Preached on the Fifth Sunday of Easter (Year C), May 18, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by Dr. Mark Lloyd Taylor.
Acts 11:1-18
Revelation 21:1-6
John 13:31-35
Psalm 148
Make All Things New, by James Janknegt
The book is called Make Magic – by Brad Meltzer, New York Times bestselling author of a dozen thrillers, non-fiction books investigating alleged conspiracies, like those around the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, as well as a series of children’s books on “How Ordinary People Change the World.” Make Magic is based on Meltzer’s commencement speech at his son’s graduation from the University of Michigan. The first proper graduation many students had had since middle school because of COVID. Although Meltzer’s son was disappointed when he learned his dad was going to be the commencement speaker: “YOU? Not Tom Brady? There’s so many people they can pick.”
Make Magic is a cute little book. It has the usual white sheets of paper with black letters on them; but also lots of dark blue pages with white letters or bright orange ones. Many in huge font sizes and just a few words on a page. If I held it up, you could probably read some of the book from out there in the pews, or up in the choir loft. For sure, the orange front and back inside covers would stand out.
I was drawn in by the subtitle of Make Magic: “The book of inspiration you didn’t know you needed.” But I’d also push back a bit. You see, Make Magic is one of four or five books I bought these past few months, so desperate have I been for inspiration of any sort. And for me at least, Meltzer’s book lives up to both its subtitle and its title.
Here’s the premise. According to Brad Meltzer, there are only four types of tricks used by professional magicians:
You make something appear.
You make something disappear.
You make two things switch places.
Finally, 4) you change one thing into something else.
And here’s the graduation-speech-appropriate application and inspiration the book offers. Like magic:
You need to make the best version of you appear.
Make your fear disappear – but not because fear is bad. Use your fear. Harness it. Don’t attack your critics, prove them wrong.
Switch places with someone else. Put yourself in their shoes. Switch places and feel empathy – especially today when cruelty and venom towards others has become a sport in our culture. If you really want to shock the world, unleash your kindness.
And the hardest trick of all – changing one thing into something else. Transformation. Never stop changing, learning; and never think you know it all. Instead, see yourself in a hall of mirrors – with endless possibilities.
Those are Meltzer’s four ways to make magic: Make the best version of yourself appear. Make your fear disappear by harnessing it. Switch places with other people to find empathy. And never stop transforming.
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There’s magic like this going on in all our scripture readings this morning. Things appear and disappear in the book of Revelation. “I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away….And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (21:1-2). Things disappear and appear before the eyes of John the seer – a human being like us, writing to a beleaguered community of Jesus followers. But God was the magician. It was God making magic. “See, the home of God is with mortals,” proclaims a loud voice from the heavenly throne; and “See, I am making all things new.…I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end” (3, 5-6).
From the gospel of John – in words spoken at the last supper, before his crucifixion – Jesus tells those gathered around the table with him that he will disappear: “Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; [but] where I am going you cannot come” (13:33). Then he promises to re-appear, in a new way; one in which he and his followers seem to switch places, somehow; even that his followers are transformed into Jesus: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (34-35).
Above all, hear and take to heart the magic, the inspiration, of our reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Peter has been out on the road – away from the earliest mission base of the Jesus movement in Jerusalem. He’s begun switching places, literally, by visiting little circles of believers in and around what we would call the Gaza strip; encouraging them and being encouraged by them. Peter, the Jewish fisherman from Galilee, ends up in the household of a Roman centurion named Cornelius and shares a meal, breaks bread, with the Gentiles gathered there. What we heard in our reading this morning was Peter’s defense of that stop on his tour, when, back in Jerusalem, some of his fellow Jewish-Christian apostles criticize his choices and actions. “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?” (11:2)
Why? It was God working magic. Things appear and appear and appear over and over again. “I was in the city of Joppa praying,” Peter reports, “and in a trance I saw a vision” (5). The original Greek actually reads: in ecstasy – standing outside of himself, beyond himself – already switching places in prayer, a vision appears to Peter. Three degrees of separation from what he would have considered the old, the safe, the straight and narrow. What appeared in Peter’s vision was something like a sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners. It came close to Peter and he looked closely at it. The sheet was full of four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. All unclean. Forbidden. And yet Peter was commanded to kill and eat them. This happened three times and then everything disappeared again into heaven.
