Can Anyone Withhold the Water

Acts 10: 44-48

May 10, 2015

As with so much of scripture, the text this week is about borderlines and boundaries, about who’s in and who’s out; and, perhaps more importantly, about who gets to decide, who controls the borders and boundaries, who determines the nature and membership of the community.

In the earliest days of the Jesus movement within Judaism, these questions pressed in on the community. When the Acts of the apostles were being written down, all of these stories told of events within the Jewish community. These are fundamentally concerns of their community.

Circumcision was a clear and critical mark of inclusion and membership. The insiders – the circumcised – were, the text tells us, “astounded” that the grace of the Spirit should not be reserved for them. After all, they were the established members of the community, the ones who had poured out their life for the good of the whole, and they held fast to their deep conviction and, perhaps, also to their status within the community.

“How,” they seem to ask, “can God favor those people as much as God favors us? We have been faithful. We have watched over the people, and maintained this community, and now these newcomers want to be considered part of us but they are not willing to undergo the same ritual of membership?”

Well, never mind for the moment the precise details of that ritual of membership and the way it may have felt different to adult newcomers than it did to six-day-olds, what is clearly at stake in this story are the borders and boundaries of the community, and the signs and commitment to them.

We may chuckle at the seemingly ancient strangeness of this story, but, let’s be honest, this concern is about as “ancient” as this morning, and, honestly, no stranger than Facebook. Does “liking” page constitute membership in that page’s community? We still struggle to define borders and boundaries – who is in and who is out of our communities, what commitments do we make to our communities, and what shall be the signs of our commitments?

Erin Lane, author of Lessons in Belonging from a Church-Going Commitment Phobe, said in a recent Washington Post article, “American religious life will look different in 20, 30, 50 years as my generation tests our millennial ideals with experience. We may not be fully in or fully out of the church, but we’re committed to something. We’re committed to rethinking commitment.”[1]

That rethinking comes as a crucial challenge to the church, and it’s one that we ought to attend to with urgency. Indeed, that’s why we’ve spent so much time at Clarendon rethinking what it means to be a member of the congregation.

More importantly than that narrow question of formal borders and structures of membership, we’ve spend a huge amount of time and energy and risk at Clarendon for many years working actively to transgress boundaries and redraw borders with respect first to the empowerment and ordination of women and, over the past two decades, with respect to the empowerment and ordination – and marriage rights – of gays and lesbians.

All of those conversations – about membership and leadership, about belonging and being called – all of those are significant, even essential conversations and movements.

But a prior movement in the text of Acts is of prior significance. It’s captured in Peter’s question, “Can anyone withhold the water?”

In other words, “can anyone hold back the Spirit of the living God, symbolized in the waters of baptism?” Can anyone control the Spirit?

No. Absolutely not. Thanks be to God.

If God wants to call women into leadership, then She is going to do so. Scripture attests to that fact, even when throughout history the men in control of the text have tried to hide or suppress the evidence. If God want to call gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer folks into leadership, then the transgressive Spirit is going to flow where it will washing away the barriers and washing clean the detritus of hatred, homophobia, sexism, and heterosexism.

“Can anyone withhold the water?”

No. The waters of baptism flow where they will, and they will flow on until, springing forth from the font, justice will flow down like a mighty water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Thanks be to God. Amen.

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[1] Quoted in Century Marks in The Christian Century, April 29, 2015, p. 9.