On Sunday, September 27, 2026, I gave a sermon at Shalom Community Church. This is an adaptation of the sermon. Here is an audio version.

Scripture

Acts 10: 34-35; 44-48 (The Inclusive Bible)

So Peter said to them, “I begin to see how true it is that God shows no partiality–rather, that any person of any nationality who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to God.

Peter had not finished speaking these words when the Holy Spirit descended upon all who were listening to the message. The Jewish believers who had accompanied Peter were surprised that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out on the Gentiles also, whom they could hear speaking in tongues and glorifying God. Then Peter asked, “What can stop these people who have received the Holy Spirit, even as we have, from being baptized with water?” So he gave orders that they be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. After this was done, they asked him to stay on with them for a few days.

Reflection

When I was in college, I double majored in history and Middle East area studies. This was the mid-to-late 2000s, so I was learning about Islam and studying Arabic at a time when Islamophobia was rampant, and the CIA was recruiting on our campus. I still remember one of my Arabic instructors asking whether I was one of those students who was “just trying to understand what happened” after 9/11. Honestly, I hadn’t really considered the question before, but she was right.

Around that time, for reasons having more to do with martial arts movies than any spiritual discipline, I also took up karate.

About five years later, these two life trajectories collided. My friend, Mohamed–it’s been 20 years and he and I are still in touch–he invited me to teach karate classes with him in the basement of the mosque he attended in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The Green Qur’an

So I did.

At first, I found the arrangement a little strange. First of all, I was one of the few white people there, but also a Christian raised in the evangelical South–from a military town, no less–teaching karate to Muslim immigrants from all over the world. We never talked about 9/11, but we did do a whole lot of karate, and after a few months, what had seemed really strange at first became more ordinary.

That ordinary life together is how I came to know one of our students, a middle-aged Moroccan man. He was a yellow belt, which is basically a beginner. And he was a taxi driver, and the long hours behind the wheel, I thought, showed in his karate. He had tight muscles and he hunched over when he should have been straight.

But I really liked him. He was the kind of student who would stay after class, ask good questions, and repeat a stance or technique until he understood not only what to do, but how to do it and why it worked. And this staying after to ask questions and talk karate happened frequently enough that we’d become friendly with one another.

One night, instead of asking me a question about karate, he asked me to follow him to his car, which I did. Under the parking lot lights, I watched him as he fished around in the back seat until he pulled out a green paperback translation of the Qur’an.1

He told me he’d enjoyed getting to know me and wanted to share something important to him. “There’s no pressure,” he said.

I wish I could say my first reaction was generous, but it really wasn’t. Instead, I felt this kind of smug superiority. I had known plenty of people in my life–especially older men like him–who “knew” “the truth” and tried to force it down your throat. And I was enlightened; I had gone to college! I had definitely grown past all that…

I remember having this thought: Wouldn’t it be nice if, just once, someone discovered that there really was one true faith–was completely certain that they’d found it–and they came back and reported that, “You know… this is funny… but it turns out I’ve been wrong the whole time?”2

The thought made me feel clever. It was easier to notice–or maybe imagine–his certainty than my own.

But that’s not what he was doing. He didn’t insist. He didn’t make my response a condition of friendship. He simply offered me something that he loved.

I thanked him and accepted the book. We embraced.

The next week, the next months, the next years, we were back to working on his stances. And he never asked if I’d looked at the book. Things went on like that until eventually, the classes petered out, and we went out separate ways.

I don’t remember this student’s name. I wish I did, though, because for years I remembered that night as the night a man had given me a book. Only later did I understand that he’d also given me an encounter–one that became part of who I was becoming.

WHT Are We Becoming?

This series on becoming was one I suggested. But I told Jo last week that now that we’re actually doing it, I regret it, because “Who are we becoming?” is a hard question. I barely know who I’m becoming, let alone any of us collectively.

One–maybe easy–way to answer that question is to point to who we say we are each week [gesture to the bulletin] and acknowledge that we’re not there yet. It’s a process. Becoming would mean closing the gap between who we are and who we hope to be.

