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Be the church. Protect the environment. Care for the poor. Embrace diversity. Reject racism. Forgive often. Love God. Fight for the powerless. Share earthly and spiritual resources. Enjoy this life.
The book of Acts features pretty heavily right now in the Revised Common Lectionary, which is a fancy term for the collection of scriptures that are organized by the calendar so that preachers don’t have to decide both what to preach on and what to say when they do the preaching. It sounds like it would make things easier, but it doesn’t. What it does do is get preachers like me to work on other places in the Bible, like 1st and 2nd Kings or any epistle…which I avoid because it just sounds like something you get stuck in your toe if you walk barefoot on the grass. So, this week anyway, I welcome the opportunity to delve into the “history” of the church, the book of Acts. It discusses the time right after Easter, when the risen Christ begins to really turn things upside down in the lives of the disciples. Today’s story takes us to a time when Peter supposedly confronts his fellow disciples in Jerusalem, opening their eyes to what is actually going on. The Jerusalem bunch, you see, still thinks that the Jesus movement is about a select group of people, people that they bring “in”, but Peter has been “out there” and has witnessed what happens when the Holy Spirit gets involved. It reminds me of a school teacher speaking to a room full of legislators, insisting that life in the classroom is nothing like the assumptions of a group of people who haven’t stepped in a classroom in 30 years…just as an example.
Peter is delivering the truth here…the gospel truth. This is news to the people gathered in Jerusalem. It is a revelation. For up until now the truth has been contained in their rituals and their codes, but the truth that Peter carries comes in the form of something subversive, even offensive to their ears. It is hard for us to imagine because we read these stories of the minority as the majority. As Will Willimon says in his commentary, “We must not read this story from the safe vantage point of a majority religion where broad-mindedness and toleration cost the majority nothing, but rather, read the story as it was first heard – from the minority point of view, people for whom a bit of pork or a pinch of incense or a little intermarriage was a matter of life and death for the community.”
That’s why the gospel is so offensive, not because the Jerusalem gang was a bunch of stick-in-the-mud fundamentalists, but because the “law” was the thing that held them together. And the offense comes with the assertion that this may be a fine way to hold together culture, but it isn’t God. God wants something more than our comfort. In his words, Peter evokes the Jesus who eats and drinks with sinners, who touches the unclean and stands with the woman accused of infidelity, shielding her from stoning with a little well-aimed discussion of integrity. Peter tells them his experience, his story, his dream, where God speaks to him and tells him that he’s still not getting it. As per usual for Bible stories and for Peter, God has to say it three times. It should be a familiar refrain to Peter who Jesus called “the Rock” perhaps because this seemed to be the substance lodged between his ears. Peter recalls to the gathered Jesus followers in Jerusalem what happened in a dream, how God spoke to him on a rooftop in Joppa and told him to, “Take and eat”, and it was all the yucky stuff…all the foods that are unclean. Peter seems to view it as a test, and says, “Oh no, God…nothing unclean has touched my lips!” It is a test. Only it’s not a test of Peter’s piety, but rather his recognition of what God is really up to at this point, and it is a game-changer, for one can hardly overemphasize the radical, earth-shaking claim that Peter’s announcement to those gathered in Jerusalem represents. If God’s spirit is as available to Gentiles as it has been to Jews, the world is a vastly different place, and their basis for survival and identity is transformed.
Transformation, of course, can be a very scary thing. For it means letting go of some set of rules or assumptions that may not have even worked very well but are at least comfortable and familiar. Peter’s environment was one of great diversity, as is ours. And like the people of that time, the “solution” to the issues that always come up with diversity was to create bubbles where you could live with “like-minded” folks and reinforce your already arrived at assumptions. It meant forming your “tribe” and then establishing ways to keep that tribe intact. You were a Jew or a Gentile, slave or free, male or female and the prevailing cultural position was that this was the “divine order” of things. Peter’s vivid and jarring dream begins perhaps the single most crucial crisis that the post-resurrection community would face, because it would forever define the nature of God’s action in the world…and it still does. God’s wasteful love without exceptions is still offense to us.
Whether it is denominational response to women’s ordination, to the participation and acceptance of people who identify on the LGBTQ spectrum or the ways that we build walls out of doctrine or theology, the approach of those “inside” a church to those “outside” a church is perhaps the standing crisis that faces Christendom today. We are, in our own ways now, still fighting the same battle that Peter engages in with the disciples in Jerusalem 2000 years ago. It has and will continue to split us into parts, to divide us as we try to maintain the tribes and determine what we will call “in” and what we will call “out”.
This phrase, “make no distinction”, lies at the heart of what it must mean to “be the church” for us today. For if the Gospel is “good news”, then at a time of high division, of tribal politics and walls being built between cultures, sometimes literally, the greatest news must surely be that those divisions are ours, not God’s. For as much as we cling to them, as often as we insist on creating new divisions, as carefully as we want to maintain our tribe and scapegoat another, we have to admit, at least a little, that such assertions are not making us happier, they are not making us more stable and they sure as hell aren’t making us feel any safer. Here amidst the broken politics of the US, and the tension of division, with our fear being manipulated, bought and sold, the church should be a place with a different answer. If we cannot come together in here, right and left, Republican and Democrat, male and female, Greek and Jew, Muslim, Bahai, Hindu, Buddhist, etc…then we have not heard the dream of Peter…nor the demand of Isaiah, or the hope of Ruth or the Gospel of Jesus.
What Peter, and different disciples in Acts, come to realize is that this ridiculous thing placed on their hearts by God, the culture-busting command to see that, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane”, is not just a line in the gospel, it is actually the Gospel itself. The “Good News” is that God crosses all the boundaries we have thought impermeable…including death. And if death is not the final answer, then surely our prejudices and judgments aren’t either.
This is why, and I know that they will get sick of me bringing this up, but here goes…this is why I so celebrate the recognition of Rich Fisher and Jennie Wachowski-Estes’ work in the community. Both have made places to engage across the boundaries that we have in place. Both have been dedicated, in different ways from the same campus, in fostering dialogue on the issues that divide us and, perhaps most importantly, in the power of hearing stories.
This is why I continue to spend so much time and energy on community organizing and why I still speak about it from this pulpit, despite my sense that many of you still don’t really know what it is when I talk about it. The Tulsa Sponsoring Committee is up to the same work that Rich and Jennie do, only at an institutional level. Community organizing, with house meetings and core teams, builds our power in the same way that you feel strength after listening to one of Rich’s probing and respectful interviews that takes you deeper into someone’s story or the kind of power you would witness after sitting in a room full of students who share their stories and decide how to react to something that offends them. Hearing each other’s stories matters. It changes us. And it changes us by revealing to us where God is and what God is really up to….like prayer, it changes things by first changing us. Are we are wise to find places, to create places, where this can happen. That’s what community organizing does. It makes those places, and it trusts them to help us in that process of repentance, which means literally, “turning around”, as part of a process to help make us whole.
If we take it as a matter of our faith that we are to be known by our love, as the campfire song goes, then love surely has to take the form of acceptance in our day and age. It has to take the form of understanding. It has to take the form of humility, the kind of humility that C.S. Lewis once said, “…is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.” It has to take the form of solidarity, standing with people who face injustice because they face injustice, and listening to every point of view, especially the ones we don’t agree with…for biases are not the business of the church, love is. And our trust in that love is what allows us to be the church…it re-imagines for us what is possible for God, which has seemed impossible to us.
This is the demand of Isaiah, the hope of Ruth, the Gospel of Jesus and the dream of Peter…
And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning. 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 God 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.”