Easter 5C 2025

THE REVEREND E. WAYNE ROLLINS

Today’s lessons echo some we hear throughout the church year. The first lesson
from The Acts of the Apostles recounts a story we often hear on Easter Sunday. The
second lesson is similar to some we hear during Advent, and then possibly at a funeral.
And the Gospel contains an omitted section of the Maundy Thursday gospel.
All three have a common thread. In fact, it’s the thread that runs through all of
Holy Scripture. That thread is faithfulness.

Peter is called before church leaders in Jerusalem. It’s sort of like being
summoned to the bishop’s office. Or, perhaps more generally understood, to the
principal’s office or those dreaded words some of us heard as a child. “Just wait until
your father gets home!” Sorry about those flashbacks.

Peter is charged with answering an accusation that sometimes begins with either
“we’ve never done it that way before” or “we used to do it this way.” The charge? He
baptized Gentiles. He didn’t take time to circumcise the males, or put them all through
catechism. What he did was witness the presence of the Holy Spirit in those Gentiles
before he even baptized them, and decided he’d better catch up to what God was
already doing.

Peter had just gone through a couple of change of life issues himself. First, he
stayed with a guy named Simon, whose profession was a tanner. Simon handled the
bodies and skins of dead animals, coming into contact with blood. That made him
unclean. That also made it possible that guests in his house were unclean. Then, Peter
fell asleep before dinner, but he was hungry. So he dreamed about food. Not roast
lamb with couscous and a side of potatoes and tabouli. He dreamed about scorpions
and snakes and other creepy crawly things he wouldn’t find on the local kosher buffet
or salad bar.

“What I have declared clean you shall not declare unclean,” says the Voice of
God to Peter. So, rather than being faithful to his traditional teaching, Peter is changed,
converted, if you will, into faithfulness to this new thing God is already doing.
John, in exile on the island of Patmos, has a vision of the new Holy City of
Jerusalem. We have a more contemporary vision of that city before us. Both draw
upon traditional understandings and familiar structures. But there’s something
different about it all, beginning with one basic understanding. The city John sees is
something God gives, not something made by human hands or planned by
contemporary architects and artists.

1The city that God will give is based on a foundation laid by Jesus himself when
he met his closest friends for supper just before he was arrested. Today’s Gospel picks
up just after Judas leaves the room, albeit with a full stomach and clean feet.
Jesus gives the mandatum novum, the new commandment. He goes so far as to
tell his followers that they will be known by how they live this commandment. Not
about how they followed a set of rules, or demanded that others do the same. “Love
one another as I have loved you. By this they will know that you are my disciples, that
you have love one for another.” I happen to believe that he was still thinking about
Judas when he said that.

Now, before we turn love into just another law that we have to follow, let’s
consider it instead as the foundation for who we are and all that we do. We have stories
about how others have done that in preparing for us to follow, and not just for
themselves. The image in front of us grew from a desire springing from John’s words
about God being the light of the new Jerusalem, “a golden light, [with] clouds that
would symbolize the joyous feeling of life over the Holy City.”

Our faithfulness, our real faithfulness, is to the God who is Alpha and Omega,
who was and is and is to come, who said to Moses “I AM WHAT I WILL BE.” Future
tense. We are called to be faithful to that God who isn’t finished creating us yet. Our
faithfulness is, therefore, to who we will be and to where we are going. Having said
that, I can imagine some conversations might yet begin with “we used to . . .” or “we
never did it that way . . . .” Sometimes those sentences can give us something on which
we can build. But, too often, they tend to serve as a means to control or stifle the Holy
Spirit, and we find ourselves standing at another buffet of scorpions and snakes. I don’t
really care if they do taste like chicken. And I’m hoping there isn’t time to prepare a
special paté for coffee hour.

How do you imagine the new Jerusalem? What would Wilmington, Delaware
look like if we lived that idea, based in love for all creation in the same way God loves it
and all who live in it? I ask these questions because the new Jerusalem is to be our way
of life as followers of the crucified and risen Christ. The new Jerusalem is found where
Jesus’ followers bear his cross of love, and help shoulder that burden when others find
it too heavy to carry for themselves.

This isn’t a yellow brick road, and we don’t need to concern ourselves with the
false prophets behind the curtain. We follow the true and living Lamb of God, and we
carry the light of that life into the darkness of our own time. We don’t grow weary of
waiting for the new Jerusalem and try to build it ourselves through judgement and
legislation. We live the life of the new Jerusalem as the godly alternative to those
attempts.

That is who we are, and we are known because the Holy Spirit speaks to us and
works through us to reveal the light of God’s love to all who live in the despair of
darkness. God’s gift is the New Jerusalem, where God’s people are the embodiment of
Love itself, for the healing and consolation of those seeking the new world that God creates
​as the place for our future life in God’s eternal presence.