But that makes it sound like what we’re becoming is a future we have designed for ourselves. That we can control. And I just don’t think that’s possible. So much of what shapes us isn’t chosen by us. We are shaped, sometimes irreversibly, by people we never expected to know, questions we didn’t want to have to answer, gifts we did not know we needed, and relationships that change our understanding of ourselves.

Becoming is not only about deciding what we want to be. It’s also about discerning and receiving what the Spirit is giving us.

Meeting Theology and Bible Stuff at the Cocktail Party

And often, I think, what the Spirit gives us comes through our relationships with other people.

[Just] Catherine

I’m speaking for myself here but I think it’s a collective phenomenon. We can sometimes imagine ourselves as self-contained individuals3 who know what we think and then decide which people or ideas we will allow to influence us. But by the time we can even make choices like that, though, it’s too late, we have already been shaped4: by our families and communities, our language and traditions, our friends and enemies, the people we love, and the people we don’t always understand. And sometimes people who are both.

These relationships don’t just happen around us or beyond the edges of who we are; they make us who we are. (And I don’t mean that we dissolve. We can be shaped by another person without losing ourselves or becoming the same as them.)

The man who offered me a Qur’an, for example, remained Muslim, and I remained Christian–even though this was during a period of my life where I questioned whether the church I grew up in had anything to offer me, and even though I had already looked into it, and though Islam made a whole lot of sense.5 But his way of offering his faith became part of how I learned to hold my own. He showed me that a deeply held belief could be offered without coercion–that something sacred, something pointing toward truth, could be shared without making agreement the price of relationship.

Being open to this kind of transformation does not mean treating every difference as unimportant or every claim as equally true. It does require discernment, though: listening closely enough to understand where we differ, paying attention to what leads us to do justice and mercy, and remaining willing to discover that we may be the ones who need to change.

John Caputo

So, that relationship became part of who I was becoming. But it was that one particular moment within it–that exchange under the parking lot lights–that stayed with me. He gave me a book, but more was happening than I understood at the time. By offering something he loved without demanding anything of me, he also showed me a kind of hospitality I was not prepared to recognize. I was so busy wondering which one of us “possessed” the truth that I almost missed what was happening.

“Transgressive Longing” and a “Rip in the Fabric of Space and Time” (Willie James Jennings); and “Woah There, Cowboy!”

Something similar happens to Peter in the passage from Acts that we read today.

Peter is speaking in the home of Cornelius, a Roman centurion whom Acts describes as devout, prayerful, and generous. But Cornelius was a Gentile, and Peter believed that entering the home of a Gentile was something he shouldn’t do, that it crossed a religious boundary.

Before they meet, each receives a vision drawing them together. Peter–himself Jewish, as were Jesus and his earliest followers–comes to understand this wild dream about a sheet and unclean animals as a call NOT to treat another person as profane or unclean. The encounter begins to expand his understanding of where the Spirit may be at work.

So Peter enters Cornelius’s home and says, “Oh, okay. I get it now. I understand that God shows no partiality, but in every people anyone who fears God and practices righteousness is acceptable to God.”

And then comes my favorite detail: while Peter is still speaking, the Holy Spirit falls down on everyone listening.

Peter has been invited there to preach. But before he can finish explaining what God is doing–before he can even finish his sermon–the Spirit interrupts.

Peter has something real to offer, but he does not bring God to a place where God was absent. He discovers that God was already there, beyond the boundaries he had imagined.

So when baptism comes up, he responds, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” Baptism–Peter–they DON’T initiate the Spirit’s work here, they just recognize and respond to what the Spirit has already done.

This was not a future Peter could have predicted or designed. Cornelius is not simply added to an unchanged community. This inclusion leads the early Jesus movement to reconsider its understanding of whom God is welcoming. And through this encounter, the church begins to become something it had not been before.

So, the Spirit shapes us through relationships–and perhaps it also guides us by interrupting us with people and possibilities through which a different community might emerge.

What About Us?

