Loving into the Dream of God - Easter 5

Easter 5C: Acts 11:1-18; Psalm 148

Revelation 21:1-6; John 13:31-35

David Mealy

May 18, 2025

When I was a child we used to visit my grandmother in Troy, New York. One of my favorite things about those visits, aside from seeing my acerbic grandmother, was her box of stereogram photographs. These were pairs of identical-looking black-and-white photos mounted on rectangular pieces of cardboard.

I’d put them on the rack at one end of a hand-held wooden viewer and look through a pair of goggles attached to the other end. If I relaxed my eyes a bit, a three-dimensional image would magically appear, of coal-miners standing at the entrance to a mine or of Civil War soldiers getting haircuts in a camp.

It was a trick of the brain, of course, but it was kind of amazing to see this three-dimensional picture emerge. It also requires a certain kind of relaxed mental focus for the trick to work. When that focus is lost, the photos return to blurry, misaligned images.

I was reminded of these old stereograms while sitting with the readings we heard today. The first two tell fantastical stories filled with wild imagery. Peter’s long-winded explanation in Acts of why he met with Gentiles is kind of amusing, and John’s revelation is simply awesome.

But it is today’s Gospel from John that lets us see more deeply into these two stories, adding depth and richness to them. Jesus invites the disciples, and us, into a vision of a new world, much the way the stereogram viewer reveals a fuller version of a photograph.

Instead of looking through glass lenses, Jesus invites us to see the world through the eyes of love. When we do, Peter’s vision of a large sheet descending from heaven filled with creatures and John’s revelation of a city descending from heaven become stories of God’s dream for us.

In today’s Gospel, John continues with the story of Jesus preparing the disciples for what is to come. In the past weeks we have heard the disciples misunderstand him, argue with him, ignore him and refuse to let him wash their feet. Today they witness Judas’ departure from their midst without understanding him to be the betrayer.

In the middle of all this, Jesus gives them a commandment to love one another. He repeats that commandment two more times to be sure they heard it. The second time he elaborates a bit, telling them they should love one another just as he had loved them. And the third time, he tells them that, by showing their love for one another, the world will know that they are followers of Jesus.

Jesus reminds them of this commandment to love one another several more times in John’s Gospel. He clearly wants them to understand how fundamental love will be to their continued work in the world.

Jesus also promises them that once he is no longer with them, there will be another advocate that will be with them forever. This will be a helper that he calls the Spirit of truth, and it will abide in them. He is laying the groundwork for them to carry on in the world, though all this talk of love and spirits left them scratching their heads.

In today’s first reading, we jump ahead to a time after Jesus’ death and resurrection where this Spirit of truth appears to Peter.

In this story from Acts, Peter is confronted by those who believe he should not be breaking bread with Gentiles, people who are outside of their community.

Peter answers them by describing a vision he had that involves a large sheet coming down from heaven several times, full of God’s creations. Today’s Psalm underscores the importance of this vision, naming these creatures in a long hymn of praise.

Peter then unfolds a story that is as full of characters as that large sheet was full of creatures. There are three strangers, six other disciples, an angel and a house where another stranger relates his own vision. Then comes the Holy Spirit telling him not to see any difference between the strangers and himself. He ends this long tale with a kind of what-are-you-gonna-do shrug, saying who am I to get in God’s way.

The Holy Spirit was at work in that story, getting Peter to enlarge the world of believers, breaking down barriers by removing old distinctions that divided people, spreading the love. It is through Jesus commandment to love one another, that lens of love, that Peter opened himself to the Holy Spirit and witnessed that the Spirit also fell upon the strangers.

Peter’s original vision of a large sheet crowded with creatures becomes a vision of God’s dream for a world where all of God’s creation lives together in love. God was saying to Peter, look, if all these creatures can live peaceably together in a large sheet, surely you can go eat with Gentiles – they won’t bite.

In today’s second reading from Revelation, it is a large city that descends from heaven. This is a vision of God’s kingdom coming to us, a world where crying and death and pain will be no more. A world where life-giving water flows from a spring, freely available to those who thirst. This, too, is God’s dream for us.

As Verna Dozier notes in her book, “The Dream of God”, this dream is always something we are living into. It is never something we achieve, because, as Dozier writes, “Human beings were not created good, perfect, programmed. Human beings were created free.”

We have always had the choice to respond as God wanted us to – to not eat the apple in the Garden of Eden, to worship no other gods - or to go another way. We try something, we choose badly, we find ourselves distanced from God, we repent, we’re forgiven and we do it all again. That’s the way God made us.

Lately it has felt as though this dream of God is slipping away from us, becoming harder for us to see. Programs and policies we created to serve the poor, the frail, the elderly, the hungry, the homeless, the immigrant and the sick are being shut down with a reckless abandon that is shocking, even to those of us who have witnessed other cruel periods in American politics.

The words used to justify this dismemberment of our social infrastructure are themselves the cruelest, most hate-filled, most vindictive language most of us have heard from a elected leader in our lifetimes.

They echo the words that were used to justify the enslavement of Black people, the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor and the expulsion of those of Chinese ancestry when they were no longer needed to build our railroads.

These words and actions have no place in the dream God has for us. We are, perhaps, fortunate that many of these words were written on documents that can be revoked and burned, though they will have a lasting impact on all of us.

This week we heard that the Episcopal Migration Ministries, the organization that leads the Episcopal Church’s refugee resettlement ministry, was told that it must resettle white Afrikaners with the federal funds it receives, while refugees from the rest of the world are denied entry.

Our Presiding Bishop, Sean Rowe, announced that the Episcopal Migration Ministries has refused to participate in the federal grant program for refugee resettlement under those conditions, an action supported by the Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa.

In rejecting this administration’s insistence on aiding a group of white South Africans who have lost the privileges they enjoyed under apartheid while refusing aid to those fleeing war and persecution elsewhere in the world, the Presiding Bishop invoked some of the language we heard in today’s readings:

“As Christians, we must be guided not by political vagaries, but by the sure and certain knowledge that the kingdom of God is revealed to us in the struggles of those on the margins. Jesus tells us to care for the poor and vulnerable as we would care for him, and we must follow that command.”

Friends, our faith will bring us through this time as it has brought us through other troubled times. We will continue to live and to love our way into this dream God has for us each day. And yes, we will falter and fall and fail and we will try again.

We are building that dream of God as we look to the new ministries our kitchen will enable for us, as we reflect on how we can live into our commitment to sanctuary, as we strengthen our relationships with our trans and queer siblings. And most of all, we do that by showing our love for each other and for the strangers among us.

May we always walk in love as Christ loved us. Amen.