Crossing Boundaries
Acts 11: 1-18
You may have seen the bumper sticker that reads: “The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it.” I wouldn’t stick that on my car, but I have to admit that I can understand why some people find comfort in those words. In a world of shifting values, often spurious spirituality, and flaky faith claims, we need an anchor, a good, solid, unshakeable foundation on which to build. “The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it.” We need standards. We need a solid foundation.
Contrast that with something 17th century pilgrim pastor, John Robinson wrote: “God hath yet more light and truth to break forth from his holy word.” There is something good about that, too. It implies that in and through the pages of the Bible we meet, not so much a set of fixed rules, but a living God who continues to speak to us, to challenge us, and to lead us deeper into faith. We don’t have the Bible all sewn up and buttoned down. God, through his word, still has more to teach us.
Peter knew his Bible. And it was pretty specific and pretty clear. The books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy include a catalogue of dietary laws and a forbidden food list. They seem archaic and strange to us, but this was an important issue for the Jews and for the first Christians who were also Jews. Obeying these laws was a means of maintaining their distinctiveness. This was one of the ways they remembered that they were a unique and special community, “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people.”
The dietary laws marked the lines of faithfulness in the midst of incredible pressure to forsake the faith, drop one’s particularities and become a good citizen of the Empire. A little pork here, a pinch of incense to Caesar there, and it will not be long before the faith community will quietly disappear and simply blend in with the surrounding majority culture. (William Willimon, Acts (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1988) p. 96.
Nor was it simply a matter of what you can and cannot eat. There were also restrictions against table fellowship with those outside the covenant community. One didn’t share a meal with Gentiles. To eat at the same table was a sign of community, of acceptance and affirmation and for many in the early church to lower the bar to include Gentiles meant that they would be moving down the slippery slope of accommodation with the world and in danger of forsaking their calling to be God’s set apart and holy people. There were boundaries, there were standards. That’s part of what it meant to be faithful.
So how did it happen that Peter went beyond the boundaries of what he and many others had always thought were the clear teachings of scripture and the accepted practice of centuries of God’s faithful people before him? And what can Peter’s experience teach us about how we might discern God’s will for the church today? What light and truth is yet to break forth from God’s word today?
First, there was a vision. Actually there were two visions. Peter had this vision of a kind of picnic blanket full of unclean animals descending from above, and then the command to take and eat what had until now been forbidden. And Cornelius, a Roman soldier, also had a vision in which he was told to send for a man named Peter who would bring him an important message. This wasn’t the private idea of a single individual. The Spirit of God was at work, and at work in the life of more than some solitary visionary leader.
Last month I went with several members of our youth fellowship to Washington, DC. We visited the Church of the Savior. That church has a practice known as “sounding the call.” If a member of the congregation has a vision for some new ministry, some mission he or she feels called to undertake, that person is invited to share the vision with the congregation. Then they pray and they wait for someone to “echo the call.” If there is a shared vision the church moves forward. If the vision is not shared the church does not attempt the proposed mission.
Peter’s crossing of boundaries and venturing into new territory was the result of a shared vision – a sign perhaps, that this was not a human initiative, but the work of God’s Holy Spirit.
After the visions there was a visit. Peter did not go off to write a theological position paper on why we can now eat pork and welcome those who are different from us into the fellowship of Jesus Christ. The vision led first to a visit. There was a knock on the door. Peter welcomed visitors from Cornelius into his house. The next day he went with them and stayed with Cornelius. They shared meals together. Peter listened to his story. Peter told his own story and he told the story of Jesus.
And the result is that Cornelius and the others in his household believe and receive the gift of the Holy Spirit and are baptized in the name of Jesus Christ.
And then finally there is accountability. Word gets back to Peter’s colleagues, his fellow apostles at church headquarters in Jerusalem, and there are questions to be answered. “Peter, what were you doing going to those unclean Gentiles? Who gave you the right to eat with them, to baptize them? How can you turn over centuries of tradition? Peter, what the heck are you doing?”
