"Can anyone forbid water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?" Peter’s rhetorical question displays the radical hospitality of the gospel. He is talking about the oppressor, the household of Cornelius, the Roman centurion. All are welcome in the capacious house of the gospel, into the new humanity of the children of God. What is that? Or rather, who is that new human? The reading from 1 John spells it out. Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is a child of God… By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. Jesus spells out that commandment of joy in today’s gospel: This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. The life of the church into which we enter by baptism is the community formed and ever enlivened by the loving Holy Spirit of Jesus and his Abba-Father. The reality of our new humanity does not depend, then, on worldly status or patronage, popularity or power; none of the polarizations of this world count any longer. Indeed desire for any of these things actually corrupts its reality. Its reality is the Spirit uniting people together in the love of Jesus to the glory of God the Father.
Let us ponder and fully digest that summary statement of our three lessons today on this sixth Sunday of the Easter season. The reality of the church is the Spirit uniting people together in the love of Jesus to the glory of God the Father. Peter recognizes the loving Holy Spirit at work in the amazing fact that these Gentiles were speaking in tongues and extolling God. It’s easy here for us to get hung up by the reported phenomena of speaking in tongues when the point is rather that it is the unclean, the ungodly, the Gentiles who are praising the God of Israel. What this ecstatic phenomena consists in is extolling God. That is the substance of the gift of the Spirit who pours the love of Jesus into human hearts so that in turn they sing love in praise to the God of love.
This Spirit-given love may take as the many forms as there are human cultures and be expressed in as many tongues as there are languages. What is decisive is that all human boasting ceases and instead hearts are lifted up to the Lord in prayer, praise and thanksgiving. That is the sure and certain sign that it is the Holy Spirit who has fallen on hearers of the gospel word. Baptism into the unity of the new humanity of God comes about when we no longer boast of our diverse identities, regarding them as superior to others, giving heed to a lust for domination, but rather in the power of the Spirit united with Jesus and thus to one another, we glorify the God of Israel who has included us in his outreaching love.
This knowledge of the Spirit’s movement provides us with a criterion for discernment, for testing the spirits to see whether they are indeed of God. Any spirit who inspires human boasting of one’s own superiority over others is not the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit of Jesus and his Abba-father is the Spirit who turns us out of our preoccupation with entrenched worldly identities, status, heritage or power towards love for others to the glorification of God. Just this straightening out, this rectification of our human selves, reorienting life in the direction of mutual love is the Holy Spirit at work. And the Holy Spirit does this work by uniting each and every believer to Jesus Christ and through Jesus Christ to every other believer, one and all united in the praise of God. This community of disciples, united in the love of Jesus, is the divine ferment in this world, under the radar of its powers and authorities, of the aborning kingdom of God.
In what does this union with Jesus Christ consist? How are we to recognize it? To begin with, Jesus says today: You did not choose me, but I chose you. See, that is the end of all human boasting – and especially any ecclesiastical boasting – when in true humility we acknowledge that our faith and discipleship does not come about by our own initiative and power, but rather by the great choice of Jesus Christ for us one and all. Today he voices that great choice: Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. This is what Jesus has done in choosing his disciples. So he continues, I have appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide; so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. This I command you, to love one another.
There is a purpose for us, then, in the great and saving choice that Jesus made for one and for all. The promise that prayer will be heard is not a blank check. The instruction is to pray in accord with God’s purpose. The purpose is that his love, which has sought and found and grasped you just as every other believer, should channel through you to unite in love with others for whom this truly good Shepherd has also laid down his life. Believers need to know this purpose of God! They need to know this purpose in the love of Jesus that there joy may be full. They need to know this because, he says, no longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.
The servant just follows orders without knowing the purpose or intention. But a friend knows the choice of Jesus and the purpose of Jesus’s choice so that the friend of Jesus, filled with the Holy Spirit, knowingly cooperates in the purposes of God the Father. So, just as the Holy Spirit unites us to Jesus and his love, Jesus refers us back to the Holy Spirit who makes us into his friends, knowing the purpose of God the Father who has sent the Son to us and, then, the Holy Spirit upon us that we intelligently and actively cooperating with the purpose of God to the glory of God and true human good.
Peter asked, "Can anyone forbid water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?" We have heard how 1 John answers: Who is it that overcomes the world but whoever believes that Jesus is the Son of God? Such remarkable faith issuing in the glorification of God, the Abba Father of this Son Jesus, is the militant work of the Holy Spirit victoriously overcoming the darkness of this world. As born anew by faith, our intelligent and active cooperation in the community of Christian love is imperative – it is a gospel commandment! – in the Holy Spirit’s battle against the malice and injustice, the apathy and lovelessness of the unbelieving world. The community of disciples bound together in self-giving love is both a refuge against the darkness of this world and a beacon-light of witness shining in it to point out the better way.
In just this Holy Spirit light, Jesus’s commandments are not burdensome. They would be burdensome for a mere servant who works by rote, to be sure. How different, however, for those who are born of God! Newly born by the work of the Holy Spirit uniting them with the love of Jesus and through that with love for one another, just this friend of Jesus, no longer servant, but friend overcomes the world and already tastes the victory that overcomes the world in our Spirit-supplied faith.
Many of us in today’s church are discouraged and alarmed by the decline of our institutions. There are good reasons and bad reasons for this decline which faithful people need patiently to sort through so that we discern the divine criticism of our Christian failures from the hostile attacks of enemies, gleefully kicking us when we are down. The place for that is the meeting room where there can be give-and-take and discussion rather than from the pulpit, where the word of God is to be proclaimed. Yet to all who are discouraged and in dismay about the state of the church, Jesus concludes today, These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you.
The joy of Jesus is this. Baptism is the radical hospitality of the gospel. Baptism is the work of the Holy Spirit converting us from self-preoccupied suspicion and coldhearted lovelessness. Baptism unites us with Jesus Christ, the good Shepherd who laid down his life for the sheep so that there be one flock, one shepherd. The baptized rise up in the power of the Spirit to knowing and active cooperation in the outreaching ingathering purpose of God to create caring communities of Christ’s people, the little yeast that leavens the whole lump of the surrounding world. Our labor in the Lord is not in vain, then, nor is it joyless drudgery. We take to heart and bear in mind: These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you. In this joy we persevere, blessing the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love. Amen, so be it, Amen.