Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
23 April 2023
Acts 10.1-17, 27-28, 34-35
It is almost impossible to overstate the theological significance
of today’s reading from Acts Chapter 10,
because without Peter’s vision on the rooftop
there is a good case to be made
that Christianity would have died out soon after.
At this point in the story,
only a tiny minority of Jewish people were following Jesus,
and the possibility for this small messianic Jewish sect
to ‘peter out’, so to speak, was very high.
Judaism in the first century was itself a highly sectarian religion,
a minority faith followed only
by people from one specific national identity.
The Jews at this time understood themselves as the covenant people of God,
as those called and chosen from among the nations
to be God’s own people.
Their role was to bear the lamp of God’s grace among the pagan nations,
shining as a beacon in a dark world,
testifying to God’s faithfulness.
What their understanding of their role did not include,
was seeking to convert all the nations of the world to Judaism.
In fact, it was surprisingly difficult for someone to become Jewish,
and that wasn’t the point.
Rather, the Jews as God’s chosen people
were there to highlight the sin of the world
through their covenant obedience,
and so to point the nations to God.
And of course, there were always those beyond Judaism
who responded to that witness,
and these were often known as ‘God-fearers’
– Gentiles who rejected the pagan gods
and worshipped the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
And the earliest Christians,
those Jewish people who worshipped Jesus as their messiah,
similarly did not have a vision of their Jesus-following
as relevant beyond the people of Israel.
Their missionary concern was to tell other Jews
that Jesus was the long-awaited Jewish Messiah,
who had come to call Jewish people
to a new depth of encounter with God.
So how do we get from there
to Christianity as a faith that spans the globe,
with followers ‘from every tribe and language and people and nation’,
as the book of Revelation puts it (5.9)?
The answer, at least in part,
is that it happens when Peter has a vision on a rooftop.
It’s not for nothing that I just quoted from the Book of Revelation,
because Peter’s vision is an apocalyptic event
– it is a moment when heaven is opened,
and a new way of seeing the world comes into being.
This is apocalyptic at its most authentic:
not some vision of the end of the world,
but a vision of a new world coming into being:
the unveiling, the revealing, of a new way of being in the world. [1]
The Book of Revelation,
written at about the same time as the book of Acts
in which Peter’s vision is recorded,
offers its own vision of heaven opened;
and what the writer sees through the open door into heaven
is a world where the blessings of God
extend beyond Judaism throughout the world.
Four times in the visions of Revelation
we get the repeated refrain
that those called by God come from ‘all nations,
and kindreds, and people, and tongues’ (5.9; 7.9; 13.7; 14.6).
In both Peter’s vision and that of the Apocalypse,
it seems that heaven’s perspective on the limits of God’s calling
are far wider than those of the people receiving the vision.
Both John and Peter have to learn that God’s call goes beyond Israel.
For Peter, the key moment is on a rooftop as he’s feeling hungry,
and he falls into a trance and sees heaven opened.
Coming down from heaven is something he finds repulsive:
a sheet with animals on it, that he is instructed to kill and eat.
I don’t know what animal you would least like to eat,
but for me it’s spiders.
A few years ago, Liz and I were in Cambodia
and we were wandering around the local market,
and there was a man with a tray of fried tarantulas and scorpions,
offering them for sale to eat.
It’s something for the tourists,
and occasionally some brave traveller will give it a go.
But in fact it’s a problematic trade,
as the spiders are foraged from the local forest,
and the numbers are becoming severely depleted.
I’d like to say that we declined the offer of a deep-fried tarantula
for sound ecological reasons,
but the truth is that we just felt the same way about that tray of spiders
as I suspect Peter felt about the sheet of animals in his vision.
Three times he’s told to kill and eat,
and he refuses not just out of disgust,
but because the animals on the sheet
are those he has been brought up to believe
it is against his religion to consume.
To eat them would make him impure.
And so the voice from heaven tells him:
“What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” (10.15)
This happens three times to poor Peter,
perhaps recalling his threefold denial of Jesus,
and the threefold command from Jesus that Peter ‘tend his sheep’.
But anyway, he’s then apparently let off the hook
as the sheet is taken back up to heaven
and Peter is spared actually carrying out the command
to eat his tray of spiders.
But then, through the following events,
the meaning of the vision starts to become clear.
This isn’t about food at all,
it’s about something much bigger.
