“God Opens What We Want Closed”

May 19, 2019 Text and Sermon

For the Fifth Sunday of Easter, our passage was from the Book of Acts.  Peter has just followed the leading of the Spirit to share the Good News with a Gentile, not just a Gentile, but a Roman soldier, not just a Roman soldier, but an officer of the Roman occupying force in the Promised Land.  The passage is the aftermath, when the "circumcised members" of the community began to criticize Peter for breaking the Law of Moses which, to this point, they were still living under.

The Lectionary Text: Acts 11:1-18

Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God. ²So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, ³saying, “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?” ⁴Then Peter began to explain it to them, step by step, saying, ⁵“I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners; and it came close to me. ⁶As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. ⁷I also heard a voice saying to me, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’ ⁸But I replied, ‘By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’ ⁹But a second time the voice answered from heaven, ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’ ¹⁰This happened three times; then everything was pulled up again to heaven. ¹¹At that very moment three men, sent to me from Caesarea, arrived at the house where we were. ¹²The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us. These six brothers also accompanied me, and we entered the man’s house. ¹³He told us how he had seen the angel standing in his house and saying, ‘Send to Joppa and bring Simon, who is called Peter; ¹⁴he will give you a message by which you and your entire household will be saved.’ ¹⁵And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning. ¹⁶And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ ¹⁷If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” ¹⁸When they heard this, they were silenced. And they praised God, saying, “Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.”

The Sermon:

            The church has thrived not because of humanity, but in spite of it.  Our story from Scripture this morning is a prime example, it is the turning point of the church whose direct beneficiaries are sitting here in this place of worship this morning.  The Biblical promise of God’s blessings to God’s children has come full circle and the ‘chosen’ children don’t like it.  And God did it despite the church.

            Would you agree with me if I were to tell you that Abraham is the Father of our faith?  He is the Father of the Jewish faith, through Isaac, he is the Father of the Muslim faith, through Ishmael.  He is the Father of the Christian faith from Isaac down through Jesus and to ourselves.  This is important for our consideration because there is a prophecy made back at the time that Abraham was called.  God told him that through him, through Abraham, all nations on the earth would be blessed.  That prophecy was fulfilled in the passage leading up to this one.  And the faithful, drawn thus far from the Jewish tradition, didn’t like what was happening.

            Here is how it came about.  You know the story of Easter, Christ has died, Christ is risen-those have taken place.  Christ will come again, maybe by the end of service today, who knows except for God.  But what Jesus told his disciples was that they would NOT be left without God upon his resurrection and subsequent ascension.  The Holy Spirit would come upon them.  That is the story of Pentecost, from Acts 3, which is really late this year, June 9.  But Jesus promised the Holy Spirit during his time among the disciples, in John 14, where he says he will send another, an Advocate, to act in his place and to prepare the disciples for all that they would face.

            Acts 1:8 defines that promise further, that the church would baptize by the Holy Spirt in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and then to the Ends of the Earth.  The first three have taken place and are recorded in Acts.  The final promise, that the Holy Spirit will extend to the ends of the earth, begins with the Holy Spirit coming down on Cornelius, the Roman Centurion, the Gentile, and his household.  That has all taken place, and now Peter has to face the music, as it were. 

            The church, as of that point, was all Jewish, all of the law of Moses, all of the same tradition and faith practice, all Jewish.  Jesus’ ministry had been very specific in renewing the Jewish faith in the love and company of God.  Peter and the other disciples were all practicing Jews, in good standing with the synagogue, until this moment.

            Sure, God commanded Peter to go on to the Gentiles, but the church sought to take him to task for daring to speak to ‘those people’.

            This is nothing new in the history of the church in our country my brothers and sisters.  This lesson from history has been repeated again and again.  It happened in the African American community.  When the Constitution was written, the oppression of people from African was enshrined in it.  Took four score and seven years before Abraham Lincoln would look back over the bloodiest conflict that America has EVER fought and reflect of what got us to even that point.  It would take another hundred years before the Civil Rights Movement would start to dig at the endemic racism still built into our culture.  Did you know it is the common practice of African American churches to have armed guards in their worship services precisely because we have not finished the work of welcoming them fully and without reservation into the church?

            We could march down the history of the First Nations, the Native Americans, in this consideration.  How many good Christians participated in the white schools built on and around the reservations to help these people defined as little more than children by the dominant culture? 

