Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
May 6, 2007
Acts 11: 1-18
As I was growing up our family would often take car trips, sometimes to Disneyland from our home in Phoenix. We even made a couple of trips to Wisconsin to visit my father’s parents and family who we did not see very often. There were three of us kids in the car and we made up games as we were passing the miles. One was the alphabet game – many of you have played that game, or play it still. You pick out letters in signs or license plates and complete the alphabet. There are easy ones – ‘A’ and ‘O’ and then hard ones like ‘J’, ‘X’, ‘Q’ or ‘Z’. And so we would play the game. I was always the rule follower, but my sister Sandy was always a little lax about the rules. For example, as you traveled, you could learn all the colors of the license plates. So she might see a license plate from here to the Taco Bell and could see that it was the color of an Arizona plate and she needed a ‘Z’,so she would say, “Z, I win!”
“You can’t see that!”
“Oh yes, there it is, I win.”
“That’s not fair! That is not how we play, you can’t see it from there!”
Or you could learn the shape of certain buildings. Suppose you needed a ‘Q’. Well, she could see five blocks away the building coming up was clearly in the shape of a Dairy Queen and she would holler out ‘Q’.
“You can’t see that yet! You are changing the rules. You can’t change the rules!”
I’m sure that after a while my parents regretted they ever taught us that game. The rule follower versus the rule changer.
I think back to our own church when we were going through our Open and Affirming Process – we had a two year study. For those of you who are newer to our fellowship, you can read our Open and Affirming/Mission Statement which is in the front of each hymnal. The Open and Affirming Statement basically says that all persons are invited to participate fully in the life of our church regardless of race, gender, ability or disability, or sexual orientation, which is a major part of an Open and Affirming statement. I remember when we were discussing this. I had meetings with concerned church members and their point was, “I have been going to church all my life and from the first, we were taught that homosexuality was a sin, condemned by God. That is what we learned.” I said, “You’re right, I learned it too.” And they asked, “What is happening now? The church is changing the rules, you’re saying there is a new interpretation.” And I had to say, “You’re right. Our church, the United Church of Christ and other churches, are reinterpreting the Word and where we are coming down is that the all-inclusiveness of God’s love ‘trumps’, if you will, these other interpretations. You are right, we are changing what you learned.”
I think of divorce. I don’t think even very conservative churches still exclude people who are divorced, but there was a time…the rules changed. And that is really the key to the discussion that is going on in our scripture lesson today. The people, the Christians in Jerusalem are saying to Peter, “You’re changing the rules.”
When Peter returns to Jerusalem, after his trip to Joppa on the coast, some angry members of the church, Church Council, Board of Trustees, and probably some from Women’s Fellowship, are all waiting for him. And they aren’t there to tell him how much they have missed him. In fact, they are in a rather surly mood. They want to know if the shocking news they have heard about his trip and what he did on this trip is true. Has Peter actually sat at the same table and had a meal – a meal that no doubt had to include ritually unclean food – has he sat at a table with gentiles? And worse, even more unbelievably, has he actually baptized these gentiles – uncircumcised gentiles – and brought them into the church? Say it ain’t so, Peter! How could you do such a thing?
Now it is crucial for us to remember here that the first Christians were Jews. They proclaimed Jesus as Lord to be sure, but they also followed Jewish law, Jewish traditions, Jewish understandings of God and God’s will – all of which they had been taught since childhood, all of which defined who they were as a people, and which distinguished them, indeed often divided them, from the gentile world. And everyone knew these laws and traditions, which you could argue, helped to maintain them as a people. Everyone knew that these had been established by God himself. It was all right there in the holy scriptures.
And look what Peter has done. He has fooled with this divinely-ordained order of things. Peter, the premiere disciple, had gone among the Gentiles and shared food with them, baptized them, even suggested that they could be part of the church without observing these timeless, God-ordained laws. “Come on. Peter. You can’t just open the doors of the church and let anyone in. It goes against everything we have been taught, everything we believe. You’re changing the rules.”
How does Peter respond to this criticism? Well, he doesn’t threaten to leave and start another church. He doesn’t start quoting scripture. No, he shares a dream. I’ll have to remember that next time we have a major policy discussion in the church. Should we put a new and expensive roof on Fellowship Hall? Well, I don’t know, but let me tell you about this dream I had the other night. Peter shares something very profound, so profound, in fact, that when the dream is shared, a church actually changes.
