

RCL Year B, Easter 6
Acts 10:44-48, Psalm 98, I John 5:1-6, Saint John 15:9-17

You heard it in the First Lesson, written by Luke the Physician, author of the Gospel bearing his name as well as the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. The gift of the Holy Spirit is “poured out even on the Gentiles.”[1] In the narrow world that is the cradle of Christianity, our forebears the Jews defined all people as belonging to one of two groups. Everyone is either a Jew or a Gentile. And the point Luke the Physician makes in this Lesson is that if a Gentile can receive the Holy Spirit, then, well, anyone can receive the Holy Spirit.

I hope you see that point immediately as good news. No one who wishes to belong is excluded, as Jews excluded Gentiles from their congregation through all their distinctive requirements touching upon diet, sacrifice, language, and ceremony. You and I are “in,” as much as anyone at any time has been “in.”

As if to give us the point a second time, Saint John in the Epistle tells us: “everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God.”[2] If you want to be “in,” you shall be “in.” If we choose to be “in,” we shall be “in.” We can be either Jew or Gentile. The requirement is only that we use our will, our faculty to decide, to be born of God. Within us, within each of us, there lies an inviolable and individual choice that we can exercise to be Christ’s own forever.

Wasn’t it Samuel, sleeping before the ark of the covenant, who said, when God called him, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”[3] And is it not in your power and my power to say that very thing to the Lord every hour of every day? And, what do you think happens when you say that to the Lord? Just as he did to Samuel, he will give you something to hear and something to do. Put yourself in the hands of the living God, and you will find you have much to do.

But remember one thing: you will not have chosen God; God will have chosen you. As Jesus tells his disciples in the Gospel today, “You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.”[4]

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[1] Acts 10:45.

[2] I John 5:1.

[3] I Samuel 3:10.

[4] Saint John 15:16a and b.