St. Thomas Evangelical Lutheran Church
3800 East Third Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47401
(812) 332-5252
Sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Easter (May 6, 2007)
Liturgical Color: White
Reverend Doctor Lyle E. McKee
"A New Pentecost"
Grace to you and peace from our loving God, and from our risen Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
In preparation for a conference, I was asked to read the book of Acts. I admit that it had been a while since I read that book straight through. But it is quite an experience, and I highly recommend it. We Lutherans may pay too little attention to this second book of Luke.
As you know, Acts tells the story of the arrival of the Holy Spirit following Jesus' ascension and of the resulting Church. The Spirit is everywhere in evidence, guiding the church as it grows and expands.
The text before us this morning, along with chapter ten, is the turning point of the entire book. Most of us are familiar with the story of Pentecost. It comes right at the beginning of the book of Acts; we will celebrate that event in just a few weeks. What you may not know is that the gift of the Spirit descending like tongues of fire in chapter two involves only Jews. They are Christian Jews who gather in Jerusalem, not Gentiles. Only in chapters ten and eleven does the Spirit come upon Gentiles, as it does upon the Samaritans in chapter eight. That chapter also tells of the baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch—an African and arguably the first Gentile convert.
Luke sets the stage:
Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God. So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, saying, "Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?"
Prior to Jesus' resurrection, his message and mission were directed to the people of Israel. As Gentiles began to accept Jesus as Lord, tensions grew in the early church between Jewish and Gentile Christians. In this passage, Jewish believers are critical of Peter for consorting with Gentile Christians. A confrontation is brewing.
Acts makes it very clear that the Holy Spirit leads Peter at every step. The shift that takes place isn't Peter's idea, but an unfolding of the purposes of God for the emerging church. This is the single most crucial crisis that the early church faced. Its resolution would define the church forever as open to all.
The language of the text—"profane" and "unclean"—may seem odd to us. But we need only consider how often we judge those who consort with people we might think of as less than savory persons. That might help us understand a contemporary way of viewing some people as "unclean". What follows in the text cautions us to keep such thoughts at a distance.
Then Peter began to explain it to them, step by step, saying, "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. As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. I also heard a voice saying to me, 'Get up, Peter; kill and eat.' But I replied, 'By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.' But a second time the voice answered from heaven, 'What God has made clean, you must not call profane.' This happened three times; then everything was pulled up again to heaven.
God is at work even before the tensions got too hot to handle. God leads Peter to yield to a way of thinking that would have been, without God's intervention, unimaginable.
When God asks Peter to accept Gentiles without their first becoming Jews, he is asking Peter to change everything he had been taught was important to his faith. God was calling him, perhaps even more so than Abraham, to leave a place of security and identity and launch out into uncharted turf with nothing else than the word of God in a vision to guide him. This odd story is about nothing less than a radical change of heart.
The vision of unclean food stands as a symbol for the regulations or religious beliefs that divide the world up into insiders and outsiders. If there are unclean foods, there are unclean people. Jesus had already spoken to this issue in various ways. It is not what goes into a person that defiles, but what comes out of the heart (Matt 15:10-11). It is not conformity to rules that is the mark of righteousness, but how a person lives life under God. People are of more value than rules, and helping people is the fulfillment of the law (Matt 15:19-20; cf. Mark 2:27, 3:4)
This amazing story suggests to us that religious understandings must shift as history and circumstances create new challenges. A perfectly legitimate expression of the faith at one time may not remain so forever. Religious dogma appropriate to one time or context may become a hindrance at another.
But how do we know when one is more appropriate than the other? And dare we change lest we abandon the substance of our faith? Peter's protest is very understandable to us. It is what we cry out when our own faith is challenged at its core. "By no means, Lord!"
This is not the protest of rebellion, but of the honest and sincere piety that does not want to let go of something that has shaped faith for years. It is the cry of one who understands what is at stake in moving from where he is, and does not want to abandon too easily what he views as an anchor of his faith.
