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United Church of Paducah
4600 Buckner Lane
Paducah, KY 42001
(270) 442-3722
Worship Times
Sunday Service: 10:00a
Refreshments &
Fellowship: 11:15a
Christian Education
For All Ages:
11:20a - Noon
Nursery Services Provided Handicap Accessible
All Are Welcome!
A Congregation Of The
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From May 6, 2007
Even Them
Acts 11:1-18
Some of you know that I served a church in
Utah. I learned something there that I now pass along to
you. Latter Day Saints have a name for someone who is not a
Mormon: Gentile. Only in Utah is it possible for a Jew to be
a Gentile!
As a Gentile living in Mormon Zion, I assure you my
experience was nothing like it was in Peter's day. Back then
to be a Gentile was a bad, bad thing. At least as far as the
Jews were concerned. Gentiles were pagans. They were dirty,
filthy followers of lesser gods.
They weren't just icky, Gentiles; they were also dangerous
to be around. Associating with a Gentile placed an observant
Jew in religious jeopardy because that contact rendered him
or her ritually impure. A big, big no-no.
Before we look at Peter's vision and what it says to us,
let's revisit the matter of religious purity, a subject
essential to our understanding of today's scripture.
When God led the Israelites out of slavery and into freedom,
it was because God had chosen them to be God's people. They
were special. Set apart. Destined for a relationship with
the one true God, a God who wanted to bless and prosper
them. Along with this desire, it was also God's desire that
Israel be holy just as God was holy.
To be holy was to be pure, clean, untarnished, unblemished.
Speaking through Moses, God set forth laws aimed at
establishing and maintaining ritual purity. Turn to
Deuteronomy and Leviticus after church this morning and
you'll see chapter after chapter detailing the purity laws
by which God's chosen were to live. Numbering over 600,
these laws governed nearly every aspect of Jewish life:
birth, death, health, economics, social relations, hygiene,
marriage, behavior, and diet.
Through these purity codes, the people heard God saying:
"I'm drawing a circle, folks. Everything inside this circle
is safe, clean, acceptable, holy. Anything outside it is
impure, defiled, and displeasing. Your task is to live
inside my pure and holy circle."
And so the Jews, out of love for God, endeavored to do just
that. But the same thing happened to them as does us. Over
time they got lax, they wiggled and waggled, they fudged a
little here and forgot a little there, loosening the hold
God's law had on them.
And as a result, hundreds of years later the Jews found
themselves far from God and the Promised Land; they were
taken into Babylon, a most humbling and humiliating
experience.
Their resolve to obey God renewed, the Jews vowed to never
let this happen again and when they returned to the Promised
Land, they recommitted themselves to strict adherence to the
purity codes. Never again were they going to permit
themselves to go outside God's circle, outside the bounds of
holiness.
Then along came Jesus. And he had the audacity to say that
as sincere as the people were, they had misunderstood. Yes,
they were to be holy as God was holy. But the be all and end
all of holiness wasn't purity; it was something even more
important.
Boil those six hundred and some commandments down and what
you get, Jesus insisted, is something far more essential
than purity. What you get is love. To be holy is to love.
And so to be like God we are to love wholeheartedly, both
God and God's children. This we call the Great Commandment.
Being in covenant with God wasn't about living within a
tightly regulated circle - the pure inside and impure outside.
Being in covenant was about living a life centered in love
and compassion. A life without the borders, boundaries, and
limits that kept some in and shut others out.
If you look closely at the gospels, you see that nearly
every conflict Jesus got into with the Pharisees had to do
with this difference in understanding. What does God ask of
us? Maintain our ritual purity or enter into the messy
practice of compassion?
Had Jesus' ministry not been cut short, surely he would have
devoted himself to addressing and resolving this question.
If Jesus had lived longer, surely he would have eaten with
even more sinners; he would have rubbed up against an even
wider spectrum of the wrong kinds of people; he would have
found all sorts of creative ways to make his point that God
is far more interested in having us widen the circle of love
than God is in having us keep that circle constricted and
its contents pure.
Where the earthly Jesus left off, the Spirit of God picked
up. We see this in Acts in general and today's passage in
particular. Pentecost is a recent happening; the church is
brand-spanking new. And already it is grappling with a most
messy matter: what to do with those non-Jewish people who
want to follow in the way of Jesus, the decidedly Jewish
Messiah.
What do we do with these Gentiles, the church asks itself.
Some argue that adherence to purity laws is foundational to
discipleship; these Gentiles must convert to Judaism. Why?
