Sermon 9/30/12
Acts 11:1-18
Room at the Table: Guess Who’s Coming to
Dinner?
My older brother Jim is six years older than me, and when
I was little, I idolized him, and wanted to be around him constantly. I wanted
to dress like him, play with the toys he played with, and do what he did. But naturally,
a 12 year old boy does not always want his 6 year old sister following him
around everywhere, and sometimes there would be a bit of conflict between me
and Jim. Sometimes, I might do something, like follow Jim around when I was
instructed to leave him alone for a while, that would result in Jim taking the
dreaded action: he would tell on me. “I’m telling!” Powerful words between
siblings, aren’t they? Apparently, I started trying my own version of a
preemptive strike, by running to my parents and saying, “Jim is gonna tell on
me!” I guess I figured Jim would get in trouble if I could somehow tell on him
first. But I couldn’t foresee the logical conclusion of my action, which would
be for my parents to ask, “And why is Jim going to tell on you?” “Um…”
My nephew Sam is an only child, so maybe you would think
he would be exempt from this whole “telling on” phenomenon. No such luck. I
remember when Sam was maybe three at the most, and my mom was babysitting him,
somehow, she broke one of the blinds on the front window. Sam asked her, “What
do you think Mom’s gonna say to you when she gets home?” And no sooner had my
sister-in-law Jen arrived at home than Sam ratted out my mom: “Grandma broke
the blinds!” When Sam started pre-K last fall, he started telling on his
classmates rather a lot. His teachers cleverly instructed Sam that when he felt
like he needed to tell on a classmate, he had to go speak to the giant toy frog
in their classroom, and tell on his peers to the frog. That way, his teachers
didn’t have to hear Sam’s complaints anymore. Jim and Jen tell me Sam spent a lot of time talking to that frog.
Of course, you can get a pretty bad reputation for telling
on people all the time. Tattle-tale is a name my brothers and I would call each
other, in an effort to not get in trouble, hoping the bad name would make the
tattler think twice before turning us in to our parents. We’d like to think
that we’ve all grown up since our days of telling on one another, but I suspect
we all find ourselves engaging in the time-honored tradition of tattle-taleing
now and then. Sometimes I joke with friends and family that if everyone would
just do what I told them to, their lives would be so much better. I like to
tease with these words, wishing they would follow my good advice for them. But
I also realize there is some truth to my words, in that they express a feeling
I think many of us have at one time or another. We can look at other people’s
lives and it is so clear to us what
they should be doing that they aren’t, or what they shouldn’t be doing that they are. It is so easy to know what would be best for someone
else, isn’t it? Hold that thought for a bit.
Today, we turn to the Acts of the Apostles, a book of the
Bible that recounts the actions of the disciples and other followers of Jesus when
Jesus returned to God’s home after the resurrection. For those of you in Pastor
Aaron’s Bible Study on Acts, you get a little sneak peak today of Chapter 11.
As I’ve mentioned before, Jesus and his disciples were often at odds with the
religious leaders of the day over appropriate rules about who to eat with, but in
the early church, the apostles were actually at odds with each other over rules about sharing meals. Our text for today is
part of this ongoing conflict.
The
whole passage is sort of a flashback, and you can read about the events Peter describes
here in the previous chapter, chapter 10. Peter, apparently, has eaten with
some Gentiles – and the food the Gentiles ate was forbidden to Peter by Jewish
law, laws that had very detailed dietary restrictions, laws that centered on
purity and impurity, cleanliness and uncleanliness. So some of the circumcised
believers, the ones who are following Jewish purity codes, want to know why
Peter has eaten with these people. And so Peter must explain himself, “step by
step,” we read, and that is where he flashes back to describe what has caused
this strange behavior in him. He’s had a vision, he says. A large sheet, maybe
like a giant tablecloth, was lowered from heaven by its corners. On the cloth
were various kinds of animals, representing animals that Peter would not be
allowed to eat according to Jewish laws, kosher laws. Surprising to him, he
hears God’s voice telling him to get up and eat these forbidden foods. Peter
refuses, insisting he would not eat anything unclean. But God responds, “What
God has made clean, you must not call profane.” This sequence Peter saw
repeated in his vision a total of three times, which tells us and Peter’s
audience that there was no mistake – he heard God in the vision correctly.
Right
after this happens, three men appear who are Gentiles, and Peter feels the
Spirit telling him “not to make a distinction” between himself and these men.
So he goes with them and fellowships with them, eats with them. In his heart,
Peter finally understands his vision. He tells the questioning apostles, “I
remembered the word of God . . . ‘John baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ If then
God gave them the same gift that God gave us when we believed in . . . Jesus
Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” And the apostles get it too,
finally, after hearing Peter’s story: They praise God and say, “Then God has
given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life!”
