Eating with Gentiles

Scripture Lessons: Jonah 1: 1-6 and Acts 11: 1-18 Sermon Title: Eating with Gentiles Preached on June 26, 2022 Relationships are challenging, so pastors try to help people who want to get married by offering premarital counseling. To describe the kind of premarital counseling that we are trained in to couples who ask me to officiate at their wedding, I’ll usually say that I won’t be giving you a bunch of advice. Instead, I’ll try to help you learn to listen and compromise, recognizing that as you build a life together, you’re combining two households, two sets of spoken and unspoken expectations, two ideas of how a family should look, so more than just talking about money, we’ll talk about what money meant in the home you grew up in, if both parents were expected to go to parent-teacher conferences, or, when dad was sent to the Kroger to buy chicken, what he came home with. When you say “chicken” in your house, what do you mean? Do you mean boneless, skinless chicken breasts, or battered, fried, and frozen chicken fingers? What staple goes on the table without even really thinking about it? I come from a potatoes family, but I’ve married into a rice family. Do you know what I mean by that? Sara and her family have rice at most every meal. This was the case in the childhood home of Jauana Eidelwein as well. Her family joined our church just a few years ago, and growing up, Jauana’s mother cooked rice with salt and garlic, nothing else, yet her husband Maico’s mother would throw anything into the rice pot: cilantro, oregano, all kinds of herbs and spices. Now, today, Jauana has grown to see and understand that there are many ways to make rice, just as there are many ways to be a family, and there are even many ways to be a Christian. Isn’t there a part of every person, though, who believes that the way you cooked rice growing up is the right way to do it? That’s how it was with my grandmother and mayonnaise. “Duke’s mayonnaise is superior,” my grandmother used to say. She didn’t say, “I like Duke’s best,” or “Duke’s is the most delicious to me,” but “Duke’s mayonnaise is superior,” as though it were an objective truth. Therefore, I imagine she would have preferred I marry a woman with a criminal record than one who used Hellmann’s mayonnaise. What was it in your family growing up? What were the things that you grew up doing that seemed to you to be, not what your family always did, but what all people ought to do? For Peter it wasn’t just chicken, rice, or mayonnaise, but an entire dietary code. The kosher food laws he grew up with were not just typical of his family, but the standard of his neighborhood and the only way to eat according to the priesthood. He had been raised to believe that some food is unclean and that those who eat things like shrimp, oysters, ham, or pork rinds are not just different but unclean themselves. Still, the Spirit pushed him towards Cornelius. He fell into a trance and saw the heavens opened. There was a sheet coming down from Heaven full of beasts he’d never dream of eating. Yet, he heard a voice from heaven saying, “Peter, do not call unclean what God has made clean.” Have you ever been there? The year after I graduated college and before I started seminary, I worked for a high-end lawn maintenance company in Atlanta. Sara and I had just gotten married. We rented a tiny, one-bedroom apartment, which was all we could afford on the $7.50 I made per hour. One morning, I was driving up to the shop a few minutes before 7:00, and I noticed that a rabbit jumped out onto the road. The car in front of me hit it 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. Then I looked up to see one of the guys on my crew riding up on his bicycle with one hand on the handlebar and the other holding that dead rabbit by the back legs. Before he would help me finish loading up the truck, he skinned and cleaned that rabbit with the water from a garden hose. Getting into the truck, he convinced me to stop by his apartment on our way to our first job so he could put the rabbit in his refrigerator. I guess all that happened on a Tuesday. At the end of the day on Friday, my co-worker with the rabbit invited me back to his apartment for a drink and something to eat. Now how about that? What would you do? What did Peter do? Cornelius called together his relatives and close friends and was expecting Peter to come. Would Peter go? Cornelius ate things Peter hadn’t ever thought about eating. Hedgehogs spread throughout Europe because Roman soldiers like Cornelius ate them and brought them along during military campaigns. Yet, Scripture tells us that Cornelius was a “devout man who feared God with all his household; he gave alms generously to the people and prayed constantly to God.” Peter wouldn’t have known that. All that Peter knew about centurions was that they occupied his homeland. All he knew was that they ate hedgehogs. And pushed his