Acts 11:1-18 May 5, 2024
This is one of the odder stories, not
just in Acts,
but of the whole of the New Testament.
Peter and the Meat Sheet.
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| Peter's Vision |
I was trying to pick out artwork for
the projection
and there was quite a bit of it out there,
but it was just too weird
to look at all through worship:
a bedsheet of animals: giraffes, hippos, snakes,
parrots, horses, peacocks, lions.
And then to think that the vision
was
of God telling Peter to eat these animals.
I wondered if some people were using this story as justification for exotic game hunting,
and I looked it up and, sure enough, people were using
this story as justification for exotic game hunting.
There was even an “Acts 10:13 Ranch” that was
like a Christian Sports Hunting ranch.
I’m not here to criticize hunting,
but I don’t think that’s what Peter’s vision meant,
at least that’s not what Peter took from it.
And to simplify it in that way does the scripture a disservice.
These are stories in Acts and
you can’t just take one
verse in the scripture and get the whole meaning.
Which is probably why we don’t hear a ton about
these stories in Acts, which is a shame because
I think they’re really important and tell us a lot
about the intent of the church.
But
we are looking at Acts today, partially because I didn’t have
much more to say about the farewell discourse
that were in the gospels. And I think Acts is
very relevant.
So last week how in Chapter 8,
Saul’s persecution of the new Christian church drove them out
of their comfy place in Jerusalem.
then Philip met the Ethiopian Eunuch and baptized him
broadening the church’s horizon.
Then in Chapter 9, Saul is converted
and becomes Paul and begins his ministry.
Then in chapter 10 we see how Peter
is changed to this
new way of understanding the church and Jesus way.
And this story is so weird, that we see it in Chapter 10,
and then Peter tells it again in Chapter 11, just so we
know we weren’t hallucinating when we read it.
Before I begin to talk about the story
here,
I want to make something clear:
I’m going to talk about first century Jewish practices here
and how Peter’s vision drives him to change those practices
for the Christian Church.
But I don’t want you to take away
what so many people throughout the history of
Christianity have taken away -- maybe especially Lutherans,
led by Luther have taken away--
that Judaism is the example of all that is bad and exclusive
and judgmental and restrictive,
and that Christianity has been a pure, grace-filled, inclusive
corrective of it. That’s just wrong. It’s wrong about Judaism and
it’s wrong about Christianity too.
This is about Peter’s own
understanding of the religious tradition
that he was raised in that needed to be undone,
and more importantly, exclusion
is a human tendency of all religions
and most other institutions. Humans seem to gravitate towards
making rules that excludes others and makes
“us” the best “them” unacceptable.
This is a human problem, and Christianity might be the
biggest poster children for this kind of behavior in our time.
Judaism is just the setting that Jesus was in and what he had to deal with.
But Jesus has something to say to all religions, including Christianity,
and all humans, and definitely to us right now.
So Jesus was Jewish and his disciples
were Jewish.
As we read in the scriptures, the Jewish people of the time
had very
strict rules of food consumption, purity and ritual.
First you
couldn’t eat certain meats, like pork
and shellfish
and other
things. They were called unclean. It’s not about
actual
cleanliness, and they weren’t sinful,
it was more
like “unclean” meant against the norm,
and so they were
to be avoided.
Similarly, a Jewish person was
supposed to avoid going into a
gentile house
because they were “unclean” in the same way.
They were supposed
to avoid eating with Gentiles.
When it did
happen, they would go through
a ritual before
they could worship again.
Peter, the chief leader of the new church
formed around Jesus
was a firm
believer in this doctrine.
And in the
beginning of Acts, and according to Paul’s letters,
he was intent
on Christians maintaining these law and practices.
He kept the traditions he was used to and he grew up with –
He believed the
food the gentiles ate was unclean
and the Gentiles were unclean in that
“against the norm” kind of way.
He did not
believe he could be in full community with Gentiles.
Us and them.
This is
where we find Peter in the beginning of Acts.
And this is
where the vision of the meat sheet comes in.
Sitting on top of a roof in Joppa,
Peter has a vision.
In the
vision, he sees different kinds of animals
four footed
creatures, reptiles, and birds of the air
that Jewish
law had forbidden him from eating,
and a voice
came to him saying “Kill and eat.”
Peter
says, “No, Lord; nothing profane or
unclean has ever entered my mouth.”
and in the
vision, the voice from heaven says
“What God has made clean, you must not
call profane.”
As I said, before, Peter didn’t take this vision to mean that
he should start a wild game hunting ranch.
He actually couldn’t figure out what it meant.
But as he was trying to figure it out,
the Spirit of God told him to go to Caesarea, and the name
of the town surely gave it away God’s purpose
Caesarea was named for Caesar. That is very gentile.
And Peter was sent to the house of Cornelius the Centurion.
A soldier of the Roman forces,
who had to pledge allegiance to the divinity of Caesar.
You can’t get much more Gentile than that.
But Peter follows the Spirit’s call and goes to Caesarea.
And when he gets there, Peter says to Cornelius
in chapter 10:
“You know that it is against our laws
for a Jewish man
to enter a Gentile home like this or
associate with you.
But God has shown me that I should no
longer think
of anyone as impure or unclean.”
And this is how Peter understands the
vision he’s been given.
It’s not about what he eats.