At that very moment, three men sent by Cornelius the Roman centurion from Caesarea – a city named after the Roman emperor – appeared at the door of the house where Peter was staying. Because – and so the magic spreads – an angel had appeared to Cornelius saying, “Send to Joppa and bring Simon, who is called Peter; he will give you a message by which you and your entire household will be saved” (13-14).
Peter’s initial response to the magic appearing before his eyes was to stay put. To remain standing firmly where he always had been. “By no means, Lord;” Peter says when told to feed upon the creatures of his vision, “for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth” (8). But then the magic of switching places comes fully into play. The voice from heaven answers: “What God has made clean, you must not call profane” (9). And so, at the door of the house, but still safely inside, God’s Spirit invites Peter to go with Cornelius’ men “and not to make a distinction between them and us” (12). Step out. Cross that threshold of difference; of us versus them. And so Peter makes his unexpected stop in Caesarea – accompanied by six of his fellow Jesus followers. They enter Cornelius’ unclean, Gentile house. As soon as Peter begins to speak, “the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning” (15). Jew and Gentile alike. Roman centurion and Galilean fisherman. Cornelius’ whole household: male and female and otherwise. Slave and free. And Peter delivers his closing argument: “If then God gave them” – those I once considered unclean, different from me and other – “if God gave them the same gift that God gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” (17) Hinder God’s magic of switching places. Of empathy. Of reconciliation and inclusion.
This morning’s reading also marks a further step, no, a giant leap forward, in Peter’s transformation. Peter, who at first was so eager to follow Jesus. Impetuous. Quick to speak and quick to act, even when he did not really understand what he was doing or saying. The Peter who claimed he would go to death with Jesus, but then three times denied he even knew him. The seeds of Peter’s transformation were planted five weeks ago – in our hearing – on Palm Sunday when Jesus turned and looked at Peter across the courtyard (Luke 22:54-62). Looked at him with mercy, and grace, and a path back to friendship, as Father Stephen said in his sermon. Transformation sprouted as Peter stooped and looked into Jesus’ tomb at dawn that first Easter Sunday and found it empty (24:12). Transformation blossomed as he recognized the stranger on the shore as Jesus, dove headlong into the sea – once again leaving nets and boat behind; shared the breakfast Jesus had prepared; wrestled with that threefold question about love; and finally heard Jesus say puzzling words about how, later, someone else would fasten a belt around Peter and take him where he did not wish to go (John 21:4-19). Transformation finally bearing ripe fruit when Peter entered the house of Cornelius and found God’s Holy Spirit as active there as we will hear it was in the upper room on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4). And, our tradition tells us, when Peter was taken to Rome to die a martyr’s death. For the hardest magic trick is changing one thing into something else.
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Now I wonder what needs to appear before our eyes? In our relationships? Our places of work and service and community? Here at St. Paul’s? In neighborhood and city and country? Our global social, political, and economic structures?
What needs to disappear?
With whom do we need to switch places in order to find empathy?
And – hardest of all – how do we change into something, into someone, else?
Here’s the little bit I can say by way of inspiration. When we gather around this table to share the meal Jesus still prepares for us, one of our priests – Samuel or Catherine, Mary Jane or Stephen – will say on our behalf words like: presenting to you from your creation, this bread and this wine. We pray you, gracious God, to send your Holy Spirit upon these gifts that they may be the Sacrament of the Body of Christ and his Blood of the new Covenant. But then they will always go on and pray something else, something like: Grant that we who share these gifts may be filled with the Holy Spirit and live as Christ’s Body in the world. Or: Breathe your Spirit over the whole earth and make us your new creation, the Body of Christ given for the world you have made.
But be careful what you ask for. If we are transformed into Christ’s own body, then we become his hands to heal the sick, the wounded, and the abused. Dangerous! Christ’s feet to go places we otherwise wouldn’t go. Dangerous!! Christ’s mouth to speak inclusion and justice and peace. Dangerous!!! But then who are we to hinder God’s magic-making?
Resources
Bard Meltzer, Make Magic (William Morrow, 2025).
Some of the other books I have purchased recently, seeking inspiration, have been: Steven Charleston, We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope (Broadleaf Books, 2023); Elizabeth Banks Cox, Reading Van Gogh: An Amateur’s Search for God (Mercer University Press, 2024); and Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (Riverhead Books, 2005).
The lines I quote from our Eucharistic prayers can be found in: The Book of Common Prayer, 369, and Enriching Our Worship, 1:59, 62.