Peter is greeted by the men who have come to summon him,
and when he gets to Cornelius’s house, he tells his host:
‘You yourselves know
that it is improper for a Jew to associate with or to visit an outsider,
but God has shown me
that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.’ (Acts 10.28).
Interestingly, Matthew’s gospel tells us that
when Jesus was commissioning Peter, he said to him:
‘I tell you, you are Peter,[d] and on this rock[e] I will build my church,
and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. 1
9 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven,
and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven,
and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.’ (Matthew 16.18-19)
And this is exactly what we find happening
here in Cornelius’s house:
it’s the only occasion we have on record
in which Peter used the power to bind and unbind
things in heaven and earth.
He declares as an absolutely binding part of the Christian revelation
that no human is to be called impure or profane.
And so, with this brief infallible declaration,
Peter opens the gates of heaven to the gentiles.
But there’s a nuance here in the way the story is told.
Peter doesn’t say,
‘God has revealed to me that there’s no such thing
as that which is impure or profane’,
but rather that God has said
not to call any person profane or impure.
It’s not that there is some objective truth of profanity,
where no-one is really impure,
whether or not some people mistakenly think that others are.
Rather, what Peter is saying
shows that what we sometimes call reality
is in fact merely a human linguistic construct.
Profanity, impurity, and the shame that come with them,
are human constructs,
and we speak them into being
in the way we speak to and of others.
If we describe someone as impure,
our description is not independent of reality,
but rather creates the reality of impurity in that person’s life.
It is not true that ‘sticks and stones can break my bones
but words will never hurt me’,
because words can be more destructive
to a person’s identity than any act of physical violence.
Words of othering, exclusion,
derogatory language, and shame-inducing belief,
create worlds in which real people
are shamed, belittled, excluded, and othered.
Our words create worlds of pain,
which we then force other people to inhabit.
So what Peter is saying,
when he affirms that God has revealed to him
not to call anyone profane or impure,
is that there is an indispensable grammatical rule in the Kingdom of God,
which is that no-one must be spoken of at profane or impure,
and therefore there must be no discrimination
against any sort of objectionable person.
Paul, in his letter to the Galatians,
speaks of the divisions that marked humanity in the first century,
naming male and female, slave and free, and Jew and Greek (Galatians 3.28).
Gender, social status, and ethnicity;
and I suspect we’re not so far from those divisions in our world too.
And yet Peter says we must not declare
another human being impure or unclean.
We must not declare another human being disgusting,
because to do so creates a world
where people come to see themselves as impure, unclean, and disgusting.
I want to read a short passage for you
from a book by Vicky Beeching.
If you’ve never heard of her,
it’s probably because you weren’t going to the right kind of church
back in the noughties.
She has been described by the Guardian
as ‘arguably the most influential Christian of her generation’.
After a spell as the worship leader of a Vineyard Church in the late 90s,
she moved to Nashville
and her worship albums topped the Christian Music charts
on both sides of the Atlantic for over a decade.
She regularly led worship in the Big Top at Spring Harvest.
In 2013, when the Same Sex Marriage act was passed in the UK,
she unexpectedly spoke out in favour of same-sex marriage,
and the evangelical church began to get deeply suspicious.
The invitations to lead worship dried up.
When she came out herself a year later,
she was shunned by those who had formerly adored her.
She was declared unclean, profane.
In 2018, after gaining her doctorate in theology from Durham University,
she published a book called:
‘Undivided: Coming Out, Becoming Whole and Living Free from Shame’.
In this book she speaks about Peter’s vision:
As I read about Peter’s vision, I felt as though I were there myself, looking at the sheet falling from the sky. For me, the “unclean things” on that sheet represented my gay orientation. And, like Peter, I was arguing with God, saying, “Lord, I’ve never so much as touched a person of the same sex romantically. I’ve kept your law and commandments. I would never disobey your word.” And what God had said to Peter, I felt he said to me too: “Do not call unclean what I have made clean.”
God was letting me in on a new perspective, one of radical acceptance and inclusion. “Do not call unclean what I have made clean” echoed around my head and heart. The person I’d always been—a gay person—was not something to be ashamed of. God accepted me and loved me, and my orientation was part of his grand design.
There was nothing unclean about it, and nothing to run away from. Just as the Gentiles could fully join God’s family, now LGBTQ+ people could too. They were on an equal footing with straight people, so there was no reason why they couldn’t love and be loved, marry and raise families, and enjoy full membership in church and society. If there was nothing unclean about gay relationships, there was nothing to condemn. God had spoken.
