![The steeple of the Memorial Church](/sites/g/files/omnuum7126/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2025-02/160725ChurchCalArt4.jpg?itok=rG9ZvXzh) # Fifth Sunday of Easter May 20, 2025 - [ Blog ](/news-categories/blog) *By Kelley Woehl MDiv III,* *Seminarian* *The Memorial Church of Harvard University* *(The following is a transcript of the service audio, May 18, 2025)* Good morning. I would like to start with a quick poll, if you don't mind being my Guinea pigs. I promise it's short and judgment-free, but as a heads-up, there will be a second one and a pop quiz during the coffee hour. So take notes. So, a show of hands, who of us can say we've been bullied? Use whatever definition you feel comfortable with, even if it's petty. There's no need to overthink it, and I promise I'm not taking your names down when I ask that question. It's just something I want us to sit with for a moment, because I've been there. My sister's here, and she can attest to the fact that when I was in fifth grade, I was told by a young girl that I was loud and bossy, rude. In her defense, I was both of those things. And truth be told, I still am both of those things, but the nerve of some people to tell you something accurate about yourself to your face, right? But honestly, it hurt. I still think about it sometimes and the scar still stings. It took a lot of time and self-love, but I look back on it now and I appreciate it and her. Whatever it was, whatever lesson it taught me, I feel grateful for it. Annoyed and embarrassed, yeah, but I'm grateful. This is what came to mind when I saw our lesson from John for today: love one another, just as I have loved you. It's pretty self-explanatory. I was immediately like, 'Oh, I’ve got this.’ This is the easiest lesson in the book. This is the good news. I remembered my elementary school bully and how quickly I was able to forgive her, and I felt pretty qualified to talk about this topic. But then I read the text from Acts, and my hopes and dreams for an easy sermon were quickly shattered. Today's text from Acts complicates Jesus' message to love one another in a few ways. In light of the Acts text, Jesus' message to love one another becomes more complicated and more radical, especially when those others are our enemies, our oppressors, even ourselves. So let's look at the story presented in Acts. In it, Peter has returned from a journey in the middle of this horrible and devastating time in Jerusalem, but he has a smidge of happiness to offer. I like to think of him riding a donkey with a smug little smile on his face, planning on how he'll tell his friends he converted a lot of people. You know how you prepare a script to brag because you want to balance humility and bragging. I almost wonder how many times he rehearsed it on his way to Jerusalem, but he gets there and he doesn't even get to brag. In fact, people are mad at him. They're questioning why he ate with uncircumcised men. At the time, circumcision was a physical way to distinguish between the Jews and Gentiles, between us and them. The previous chapter, Acts 10, gives some *more context to this passage where we learned that one of the converts Peter is talking about is Cornelius, a God-fearing Roman soldier.* Harvard Memorial Church · Kelley Woehl MDiv III - May 18, 2025 | Sunday Sermon So Peter finally finds the opportunity to use his script, and he tells this really incredible story of his vision. He describes this sheet coming down, not too dissimilar from this thing I'm standing under, and it's a message from God telling him to kill and eat. But Peter is a pretty righteous man, and he says, "I know this trick. You're trying to get me to disobey the law by eating unclean foods. Well, I'm not falling for it." But God snaps back and says, "What God has made clean, you must not call profane." And this happens three times over and over and over. Peter restrains himself from eating unclean foods, thinking he's doing the right thing, and then God tells him that God has made it clean. The repetition of this vision is important. It's like Peter is being retrained on what it means to be pure, and God is the one teaching that lesson. Now, while this is happening, the Spirit is telling these other men, these Gentiles, these Romans, to seek out Peter. When they find him and bring him back to their house, they're baptized in the Spirit. When Peter tells this to his community in Jerusalem, they no longer question him dining with the uncircumcised. In fact, it's a pretty drastic shift from where they were at the beginning of the story. At the end, they actually celebrate. Now, at first glance, this seems to complement Jesus' message to love others. But when we look deeper into the text's content, context, and history, it gets much more challenging. When this was written, Jerusalem had just been completely