No One is Left Out

Acts 11:1-8 

So two weeks ago we heard the first part of this story, but as with most important things, it is worth repeating. The passage I preached on two weeks ago is where we find the beginning of this story. There we learn how Cornelius, was gentile, who believed in God. He was praying when God told him to send for Peter. Peter was praying when God after seeing a strange vision in which God told him to eat a bunch of things God had forbidden for Jews to eat way back at Mount Sinai when God gave the people the Torah, the people Cornelius sent show up. Peter goes with them to Cornelius’ house, preaches the good news of Jesus Christ. Everyone believes and the Holy Spirit fills them all and Peter, realizing what the vision was all about, baptizes them all and they have a big feast to celebrate.

But now, all the rest of the apostles and all the believers in Jerusalem have heard what happened and they are upset. Peter is breaking all the rules. He is going against everything they have been taught. God came to Peter and Peter was able to see God was at work in the lives of these new Gentile believers but none of the others were there and what Peter did challenges how they have come to see the mission of Jesus. And it goes against their understanding of the Law of Moses and all their traditional understanding of the work and the mission of God’s messiah, who they now know is Jesus Christ.

And I can understand where they are coming from. I am a rule follower. I am told by popular psychology that this is partly because since there is nearly 10 years between my elder sister and myself, that although I am a middles child, I am shaped by many of the things that shape eldest siblings. I am told that one of the many characteristics of eldest siblings is that they have a strong penchant for the rules, following them, adhering to them, believing that there is intrinsic value in doing so. I am not sure if popular psychology is often right or not, but I do know that I AM this kind of person. I believe in rules. I believe in following rules. I see value in them and will often follow them even if I disagree with them.

For example, when I was a freshman at ENC, freshmen had a curfew. But that is not really how it worked. You see really only the freshmen women had a curfew. Since most of the freshman women were all in one dorm it was easy for RA’s to keep track of whether or not the freshmen were in the dorm. An RA who signed up for a freshman floor in the freshman dorm knew they had the added responsibility of enforcing curfew. There was a sign in sheet and you had to sign in before curfew to be counted “in”. There were fines for not being in. The women’s dorm was sectioned off by year, all the freshmen in on wing, all the sophomores in another and the Juniors and Seniors were in a separate dorm all together.

The men were all mixed up in their dorms, freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors all together. So male RA’s had to keep track and remember which of the students on their floor where freshman and which were not and then had to keep track of the freshmen men and whether or not they came in by curfew. But they didn’t. They said it was too hard to keep track of the freshman guys, so many of them didn’t bother.

The result, freshman women had a curfew, the men did not. It was not fair. But simply because it was not fair did not mean that I disregarded the rule. There were ways around the curfew, you could sign in, be sure you were in when the RA checked and then go back out. You could tell your RA you were going to another gal’s room on another floor or in the sophomore dorm. You could sign in and hope that the RA did not notice you were actually not there. But I did not do any of these things. If I did not make curfew, it was usually because I choose to do so and usually did so because I believed what I was doing was worth the $5 fine for missing curfew. And whenever I missed curfew I set the $5 aside to pay at the end of the semester (because you better believe I was going to pay my own fine and not leave it to be sent as a bill to my parents at the end of the year). I was a rule follower and if I broke the rules I was willing to pay the consequences, in this case the price for doing so.

I understand how comfortable rules can be. When you know the rules and you know where you stand. The world is carefully laid out. There lines to follow, a course set out. You know where you are going, and you know how to get there. The world makes sense; it is easy to get around in. I find a certain amount of freedom, comfort, and security in knowing exactly what I should and should not do. The rules are a nice little box into which everything fits and you know if it does not fit inside of the box then, well it is out. Rules make things that simple, that easy. Everything is either in or out.

Peter was a lot like me. He knew the rules. He liked the rules. They worked for him. He had a box that made sense to him. The rules say you don’t eat pork or shell fish, well then no lobster bisque or bacon egg sandwiches for you. That makes complete sense. He could hold that box, he could comfortably live in that box. If God says that eating shell fish and pigs made you not a child of God, well then it must be true. If the rules say you can’t eat with a Gentile, since whenever you ate with a Gentile you ran the possibility of eating something of which God did not approve, not to mention there was a cultural comradory that eating together implied and acceptance of each other, on a deeper level than simply eating together implies to most of us. But Peter obeyed the rules because they were the rules. They were God’s rules. It was that simple. I understand Peter. The rules were nice they let you know where to go, how to get there and what you needed to do to stay on target.

Simply by going to Cornelius, he was exiting his box, he was breaking the rules. But not only did he go to Cornelius’ house but he also ate with him. Eating anything Cornelius gave him would have been outside of the rules his understanding of what it meant to be a good follower or Jesus, it did not matter if the food was kosher, or un-kosher, whether it was pig, crab, horse, or cow. It did not matter whether it was butchered properly or not. Eating with a Gentile was not acceptable. It was simply not a thing Christians to do. You did not eat with unbelievers and by extension you did not eat with any Gentiles (because all Gentiles were naturally unbelievers).

