The Better Deal - Acts 10:44-48

Let’s be honest: don’t you hate it when someone else gets a good deal that you think you have missed out on? The most trivial, real life example I can think of this past week is when I saw that some people got local strawberries for $4 per quart when I paid $8. I was a bit envious. But as the stakes get higher in the world of deals, the discomfort increases. Someone else gets the great deal on a used road bike when that was the exact sort of bike you wanted but weren’t willing to pay the ridiculous retail price for it. Or someone else gets an obscene amount of money when selling a house while you are still paying a mortgage.

Now, let’s get off the subject of money and deal with a real-life disappointment this year for lots of nice progressives (or should I say Episcopalians), as in the following: A politician from a very conservative state does away with all pandemic restrictions and the infection rate there subsequently does NOT go up. That is when envy can turn into demonization. If you think that sort of behavior does not occur, go read the article in the Atlantic a couple of months ago about a professor at Brown University who wrote that, from what we now understand about the covid virus and given how many people are getting vaccinated, it would be okay to take one’s children on vacation this summer. The response of one very angry Atlantic reader was to accuse her of “genocidal encouragement.” It is so tough when one’s own prejudices are not confirmed but rather overturned.

In truth, being upset that someone else might be getting a better deal is the way that humans have always been. After all, envy made the list of the seven deadly sins a long time ago. Someone else always seems to be getting the better deal. The Hebrew Bible is full of such stories. Hagar the slave and mistress gets pregnant while the devoted wife Sarai stays barren. The younger son Esau gets the father’s blessing while the older son Jacob is left without it. The people of Israel, ruled merely by a judge, are upset that everybody else around them gets to have a king. Frustrating cases of someone else getting a better deal.

It appears that envy did not die with the arrival of the Christian testament, as people started seeing the resurrected Christ in gardeners and fishermen and scared disciples, two days after what we call Good Friday. Today we get one more story about envy in the book of Acts. In this story, we are told that the first Jewish Christians were astounded that God’s spirit was resting on people who had not followed Jewish religious laws. Or more literally, in the original text, the first Christians were beside themselves. They were envious of someone else, just like we are when someone does not pay the price that we had to pay, be it in dollars or required conduct.

Lately, I have been reading several books on race relations in America, one of which is by Heather Cox Richardson. She says that one of the important founding myths of this nation was the story of the independent, hardworking (and, I will add: white) farmer who had the ability to prosper in this new land by that hard work. From that historic myth comes the result even three hundred years later that we who have prospered still get beside ourselves when any proposal arises to support people who historically never had the advantages that we had. Why should someone else get a good deal that we were not given? In the mirror held up by the biblical story in Acts, we prosperous people who earned what we have are today’s examples of those very first disciples-turned-Christians. Holy scripture always ends up being about us.

No wonder that in this story in Acts, Peter had to order that the Gentiles be baptized. He was a follower of Jesus who got the message after his own embarrassing actions prior to Jesus’ crucifixion. If he could be a follower, anyone could. He now called for the setting aside of social and religious hierarchies, even if that action would cause the first Christians to be beside themselves, so to speak. At that moment, baptism became the sign of what had taken place in the lives of the Gentiles with whom Peter was working, in much the same way that it becomes a sign when we baptize.

In baptism, we do not magically turn people into Christians, nor in Confirmation do we magically turn people in Episcopalians, so much as we simply acknowledge what God is doing in the lives of everyone: declaring them part of the family no matter what. These actions are our witness to the world that God is already present in the lives of a vast variety of people. We in the church need to acknowledge that truth for the sake of our own health, so that we might be cured of the sin of envy, and we in the church need to find a way to help people outside the church come to know that truth in their own lives. It’s a health issue, like everything else that is taking place in this pandemic. After all, for the religious and irreligious alike, envy does nothing but make us miserable and likely leads to an early death.

This is still Easter season, and we still have a lot to learn about resurrection. We need to find fresh ways to talk about it in this day and age. What if we started to tell anyone who doesn’t understand what Christianity is about (or, for that matter, anyone who has turned away from it after seeing how its message has been corrupted by political greed), that to be resurrected is simply and profoundly to be given new eyesight, a new way to look at other people, to see everyone as, well, our equals. That is what Peter was finally seeing after looking at an empty tomb.

In the end, there was no need for those first disciples-turned-Christians to be envious. The story tells us that the Spirit came down on everyone. Those first followers simply could not yet see it as universal gift that hey received as well. They were still trying to figure out what resurrection looks like. And we still are two thousand years later. We are growing into it, growing into finding salvation, growing into seeing what health and wholeness can look like in a world that is so unhealthy. To do so, we will keep baptizing and confirming all sorts and conditions of folk to remind us that truth. And one of these days, we will finally get it. Amen.