Just you and I cannot be Paducahans without also being
residents of McCracken County, the argument some se is that
it is impossible to be a follower of Jesus and not also be
Jewish.
Speaking out of this debate, speaking to this debate, we
hear the Spirit. The same Spirit who only recently has
transformed a motley group of believers in Jerusalem into
the very Body of Christ, the church.
This same Spirit comes to Peter and in a vision reveals
something so radical, so cage-rattling that Peter can
scarcely believe it: meat that for centuries has been
forbidden, considered impure, is no longer. There is no such
thing anymore as profane, unclean food. It's all good!
Peter is so unprepared for the Spirit's disclosure that he
can't believe what he has seen, can't believe what he has
heard. In fact, three times he rejects the Spirit's clear
and authoritative message.
To say that Peter's vision rocked his world is a huge
understatement. All his life Peter has known certain things
were entirely off limits to him as a Jew. But now God is
saying otherwise. Cross that line, God says, because there
is no line anymore.
In trying to appreciate how scandalous and upsetting this
news would be for Peter, one scholar suggested that you and
I imagine what it might be like to hear God encouraging us
to eat guinea pigs and dogs.
But I don't think that suggestion goes far enough. Because
Peter' vision didn't shock him, didn't just spin his head
around; it turned his stomach, too. Imagine God endorsing
cannibalism; your response to that idea is probably what
Peter felt.
What Peter saw and heard in his vision went right to his
gut. And you know what happens when our response is
visceral. It makes it very hard to be open. No wonder God
had to speak to Peter three times before he was willing to
believe God was in this.
Peter's vision challenged everything Peter had been taught
since the time he was teeny tiny. It jangled every Jewish
nerve in his body and turned upside down everything he had
come to believe was so. Because not only was God giving
direction about food, God was giving direction about people.
Guess what, that vision shouted, God does not deal in
distinctions.
The first controversy the church faced rose up out of the
implications of Peter's vision. In God's kingdom set on
earth, there is no such thing as "us and them." And even
though the church sorted this out rightly and opened its
arms to Gentiles, accepting them "as is," the matter of full
inclusion didn't end there. God continues to challenge the
church to take a good, long look at who is in and who is
out. Because it is in our nature to make distinctions, to
create borders, to divide up one way or another into teams
and tribes.
Throughout the centuries God has asked the church to
recognize and repent its boundary lines. In every age, God
has asked us to acknowledge us/them divisions, so that these
divisions might be seen for what they are: hindrances to
God's love, impediments to grace, barriers to the kingdom
life God intends not just for some but for all humanity.
The church in every generation is confronted by the Spirit.
Because every generation has barriers that need letting
down. In the early 1800s, the Spirit led our
Congregationalist forebears to wrestle with the limits
imposed by race. In the 1830s, our first black clergyperson
was ordained. The same Spirit challenged the church to
recognize its gender lines and in the mid 1800s, we ordained
our first woman. The Spirit was at work when in the 1972
Bill Johnson was the first gay man ever to be ordained.
The Spirit continues to work even now. This very weekend,
the Spirit is moving in Arizona as churches there grapple
with how far love's reach extends when a national border is
involved.
We have to be clear here. Peter did not wake up one day and
say to himself, "My goal is to include Gentiles; it's the
politically correct thing to do, you know." No. The change
that changed everything was one prompted by the Spirit. The
change that changed everything was God's doing, not Peter's.
The change that changed everything was brought not by some
group Peter lobbied and convinced.
The path the church took was not the result of a focus group
or some study of the cost-benefit ratio of heading in a new
direction. The revolution of love that included the Gentiles
without asking them to also become Jews was not some
fisherman-turned-disciples's controversial and crazy idea
for growing the church.
No. It was the work of the Spirit, the work of God. It was
the work of a God who, despite Peter's initial, visceral
response to the contrary, opened Peter's eyes and heart.
What launched a radical change in the church, and indeed the
world, was nothing short of the work of the Holy Spirit.
The same Spirit who had Peter, just before he went up to
Jerusalem, say to his newly baptized Gentile brothers and
sisters, "I truly understand that God shows no partiality,
but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is
right is acceptable to him."
What God began in Peter, God continues in us. Truly God
shows no partiality. Friends, in God's kingdom there is room
not only for us, there is room also for them.
© 2007 Rev. Karen Winkel
United Church of Paducah (UCC) |
"Never place a period where God has placed a comma." - Gracie
Allen
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