destroyed. Josephus wrote that almost a million people were killed when the Roman Empire forcibly took control over the city. The Temple of Jerusalem, the center of religious observance, was gone. No one knew what to do or where to look except inward, turning towards their community for support. And now here's Peter riding in on his donkey, telling them that actually they need to expand that community. In fact, they need to expand that community towards the group that inflicted harm on them. With this history, it makes sense why they were so freaked out at first. I mean, I would just pretend I didn't hear Peter. But the audience confronts the conflict, and by the end, they recognize Jesus' message in Peter's story. Jesus calls us to love others, but this has dimension to it. Loving your neighbor includes those interpersonal relationships. It means that even when things get hard in our personal lives, we should continue to love the humanity of those around us. A similar lesson from Jesus, loving your enemies, is another tough way to love others, but even that assumes a similar status and implies mutual harm. What Peter is instructing here is so much more complicated than loving others. Here, Peter is asking his Jewish community for something more. He's asking people to love beyond their bounds, including those who belong to the group of oppressors. He's asking them to love the others, the uncircumcised, the impure, the Gentiles, the Romans. Peter is asking them to trust people who are part of a group different from theirs, people who are part of the group that killed Jesus, destroyed Jerusalem, and continued to oppress the Jews. It's complicated because those people that Peter baptized, yes, they were Gentiles, and yes, they were Roman soldiers, but they were also described as good and God-fearing people. They worshiped with Peter and learned from him. Though they were part of the movement that caused destruction, it seems in the text that they are seeking forgiveness and choosing love over hatred. What Peter is pointing towards is the fact that whether someone belongs to a group, whether the oppressed or the oppressor, does not immediately forfeit their claim to God's love. Like I said earlier, the previous chapter explains this exact same story in real time. So in Acts 10, we see the Gentiles' version, their perspective, and we get more details on their conversion. But the next chapter, chapter 11, today's chapter, is meant to help us see from the Jewish side. As readers, we're meant to empathize with their internal conflict, their initial hesitation. But we get to see both sides, the Gentiles and the Jews, to see their larger message from Peter, his call to love those beyond our boundaries. But there's an important distinction that needs to be made. What Peter is asking the Jews to do is not to forgive or forget the atrocities of the Roman Empire. He's not absolving them of guilt or saying that they were in any way justified. He's saying that those pasts should not keep them from repenting, from asking forgiveness and being given it by God. Peter is asking his people to learn from Jesus' example when he forgave the centurion as he was nailed on the cross. It's not just about loving others, it's about widening our definition of who qualifies as other. And that's a much harder ask. Now, it's time for that second poll I mentioned, but you don't have to raise your hands for this one. You may see it coming, but the question is, have you ever been the bully? I'll go first. I have. I've spoken without thinking. I've acted out of jealousy. I've pushed too hard. There are moments I regret, and they shake me, and I know I'm always in need of forgiveness. I needed to remind myself of that a lot while preparing for the sermon. Because to prepare for today, I read lots of commentaries on this text, some from early Christian fathers, some as recent as 2020. But a common thread was the argument that took this Acts text out of context. They often said something along the lines of Jewish people must have hated outsiders, but Jesus taught them to love others. But interpretations like this framed Judaism as incomplete or hateful while presenting Jesus as correcting these things, as though love for others was foreign to Jewish tradition, when in fact prophets like Isaiah and Zechariah taught similar messages. Another example of historic use of this text is in God's message to Peter, "What God has made clean, you must not call profane." It's a pretty powerful call to extend our boundaries. But the text has been manipulated to completely dismiss the commandments of the Hebrew Bible and by extension those who observe them. Let's not forget that Jesus was a practicing Jew of his time. He observed Jewish holidays, worshiped at the temple, and followed the purity laws. And baptism itself comes from the practice of mikvah immersion