Easter 5, Year C: Acts 11:1-19
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
May 15, 2022
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
It’s been an unusual week at home. Some of the renovations on our fixer-upper have finally commenced, reducing the current size of our living space. We’ve boarded the dogs, moved furniture out of bedrooms, and made efforts to prepare for when demolition and construction move into full swing. Contractors are coming and going and stomping and banging and otherwise doing their jobs throughout the day. The electrical updates we’ve been pushing for since we bought the place in September finally began on Thursday and—hopefully—will be complete tomorrow. But the very first upgrade to get moving turned out to be the last one we had ordered: new windows.
From what we can tell, our windows are original to the house when it was built in the 1960s. They’re the single pane, aluminum frame type found in many older homes. They keep out the bugs, but it feels like noise and dust come straight on in. Ours also have some sort of orange film bonded to the glass, which I assume is meant to dampen the bright sun and keep the summer heat from pouring through. Although a few windows show significant cracking and peeling, the glaze isn’t particularly noticeable in most rooms.
Or at least it wasn’t.
The new windows are a simple, energy efficient kind with the white frames and sliding panes. They aren’t remarkable in any noticeable way and are probably pretty standard for modern builds. But even with the changeover only partially complete, the difference they make has been shocking! The previous owner really liked dark colors—we have orangish brown walls and carpet throughout most rooms. We bought the place because we could see its potential, but the left-over decor and a dearth of light fixtures can sometimes make it feel like we’re living in a cave. So it’s been amazing this week to see the rooms transform without us changing the interiors at all.
The contrast was most obvious in our entrance/kitchen area, where there’s a wall with two windows offering a peek-a-boo view to the Organ Mountains through the neighbors’ trees. On Wednesday the workers replaced one of those windows while leaving the other for the next day. That evening revealed just how distorted our vision had been. Through the old window, the sky was bright but a touch murky and the mountains were a sort of brown as the sunset fell across them. However, through the new one, a crisp blue from the evening sky swept across our courtyard, and the mountains shone a pinkish purple. The scene was so sharp I checked three or four times to make sure the glass was actually in the frame. Set beside the new window, the old looked flat and dirty, the late afternoon light filtering through a yellowish haze as if decades of tobacco smoke had condensed into the panes themselves.
I’ve enjoyed that view frequently since we moved in without ever really giving the windows a second thought. I’ve watched the colors change over the course of an evening or even across seasons and been perfectly happy with what I’ve seen. And in the big scheme of things, I hadn’t necessarily been missing much. The mountains were still beautiful through the film, and the tinting actually enriched certain tones. We could have spent the rest of our lives with the old windows and remained completely satisfied with the view. But having looked through the new ones, I’m thankful we don’t have to go back to the old. Nothing is different about the scenery, yet everything feels clearer and closer. There’s more variety to the colors, and it gives the sense of having a better connection to the natural world. The new windows haven’t changed reality from the outside, but from the inside, everything has changed.
I wonder if that doesn’t reflect the experience Peter and the other early Christians shared in our first reading.
At this point in the story, we’re nearly halfway through the book of Acts. We don’t know how long after Jesus’ resurrection our reading takes place, but the Church seems to have some institutional structures forming with it, which suggests it’s been around long enough for people to find the need to start organizing things. What we have seen is the Gospel spreading among the Judeans and the Samaritans, and converts to Judaism, such as the Ethiopian eunuch, have also become faithful to Christ’s message. But there hasn’t been any notable activity outside of the broader Jewish community of that day. Christianity is still a largely ethnic religious movement—and happily so. Jesus’ death and resurrection were in the process of revamping culture among Israel’s descendants, but like many good things, people within its original community probably didn’t expect it to have much application outside their standard social boundaries—boundaries honed and reinforced across centuries to help an exiled or oppressed population survive with a common identity.
So think of how confusing it would have been to hear that one of your community’s leaders had broken those long-established social norms. It probably felt something like if you saw me moonlighting at one of the new pot shops. Marijuana isn’t illegal here anymore, so I technically wouldn’t be doing anything wrong. But it doesn’t really fit our traditional expectations: priests and “drugs” just hold different spaces in our minds. So in the same way you might have questions for me in that situation, the early Christians needed to understand what in the world Peter was doing.
And it turns out that Peter himself didn’t entirely understand! He had been going about his business, ignoring the world of outsiders like the rest of his community when he saw a vision where God’s Sacred Breath whispered for him to trail along with some strangers. I doubt he knew what to expect as they entered this Greco-Roman house with its foreign styling, outlandish decorations, and strange expectations. But he starts telling them about Jesus, and while he’s still talking, it’s like Pentecost begins again. Without these foreigners doing anything, without them changing who they were or adopting anyone else’s cultural practices, the Holy Spirit sweeps through the room the exact same way it had with the apostles. These outsiders hadn’t changed their diet. They hadn’t changed their language or their clothing or their preferences. They hadn’t even been baptized! And yet God had made it clear that despite their difference, despite the confusing or uncomfortable nature of their customs, these too were reflecting Jesus and accepted as Children of God’s Kingdom.
The Gospel hadn’t changed, and the people hadn’t changed, yet everything had changed. It was like God had switched out Peter’s old, tinted window with a new, clear one. The same message suddenly showed sharper detail and expanded color. Peter began to realize that God’s love, mercy, and mission of reconciliation stretch far beyond any one community’s expectations of what that should look like. It did so then, and it continues to do so today.