What,
you might be asking, is it that they all seem to understand now from Peter’s
strange vision? Well, as we encounter in this text and other texts in Acts and
the epistles of Paul, Peter and the rest of the ‘original’ disciples and Paul
and Barnabbas and the apostles working with them approached their ministry very
differently. Paul, certainly a devout Jew, spent most of his ministry reaching
out to those who were not Jewish – reaching out to the Gentiles. Paul had a
complete conversion on the road to Damascus, and he was ready and willing to
let go of all the old things in his life – so he felt free to tell others
becoming Christians that they didn’t need to adopt all the commandments of
Jewish life – they were new creations in Christ. But Peter and company didn’t
see things Paul’s way: Peter and the rest of the Twelve focused their outreach
and evangelism primarily on those who were already Jews, viewing God’s message
in Jesus as directed only or at least mostly for the chosen people of Israel.
He thought that those who were not Jews who wanted to follow Christ should at
least convert first to the Jewish faith, and then become Christians. The two
sides spent a lot of time disagreeing over this topic, and ultimately agreed
that each would focus on their own special area of ministry. But here, here is
Peter’s own conversion experience. Peter has already converted his life to be a
follower of Jesus Christ – here he has a conversion of a different nature, when
his mind is opened and he sees the radically inclusive and all-reaching nature
of God’s love and grace in Jesus Christ. In his vision, he’s told essentially
that only God decides what is clean and unclean, and that what God has made
clean, we humans have no right to reject.
Last week, we talked about the kingdom of God being God’s
party, and we reminded ourselves that it is God, not us, who creates the guest
list. I think this scripture passage in Acts builds on those themes. Somewhere,
Peter crossed the line from trying to be faithful to the laws of Judaism that
had guided is whole life, to actually withholding the good news about Jesus –
the very news that had changed his whole life – withholding that from others so
that he didn’t have to break rules about who to eat with. And suddenly, Peter is
acting in the same way as the Pharisees Jesus was always criticizing. Peter was
deciding who should and shouldn’t get to hear the good news, and deciding that
only people who agreed to follow the rules he followed would be able to hear
about Jesus. How quickly Peter messed up one of the main things Jesus taught
and lived – God’s love is for everyone – and how quickly he started behaving in
ways that added qualifiers to who got to hear the good news.
And how quickly do we do the same thing as Peter! We
started today by talking about telling on each other, being tattle-tales.
Sometimes I think that our favorite person to tattle-tale to is God. If we are
truly honest with ourselves, how much time do we spend tattling to God in our
minds and hearts about what others are doing? What rules of ours we think they
are breaking or ignoring altogether? Now we can dress up our tattling to God in
fancy packages. We can pretend we are only looking out for one another, making
sure someone isn’t going “astray.” But just like my parents almost always knew
what was happening with us kids without the aid of any tattling on our parts,
so our God certainly knows the hearts of each precious person made in God’s
very image. When Jesus gave the Great Commission, sending his disciples out in
mission and ministry, he didn’t say, “Go out and make sure everyone is behaving
in the right way.” No, Jesus sent us out to share good news – God is with us
always, and loves us always, so come, and follow.
The rest, friends, just isn’t our responsibility. It just
isn’t. Whether someone believes exactly the same thing as you do, or has the
right understanding of a passage, or is acting in the right way: God does not
ask us to monitor one another. We can help each other. We can work together to
grow in faith, when we mutually try to live as disciples, certainly. But we can
free ourselves of worrying about being the judge of right and wrong. God’s got
it covered. It’s a task we can cross right off our list. Because when we,
faulty as we are, try to decide what’s best for others, we end up building
dividing walls, creating strife and hostility, and worse, like Peter almost did, holding back on sharing the
good news of God because we never let ourselves build enough of a relationship
with someone to do so.
Peter
had a vision, one that God made sure Peter got, showing it to him again and
again, that Peter was trying to be so right that he was actually getting in God’s
way. And the last thing we want to do is become an obstacle between someone and
God. Peter summed it up with a perfect line: “Who was I, that I could hinder
God?” Who are we, to get in the way of God’s work, God’s mission, God’s love,
God’s party? We’re God’s children. We’re beloved. And God is breaking down
walls and boundaries left and right in our world, so that we will sit down
together, all of us, at God’s table.
Your
homework this week? Easy, and hard. Don’t hinder God. Serve God. Listen to God.
Love like God loves. And praise God – for God has offered to all of us the way
that leads to life. Amen.
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