Peter Explains His Actions

Acts 11: 1-18, page 779
The apostles and the brothers throughout Judea heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God. So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him and said, “You went into the house of uncircumcised men and ate with them.”
Peter began and explained everything to them precisely as it had happened: “I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. I saw something like a large sheet being let down from heaven by its four corners, and it came down to where I was. I looked into it and saw four-footed animals of the earth, wild beasts, reptiles, and birds of the air. Then I heard a voice telling me, ‘Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.’
“I replied, ‘surely not, Lord! Nothing impure or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’
“The voice spoke from heaven a second time. ‘Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.’ This happened three times, and then it was all pulled up to heaven again.
“Right then three men who had been sent to me from Caesarea stopped at the house where I was staying. The Spirit told me to have no hesitation about going with them. These six brothers also went with me, and we entered the man’s house. He told us how he had seen an angel appear in his house and say, ‘Send to Joppa for Simon who is called Peter. He will bring you a message through which you and all your household will be saved.’
“As I began to speak, the Holy Spirit cam on them as he had come on us at the beginning. Then I remembered what the Lord had said: ‘John baptized with water but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ So if God gave them the same gift as God gave us, who believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to think that I could oppose God?”
When they heard this, they had no further objections and praised God saying, “So then, God has granted even the Gentiles repentance unto life.”
Sermon
In a sermon series by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. titled “Paul’s Letter to American Christians” Dr. King assumed that “the mere fact we are at church might affirm that we believe in God, but we must remember that it’s possible affirm God’s existence with your lips, but deny God’s existence with your life. Churches are full of people who are willing to serve lip-service to God but aren’t willing to pay any life-service.”
Our first scripture lesson from the Gospel of John is one of those passages that all of us here present today would agree with: “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” But I am convinced, that while we would all agree with this passage with our lips, from my own personal experience I am convinced also that we all have disagreed with this passage at some point or another in our actions.
Rather than just leave Jesus’ words at “love one another,” we have re-translated his words to something like, “love all the nice folks, but keep the dangerous ones as far away as possible,” or “love the ones who are in my family, the ones who have become my friends, but keep everyone else at a distance,” or “be open to the idea of loving the ones who look like me and talk like me, but as for everyone who looks different…maybe I’ll just be polite to them.”
What we lose by our re-translation of Jesus’ words is the essence of the gospel; what we miss out on is the chance to see incredible things happen in our lives.
The year after I graduated college and before I started seminary, I worked for a high-end lawn maintenance company. Sara and I had just gotten married. Somehow we convinced her parents that marriage was a good idea – I was after all making $7.50 cents per hour.
One morning I remember distinctly. I was approaching the shop a few minutes before 7 and I noticed that the car in front of me hit a rabbit and killed it. I didn’t think much about it, pulled into my normal parking spot and started loading up the lawn mowers, weed-eaters, and edgers on the truck I was assigned to drive like I did every day, when one of the guys on my crew rode up on his bicycle with one hand on the handle bar and the other holding that dead rabbit by the back legs.
Before he would help me finish loading up the truck he wanted to clean that rabbit, and somehow or another he convinced me that it would be a good use of our time to stop by his apartment on our way to our first job so he could put the rabbit in his refrigerator.
I had never seen anyone clean a rabbit, but I’ve grown up removed from agrarian culture. I’d never shot a gun before last week when Charlie Black taught me how, and I didn’t know folks still ate rabbit before that guy on my crew from a rural town on the gulf side of Mexico convinced me to stop by his apartment.
I guess all that happened on a Tuesday, and at the end of the day on Friday my friend with the rabbit invited me back to his apartment for a beer and something to eat. I was too polite to refuse, but was pleasantly surprised to see that steak tacos were on the menu and not rabbit enchiladas.
I was also surprised to see that not only my coworker but five other guys from the company all lived in that little one bedroom apartment, the same size as the one Sara and I shared. I was invited to sit on one of the coveted couch seats, and by the end of the afternoon my name was no longer Joe Evans, it was Bolio, don’t be impressed. Bolio is just slang for “white bread.”
