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God Shows No Partiality, Jeff Wright, 1/12/14

God Shows No Partiality

A sermon preached at
Heart of the Rockies Christian Church

(Disciples of Christ)

Fort Collins, Colorado

January 12, 2014

            Peter attempts to struggle with his recently received new perception of the movement of the gospel.   He has no proof text to justify himself.  He is out on risky terrain without tradition or Scripture to back him up.

This is the way it sometimes is in the church.   If Jesus Christ is Lord, then the church has the adventurous task of penetrating new areas of his Lordship, expecting surprises and new implications of the gospel which cannot be explained on any basis other than our Lord has shown us something we could not have seen on our own.

William H. Willimon, Interpretation

Texts: Acts 10:34-43 & Matthew 3:13-17

You remember Tom Brokaw’s book, The Greatest Generation.  Brokaw wrote about the World War II experiences of ordinary Americans who, he wrote, “gave new meaning to courage, sacrifice and honor.”  Brokaw told about Mark Hatfield, retired senator from Oregon (pp.332ff., Random House).  During the war, Hatfield served as commander of one of the landing vessels that took marines ashore during the battles at Iwo Jima and Okinawa.  Of his feelings about the Japanese, Hatfield said, “You learn to hate with a passion in wartime.”

Brokaw reported an experience in September, 1945, that shaped Hatfield’s life and politics.  In Hatfield’s own words, “I was part of a crew of people that went into Hiroshima.  This was about a month after the bomb had been dropped.”  As American ships sailed into the canals, Japanese, young and old alike, stared in silence.  “When we landed, the little kids saw we weren’t going to kill or shoot them, so they began to gather around.  We realized they were very hungry, so we took our lunches and broke them up and gave them to as many kids as we could,” he said.  Took, broke, gave.  Sounds like communion.  In that moment, something happened to Hatfield.  He said, “…sharing those sandwiches with the people who had been my enemy was sort of a therapy for me.”  He said he could feel the hate leaving him.  It was a spiritual experience.

But then Hatfield had been prepared to expect this kind of thing in life and he went on to expect it in his career as a senator.  Hatfield was raised in the church, a Baptist.  In church, reading the Bible, paying attention, Hatfield had learned that amazing things happen when folks eat together.  When you take bread, bless it, break it and give it.  Lives are changed.  Strangers become friends.  Enemies are reconciled.  Something happens in us.  Something happens in the world.  God happens.  And the kingdom is advanced.  As Hatfield discovered, sometimes the bread that’s taken, blessed, broken and given – broken hard – is the stuff of our old understandings and prejudices.

It happened to the disciple Peter.  Our reading from the Book of Acts reports the culmination of a remarkable story about eating and drinking and how this most basic of human endeavors became the occasion for overcoming a formidable prejudice in the early church.  Picture Peter, a Jew, standing on the threshold of the home of Cornelius, a Gentile, that is, a non-Jew.

Back in Peter’s day, Jews didn’t go into the homes of Gentiles.  They just didn’t.  Peter didn’t.  Peter wouldn’t.  Most Jews simply put up with the Gentiles.  The most prejudiced of the Jews thought that Gentiles were filthy, godless, immoral people.  Probably not Peter.  But Peter knew the rules.  He would have followed the protocol.  He wouldn’t have shared a meal.  He wouldn’t have gone into the home of a Gentile.  It had to do with all the laws God had given the Jews, especially the ones about diet and cleanliness.  What you can wear, what you can’t wear.  How you’re to clean your home, including your dishes and cooking utensils.  What you can eat and what you can’t eat.  These laws go to the heart of what it means to be a Jewish person and, according to the strictest Jews, what it means not to be a Gentile.  Most Jews in Jesus’ day understood that God had chosen the one, and not the other.  So here is Peter standing on the threshold of a Gentile home.  Two scenes have led to this awkward moment.  They take place along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea.  You can read about them in the tenth chapter of the Book of Acts.

Scene I.  Two days earlier, up in Caesarea.  A Roman centurion of the Italian Division named Cornelius has a vision.  Cornelius is a good man.  He fears God.  He’s generous to others and prays earnestly.  He has a vision in which an angel says, “Cornelius, God has taken notice of your prayers and your acts of good will.  Send to Joppa for a man named Simon Peter, a tanner, whose house is by the sea.”  Cornelius dispatches two slaves and a soldier to get Peter.

Scene II.  The next day, down in Joppa.  As Cornelius’ group nears the village, Simon Peter is at prayer.  It’s about noon.  Peter is hungry, but lunch isn’t ready, so Peter goes off to pray.  He falls into a trance.  He sees heaven open and something like a large sheet is lowered to the ground.  On the sheet are all kinds of foods forbidden to the Jews: pigs, camels, rabbits, shrimp, ostriches.  A voice says, “Get up, Peter, kill and eat.”  But Peter’s a faithful Jew.  “By no means, Lord.  I’ve never eaten anything that is unclean and forbidden.  I won’t start now.”  The voice insists, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”  The scene is repeated two more times.  Each time the Voice says, “Eat.”  Peter, Luke writes in our lesson, is greatly puzzled.  Just then, the group from Caesarea arrives.  They call out for him.  The Holy Spirit says, “Peter, they’re looking for you.  Go.”