I wonder if you have ever found yourself at such a place. Have there been times in your life when it seemed that you were being asked to stretch your faith to the point of breaking? Have you scoffed at ideas put forward by folks who claim a Christian foundation? Do the claims to faith that others make sometimes call into question either your own or test your willingness to accept the validity of the other person's claim?
I really hope that some of this happens to you. It has been at such times that my faith has been able to shed the cocoon of narrow-mindedness and unfold new wings of understanding. Indeed, my teaching is often targeted at just this kind of wrestling with the faith. It is why I teach now far more about orthopraxy than orthodoxy. That is, I am far more concerned that you have a dynamic relationship with God that leads you to live good lives than I am with whether you can either state or affirm all of the various doctrines and dogmas of the church. Right living is more important than doctrinally perfect belief.
This story challenges us to do this kind of faith stretching and faithful living. For Peter, the full revelation came with what we might call a new Pentecost:
"At that very moment three men, sent to me from Caesarea, arrived at the house where we were. The 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. He told us how he had seen the angel standing in his house and saying, 'Send to Joppa and bring Simon, who is called Peter; he will give you a message by which you and your entire household will be saved.' And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning."
I don't remember any of you falling off of your chairs when this passage was read a few minutes ago. But that is what the Christians of the day may well have done. The Holy Spirit falls even upon Gentiles?! Amazing! Absurd! Unbelievable! Disgusting!
Note that Peter does not go out on his own and seek out Cornelius. God is already active in the life of one Peter considers beyond the pale-beyond the reach of God's grace. God took Peter where he did not want to go. The Spirit took the early Church where it did not want to go. The Spirit of God takes us where we do not want to go.
But, the text reminds, God will always bring us again to remembrance, and grant us grace:
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 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?" When 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."
It is the Spirit who attests to God's Word. It is the Spirit of God that opens us up; the spirit of evil closes us off.
The status quo cannot and will not contain the Gospel. Our ideas of propriety cannot bind the gospel, no matter how well conceived or valid. Labeling people as "unclean" based on our ideas of religious identity only serves to violate the spirit of the Gospel by excluding the very ones for whom God is at work.
Here's another clincher: We tend to read this passage as if we are the insiders. We see ourselves as the "chosen" who are sent into the world to help others see the error of their ways, and conform more to us. But if we listen to this text carefully, we will see that we are not the insiders at all! We are the outsiders who have been accepted, who have been permitted by the grace of God into this new divine work in the world. We are the new work of God in the world; we are the subversive element of the gospel, the salt, the light, the leaven that will transform. We are the Gentiles breaking into the Jewish Christian establishment and not the establishment itself.
I really like that insight.
We so badly want to be the insiders, we want to be the chosen—the gatekeepers of the faith. So if we are not careful, we allow our traditions, our entrance requirements, to become barriers for people who would join us even though other barriers have already crumbled so that we might enter.
In the end, we are called simply to bear witness to what God has done in Christ. We are called, like Peter, to tell the story of God's great act of reconciliation. And who better to tell that story than those who have no right to be a part of it at all? Our status as insiders who were once outsiders gives both a humility to us and an immediacy to the invitations that we extend.
The church needs a new Pentecost—a new outpouring of the Spirit of inclusion and suspension of judgment—daily. That sentence buried in the story strikes me as one of the most instructive in scripture:
The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us.
The Spirit moves still among us yearning for a new Pentecost. It is there as we strive together over the troubling issues of our day: How will we engage in dynamic mission in the world? How will we treat those the world shuns? The significance of this passage extends even to questions of how we treat Muslims and Jews in a world forever torn apart by so-called religious fervor. Will we respond with "By no means, Lord", or will we recognize the call of God to go out, to embrace, and to see where the Spirit leads? Amen.
May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep our hearts
and minds through faith in Christ Jesus our Lord, unto eternal
life. Amen.
