What God Called Clean
When we began planning for yesterday’s Messy Church, Nikki Blair checked out the lectionary to discover that this story – a story about Peter’s vision from God about what is holy or clean – landed on the calendar for this Sunday – the fifth in Easter.
We all smiled, because it was one of those Holy Spirit moments when our human brains could not have chosen a more perfect text for launching a radically inclusive, low-threshold, hospitality intensive, intergenerational way of gathering to worship together.
And I smiled because it was just about a year ago, on June 13, 2021 to be precise, while we were working our way through Brian McLaren’s book We Make the Road by Walking, that I preached about the part of this story that immediately proceeds what we’ve read today, about Peter and Cornelius both having visions that lead them to bridge their differences and share testimony with one another about their experience of God.
Once again on that Sunday, the Holy Spirit was at very much at work because that Sunday was also when we took our vote to become a reconciling congregation. It was a Sunday when the question of what God loves and claims, what God has called clean, and what might happen if we bridged our differences to share life in new ways was before us in a very specific way.
Let’s take just a moment to understand the fullness of what is happening in this text read today on the 5thSunday of Easter as we continue our Easter season focus on what it means to be a witness, remembering that to be a witness is not merely to see or experience but to go forward from our seeing or experiencing to act differently, to share what we’ve seen, to invite others to see as well.
In the scripture you just heard, Peter, who is Jewish, is returning to Jerusalem after having baptized Cornelius, a gentile. In bible lingo, that means Cornelius was not Jewish – that is the important thing to remember there.
Peter baptized Cornelius only after receiving a vision in which God commanded him to eat food, some of which by Jewish law was considered unclean. When Peter protested, three times the Spirit reminded him that what God had made holy should not be declared unclean by Peter.
Peter somewhat notoriously needs to hear things three times. Remember that he denied Jesus three times as the crucifixion unfolded. But the risen Christ also redeemed those three denials by asking Peter to profess his love and commanding him to feed Jesus’ sheep three times. And here in Acts, once again, Peter hears the same message three times – get up, kill and eat… God names what is holy and what is good, Peter. Three times. Always pay attention to the echoes.
Speaking of echoes, in Matthew and Mark’s gospels, Jesus was approached by a Canaanite woman – a gentile - who asked for healing for her daughter. Jesus’ difficult-to-hear response was that he’d come only for the children of Israel – “it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs” he says in one translation. The woman replies – “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.” And so Jesus heals her daughter. Jesus had to be challenged to reach beyond his own Jewish community with the message and power of God.
Like Jesus did in that encounter with the Canaanite woman, in the encounter with Cornelius, Peter was learning, growing, and being changed through God’s call and by the resulting vision and by Cornelius’ testimony of receiving God’s call as well.
When Peter returned from his time with Cornelius, he was challenged by a group of “circumcised believers” – read this to mean devoted and traditional Jewish folks who were very committed to upholding Levitical laws.
Confronted in this way, Peter testified to his vision. And to Cornelius’ vision. And to the way Peter was prodded by words he had heard directly from Jesus about baptism by the Holy Spirit.
And to who Jesus was and what Jesus had done and how that story impacted Cornelius and those gathered in his household to hear from Peter.
As a result of Peter’s experience, his critics were silenced, except for their praise of God, a response to what had happened when Peter and Cornelius crossed their various cultural and religious differences to testify to one another.
Let’s be real for a moment. It is really hard sometimes to bridge the differences between us in order to share life with others. It is hard to let go of the differences between us at times to let God do God’s thing.
If you are within the sound of my voice, if you are tuned in to worship this morning, there is a pretty good chance that you’ve had an experience of someone suggesting that there is a right way and a wrong way of being a Christ follower. A right way and a wrong way of being the church. Because, let’s face it, in the history of the church universal, in the history of most individual congregations, someone is generally creating some rules and expectations for how to “do it right.: And oftentimes those expectations and norms leave someone else out.
Let me share some examples:
There are strong opinions about the names we use for God.
Or for Jesus. Or what pronouns we use.
There are people with very strong opinions about what kind of music honors God in worship.
Or what kind of wine gets used at communion.
Or who can take communion and how often we should take communion.
There are strong opinions about who God actually calls to ministry.
And sometimes all of those things get in the way of our ability to hear another person’s experience of God. Sometimes all of that gets in the way of our reaching the very people God is calling us to reach. Or on the flip side, it gets in the way of our being reached by the very people God has called to reach us!
This text really does point to a need that we have as the body of Christ today.
Are we about God’s mission? Are we about where God is pointing and connecting?
Or are we protecting what we know, what feels comfortable, what others who are not God have told us?
One year ago, I ended my sermon on what was profane and what was holy in this way:
“Beloved, there is work before us.
The decision to love as God loves and see as God sees is the pivot that we are all called to.
As bearers of the testimony to God’s love, we have a credibility problem if we do not love others as God loves.”
This year, I add this:
We also have a credibility problem if we are not also willing to receive the testimony others have about their experience of God. We have a credibility problem if we are not allowing ourselves to be shaped by those different than we are. We have a credibility problem when we are not sharing testimony hour by hour of the power of God‘s love in the world bent on hate and drawing lines about who’s in and who’s out. We have a credibility problem when we fail to abide no hatred.
Beloved, there is work before us.
Let’s get to work.
Amen.
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