So says the wonderful Vicky Beeching.
But what has all this got to do with Easter?
What was it in the story of the cross and resurrection
that led Peter, and John, and other early Jewish Jesus-followers,
to a revelation that God’s inclusion went far beyond
the boundaries of their inherited tradition?
Well, James Allison suggests that it’s all to do with Jesus as the lamb of God
– the innocent victim slain by the sins of the world.
At Easter, we find Jesus, the sinless one,
being made ‘sin’ for the forgiveness of sins.
The pure and holy one becomes impure and unholy,
in fact as impure as the grave:
within Judaism, any contact with a dead body
rendered a person unclean and profane,
and Jesus’ execution as a criminal on the cross,
and his burial in the borrowed tomb,
had rendered him as impure as it was possible to be.
Or, to put it another way,
at Easter, Jesus becomes the scapegoat for humanity
– the one on whom the sins of the world are laid.
The book of Leviticus tells the story of the origin of the Scape Goat:
Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities of the Israelites, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task.[a] 22 The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region, and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness. (Leviticus 16.21-22)
This process was the way in which the ancient Jewish community
dealt with its sense of its own sinfulness,
its sense of its own shame.
It laid that guilt and sin on the innocent goat,
and sent it out in the wilderness to die.
And human communities have been doing this down the centuries ever since
– it’s just that for most of the time the scapegoat is another human.
We declare someone, or some group,
to be responsible for all the problems and dissensions in our society,
and we scapegoat them, we expel them, we victimise them.
And we come to believe that they are genuinely dangerous:
we use our language to construct a reality
where they become for us unclean, impure, shameful, and guilty.
We do what Peter realises should not be done,
and we call the innocent profane.
And this is what happened to Jesus par excellance on the cross:
he becomes the victim hated without cause,
killed without reason, sinful without sin.
But the impurity will not stick.
The glory of the empty tomb is that the lie of the cross is exposed.
Because of the empty tomb,
it becomes impossible to believe in the real blameworthiness of the victim.
And, as Peter and other early followers of Jesus discovered,
if you can no longer believe in the guilt of the victim,
then no more can you believe in the linguistic construction of reality
which created the ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the first place.
For Peter, he could no longer believe
that God was only for Peter’s own people,
because to believe that was to declare the gentiles ‘unclean’,
something he could no longer do
in the light of the cross and the empty tomb.
Peter’s vision, received in the light of the events of Easter,
showed him that the mechanisms of scapegoating,
of declaring the other profane,
are nothing but a lie told by people
to justify their own sin, guilt and shame.
He realised that the resurrection of the crucified victim
didn’t simply declare people clean,
but rather exposed and dismantled the whole mechanism
which creates impure or profane people of any category in the first place.
It’s not so much that in Christ sinners are declared clean,
but rather that no-one, NO-ONE, should be declared unclean.
In the kingdom of God,
it is not possible for one person to judge themselves righteous
compared to the unrighteousness of another,
because ‘God has shown us
not to call any person profane or impure’. (Acts 10.28).
And so Peter baptises the gentile Cornelius and his household,
as a sign and symbol of the new world that is coming to being in Christ Jesus,
where no-one is declared unrighteous, not even a Gentile Centurion.
And if nothing and no-one is declared profane,
then all things and all people are sacred.
It is one of the great tragedies of Christian history
that scapegoating and witch-hunts
have formed such a dominant part
of the way we relate to one another and to the world.
And what would it mean, I wonder, for us, here, today,
to agree with Peter that God has shown us
not to call anyone profane or unclean?
Can we speak into being a world where the victims are recovered,
where the dominant narratives of ‘othering’ are silenced,
and where the universal good news
of the death and resurrection of Jesus
is genuinely good news to those
whom others reject, exclude, and enact violence against?
You see, the thing is, if you’re looking for God,
then God will not be found in the empty tomb of the resurrection.
Rather the resurrected Christ is found in the face of the victimised,
the excluded, the abused, and the rejected.
Whoever we would turn our face from,
however distasteful they may be to us,
the spiritual reality is that they are a reflection of the face of Christ,
the one who died on the cross
for the forgiveness of sins and the redemption of all.
So let us speak a new world into being;
and through and words and by our lives,
the kingdom comes on earth, as it is in heaven.
[1] This sermon draws extensively on James Allison, ‘Raising Abel’
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