Foothills Congregational Church The Rev. W. Matthew Broadbent

Uited Church of Christ 5^th Sunday of Easter

461 Orange Ave., Los Altos, CA 94022 May 6, 2007

NEW VISION

Acts 11:1-8

If you ever wanted a scripture that captured the central crisis of the early church, this is it. And if ever you wanted scriptural defense for the inclusive gospel, this is it. This is a story of a new way of being “church” – a new vision through the experience of Peter. This is Peter’s, “I Have a Dream,” sermon.

We must, first, recognize the context of this experience. This is post-temple Israel. Acts was written somewhere around 80-90 CE, ten to twenty years after Rome had destroyed Jerusalem, dismantled the temple, and dispersed much of the population to the four corners of the Roman Empire. The remnant that was left was rebuilding, recreating, reframing their faith. No more was Judaism dependent upon the power and ritual of the temple in Jerusalem, but now it was focused on the Book - Torah and subsequent teachings.

The stump of Jesse, still rooted after the disaster, sprouts two strong shoots. One would become known as rabbinical Judaism under the leadership of the Pharisees; and the other was known as the people of the “Way” who followed the example and inspiration of Jesus, whom they called the “Christ.”

The question for both groups was: “Who is in?” and “Who is out?” This is what early church meetings were all about in those days. The “headquarters” (read that as Conference or General Synod or Diocese) in Jerusalem was in an uproar over the report that Peter had been breaking some very important rules and boundaries in his ministry with the Gentiles.

Now, boundaries are important. In recent years, we, UCC clergy have been required to have boundary training, to make sure we understand the civil laws and church ethics regarding professional conduct. We are trained in reporting physical, emotional, and sexual abuse with children and elders because we are mandated reporters that are no longer protected by the euphemism of the “privacy of the confessional.” Confidentiality, it turns out has legal limits.

We clergy, also, have learned to be careful about how we use the power of intimate contact that is often the very stuff of a parish pastor. How I touch, hug, kiss, offer comfort and care, must be monitored. There is power in speaking for God and I must not abuse that privilege, and cross the lines of appropriateness – which, of course, are different for different people – and makes the work of ministry a tricky, balancing act.

Ministry is not like it used to be when we assumed the preacher-priest spoke for God and could be trusted to be right in all things. Man of the cloth! Power of the pulpit! and all that. Those days are gone. Protestant and Catholic churches are coming to terms with the abuse of power by some of its clergy and its institutional structures. Boundaries are going up. Privilege has been denied. New rules are being written.

In post-temple Jerusalem new rules were being written to protect the historical legitimacy of the faith. What does it mean to be a Jew, even a Jew following Jesus of Nazareth? One might expect the Council in Jerusalem to be upset about Peter preaching and healing the unclean Gentiles. It would have been right to assume they would be scandalized by the fact that Peter baptized an uncircumcised Roman, named Cornelius – in fact, he baptized the whole family, the servants included. But the question that came first to their lips was, “Why did you eat with them?”

Its amazing what is really important, isn’t it? We will let the question of salvation by spirit and water go by in favor of manners and mores.

The lines became very clear in those days and the rules were increasingly rigid. With the loss of the temple rituals, people fell back on home and tribal traditions to define who was acceptable to God and who was not. You could not eat unclean food and you could not eat with unclean people, and the Gentiles were unclean people. (The reason this discussion is important to us is because we all are the descendants of Gentiles.)

The rules of cleanliness can be found in the Book, Leviticus, Chapters 10 and 11, for those of you who want to look. It included all those animals mentioned in Peter’s dream: four footed animals with cloven hooves, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air, especially predators and scavengers.

In Leviticus 11, the pig was deemed unclean because, although it has cloven feet, it does not chew its cud. There may have been health reasons for this prohibition but in the Roman-Hellenistic world the pig was a primary source of protein because it was easy to produce and preserve. Prosciutto and ham hocks with beans goes way back.

This cultural conflict was a huge barrier. There was a visceral reaction. It made the Jerusalem leaders literally sick to their stomach. How can these unclean people be acceptable to God when they make me want to puke.

Peter, by the time he confronted his challengers at headquarters in Jerusalem, had worked through this dilemma in a stunning reversal of all he had been brought up to believe and practice. Joppa on the Mediterranean coast may have been only 30 miles as the crow flies over the mountains to Jerusalem, but it might as well of been in another world.

In this strange world Peter has a dream in which God came to him and revealed: What God has made clean, you must not call profane. This happened not once but three times, and it transformed Peter’s understanding of God’s will for his personal life and faith practice as well as for the church.

Peter didn’t just come up with a clever marketing strategy: “To grow the church: Accept outsiders! That’s the way to build your market base.” No, this was God’s doing. In Jesus, whom we call Christ, God’s salvation and healing, unconditional acceptance and affirmation – whatever you want to call it – is now open and available to anyone – even Gentiles.

If this was a source of tension in the early church it is equally a source of tension in today’s church. This has been called the post-modern age, and the church has been said to be in a post-Christian era. The old rituals and traditions are deteriorating. The moral and cultural barriers are coming down. A friend of mine sent me an email describing an historical analysis that says all democracies last about 200 hundred years and their decline is marked by cultural diversity, alien immigration, liberality, and civic lassitude. The conclusion was that we were in the last days of the republic, better lock the gates to the fortress and settle in for the worst.

Our reaction to conflict and uncertainty is to quickly put up new, rigid barriers. It is just like building a wall between the United States and Mexico. With an enormous outlay of resources and energy we are putting up sections of a wall to stave off a wave of illegal immigration. Tell me, in the history of human civilization has a wall ever worked? In the long run? The Great Wall of China? Hadrian’s Wall? The Magineaux Line? The Berlin Wall? The walls of Jericho?

No, walls break down because something else is at work. Political history changes; economic forces make walls suddenly irrelevant; technology punches through, digs under, or flies over walls designed to keep out. To me, walls are futile monuments to declining power.

For Peter the power is the new vision from God that comes not just once but three times in a dazzling dream and an amazing revelation. Awestruck he says: [Now] I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation any one who fears (who stands in awe and wonder of) God and does what is right is acceptable to God.

Then Peter goes to Joppa and witnesses the sincerity and the movement of the Spirit in Cornelius and his family – it was like a mini Pentecost - and in that moment he remembers Jesus’ own words “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? Who indeed?

This passage is an amazing profession of faith and a model for the church today. Here Peter confesses to his own racial and religious prejudice in chapters 10 and 11. He did not want to baptize or eat with this Gentile family. It was foreign, alien country, and he was afraid of what they might say at home. But Peter’s great gift was not that he was a “rock,” that is, someone who takes a position and never budges, but he allows himself to climb up on the rock of ages and let God point out a new vision, a new way of being “the church.” He let God work through him “unhinderedly,” and in amazement told of what he saw.

The adverb, “unhinderedly,” is a strange word to use in the previous sentence. I use it because this is the last word used in the Book of Acts. Literally: proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching the things concerning the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness unhinderedly. The translation in your pew Bibles reads, with all boldness and without hindrance, which sounds like no one got in the way of the proclamation. In the Greek, the person who got out of the way was the one proclaiming the message so that God could come through unhindered.

I encourage you to look to Peter as a hero of the early church and a model for your life. He was pretty traditional, conservative in the best sense of what that means. He had his prejudices and preferences, but he also had courage, strength, and the willingness to be open to the movement of the Spirit. Most importantly he had the vision to make the linkage between what God revealed and what he should do. Even when it was uncomfortable for him in the moment, he did what he was called to do. Like Peter, then, who are we to hinder God?