And that brings me back to us–to who Shalom is becoming.

Congregational Turn

Many of us know people who share our longing for justice, for mercy, for walking humbly,6 but who have little or no interest in church–any church, not just this one. They may be committed atheists or agnostics, secular Jews, people of other religions or no religion, or people who have simply decided that church has nothing to offer them. I even know people who think that church is actively harmful.

And while these are not interchangeable groups, and no one person represents a group,7 there have been particular people like this who have changed me.

  • Atheist friends have shown me that humans do not have to be “takers,” but that we can practice reciprocity and live as responsible members of the living world.8 Some of them are more tough love kind of people than others.
  • Secular Jewish friends have shown me how memory, practice, argument, and even doubt can sustain belonging even when certainty about God is absent.
  • And people I know through labor unions at work, many of whom have no interest in church, have shown me what community looks like simply by continuing to show up for each other.

There’s a temptation here: I don’t need to call any of them secret Christians–to claim that their justice or compassion is really Christian, whether they recognize it or not. Actually, that would be me refusing to let them be different. But I can recognize and receive what their lives show me and allow those encounters to shape the Christian I am becoming.

Still, I sometimes have a thought: They want community. We have community. Maybe we have the community they’re looking for.

And sometimes that is true. That is why I am here! Learning to receive from others doesn’t mean we have nothing to offer. Shalom has real gifts to share: the music, story of Jesus; the unique ways we let one another into our lives and care for each other; and practices of peacemaking, environmental stewardship, and political engagement.

But Peter’s story should keep us humble. Having something to offer does not mean bringing God where God was absent, and calling ourselves a community does not mean we possess the community others need.

And, I’ll just say it: Our neighbors may already be practicing something the church is called to become, but it isn’t yet.

So perhaps the question is not only, “How do we invite people into our community?” It is also, “What kind of community might the Spirit be creating between us?”

Biggie Driving Us Home

Nearly twenty years ago, under the parking lot lights outside a mosque, a man placed a green Qur’an in my hands and said, “There’s no pressure.” And I think that he really meant it.

He didn’t hide what he loved or pretend our differences were unimportant. He offered me something sacred to him without making agreement the price of our friendship. He gave me a book, but within that gift I also heard a call to hospitality. And perhaps that is one image of the community the Spirit is calling us to become.

Likewise, we can offer what we have been given: the story of Jesus, the practices that sustain us, and the “wild hope” that carries us. But genuine relationship means that like Peter, we may arrive with something real to offer and, like Peter, we may discover that there is also something we need to receive.

And, it might turn out that the Spirit isn’t calling us to a future we would have designed. Sometimes the Spirit draws us into relationship with an unexpected neighbor, confronts us with a difficult question, involves us in a shared struggle… or places a green book in our hands under parking lot lights.

Perhaps these are not interruptions of our becoming. They are how we become.

That Qur’an is still on my shelf. I am still a Christian, but I hope I am not the same Christian I was before it was placed in my hands. That encounter did not make me less rooted in my faith. It taught me that being rooted does not mean remaining untouched.

Roots live by receiving from the living world around them. They hold us firmly enough that we can grow.

May we become a people rooted enough to offer what we love, rooted enough to receive what others bring, and rooted enough to follow the Spirit into a future none of us possesses yet.

Amen.

Categories: talks

  1. That’s the way it works in Islam. The Qur’an was revealed in Arabic, so anything else is a translation. ↩

  2. Caputo, Hoping Against Hope, pp. 91-96 ↩

  3. My favorite way of putting this actually comes from Mohamed, who described this as all of us going along in our life in our own little spaceships. ↩

  4. I’m paraphrasing, but by the time we realize we’re in a grocery store, our cart is already halfway full. -Peter Rollins ↩

  5. Taylor, Holy Envy ↩

  6. Hello, Micah. ↩

  7. My favorite way of putting this: ISLAM DOES NOT WAKE UP IN THE MORNING AND BRUSH ITS TEETH. Muslims do. -Omid Safi ↩

  8. Quinn, Ishmael ↩