father around in the marketplace. And whistled as his mother and his sisters. And should he have had two coins to rub together, a Roman solider might shake him down. More than that, by Pilot’s orders, they nailed his Savior to the cross and stood by to make sure no one tried to save Him. That’s what Peter knew about Cornelius and his kind of people. However, the Gospel of Luke tells us that as He died, the Lord cried out in a loud voice saying, “‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Having said this, he breathed his last. [And] when [a] centurion saw what had taken place, he praised God and said, ‘Certainly this man was innocent.’” Did Peter hear the centurion say that? I doubt it. This is a great challenge with human relationships. We think we know a person in full because of a few details, but when we eat with them, we really get to know them. The Spirit pushes Peter towards Cornelius that Peter might see Cornelius the way God sees him. The Spirit messes up our nicely ordered prejudices this way. This is the reason our own Mary Ella Nunn used to say, “The Lord works in mischievous ways.” It’s because the Spirit is pushing us out of our comfort zones, beyond our prejudices, and towards those we think we don’t have anything in common with to learn what all we do. When I accepted the invitation to eat rabbit tacos with my lawn maintenance friend, that’s what happened. That day we just had steak tacos. They had eaten the rabbit earlier in the week, but as we (with the group of guys he lived with) shared a meal, as we broke bread together, you can imagine what happened to me. My eyes were opened, not to what was different, but to what was the same about all of us. After that meal, I knew we shared the same dreams for the future, the same love of family, and the same hopes for our lives. That day and every other time those guys invited me over, we laughed and told stories. One afternoon, I invited the crew to our little apartment. One said in Spanish something I couldn’t quite understand. I asked another to translate, and he told me what this man was saying. He was saying, “I’ve never been in a white person’s home before.” That was a sacred moment for me. It made our little dinner table feel like hallowed ground, which is the power of the Holy Spirit, and that power is at work whenever such relationships are formed. Jesus didn’t say it had to be a special table. He took bread and broke it. He took wine and poured it out. Then He said, “Whenever you eat of this bread and drink of this cup, do this in remembrance of me,” only how do we remember Him? In our first Scripture lesson, Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh. In our second Scripture lesson, “When Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him saying, ‘Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?’” The circumcised “believers” criticized him. This doesn’t sound like the way to remember Jesus, who was known to eat with tax collectors and sinners. No, this sounds more like the middle school cafeteria or the first bus ride of Forrest Gump, row after row of half-empty seats, yet “You can’t sit here,” was all he heard. Therefore, I call on you to think about the sacred power of the dinner table, for when bread is broken, bridges are built, relationships form, and people who think they are different find out that what they have in common matters more than what divides them. I also ask you to imagine. Imagine, if the church of Jesus Christ were defined, not by her members’ words or support of political policy, but by gracious dinner invitations and amazing relationships built over social divides. Now, we’re talking about food today, but it’s more than that. Isn’t it? In our world today, as the news focuses our attention on division, we make those who are on the other side from us not just wrong in their opinions, but unclean, unlovable, wrong in body and wrong in soul. That’s dangerous, and it doesn’t represent the way of Jesus. Therefore, I ask you to remember Peter and Cornelius today. Remember what happened when he stopped calling unclean what God had made clean. And this week, try something you’ve never tried before. That’s your homework. What’s a restaurant where they serve rabbit? Where’s an interesting place to eat near you that you’ve never been to? Write it down on your bulletin. Go ahead. If you can’t think of one, go to Pollo Dorado on Sandtown Road. It’s Mexican rotisserie chicken, and they have the best potato salad you’ve ever had, or go to Wei right on the loop for Szechuan Chinese food. Go someplace where no one on the waitstaff looks like you and prove to them that people who look the way you do are kind and loving. Ask your waiter about his favorite dish on the menu. Learn his name. Tell him, “Thank you.” Give him a good tip. And learn something that he has in common with you, knowing that “God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.” Amen.

