5 Easter C
Text: Acts 11:1-8
sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
May 15, 2022
Peek into the Sheet
Get comfortable. This is a long one. There are three different stories I wanted to tell in this sermon, and I thought about cutting one of them, but then I thought: what are you guys gonna do; fire me? So I’m telling ‘em all this morning; I’m takin’ my time!
For the first lesson this morning we get Peter’s report of his marvelous vision, the sheet coming down from heaven filled with all the animals, those traditionally considered clean and those unclean, and Peter is told that now all God’s critters got a place in the choir. God in Christ has made all clean, and what God has made clean, neither Peter nor any one else is to call profane. So it is that for breakfast this morning you had your bacon or ham or sausage, for God’s old prohibition against unclean animals – pigs are not kosher! – that law has been lifted by the grace of God in Christ. And that goes as well for the law requiring circumcision, and the law barring the Gentiles from the house of worship. In Christ, it’s a whole new ballgame.
My first story is of an art installation I saw some years ago at Wicker Park Lutheran Church, on the near north side. Wicker Park Lutheran was celebrating its centennial, 100 years of Wicker Park Lutheran Church, and they got to thinking about all the people who had been part of that faith community over that century of ministry: German immigrants who had settled in the area early 1900’s and established the congregation; poor people of various races in the 1950’s and 60’s as the neighborhood was stricken by poverty; the bohemian artist community that had taken hold in the late 60’s and 70’s; and the present community of urban professionals, gay and straight, as the neighborhood has now gentrified.
The congregation got its quilting ladies to make quilts of all these various descriptions, and had then woven them together, edge to edge, to make a gigantic quilted sheet that was then suspended from the ceiling of the grand 100-year-old sanctuary. It was the sheet of St. Peter, and it remained there for the centennial year, reminding one and all that all God’s critters do indeed got a place in the Wicker Park choir.
Now I know that at one level the matter of who belongs is not quite as clear, not quite as warm and fuzzy, as all that. Certainly the Godly community stands for something, which is to say that it stands over against some other things, and some behaviors we recognize as building up the Body of Christ, and others we discern as tearing it down. We have to make that judgment; of course we do.
But if there is anything that we learn from the story of Peter and the sheet of broad salvation, it is that we make those judgments with great care and all humility, open every moment to remembering that, oh!, we have been wrong before!; and open every moment to the possibility that we might well learn something new about God again. To put it another way, we make those decisions and those judgments, expecting every moment that God may surprise us, as God has surprised us before, as God did surprise Peter, with the incredible breadth and depth of divine grace.
Let me tell my second story, as an example of what may surprise us when we look into that sheet. In the 1960’s, Lutheran churches in the United States were fiercely debating whether women could be ordained and serve as pastors, debating just as fiercely as Christian churches have been recently debating the place of gays and lesbians in the Christian community. I guess it’s hard for us to imagine that the question of the ordination of women was ever quite that controversial, as hard as it is for us to imagine why the earliest Christian communities got so hot and bothered about whether Gentiles could be Christians, but there you are.
The issue was finally decided, sort of, when in June of 1970 the Lutheran Church in America voted to change its constitution to permit female candidates for ordination. I say the decision was made sort of, because, you may know, Lutheran church polity calls for three things to be present for us to understand an authentic call to ordained ministry: 1) the person must be called; that is, the candidate must say, “I believe I’ve been called by God to be a pastor”; 2) the wider church must recognize the call; that is, the wider church and the bishop must say “We have examined this person, and we believe this person has been called by God to be a pastor”; and 3) a calling entity, usually a local congregation, must recognize the call; that is, the congregation must vote to say “We believe this person has been called by God to be our pastor.”
In 1970 there were plenty of female candidates for ordination, so that took care of #1, and with the June vote the wider church recognized them as qualified, #2. It was #3 turned out to be the sticky part: Would any congregation vote to call a female candidate to be their pastor? Would any congregation look into that sheet and say, “The old law was that women weren’t kosher, couldn’t serve, but now we see what God’s grace has done in Christ Jesus, and what God has made fit no one must call profane”? Would any congregation look into that sheet, and say that?
In November of 1970 Elizabeth Platz became the first woman ordained by the Lutheran Church in America, but she was not called by a congregation; she was called by the national church to serve as campus pastor at the University of Maryland. The next month, December, Barbara Andrews was indeed called by a congregation, but it was her home congregation, and while it was technically a call it was not a job, there was no salary for her, so the call was more or less a token. Still, no congregation that had a pastoral opening had voted to call a woman to full-time ordained ministry, and that remained true for almost two years after the national vote.
Then, in the summer of 1972 – 50 years ago this summer! – it finally happened. A congregation with a pastoral opening accepted a female candidate from their bishop, interviewed her, recommended her to a congregation meeting, and the congregation voted by the required 2/3 majority to call her as their pastor. The congregation, as a matter of fact, was called Faith Lutheran Church, and that congregation was in a south suburb of Chicago called Homewood, IL. That vote took place in this room. The Rev. Karin E. Knutson was called to this pulpit, that altar. Just as Peter had a vision of God working in an entirely new way, so also did this congregation on that day. People of God at Faith Lutheran Church: never forget that story! Never forget it; tell that story again and again,
• for the identity of this place as a congregation that will welcome lifetime church members and people who are new to Christian faith;
• the identity of this place as a congregation that holds Black Christians and white;
• the identity of this place that invites those who have much faith and those who have little;
• the identity of this place as a community where gay people and straight people can commit themselves to Christ, together;
• the identity of this as a place that could hold dissension and even division for the sake of a new vision of the meaning of the Gospel;
the identity of this place was surely forged on that day 50 years ago. Never forget it; that story is part of Faith’s DNA, and that story is shaping us still.
If there is anything that we learn from the story of Peter and the sheet of broad salvation, and anything we learn from the story of the first regular call of a woman to the pulpit of an American Lutheran congregation, it is that we approach all judgments with great care and all humility, open every moment to the possibility that we might well learn something new about God again. Where is it in your life that God is trying to break in to teach you something new? Who is the person in your life, maybe, whom you have written off, but whom God may well be thinking is valuable and worthy? Peek into the sheet, with all humility; peek into the sheet, and we’ll all be surprised by what God can make holy.
I will close with my third story about sheets and visions of God, and what God calls clean and we must not call profane. This story was shared by one of our members in one of our Bible studies this week, and I share it with her permission.
She told us that in 1973, in her twenties and working as a schoolteacher, she became pregnant. There were issues, because she was not married. She would not have an abortion, but elected to bring her daughter to birth.
The first issue was with her health insurance, which refused to cover her care and the birth because she was not married. Apparently insurance companies could do that in 1973. The next issue was the school system, which would not grant maternity leave to someone who was not married.
But the one that really got to her happened just after her daughter was born, when she bought a house. “Now try not to be offended,” said her real estate attorney when time came to sign the papers; “there are some old-fashioned legal terms in here that are still part of real estate law.” But she was offended, because the documents described her as a “spinster,” at that time the legal term for an unmarried woman. And she was really, really offended, when the documents described her legal heir as her “bastard” daughter. Well, that may be the legal term, she told her lawyer, but it oughta be illegal.
I listened to her story, and then it suddenly occurred to me that I knew that daughter of hers. “Wait a minute,” I said, “is that ….?”
“It surely is. That bastard daughter grew up to be ordained as an ELCA Lutheran pastor,” she said. I know her; she is a colleague, serving a congregation now in Buffalo, New York.
What God has made clean, you must not call profane.