You heard the dream in our text. In his dream, he sees a sheet come down from heaven, a sheet filled with all kind of animals. A voice tells him to eat, but Peter responds, “No way! I’m not going to eat that nasty, unclean, profane food.” Suddenly, being a vegetarian doesn’t look so bad. But then the voice says, “What God has made clean, you shall not call profane.” Peter concludes from that dream that God has declared all foods clean. So much for the time-honored dietary laws. And could what God has declared about food also apply to people? For his dream is followed by these guys who come from Caesarea and take him to Cornelius and his family, when, in what sounds like a Pentecost for gentiles, they receive the Holy Spirit and are baptized by Peter. And he concludes his story with the words, “Who was I that I could hinder God?”
As far as Peter is concerned, this new openness, this new inclusiveness for the church is nothing less than the will of God.
What a shocking story for these Jewish-Christians to hear. How could it be? Could it be that the same God who had given them the law, all their rules about circumcision, diet, who’s in, who is out, is changing the rules? Is God moving in ways that were formerly unimaginable?
A pastor shares this story: “I attended a church where the preacher was preaching against moral decay in America. As an example of our moral decay, he used the outbreak of AIDS. These people with AIDS are getting just what they deserve, the preacher implied. Their sin has led to this sickness. Case closed.”
He says, “After the service, on my way out, I struck up a conversation with an older man, longtime member of that church. We spoke about the sermon. He said, “I used to think just like the preacher. Then I got involved in our town’s home for AIDS victims. I go there every week to be with these young men. Most of them have been all but forgotten by their families. I do what I can. To tell you the truth, I get far more out of them than I give. It’s done wonders for my faith and for my prayer life.” “Will we, like that man, like Peter, allow the Holy Spirit to prod us today, to give us a vision of the wideness of God’s mercy?” I tell you, sometimes the love and mercy of God are just a little hard to handle. “So high you can’t get over it, so low you can’t get under it, so wide you can’t get around it…” God refuses to be circumscribed by our limited view of reality; God seems to take delight in breaking through our predetermined boundaries. Are we ready for such a God?
Returning to our text, I love the way it ends. First, in talking about the baptism of Cornelius and his household, Peter says, “God gave them the same gifts God gave us.” He is talking about a Roman gentile family, the oppressor. This is a new verdict on clean and unclean, on the distinctions we make between us and them. Because them now have the same gifts of God as us! Imagine that...no boundaries, no distinctions, all blessed by God. It is the first century – what a remarkable thing to say.
Peter wants them and us to know that God is breaking open a new earth, beyond our comfortable assumptions and arrangements. And it’s tough for someone like me, someone who likes things rather controlled and predictable and nailed down, who always plays by the rules. It’s tough dealing with a holy spirit that is so restless, so on the move. Just when I have convinced myself that life with God means this, I discover that – surprise! – it means something entirely different. So I ask again, are we ready for such a God – a God who is still moving through the church threatening old patterns of action, old patterns of belief, old ideas about who is welcome and who is not?
But did you catch the very end of our text? “When they heard this – all that Peter had told them – they were silenced. And they praised God, saying, ‘Then God has given even to the Gentiles, the repentance that leads to life.’” These are the words of a church, words of Christians in a church – who are changing; or better yet, are allowing themselves to be changed by this restless, relentless Spirit. And in a rather staggering and rather uncommon narrative, one that features a trance, a dream, and angels, this may well be the most remarkable thing of all. The people change.
Peter shares this vision of welcome, of a new openness, of a new inclusiveness. It is a hard vision, one that goes against all they have been taught, all they have experienced. And they resist. But as Peter continues to share the vision, I guess you could say there is an outbreak of the kingdom of God. His vision becomes theirs, minds begin to change, and we see a church right on the edge of a whole new area of mission. And we, who are sitting here today, can be glad they did that. Says one colleague, “Because of their participation in the church, these ordinary folk were changed, made different, better people than they would have been had they not been part of this visionary and transforming community.” Well get ready folks, because what God did to them, God can surely do to us.