Water from the Rock

Scripture Lessons: Numbers 20: 1-13 and Acts 9: 36-43 Sermon Title: Water from the Rock Preached on June 19, 2022 Last week was Vacation Bible School, an important week at our church, which makes a difference in the lives of many children, mine included. I remember moving here to Marietta as a seven-year-old, coming to our VBS not knowing a soul, but meeting friends, having snacks, and starting to feel at home in this church by the end of the week. That’s the wonder of Vacation Bible School. As a kid, I was a participant. When I was old enough, my mom enlisted me to help her as her assistant. Since becoming a pastor, I’ve had a starring role every year as Daniel, Paul, Peter, Abraham, and last week, I went into my role as Moses with a high degree of confidence. I’ve played Moses before. I had my beard on and my robe. I knew just how to put my wrap on my head with cloth to cover the beard strings, but we finished the lesson too quickly on Wednesday. We had 25 minutes to cover the battle with the Amalekites and only filled 15, leaving 10 minutes of unstructured time. That was a mistake. I suggested that the kids sit quietly and wait. That was a rookie move. Only for a few seconds did they sit quietly. Then the wheels started turning towards an insurrection. One snuck up behind me and pulled my headwrap over my eyes while another stole my shoes. Next thing I knew, I was shoeless, beardless, and felt like I was a character in Lord of the Flies instead of Wilderness Escape Vacation Bible School. What are we to say about these things? Well, in life, some things go worse than we expect them to. Other things go better. That’s how it almost always is when I go to the bedside of the sick or dying. Several years ago, I knew Jim was dying, so when I walked into his hospital room, my head was spinning with my own grief, my concern for him and his family, and a self-centered fear that I wouldn’t know what to say. Jim had chaired the committee who interviewed me and then asked the congregation to hire me as Associate Pastor at Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church in Lilburn. It was my first church, and as a self-conscious green-horn pastor, I wanted to do a good job, but after I preached my first sermon there, I wasn’t sure whether I had preached a good sermon or crashed and burned. I looked up right after I gave the benediction, and Jim was giving me a thumbs up from where he always sat. Every Sunday after that he was giving me a thumbs up. What would the world be like without Jim Hodges in it? I knew he was dying, and I went to his bedside. As soon as I walked in, his wife, Carol, left the room, just in case Jim needed to tell me something he couldn’t say in front of her. “Are you afraid?” I asked him. He said, “Yes. Carol doesn’t understand the maintenance schedule for the HVAC, and she won’t pay attention whenever I try to tell her about it.” Now that wasn’t what I was expecting him to say. What was I expecting him to say? That he was terrified? He wasn’t. That his faith was shaken? It wasn’t. What are any of us expecting dying people to say or ask of us when the time they have left is ticking down to days, hours, or minutes? I tell you, while VBS will often go sidewise and end up in a place we weren’t expecting with our headband blinding us and our shoes stolen, pretty much every time I’ve gone to the bedside of the dying as Peter went to Tabitha’s, it’s been an experience of the holy. That’s the truth. Yet, I’ve known plenty of people who just couldn’t go. They say things like, “I just want to remember her as she was.” “I don’t think I could stand seeing him like that.” I get it. My dad was 51 and having quadruple bypass surgery. So sure was my mom that there was nothing serious wrong with him, she wouldn’t pay for the valet service at the hospital, but made him walk from the parking garage into the hospital. She still feels bad about that, only I get it. He was so strong and able-bodied. There hadn’t been anything wrong with him, only then, all of a sudden, he was confined to a hospital bed, only two in the room at a time. Mom wanted me to take my little brother down. He was just 13, and I was supposed to be there with him in case the sight of our dad scared him. I was 22 and was expected to handle it, though the sight of my dad hooked up to all those wires, so pale, so vulnerable, affected me to the point where it was my little brother helping me keep it together. Have you ever been to the bedside of a dying friend? Have you ever seen the one who was always so strong, weak and in pain? It’s enough to keep plenty of us away. Sometimes when parents get sick, one child ends up