Peter came to Cornelius, accepted his hospitality, accepted his food, accepted him as a person and accepted him as a fellow believer. This was breaking all the rules. No wonder the all the other rule following Jewish Christians (as if there was anything other than a Jewish-Christian) back home were upset and confused by his actions. This was not the hardnosed rule following Peter they knew. Peter was a Jew, who lived by the rules and expected all those around him to do the same. He was not the kind of person to just disregard any of them. Peter would NOT do this sort of thing! Why would Peter accept Cornelius as a believer? Why would he have baptized Cornelius? Why would he have gone to Cornelius, eaten with him?  What would have possessed him to do this? 

When questioned, Peter gives his answer. Nothing would have, could have convince Peter do this thing he had done . . . nothing . . . short of a powerful vision given to him by God. And that is exactly why God did just that. God gave Peter a vision in which Peter is shown all kind of animals, clean as well as unclean and God told him to kill and eat. God then told him to go to Cornelius. And in truth it was God who ultimately accepted Cornelius as a believer and it was just Peter who listened, witnessed and obeyed. God made the rules and God said to break them. God opened Peter’s eyes. Jesus was not just for the Jews, Jesus was for everybody. Jesus was not just for Peter and his favorite people, Jesus was, is for everybody.

This was pretty ground breaking stuff in the first century. Now the Church spends quite a bit of time hammering this all out, figuring out what it means for a Gentile to be a Christian. What it looks like, how they live what it means for them. It took a lot to separate Jewish culture from belief in Jesus Christ. You see early Christianity was embedded in Jewish culture (in much the same way here in the US, being an American is very much embedded in how we understand what it means to be a Christian). So much of what they all believed and what it looked like to be a “good Jew” was pretty much what it looked like to be a “good Christian,” except of course you believed in Jesus Christ. So basically you were a Jewish Christian. It was all wrapped up together, culture, Christianity, loving God, loving Jesus, eating like a Jew, acting like a Jew, living a like a Jew and believing in Jesus were all tied in together. After all Jesus kept kosher, Jesus lived, acted, and dressed like a Jew, for the most part, except when he wasn’t. Except when he was picking wheat and healing on the Sabbath, when he was eating with tax collectors and sinners, going to gentiles’ houses to heal their daughters, and their servants, telling stories about heroic Samaritans and allowing Samaritan women to tell preach to their villages about how he is the Messiah. But other than that he was very Jewish, doing, saying and acting like the Jew he was.

It was not a strange thing for his followers to then assume that they too needed, for the most part to be good Jews, to live and to act like good Jews, even when it came to with whom they spent their time and to whom they shared the Gospel. It was easy for them to overlook or forget about the one or two Romans, Jesus helped, that one Gentile woman he healed or that one Samaritan woman and her who village who believe him to be the Messiah before Peter himself had come to that conclusion. So it is no wonder that as the church is blooming and growing in these early days that they need a little reminder that Jesus is bigger than the Jews; that is Christ’s call is to all the peoples of the world and that God’s plan had always been that through Abraham all nations would be blessed. And since all those first Christians were Jews, who lived like Jews and saw their belief in Jesus through a filter provided to them by their Jewish upbringing and the very Jewishness of Jesus himself. That all Christians my not look like them, may not act like them, may not eat like them.

It begins with the conversion of Cornelius and ends when the Jewish counsel decides that the Gentile converts do not need to keep the Jewish purity laws, but what they are realizing that they cannot expect every convert to look like them, to eat like them, to act like them and to turn into copies of who they are in order to be Christian. In many ways they had to separate what it meant to be Jewish, their culture, from being Christian, their faith, so they could openly accept people who were not a part of their culture into the Faith.

But to get there they had to begin by listening to God, going out and seeing how God moved and worked among people who were different. Peter went because God told him to go. He stepped out of his comfort zone, outside of the box he and the early Christians had created to understand their new faith, their new belief in Jesus and shared the truth of Jesus Christ with people who were outside of that box, who made him uncomfortable, whose conversion made him a little uneasy and when he went where God called him to go, when he did what God called him to do, when he accepted the people God called him to accept, he was amazed how God moved and worked among them. When he saw the Spirit move and work in them, he could not deny that they believed and the God’s gift was for them as well. This blew his mind, this stretched his belief system. This changed the rules, because it broke the rules. God was working and moving in ways that did not entirely makes sense to him, but he was a wise man and was not willing to try to stay the hand of God, to tell God that is not the way things were done. He was skeptical, he was careful, he was leery, but when he saw God moving and working in ways that dud not entirely make sense to him, he joined God and did what God called him to do so that Cornelius and his whole household could come to believe, which was the first step to the gospel being opened up to the Gentiles, which come on let’s be honest allows you and I to be here today.

Sometimes Christianity happens outside of the box. God does not always move in ways that makes sense to us. The things God calls us to do to reach out to our world and share the gospel with those around us is not always easy. Sometimes God breaks the rules. Sometimes God does things that stretch us and calls for us to do things that do not makes sense to us, sometimes god calls for us to eat things we don’t want to eat, to go to people to whom don’t want to go, to go places and do things that challenge what we think is right. But when God calls us to do these things, to go to these people to go to these places we will see God move in ways that will show us that this is not just some half-baked idea but that this is God at work in these places, doing these things in these people’s lives.