Fifth Sunday of Easter

Acts 11:1-18

Pity the poor church. We are in a bind. In order to be faithful to the gospel of Christ, we must have boundaries, there must be limits to what somebody can believe, or disbelieve, and still be a Christian. It's fair to have doubts, but it is not fair for us to gather here on Sunday and say, "Jesus Christ is Lord," while at the same time having most of our members believe that Jesus is just a nice person who went about doing good in the First Century. So we ask questions when you join. We have a creed which we must affirm. We submit to scripture. There are limits.

And yet to be faithful to the gospel, there is this prodding, this incessant prodding, which pushes us out beyond our limits. There is this nagging voice (called the Holy Spirit?) always whispering in our ear, "Are these stated limits your limits or are they God's limits?"

Peter believed in limits. He believed in the validity, the biblical basis of Jewish dietary laws. You are what you eat and be careful with whom you eat. And don't make the mistake of thinking that Jewish dietary laws -- laws telling you what to eat and what not to eat, therefore with whom to eat and with whom not to eat -- are silly. Israel has endured centuries of scorn and persecution by its pagan neighbors by lovingly adhering to these laws. Laws about food were not only clear in scripture, but they were a life and death issue of Israel.

But in a vision at Joppa, when a sheet was let down, a sheet containing all sorts of animals, some of them "unclean," Peter caught sight of the limits of his limits. The voice said, "Rise, kill and eat!"

Peter had indignantly replied that he had never been guilty of eating "unclean food." But the voice and the vision came to him three times. Three times it said, "Rise, kill, eat!"

When he awoke, there were men sent to him from a Roman army officer, Cornelius. A gentile, a member of the very army which now so terribly oppressed an occupied Israel. Peter went, met Cornelius, and was surprised to learn that the Risen Christ had sent him there. He baptized Cornelius. He ate with Cornelius. Peter saw that the vision and the voice were not so much about unclean food as about unclean people. "Don't call anything I have created 'unclean,'" said the voice.

I believe in the necessity of proper distinctions, proper boundaries. I examine people for membership in the church, candidates for baptism. We can't be all things to all people. We can't mean anything people want us to mean and still be the church. Proper distinctions must be made.

And yet, here's this story of Peter's vision. We are like those apostles in the church in Jerusalem who asked Peter, "What were you doing going to those unclean, oppressive, Gentiles? Who gave you the right to eat with them, to baptize them?"

And, in his defense, Peter told them about the vision. Such intermingling was not his idea. It was an idea so bold, so disruptive, so unsettling, it had to come straight from God. In a vision. Peter told them that through the vision he had learned that what God had given to them as Jews in Christ, God had also given even to the Gentiles (Acts 11:17).

It came as a shock. Israel, who had been chosen, and who had suffered terribly down through the ages precisely because of her "chosenness," for Israel to be told that the promises of God given to her were now also given to the Gentiles, well, it was quite a shock.

The story ends claiming that everyone at First Church Jerusalem "glorified God," when they heard Peter's story, when they heard that the saving grace of God had gone even to the Gentiles.

I wonder. Was the church glad, or afraid that God's glory had, once again, leapt over our limits?

In my last church we said that we wanted to reach the young adults. We hired a church consultant, specialist in young adult ministry. She asked us, in her first session with us, "If I were to go looking for young adults this Friday night, where would I find them in this town?"

We didn't know. Then, someone sheepishly spoke up. "Well, I guess that would have to be at the 'Red Armadillo,' out on the edge of town."

"Let's all go there this Friday, set up shop, and see who the Lord sends us."

What? Good, Christian, respectable folk like us go to a place like that?

"Do you want to reach out to young adults in the name of Christ or don't you?" she asked.

I was in a church where the preacher was fulminating, in a sermon, against moral decay in America. As an example of our national moral decay, the preacher used the AIDS epidemic. These people with AIDS are getting what they deserve, the preacher implied. Sin leads to sickness. Case closed.

After service, on my way out, I struck up a conversation with an older man, longtime member of the church. We spoke about the sermon. The man said, "I used to think just like the preacher. Then I got involved in our town's home for AIDS victims. I go there every week to be with these young men. Most of them have been all but forgotten by their families. I do what I can. Tell you the truth, I get more out of them than I give. It's done wonders for my prayer life."

There is a question for us, lurking behind today's text from Acts. The question: Will we allow the Holy Spirit to prod us today, to give us a vision, to drag us, as it dragged our apostolic forebears before us, kicking and screaming, all the way toward the wideness of God's mercy?

Or will we hunker down right here with folk just like us? Safe. Secure. Boundaries firmly fixed. And the Holy Spirit gone on elsewhere, instrument of a living God determined to have the whole world as his own.

My friend, Fred Craddock, tells about a church he knew. He remembered it as the status church, First Church Downtown, it was called. Everybody who was anybody went to that church, when Fred was a boy. Not just anybody could walk in there and join. Income and proper attire seemed a membership requirement at First Church. Needless to say, People of Color need not apply.

As you might imagine, First Church did not receive many new members. Members simply grew older. As an adult, Fred learned that First Church had closed. Too few people of the "right type," I guess.

Fred had occasion to go back to town and discovered that old First Church was still standing. But now it was a restaurant, a fish restaurant. He walked in the big gothic doors and, sure enough, where there had once been pews, now there were tables, and waiters, and diners. He looked down the nave of the old church and where the communion table had once stood, now there was a salad bar.

He walked out the front door, back down the steps, muttering to himself, "Now, I guess everybody is welcome to eat at the table."

__________________

"Orthodox Christianity, the church in most of its past and present forms, has defaced and even reversed whole huge aspects of Jesus' teaching; but in no case has the church turned more culpably from his aim and his practice than in its hateful rejection of what it sees as outcasts: the whores and cheats, the traitors and killers, the baffled and stunned, the social outlaw, the maimed and hideous contagious."

-- Reynolds Price, Three Gospels Scribner, New York, NY, 1996.

PRAYER:

Lord, we have bolted down the pews in our Chapel. We have built our house of worship heavy and substantial. We have become fixed, settled in our place.

And yet, there is Easter. The tomb is empty. You have risen and sallied forth toward light. Life conquers death and you are Lord of Life.

Deal with our deadliness. Easter among us. Prod us. Cut things loose. Open us up. Shine. Spirit spur us. Push us out. Show us, by your prodding, life-giving breath among us, that Easter is true and that our church is called to follow you forth into life and light, and that all are welcome at your table. Amen.