            We could consider our relationship with Latin Americans, going back to the Mexican American war, when we stripped Mexico of half her territory, through to this very day with what is happening along the borders now.  We don’t want them here, they are not welcome here, they are being returned to their own countries and hang the threats to their lives that let them to flee in our direction in the first place.

            And yet the Word of God prevails.  We have White Churches, African American Churches, First Nations Churches, “Latino” churches, yet how many are deliberately integrated and thriving and celebrating all of God’s people?  In most cases, it is never a matter of “they” not being welcome in our midst.  Rather, it is a matter that “they” are not like us and don’t stick around if they do come.

            It has been only in the last century or so that this struggle has moved from racial and ethnic to gender lines, in regards to the leadership of women in the church, in regards to the self-identification people have of themselves.  God loves us all and welcomes all of us, but we of the church…well…

            A couple of months ago, the story from the gospels for the Sunday lectionary was the Syro-Phoenician woman coming to Jesus, begging him to heal her child.  Jesus’ reaction was that the meal that he serves is not fed to the dogs.  Her reply was that dogs even pick up the scraps.

            Notice what the metaphor is here.  Before Peter went to Cornelius, God opened up a vision in which all the creatures of the earth that were unclean for a Jew to eat were made clean.  We, the Gentile human beings of the church, our welcome into the church was made clear to Peter by God’s opening up his menu options.  In that moment, we became meat for the table of the Lord!  We Gentiles became the bacon and the shellfish of the Jewish culinary movement.

            But the takeaway is clear.  God decides who is sacred and who is not, and in that moment, there was NO ONE left in the Non-Sacred camp.

            Notice the second lesson from this passage.  The Jewish members of the community, of the circumcision party, they pushed back on what Peter was doing.  It was different and it contravened everything they understood to be right about the faith Jesus had laid upon them to that point.  God was doing a wonderful, amazing thing, and not everybody got it first time out.  There are good and wonderful and amazing Christians out there who have blind spots in their faith and they don’t get it when God has welcomed someone previously considered unclean into the community of faith.  They require patience and diligent convincing as to the work and love of Jesus Christ.

            Not everybody is in the same place we are at this moment in our walk of faith, and that is OKAY.  What is NOT okay is when the faith goes from being a place of love, safety, and justice to becoming a tool of oppression, hate, and discrimination.  In other words, I may not understand why someone is worshipping in my church, and that’s okay, but it is NOT okay if that is my reason to shun, ignore, oppress, or mock them.

            Now lesson three for our community, we need to be prepared to have our minds blown by Jesus and his mysterious, loving ways.  Listen to Peter, talking to the circumcised believers who were criticizing his actions, from verse 15, “And as I began to speak (says Peter), the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us in the beginning.  And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, “John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”  If God have them the same gift that he gave us, who was I that I could hinder God?”

            We know they are Christians by their love, we will know they are Christians by the expression of the Holy Spirit in their lives-in their changed lives-and that is how God wants us to identify our fellow children in God’s family.

            Peter walks them through the whole story, the vision of the unclean animals made clean by God’s command, his summoning to Cornelius and the confirmation of his need to answer that summons by the Holy Spirit, his presence in the house of a Gentile, a Roman soldier no less, contravening everything he knew to be right to that moment, and Peter watched in joy and wonder as the Holy Spirit descended upon Cornelius and his entire household.  To which Peter continued by baptizing them into the household of faith.

            There is only one reply to a moment like that.  And it is NOT TO SAY, I hear what you are saying Peter but…  The only response is as the circumcised believers responded, When they heard this, they were silenced.  AND THEY PRAISED GOD!!!!  They were still shaking their heads.  Can you hear the disbelief in the final phrase, “Then God has given even to the Gentiles, EVEN TO THOSE PEOPLE, the repentance that leads to life.”

            The church did not thrive because of what the people had done.  To a person, to Peter himself, the notion of even entering the house of Cornelius, despite his credentials, chapter 10, verse 2 “He was a devout man who feared God with all his household; he gave alms generously to the people and prayed constantly to God”, the idea of entering his house was anathema.  You don’t do that.  At best, an observant Jew would come to the threshold of his house.   The church thrived because of what God did!  This was a child of God and God is calling God’s children home.  And we best get with the program.

            That is how church is done.

Amen