in Judaism. These two arguments that the ancient Jews needed Jesus to complete their theology and that the purity laws no longer needed to be observed are harmful. Not just because they are inaccurate, but because they belittle both Jesus' ministry and the entire Jewish faith. They imply that Jesus fixed Judaism, reducing him to a reformer of his tradition rather than a revolutionary in his own right. Christians have used this text to hurt Jewish populations for centuries. It has been key in forming arguments around supersessionism, the idea that Christianity completed Judaism or made it obsolete. I say all this because as we approach the discussion of loving our oppressors, we have to confront ourselves as the oppressors. We have to balance the complex emotions of guilt and anger as we ask for forgiveness from ourselves, from others, from God. This poses a few questions. How do we love our oppressors? How do we love ourselves as oppressors? And how do we ask for love from those we have oppressed? These are uncomfortable questions with uncomfortable answers. I won't stand here and simply tell you to love the oppressors. It feels inadequate and inappropriate. I can't tell you to love the oppressors while people are being kidnapped from their homes and off the streets. I can't tell you to simply love the oppressors while starving children are targets of attacks. As someone who is often in the privileged position, I also think it's better to turn to other sources to find wisdom on this topic. Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, who founded Latin Liberation Theology, says that while God loves the powerful, he goes out of his way to stand with people in poverty and oppression. James Cohn writes that loving your enemy and loving your oppressor does not mean to pray passively, but to love and pray fervently, passionately for the conversion of oppressors, to hope for their repentance, and for that to be a comfort to those oppressed people. Cohn says that as an oppressed person, Jesus represents all oppressed people. When God came down, he could have come as a king or the richest person on the planet, but Jesus was not a conqueror. Jesus was a carpenter. God came to earth as part of an oppressed group. And as someone who was kidnapped and killed at the hands of empire, his love wasn't passive, it was resilient. It was active. It was revolutionary. So back to those two polls. If you, like me, answered yes to both, you're not alone. Most of us, if we're honest, exist in that complicated middle space. Sometimes oppressed, sometimes oppressor. Sometimes loud and bossy, sometimes kind and forgiving. The message in Acts reminds us that the categories we cling to, insider and outsider, good and bad, clean and unclean, don't define who belongs in God's kingdom. God's love does. Jesus calls us to love others, and Peter calls us to expand our idea of who those others are. Peter calls us to include our enemies and our oppressors in that love. Loving the oppressed means to love Jesus, but loving the oppressor means to love like Jesus. But this does not mean we should sit idly by. Jesus' approach was not one to justify violence and retaliation, but he did not expect people to submit to their oppressors. It was something in between, and I think that in-between route is where we find love. It's loving others by not violently retaliating, and it's loving ourselves by standing up to oppression. We push back with love and wisdom and reason and grace by fighting when we can, standing up for others, and in everything we do, hoping for the best, even for our opponents, even when we want better for them than they want for themselves. Loving our neighbors and oppressors may look like holding them accountable. Love may look like demanding change for a truth we already know, the truth of justice, equality, and inclusion. Love may look like protests and rallies. It may look like hard conversations or the intentional action of walking away. Jesus taught all of these things as examples of loving others. Peter is demonstrating it to both the Jews and Gentiles. It takes faith and courage to see and know that that change is real, to see God's presence in those different from us, to acknowledge the humanity of those who hurt us and those who we hurt. Peter's audience in this story does not let their fear hinder the hope and joy of the Gentiles' conversion. Instead, they celebrate at the hope of change. This moment in Acts presents a message of complicated love, one that crosses boundaries. But when we distort it, we become the ones in need of loving forgiveness. When we embrace it, we become agents of the gospel's radical, boundary-breaking love. Amen. ## Full Sunday Sermon ## See also:- [ Sunday Service ](/archive/sunday-service) - [ Sermon ](/archive/sermons) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#)