Acts 10:9-20, 44-48 "Not Playing Favorites" Scott Hoezee

It's mid-August on a Sunday afternoon in the year 1940. Inside a modest farm house in Drenthe, Michigan, a Christian Reformed family is devoutly observing its Sabbath day's rest. They'd been to church already earlier that day. After coming home, they dined on their pot roast and potatoes. Mom and Dad sipped coffee with their meal even as they discussed the Domine's sermon of that morning. The two children stayed mostly quiet as they moved their peas around their plates and chewed on Mom's slightly dry roast. But now it's mid-afternoon. Dad is reading The Banner, even as Mom and the kids are resting in the living room, watching the dust motes drift lazily through the shafts of sunlight streaming through the picture window. Before long it will be time for Mom to re-comb the children's hair even as Dad will re-tighten the knot in his tie as they head out for the vesper service.

But for now Dad is reading an article by a Seminary professor about the "L" of TULIP ("Limited Atonement") and is feeling satisfied at the fine theological heritage of the Dutch Reformed tradition. But then, suddenly and shockingly, the words on the page begin to re-arrange themselves! Suddenly a message from God himself appears in The Banner (of all places)! It says that there is a new Cary Grant movie playing at the cinema in Grand Rapids and the Spirit thinks that this family should go take in the afternoon matinee that very day!

Now just how do you suspect this family will react to this development? Well, with shock, with incredulity. They would be scandalized and so resistive to this cinematic command. Surely they would want to tell God's Spirit he had made a mistake, and it would take no small amount of prodding by God if this family were ever going to actually do what God had said. This is the kind of thing that Christian people simply did not do.

When you are a devout person who wants nothing more than to serve God, then there are few shocks to the system quite as great as spiritual shocks. Just ask the apostle Peter. He knows all about this kind of thing. And if you think that my little illustration a moment ago sounded absurd, keep in mind that the spiritual shock Peter got in Acts 10 was actually very much the same kind of holy surprise. Indeed, it was a much greater surprise, a much more significant re-alignment of Peter's spiritual sensibilities than even my fictional cinematic command would have been.

Because unlike some of our religious customs, God's laws about clean and unclean foods were easily traceable to the Bible itself. Blue laws about theater attendance and card playing such as we once had in our tradition were things that our forbears derived not based on specific Scripture passages but were drawn instead from various principals in the Bible. But not so with rules pertaining to keeping kosher! Peter could flip open his Scripture scroll to Leviticus and quote back to God chapter and verse the ins and outs of why Peter and his fellow Jews ate, and did not eat, what they did.

So when in this rooftop vision God commands Peter to break rules from God's own book, Peter is scandalized. He is confused. What could this all mean? His brain is still spinning when there is a knock at the door. It's a delegation of some swarthy-looking Italian types who represent a Roman centurion named Cornelius. Improbably they are seeking Peter, and long about the moment Peter is ready politely to tell them to go away, the Spirit of God whispers into Peter's ear, "I sent these fellows, so go with them now!"

Next thing you know Peter is hitting the road for Caesarea, "Caesar-ville." The very name of the city smacked of the Caesar, and so of all that was loathsome to devout Jews like Peter. Keep in mind what I mentioned two weeks ago from Acts 3: despite the knowledge of and belief in Jesus as the true Messiah, Peter and the other apostles still saw themselves as Jews. Their religious identity as Jews had been added on to through the revelation of Jesus as God's Christ, but their core religious identity had not been replaced.

So as a devout Jew, Peter believed he had a kind of religious duty to avoid Gentiles, or at least to turn them into Jews before having a whole lot to do with such folks. This mentality was so deeply ingrained in Peter that when he first enters Cornelius' house, as we read this in verse 27, the first thing out of Peter's mouth was hardly something you'd call the pinnacle of social grace. "You all know that it's illegal for me, a Jew, to be consorting with the likes of you Gentile types, don't you? I'm only here because God ordered me to come! So what do you want?"

Peter has a lot to learn! And he will begin to learn it in this very chapter. After Cornelius tells the story of also his own vision, Peter proclaims the gospel to everyone there in that house. To Peter's wonder, there is a new day of Pentecost right then and there! The Holy Spirit is poured out on these Gentiles no less certainly than it had been given to Peter and the other disciples in Jerusalem some time before. He cannot believe his eyes, but then again he cannot deny the reality of what is happening. And so he calls for some water so that he can baptize these folks as quickly as possible.

It will still be a while before Peter really understands all this. He will go on believing for a time that Gentiles should be turned into Jews before they can be fully accepted as followers of Christ. In fact, Peter and the apostle Paul will eventually have one of the early church's most famous donnybrooks on this very question. Peter will insist that Gentiles keep kosher and be circumcised while Paul will insist that such requirements are ludicrous. If God doesn't wait for such rituals before giving out the grace of his very Spirit, then why would anyone else insist on such things?! In the long run, Paul will win that particular argument.

It will take time for all of this really to sink into Peter's head and heart, but it will happen. Eventually even Peter will connect God's grace with all those times when he watched his master Jesus eat with tax collectors and speak kindly to prostitutes. Peter had been raised in a time when there were blue laws to the effect that a Jewish midwife was not allowed to birth a Gentile baby lest this midwife be guilty of adding yet another greasy Gentile to the land of the living. But Peter had seen Jesus heal the children of Gentiles, and eventually he'd realize that God really does save by grace--God does not play favorites. It's the unity of the Spirit that is the main thing, and once that Spirit is in evidence in people, then the only thing left to do is fall back and celebrate the fundamental union we all share in Christ and also with one another.

