Acts 11:1-18 is actually a retelling of an event that happened in Acts 10. There we see that
Peter was still in the city of Joppa and had a vision of this animal filled blanket, while
at the same time God was speaking to a Gentile man named Cornelius who was
praying to a God he didn’t completely understand or have correct info on, and
God told him to send for Peter. Peter came, reluctantly, to this man’s house
and shares a message of a God who doesn’t play favorites, of a God who is no
longer designating clean and unclean and of a God who will fully accept anyone,
of any nationality, of any race, if they call upon his name.
Down came the
blanket with those creepy, crawling snakes and birds and pigs and other animals
on it. In fact, the heavenly blanket came down three times. And each time
the blanket descended, Peter said, "No, not me!"
Peter's response to
God's picnic invitation was not mere squeamishness. Peter found the menu
repulsing. None of those animals was acceptable food for a Jewish person.
Peter's "no" welled up from deep within him. An observant Jew,
Peter had spent a lifetime trying to remain ritually clean. His
"no" to the heavenly invitation was the reactive, reflexive result of
years of religious learning & conditioning.
But God was dropping
the blanket, God was tearing down a wall.
You can’t watch much
TV these days, particularly CNN or FOX News without hearing something about
fences or walls. We as a human race have done a good job building fences-to
keep people out or to keep mother-nature in, and building walls to protect what
is ours.
Robert Frost, in his
poem The Mending Wall has a conversation going on with someone wanting to wall
things in or wall things out and this person says “good fences make good
neighbors”.
Some fences are a
little harder to see, some seem almost invisible.
An invisible fence
has two components: a wire buried along the desired boundary and a dog
collar that sounds whenever the boundary is approached, finally, a mildly
unpleasant tingling sensation from the collar whenever crossed over. So
with practice and conditioning, dogs learn to stay in the backyard. The
fence is still there, the boundary is still up, even if you can’t see it.
In our passage from
Acts, the blanket from heaven carried with it the promise of God's unimaginable
generosity for all humankind. God's blanket was blotting out the boundary
between Jew and Gentile, a boundary that God said was now unnecessary because
of Jesus. What God had made clean was clean indeed. For Peter,
Gentiles were as unclean as the weird cuisine in the dream. Peter refused
God's invitation to get up and eat, three times. But the story isn’t really
just about food, food was the analogy played out in the dream.
The food represented
people in the dream to Peter, and it still does today. For Peter the people
were Gentiles, which was every non-Jewish person, which is us.
For us, who does the
food represent? What walls are we hiding behind in our lives? What invisible
fences are we afraid to cross?
Resist evil, oppression, and injustice is what
we said we would do as Christians in our United Methodist baptismal covenant. Sometimes resistance to evil means standing up for people
that the church herself has deemed unfit for membership or ministry. In our own
Methodist history just a couple hundred years ago John and Charles Wesley spoke
boldly against slavery of all sorts, and in particular the practice of
enslaving people of African descent. And still today we are seeking to resist
and eradicate the racist attitudes that are so deeply embedded in our American
Christianity.
Alienating, or
rounding up, or labeling, or building a bigger wall to maintain a division of a
particular group of people based on their ethnicity is hate, it is fear, and
this Spirit that Peter was talking about is not a Spirit of fear.
And although the
biblical accounts are clear that women held significant positions in early
Christianity, since the church began woman have been refused certain leadership
positions in the church. Even today, in the majority of Christian communities
woman are not allowed to preach or teach men in the church. Methodists began to
ordain women in 1956 and today women outnumber men in our seminaries, but in
this facet we are still chipping away at the invisible fence.
Closer to home, and
maybe closer to our hearts, Jesus calls us to cross invisible fences that separate
us from those who have hurt us or those whom we have hurt, so that we may see
and love others just as God sees them and loves them. Peter had to get up and
go to Corneleus’ house, maybe there is someone’s house we need to get up and
got to also. We are called to be Christ’s representatives in this world, we are
on this mission of love and reconciliation as part of our mission from God, our
missio dei.
Fred
Craddock, a Tennessee pastor and Emory professor, said, "To give my life for
Christ appears glorious, To pour myself out for others. . . to pay the ultimate
price of martyrdom -- I'll do it. I'm ready, Lord, to go out in a blaze of
glory. We think giving our all to the Lord is like taking $l,000 bill and
laying it on the table-- 'Here's my life, Lord. I'm giving it all.' But the reality
for most of us is that God sends us to the bank and has us cash in the $l,000
for quarters. We go through life putting out 25 cents here and 25 cents there".
Listen to a friend’s troubles. Go to a committee meeting, or visit a church
member in the hospital or just call someone to check on them. Volunteer to cook
a Wed night meal, or set up chairs or help with VBS. Feeding a meal at the
Melting Pot or Shades of Grace. Bringing in items to your church for families here in our area that
don’t have them. Usually giving our life to Christ isn't glorious. It's done in
all those little acts of love, a quarter, at a time. It would be
easy to go out in a blaze of glory for Jesus; it's harder to live the Christian
life a quarter by quarter over the long haul."
And often all of
this resisting of evil, injustice, and oppression, is done in small, little
steps.
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