And step by step Peter gives an account. He tells them about his vision. He tells them about his visit to Cornelius. He tells them about how these Gentiles, –just like us– received the gift of the Holy Spirit. “This whole thing wasn’t my idea,” says Peter. “I didn’t go to the evangelism and mission committee and come up with a plan to reach out to the Gentiles. I was just catching up to what God was already doing.” And the church is converted. In fact they are dumbfounded. With a kind of ‘slap-on-the-forehead’ exclamation, they say, “Even to the Gentiles God has given repentance that leads to life!” This news is so startling, so new that they can scarcely believe it. And the church is dragged, sometimes kicking and screaming, toward the wideness of God’s mercy.
I can’t read this account without thinking about how the issue of homosexuality is confronting God’s church today. This, too, is an issue about boundaries and standards, about how welcoming and how open a church should be, about what is acceptable and what is not. It’s an issue that is a difficult and divisive one for many churches including the Reformed Church in America.
But I believe the Bible gives us some guidelines for how we deal with issues that divide us. And this experience of the early church may give us some direction in how to proceed. It is a story of moving from vision, to visit, to testifying to our own experience of God’s grace, to being willing to be held accountable to each other.
There are many in the church today who have a vision for a church that is open and inclusive and welcoming and affirming of gay and lesbian people. A vision for the church where persons who are gay and lesbian are welcomed into full fellowship and participation without first having to turn away from and deny who they are. A vision that holds that neither homosexuality nor heterosexuality is a sin, but is the way God made us, and therefore people, gay or straight, ought to be welcomed by the church; therefore people gay or straight, who are living in a committed and faithful relationship with a partner, ought to be able to have those unions recognized and blessed by the church. It is a vision, not of one or two people, but a vision shared by many, though certainly not all, in the church. We need to listen to it, to pay attention and together seek to discern God’s will for the church.
But we don’t stop with a vision. We also need to visit. We need to be in each others’ homes, share meals together, have face to face conversations. We need a safe place for each of us, and especially for gay and lesbian people, to be able tell their stories, to testify to their own experience, to tell their own faith journey. We need to try to understand each other’s perspectives.
The Reformed Church Women’s Conference scheduled for this summer was planning a workshop on theological and sociological perspectives on sexual orientation. But there was so much negative reaction that the organizers of the conference decided to cancel the workshop.
In many parts of the church there are gay and lesbian persons who are devout, who love Jesus, who earnestly seek to live in obedience to God. Yet they are hidden from us because they are not sure that the church is a safe place where they can honestly share who they are and what their faith journey has been.
We need to practice the ministry of hospitality, to create a safe place where the stranger can become a friend, where we can know each other as persons, hear each others’ stories, and to testify to our own experience.
I used to think, as many Christians did and still do, that homosexuality was wrong. Or at least was not what God intended for creation. My mind has changed over the years —partly as the result of reading and discussing theological and psychological studies–but mostly through meeting gay people whom I knew to be faithful and committed and gifted followers of Jesus Christ. I heard from them about their experience of grace, learned from them about their faith, and then I began to ask, as Peter did, ‘If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I, that I could hinder God?’
Not everyone in the church is asking that question, of course. In fact many are asking the kind of questions that were asked of Peter: “What the heck are you doing? What are you thinking?” We need to respond to such questions. We need to be held accountable. As a minister in this church I am accountable to the board of elders, to the classis, and also to you, the members of this congregation. You have a right to ask questions, to disagree, to ask for further clarification and conversation. In the covenant community of the church of Jesus Christ we don’t just go off and do things on our own. Peter came back to Jerusalem, to church headquarters, and gave a step by step account. He testified to his own experience, listened to their objections, answered their questions. Together they tried to learn where God was leading them.
In the life of the early church God led the way and prompted Peter’s change of heart and mind with disturbing visions and visits by unexpected strangers. So we trust today that God still leads the church. Too often our anxious question is, “What shall we do?” The better question, the more important question is, “What is God doing?” Anthony Robinson and Robert Wall, Called to Be Church: The Book of Acts for a New Day (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006) p. 160.
“Faith, when it comes down to it,” someone wrote, “is our often breathless attempt to keep up with the redemptive activity of God, to keep asking ourselves, “What is God doing? Where on earth is God going now?” (Willimon, p. 99.)
The answers aren’t always obvious. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what God is doing. Discerning that answer is the ongoing task of the church. It takes time and patience and prayer. The important thing is that we keep that question ever before us and that we wrestle with that question together–always willing to give an account of the faith that is in us and to listen and learn from each other, trusting that through that conversation, and in conversation with God’s Word, God has yet more light and truth to reveal to us.