Two days later now, they have arrived in Caesarea.  Peter the Jew finds himself standing on the doorstep of the home of Cornelius the Gentile.  He is met by a house full of Gentiles.  You know what happens.  Peter crosses the threshold.  I’ll tell you what else happens.  Faith-wise, Peter becomes a little less Jewish and a little more Christian.  I think it’s the poet Maya Angelou who says she expresses surprise when folks come up and tell her they’re Christian.  Because, she says, she expects that it’ll take her whole lifetime to become Christian.  I like that.  I think there’s a sense in which Peter becomes more Christian, more Christ-like, as he steps across that threshold.  I like the way Barbara Brown Taylor describes this passage.  She writes,

Peter had prepared himself to meet one Gentile, not a whole house full of them.  [He says,] “You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile.”  That’s the first thing Peter said to them, and I imagine some of them were crushed.  Here they had waited for this great man whom Cornelius had told them so much about and he turned out to be just like all the rest, treating them as if they were dirty and he might catch something just by being in the same room with them.

“But…” Peter said next.  I love that word [Taylor writes].  [She says,] Sometimes I think the whole Gospel swings on that word (“I was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see”).  It means things can change.  It means we do not always know everything there is to know.  It means God can still teach us something.  “But,” Peter said, “God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.  So when I was sent for, I came without objection.  Now may I ask why you sent for me?” (Bread of Angels, p.77, Cowley)

This is when Cornelius tells Peter about his vision and what the angel said and how he had sent for Peter like the angel told him to.  Cornelius says, “So now we’re all here in the presence of God to listen to what the Lord has for you to tell us.”  I think this is when Peter gets it.  When it comes to him, the point of his dream, the point of Cornelius’ call, the point of his standing here in a house full of Gentiles, the point of Jesus’ ministry.  Peter says, as if to himself but loud enough for everybody in the house to hear – clear enough for you and me to hear, too, if we’re listening: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”  So Peter tells them about Jesus: the message that Jesus was anointed by God with the power of the Holy Spirit; how Jesus went around doing good and healing people who were oppressed by the devil; how Jesus was put to death on a tree; how God raised Jesus on the third day; and how, after Jesus rose from the tomb, he sat down to eat and drink with those who had put their trust in him.

While Peter is still speaking (10:44), the Holy Spirit interrupts him.  Sometimes we preachers don’t know when to shut up and let the Holy Spirit do his thing.  While Peter is still speaking, the Holy Spirit falls upon the Gentiles.  They come to faith.  After their baptism, they all come back to Cornelius’ home, sit down and eat together: Peter, the Jew, in a house full of Gentiles, with a pork roast on the table.  Peter remembers the vision he had and how the Spirit told him that nothing is unclean.

“M-m-m-m,” Peter says. “Pork is good.  I think I’ll call it the other white meat.”

Really, I don’t think there’s any way I can explain to you how huge a thing this was: Peter’s dream, his going to Cornelius, his breaking the Law and fellowshipping with Gentiles.  Folks in Jerusalem call him up on charges.  Maybe it’s the first church tribunal.  Peter is one of their leaders!  He’s an apostle, chosen by Christ and given the keys to the kingdom.  They think he’s gone mad.  They know God’s will in this matter.  It’s written all over their Bible.  “You ate with those people,” they say.  It’s an enormous moment in the life of the early church.  Truly, the future of the church hangs in the balance.  No wonder the Holy Spirit intervenes.  And will have to intervene again, just four chapters later in the Book of Acts, when Paul is called to Jerusalem on the same charges.  They have this church-wide meeting.  All the big muckity-mucks are present, arguing about whether the Gentiles, responding now to the Gospel, will have to become Jews first and obey all the Old Testament laws on diet and cleanliness before they can be considered Christians in good standing; arguing whether or not it takes anything more than a person, anyone, deciding to follow Jesus.  Peter puts it bluntly: “If God gave them the same gift that he gave you and me when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?”

If the church hadn’t been moved by the Holy Spirit at work in those leaders, the church might not have survived.  The church wouldn’t have become the community through which God is shaping and redeeming the world.

About ten years ago, Disciples announced the decision to open conversations with groups of non-believers, especially Muslims but other faiths as well.  You know who we asked to help us in these interfaith dialogues?  The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, because they’d been doing this kind of thing for awhile.  Some of you will remember that it wasn’t too many years before, that Protestants weren’t talking to the Catholics.  Protestants and Catholics not talking to each other, that had to please God.

I had a friend call.  “Did you read about the interfaith dialogues we’re starting up?  What do you think?”  I knew what he was saying, but I said, “What are you saying?”  “I’m just thinking,” he said, “that here we go again, watering down the faith, talking to all kinds of people who don’t believe in Jesus.  And what’s this asking the Catholics to help us?  What do you think about that?”  My friend was accustomed to my impatience.  I said, “I guess it’s occurred to somebody in Indianapolis [that’s where our headquarters are] that we can’t tell others who God is for us if we aren’t willing to sit down and listen to others tell us who God is for them.”

Thank God for the Simon Peters of this world who, though puzzled when the Spirit intervenes, are willing to see the bigger, blessed picture of God’s love – God’s embrace of all that God has made, his tremendous love and mercy for all that’s he created, everything, everybody, as Peter came to realize – and then risk living it, going about like Jesus doing good and healing all those who are oppressed.

You sit down and eat with somebody, a stranger, an enemy, an estranged family member or friend… You take your life and ask God’s blessing on it, then let God break it and give it… something extraordinary happens.  Lives are changed.  Strangers become friends.  Enemies are reconciled.  Something happens in us.  Something happens in the world.  God happens.  And the kingdom is advanced.

— Jeff Wright