Truth is, though, that this basic lesson is something God had been teaching all along, if only people had paid attention. Because there is one tiny detail recorded in Acts 10:5 that unlocks this whole passage. It's easy to miss but Luke, the author of Acts, assumes that we are biblically savvy and literate folks. The detail is the city Peter is in when he first receives his vision: it's Joppa. There are only two stories in the whole Bible that involve the city of Joppa: this one in Acts 10 and the story of Jonah.

Remember Jonah? He was the prophet who fled to Joppa because he refused to obey God's command to go preach repentance to a bunch of no-good non-Jews in a place called Nineveh. Jonah believed that salvation was a "For Jews Only" kind of club and so he wasn't about to take the risk of becoming responsible for the salvation of some non-Jews. Suppose he did preach repentance to the Ninevites and suppose they actually heeded his advice? Then what? No, it was safer to flee God's command, and so Jonah ends up in Joppa.

And now, hundreds of years later, Peter ends up in Joppa, too, and the final lesson for him is the same as it was for Jonah: God is concerned with all people in all places. God's dearest desire is to save all people in all places, and everything God has done from the call of Abraham to the resurrection of Jesus was aimed at that goal. Our task as followers of God is to help that process along, not hinder it by piling on our own expectations, rules, or ethnic insularities. When we see God building his Body up by adding people of all kinds, our task is to rejoice, to be welcoming. And once these folks, many of whom are indeed so "different" from some of us, are so added to the Body, then our union with them as fellow believers is what needs to be in the driver's seat of our attitudes and actions.

This morning we are coming to the table of our Lord Jesus Christ. There is no single feature to the Christian church that reveals our unity with Jesus and all Jesus' people than this sacrament. In his recent memoir, Open Secrets, Richard Lischer employs a most lovely image at one point. In the church he first served following his graduation from seminary, the wine chalice used for the Lord's Supper was a fairly large goblet made of a shiny silver. Each time when he presented the wine, he would lift the cup up high over his head. A few people in his staunchly Lutheran congregation didn't like that move--they thought it looked too Roman Catholic. But Lischer says that the reason he did this was because when he lifted the cup up, he could see on the curved underside of the chalice the entire congregation reflected. It reminded him of the fundamental truth of the sacrament: when we eat the bread and drink the cup of our Lord, we thicken our union with him but we also become members one with another. We are all one in the cup we share.

It's a great picture and a precious truth. But in practice, we still struggle with seeing our union with other people no less than did Peter. We are still good at using our own piety and practice as the yardstick against which all others are measured. We are still apt to think that all real Christians are people who observe Sunday the same way we do, who sing songs like we do, who eat and drink, or avoid eating and drinking, the same things we do. It's still difficult for us to see the unity we share with people whose skin is a different color, whose speech is a different language, whose culture is so different from our own.

I recently heard a speech by a professor from a large seminary in South Africa. For many and various reasons, the churches in Africa are forced to deal with the scourge of AIDS in a way most churches in this country do not. As I noted in another sermon not too long ago, in sub-Saharan Africa, AIDS is pandemic and if something is not done to get needed medications to Africa, a whole generation of people, including of fellow Christians, could simply disappear. But I mention this today because this professor was very poignant in saying, "The Body of Christ has AIDS."

If there are Christians anywhere who struggle with something like AIDS, then our most basic unity with these brothers and sisters, as we see it so keenly in the bread and wine of the holy supper, forces us to see that collectively, we all have AIDS. We all have a problem that needs addressing and solving, and our union in Christ means that when one part of the Body suffers, the whole Body suffers and so needs to respond. As someone once put it, when you get a thorn in the bottom of your foot, your whole body has to work together to bend down and pluck that thorn out. It is no different with the Body of Christ, as Paul made so eloquently clear in many of his New Testament writings about the Body.

In his communion sermon last month, Pastor Bob encouraged us really to see and to visualize Jesus himself when we come to Jesus' table. Today Acts 10 encourages us to do that, too, but then also to take it one step further: when we see Jesus himself present in the bread and the wine, we should also see in our mind's eye all those other Christians whom Jesus sees in the same glance in which he sees you and me. We must see the people in this place as brothers and sisters, but also those many millions in other places with whom we are one in Christ. We must see the African Christian suffering with AIDS, the Chinese Christian whose faith the government despises, the Nigerian Christian in Idachi whose culture is utterly foreign to us but whose faith in Jesus is exactly the same as our own faith, the gay Christian who struggles so mightily with his identity, the divorced mother of three whose innercity life is a struggle most of us more well-to-do folks can scarcely imagine.

We must see also all these people because if the grace of God through our Lord Jesus Christ really has come to them, then our task, as was Peter's task so long ago, is to rejoice, to celebrate our unity in diversity, and to proclaim together the one Lord Jesus Christ who is alone this world's hope. Acts 10 concludes with something that Peter could never in his wildest dreams have imagined when this story began. After baptizing Cornelius and his household, Peter is invited to stay, actually to live with, these Gentiles for a few days: to sleep under their non-Jewish roof, to eat at their table non-kosher table. And he did it. The Spirit of Pentecost that converted Peter to faith in Jesus in the first place often provides many subsequent mini-conversions. Those who eat the bread and drink the cup of Jesus the Lord should expect such new revelations now and again. We should expect them and, when we find them, rejoice in God's love all over again! Amen.