It’s about who he eats with.
As Peter said, “The Spirit told me to go with them and
not to make a distinction between us
and them.”
This is the new thing that the Way of Jesus was doing
a conversion for the church and for the world.
This is the special call of the Christian church.
This is the mission that is central to the church of Jesus.
“The Spirit told me not to make a
distinction between us and them.”
It’s a shame that we’ve mostly ignored it and defied it for
2000 years. Christians have thought that we have been
doing a new thing and following this scripture when we allowed
Christians
to eat pork and when we’ve gone out and converted—oftentimes by
force—
people from different races and cultures.
But that’s an incredibly safe and boring
interpretation of this radical new thing that God was doing.
Jesus didn’t die on the cross for those things.
Jesus died on the cross for a completely new thing.
Jesus died to fulfill God’s plan.
Jesus died to save the world, from ourselves.
What God has made clean, you must not call profane.
I don’t want to spend time going over all the people
that Christians
have called profane over the centuries
but we know it is a long, uncomfortable list.
But I am going to talk about sexuality again.
I usually like to switch it up week to week, but I think
these stories in Acts both apply so clearly to sexuality
that I can’t go anywhere else with this.
And sexuality is really the struggle of the Christian Church
in this century so I’m talking about it again.
The church has had Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and transgender
people on its list of what it considers profane
since about the 1950’s when LGBT people
started coming out of the closet
and openly joining the mainstream of society.
Since then, the Christian Church has run
the gamete from merely excluding people
to being outright abusive to LGBTQ people.
This includes telling LGBT people they can’t be part
of the church, they can’t have relationships
with the people they love,
that they can’t have jobs in their institutions,
they can’t adopt children, they can’t get medical care in
certain hospitals, they can’t be pastors.
And this is the merely the tame excluding end.
The other end is telling people outright
that they’re going to hell, that they’re abominations,
directing horrible destructive conversion camps and therapies,
and actually outright advocating for violence against
people because of their sexuality and gender identity.
And we might get the feeling from our little bubble,
That sine the ELCA decided to allow LGBT people to be
pastors in 2009 and we decided to be an openly welcoming
Reconciling in Christ Congregation last year,
that we might fool ourselves to think
that Christianity is beyond this now.
The Christian Church as a whole unit is NOT over
this and is not clear on this at all.
And that has been, and continues to be
a disservice to the Christian Church
as a whole and to the gospel of Jesus.
The United Methodist church, the second largest
protestant denomination in the United States,
just decided this weekend to allow LGBT people to
serve as pastors in the church, and voted not to continue
to bring charges against pastors who perform same-gender blessings,
or have churches that openly accept LGBT people. Just this weekend.
It’s a big deal.
Hearing from my Methodist friend who was there,
it was a joyous and celebrated decision.
But this was after a lot of pain.
After 25% of Methodist churches around the world
left the General Conference of The United Methodist church
in response to this anticipated vote.
The Methodists probably took longer than we did
or the Episcopal church did because they are a worldwide
organization, and not every country is in the same place on this,
and because, I think, of how they have historically read scripture.
Here’s the thing: there are verses in scripture that
do prohibit same gender relationships. It’s there.
We reviewed them when we talked about becoming RIC.
And we can do it another time in a class for anyone
who wants to talk about it again.
But shortcut right now
so we can all get to lunch at a reasonable time,
the people writing these verses NEVER considered loving,
consensual
relationships between two people of the same gender.
They never talked about people who wanted to
marry and make a family together.
They only had the experience of same gender relationships
that were a result of rituals, pedophilia sexual assault, and relations
that were a terrible imbalance of power like servant and master.
And we are all completely against those things no matter what
sexuality they occur in.
So we can’t read the scripture and take a verse,
and not understand the context, and then make a rule out of it.
And we have to remember that tradition can inform us,
but the past can’t dictate to us how we should behave now.
The Spirit is always guiding us.
We can understand scripture in a new way.
Every day, God is making new revelations and we can’t just say,
this is the way we’ve always done it so that’s the way it is.
Churches like ours and the United Methodist Church now
have been accused of not honoring scripture.
I believe we do honor scripture a lot.
We honor it so much that we truly do the work and dig deep and
understand the historical context and grapple with it.
AND we are really honoring the stories of Acts.
It’s not as easy to explain and talk about these stories
as some short verses with no context attached,
but it is probably one of the most relevant
books for the Christian church.
We have Acts 8 and we have Acts 10 and 11.
We have Philip baptizing the Ethiopian Eunuch,
and we have Peter eating and baptizing the household of
Cornelius the centurion.
We have disciples who started out believing
they needed to exclude, based on scripture, and tradition
and then we have the Spirit of God
showing them that following Jesus means something different.
We have to remember with the disciples
we always have to read scripture through
the lens of the love of God that came through Christ Jesus.
We always have to read it through the lens
that Jesus looked through
when he ate with outcasts,
when he welcomed sinners,
when he was lifted up on that cross and
opened his arms for all the world to be enclosed in.
We have to honor the scripture that says:
God has shown me that I should no
longer think
of anyone as impure or unclean.
And
The Spirit told me not to make
a distinction between them and us.
That is the gospel of Jesus Christ in a nutshell,
that is what the mission of the Christian Church should be.
That is how God plans to save the world,
And that is what Jesus died and rose for.