Peter also knew what it meant to be given a new name. If you look into the preceding chapter of Acts you’ll see that as Peter debated with himself to go or not to go, to eat food that he wasn’t used to eating or not, to listen to the Holy Spirit or ignore it, he is referred to interchangeably as Simon, the name he was given at birth, and Peter, the name given to him by Christ.
As he is faced with an uncomfortable situation he vacillates between the two names as though he were deciding who he would become – Simon, one who paid lip-service to the gospel, or Peter, one who paid life-service.
It doesn’t seem like that big a stretch now, but at the time, what Peter was willing to do was radical. It wasn’t just as though he was sacrificing his popularity by changing tables in a high school cafeteria, he was breaking away from what he had always been taught, throwing away generations upon generations of tradition. We may assume from the day he was born he was taught the Mosaic Laws of diet, cleanliness, and social discipline, not as a matter of convenience, but as his life – follow these laws and you will live long and prosper in the land that I am giving you, says the Lord your God.
We may also assume that among these apostles and brothers throughout Judea who wanted Peter to explain his radical actions there was one or two who whispered to each other, “It sure is a blessing that his mother isn’t here to see this. Gone into the house of uncircumcised men, sitting down to supper. What’s next Simon Peter, eating out of a dog bowl?”
Up until this point there were Gentile converts but they had to first become Jews before they could become Christians – the men would be circumcised before they could be baptized; so what Peter was proposing is that there need not only be Jewish Christians – that these Romans don’t need to become Jews, they can stay Roman and be Roman Christians.
That crowd had reason for concern – Peter was breaking with tradition, but it wasn’t just tradition, he was breaking the Law – the Law that made the Jews a unique people who could preserve their culture despite generations of living in a foreign land. Peter was compromising his values, and I would think that there would have been more than one in that crowd who questioned his actions who were saying: “Peter you are playing with fire.”
To which I know he would have replied, “I know it, but don’t you see, it’s Pentecostal Fire! And the boundaries that once separated us have been burned down by its flames.”
This is a radical word for us today, not because we aren’t Christian, but because in addition to being Christian we are also members of a particular culture.
So we have a little bit of trouble with the idea of Homeless Christians, not because we believe that Christ came for us and not them, but because it would make us more comfortable if before homeless folks join our church they’d clean up a little and dress the way we dress.
So are we doing cotillion here, or are we doing church?
For the same reason we have trouble with the idea of Illegal Christians, not because we believe that the Gospel is too good for them, but because their residency here stretches our resources, slows our schools, and changes our towns, so before illegal immigrants join our church we’d at least like them to get their papers in order and learn our language.
But are we about making citizens or are we about making Christians?
And we have trouble with the idea of Homosexual Christians, not because we believe that they’re not Children of God, but before Gays and Lesbians join our church we’d like for them to adopt our life-style and turn their back on their homosexuality.
Peter stood alone before the Apostles that day, not because those apostles were disappointed that the Gospel was spreading, but because his actions brought up an uncomfortable question: Did Christ send us out to make Jews of all the nations or Christians?
And Peter brings that same question to us today: are we willing to give up some of the standards of our culture for the good of the Gospel?
Last Sunday the Sunday School class who meets at 11:00 took this question seriously at the encouragement of Gwen McDonald. She offered everyone in the class fudge, cream cheese squares, and chocolate chip cookies, but not to eat themselves. She charged them to go out and to give those delicious treats to someone else saying, “How often do you eat with someone who is not like you.” So off they went to fire departments, police departments, and check-out lines throughout our area, giving different kinds of folks something good to eat and inviting them to our church.
The world would prefer that we didn’t do this kind of thing as some laws work better when people whom the world has called different stay away from each other, never sitting down together at table.
The Law would not allow it, but the Gospel demands it – it must spread like the fire of the Pentecost – out into the whole world, out to all God’s people.
Amen.