All God’s Children
Sermon for Sunday, May 5, 2025
How do we know who is a child of God? The apostle John sets out a pretty simple test: Those who are children of God can be identified because they believe that Jesus is the Christ, that is, the Messiah, the Son of God. Further proof is found in the love that God’s children have for one another. Or to put it in negative terms, those are not God’s children who do not believe that Jesus is the Christ, and do not bear love for his family, the Church.
Christianity is thus both radically inclusive and starkly exclusive. For those who want to belong, nothing about who they are, or where they come from, or who their parents are, or what they have done, can keep them out of the kingdom of heaven.
On the other hand, for those who do not believe in Christ nor love his family, it doesn’t matter who they are, how much money they have, how they were raised, how blameless their conduct. They lack the one thing necessary.
In the early chapters of Acts, the apostle Peter encounters a group of God-fearing Gentiles, non-Jews, and at first he is not sure what to do. You may have heard the story. He is in Joppa, staying with a fellow Jewish believer, Simon the Tanner, praying on the roof while the men who have come from Cornelius’s house wait for him below. He sees a vision of a sheet being let down from heaven by its four corners. Within the sheet are all kinds of animals which were forbidden to the Jews to eat or even touch. They were unclean. A voice from heaven instructs him: “Rise, Peter, kill and eat.” Peter objects. All his life he has kept the purity laws. “I have never eaten anything unclean,” he says. The voice responds: “What God has made clean, do not call common.” The instruction is repeated three times, and then the vision recedes.
Peter now understands that God is not telling him to change his dietary habits. Rather, the spiritual interpretation of this vision is that the gospel of Jesus is to be preached to all people without distinction between Jew and non-Jew. So he preaches, and this is where the story picks up in this morning’s first lesson. As soon as the people hear the word of Christ, they believe and are filled with the Holy Spirit and begin to praise God in other languages, just as the Jewish disciples of Jesus had done when the Spirit descended upon them at Pentecost. So God distributes his gifts to these new Gentile children the same as to the children of Abraham who believed. Seeing this, Peter calls for their immediate baptism, saying to the Jews who have come with him and observed the miracle, “Can any one forbid water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?”
“Every one who believes that Jesus is the Christ is a child of God, and every one who loves the parent loves the child.” If we love God, we must also love his children, and everyone who believes in Jesus is a child of God.
“And the Spirit is the one that testifies, for the Spirit is truth. There are three witnesses, the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three agree.”
All of these three witnesses point us to Christ. The Spirit descends on Christ at the moment of his baptism. The same Spirit descends on his brethren in the upper room, and again on those of Cornelius’s household. Water, too, is involved, baptism being the sacrament of the new birth in Christ. And the blood of Christ, poured out for our sins, now unites the whole church as “one blood” though called from many different nations and peoples.
I trust that so far you have been mostly nodding along. The message of these scriptures seems to be, at least on the surface, compatible with the egalitarian prejudices of our age. These prejudices, expressed in slogans like “love is love,” which tend to deny that different kinds of things can be distinguished from one another, including ultimately a difference between right and wrong, between the way that leads to life and the many ways that lead away from God toward death.
The gospel is not about blurring lines, abolishing boundaries, erasing distinctions, wiping away the horizon. The Gospel is about the reconciliation between God and man through Christ. This relationship restored is a source of unity that does not destroy, yet is, both stronger and deeper than other human differences.
The gospel of Christ not only opposes but overcomes prejudices both ancient and modern; John says that “this is the victory that overcomes the world, our faith.” Not faith as an abstract, a disposition toward belief in anything, but specifically faith in Christ. “Who is it that overcomes the world but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?”
Faith in Christ is thus the universal inheritance of all God’s children, and the rule by which they (hopefully we) are distinguished from all that opposes Christ and his gospel. Peter had to see that Jew and Gentile made no difference to God, but only belief in Jesus Christ. May our vision in these latter days be so clear. Thanks be to God.
+ In nomine Patri . . .