carrying the heaviest load while the others can’t make themselves go. What is it about the bedside? I can’t say exactly, but as the disciples are sent to the four corners of the earth, don’t forget that being called to take the Gospel across the sea and into that foreign land is no less terrifying than going to the bedside of the sick and the dying. Peter was called to the bedside of a disciple whose name was Tabitha, which in Greek is Dorcas. She was devoted to good works and acts of charity, yet she became ill and died. Even the holy become ill and die. Even the lovely. The dedicated. The beautiful. The kind. The good. All become ill and die, and they called on Peter to go and be by the bedside of Tabitha. Have you ever been there? Have you had the courage to go when you were called? Not everyone has. Some of us, given the choice between taking the Gospel to China or testifying to the light at the bedside of the dying, would sooner get their passports in order. What is it that we fear about the dying? Is it that they’ll take us with them? Or is it that where they are, we’re soon to follow? I once went to visit a woman named Jean Love who was that uncommon person who was always getting ready for her funeral. She didn’t have time to beat around the bush. She once told me that she was tired of me always being late for appointments and that I should never be late to meet with old people, who take so much time to get ready and only have so much time before they have to go and use the bathroom again. I asked if she was so direct with everyone who comes to visit, and she said, “Oh, Joe. Getting old is terrible. It’s just terrible. Everything changes. Nothing stays the same. I miss so many people, but getting old is so much worse if you’re afraid to look it in the eye.” Peter was called to the bedside of Tabitha, and there he had to look death in the eye. There he went to the place we all are headed. There he surely remembered what Jesus had warned him about. You remember what Jesus told him. It was when they were on the beach. Jesus said, “Very truly I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” Jesus gave Peter, then young and able-bodied, a glimpse into his future: a future no one rushes towards, so people don’t flock to the nursing homes where some are led around and taken where they don’t wish to go. No. When people reach a certain age, they are often ignored and suffer not only the aches and pains of old age but the suffering of isolation. Who goes to the bedside? Peter was called there. What did he expect to find when he got there? What do any of us find when we get there? I tell you: At the bedside of the sick and the dying is the light of Christ shining brightly. That’s what we see there, especially if we know how to see. Yesterday, our own Denise Lobodinski, along with Susan Tibbitts, organized the break room at VBS. The VBS volunteers deserve a break room. Denise sent me an email from the rector of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Birmingham, Alabama. If you’ve been watching the news then you know that three are dead after a man walked into that church and opened fire. Denise sent me an email from the rector. Her friend has been visiting the church, and her friend’s daughter attended VBS there recently. The rector quoted my favorite verse of Scripture, John 1:5, “The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” If you’ve been to the bedside of the dying then you know that already, that God draws closer by the bedside than most anywhere else. That’s why the rector was preparing to have church in what was a crime scene. It’s because the darkness is real, but so is the Light. I told you that Jim Hodges would give me a thumbs up after I preached. As he lay dying, he took a picture of his thumb so I’d always remember that he was looking down from Heaven pleased with my ministry. From his death bed, he told me he wasn’t sure what he was going to do when he saw Him. “Saw who, Jim?” I asked. “Will I laugh? Will I sing? When I see Jesus, I don’t yet know what I’ll do.” he said. Too often, we allow the suffering of today to distract us from the joy of tomorrow. I call on you, therefore, to go to the bedside of the sick and the dying today. Think about where you might go. Who is Tabitha in your neighborhood? Who is sick? Who is dying? Who hasn’t left the house? To whom are you scared to go? Take a moment and write her name down on your bulletin. Let us make a point of going there this week. But why? To do what? To see the Light shining brightly, for like water from the rock, like life after death, the Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it. Thanks be to God. Amen.