Scripture Reading:

11Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God. 2So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, 3saying, Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them? 4Then Peter began to explain it to them, step by step, saying, 5I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners; and it came close to me. 6As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. 7I also heard a voice saying to me, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’ 8But I replied, ‘By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’ 9But a second time the voice answered from heaven, ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’ 10This happened three times; then everything was pulled up again to heaven. 11At that very moment three men, sent to me from Caesarea, arrived at the house where we were. 12The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us. These six brothers also accompanied me, and we entered the man’s house. 13He told us how he had seen the angel standing in his house and saying, ‘Send to Joppa and bring Simon, who is called Peter; 14he will give you a message by which you and your entire household will be saved.’ 15And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning. 16And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ 17If 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? 18When they heard this, they were silenced. And they praised God, saying, Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.

Acts 11:1-18

For a long, long time, pastors have been told that with at least fifteen hundred years of scriptural interpretation that has come before us, just about everything we'll ever have to say from the pulpit has been said before by someone else. And there's some truth to that. And as I prayed with this week's scripture passage from Acts, I was taken back to something I've read a few times in my life that deals with the same themes and makes a similar point but was stated in much more eloquent phraseology than I could ever come up with on my own… and so I hope that you'll indulge me as I read an excerpt for you… From Dr. Seuss's book entitled: The Sneetches.

Now the Star Bellied Sneetches had bellies with stars. The plain bellied Sneetches had none upon thars. Those stars weren't so big. They were really quite small, you might think such a thing wouldn't matter at all. But because they had stars, all the Star-Belly Sneetches – would brag, ‘We're the best kind of Sneetch on the beaches.’ With their snoots in the air, they would sniff and they'd snort ‘We'll have nothing to do with the Plain-Belly sort!’ And whenever they met some, when they were out walking, they'd hike right on past them without even talking.

When the Star-Belly children went out to play ball, could a Plain-Belly get in the game…? Not at all. You could only play if your bellies had stars and the Plain-Belly children had none upon thars. When the Star-Bellied Sneetches had frankfurter roasts or picnics or parties or marshmallow toasts, they never invited the Plain-Belly Sneetches. They left them out cold, in the dark of the beaches. They kept them away. Never let them come near. And that's how they treated them year after year.

I don't know if Dr. Seuss ever imagined that the sneetches would so readily illustrate a sermon, but especially the beginning part of the book, which I just read, is a marvelous depiction of the natural tendency of people to exclude or to shun those who are perceived to be different in some way or another… It's easy to slip into a mindset or a worldview that sees people in terms of who's we and who's they… which is better, which is worse, who's got the stars upon thars… and everything else that goes along with it. To fill you in on the rest of the Sneetches and to make the long story shorter, someone comes to help the plain-bellied Sneetches. He's an enterprising gentleman who has a machine to put stars on their bellies so no-one can tell who's who. Of course, that infuriates the original star bellied Sneetches who were so used to their special status that they had to do something… and wouldn't you know it, the same guy who had a star-on machine also had a star-off machine… and a cycle ensued where everyone would go from one to the other trying to chase the path of privilege until no-one could tell, by simply looking, who was which and which was who… it was only then that the sneetches realized that maybe the stars or lack thereof didn't matter nearly as much as they once thought.

Now to be fair, I have to admit that even in my own personal experience, there are some people who are easy to understand and others who aren't… sometimes it's due to shared experience or similar cultural upbringing, sometimes it's because we like to do the same kinds of things or we have something else in common, but there are some who are easier to click with than others, I won't deny that. But the distinction between the star-bellied and plain-bellied Sneetches wasn't simply about who they liked, it was about who they would even associate with. And that's where the parallel with our passage comes in.

Throughout the New Testament, one of the major, ongoing issues that's addressed over and over again boils down to a question of who is eligible for the good news of Christ, who's allowed to have this new found faith, who can become a disciple and who can be welcomed into the community. For us, the answer seems clear, but it wasn't always so. When our passage begins, Peter is asked to defend his actions to a group who believed, like many of the early believers, that only Jews could follow Christ. To their mind, the messiah was the continuation of God's work in the world and as members of the covenant that God established with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, God's chosen people had a special place in that work. There were many Jews who started to follow Jesus even after his crucifixion who couldn't conceive of a messiah that didn't also involve political liberation from Rome… Their whole way of understanding a messiah makes a lot more sense from a perspective of Judaism… So scholars think it was actually the majority position at one point in time: that you had to become a Jew in order to be able to follow Jesus… and there was a lot that came along with that… food laws, purity laws, the physical sign of circumcision. It would not have been an easy task to convert. There was no star on machine, so to speak… And so the circumcised believers in Jerusalem confronted Peter when they heard that he had gone to eat and to share the good news of Christ with Gentiles.

Here's what happened, as presented in Acts. Peter had a vision of a sheet coming down from heaven that held animals which were considered unclean for faithful Jews, normally they wouldn't have touched them and they certainly wouldn't have eaten them… but a voice associated with the vision said Peter, kill and eat… At first Peter didn't know what to make of it and he resisted… nothing unclean has ever entered my mouth… but the voice continued, What God has made clean you must not call profane. And it happened three times.

While Peter was trying to figure out what that meant for him, some people came to his door who almost immediately made the meaning clear… they were gentiles, and they asked Peter to go with them… From the beginning of the discussion he told them, You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but 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? And a man named Cornelius who was a centurion in the Roman army told of his own vision and asked Peter to share the good news that God had given. Peter did, and the gentiles who heard the good news received the gift of the Holy Spirit… it was their own miniature Pentecost.

That's the story that's told in chapter 10… and in our passage, from chapter 11, Peter recounts that story almost word for word. In fact there's only one substantive change in the way Peter tells it and it has to do with his motivation… after all, he's being asked to defend his actions and part of a good defense is always linked to motive. It's perhaps the strongest point in the telling of the story when Peter says, If God gave them the same gift that God gave us, who was I to stand in the way of what God is doing?

The whole experience was a conversion for Peter. He changed his way of thinking when he realized that God wasn't only for him and people like him, but that God was for everyone. And it was a conversion experience for the people who heard his story of what happened as well. Verse 18 tells us that the people who were confronting him were silenced and they praised God saying, Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life. Isn't it interesting that Paul came to the same conclusion after his conversion story that we looked at last week… There is not an inherent difference between Jew and Greek, between slave and free, between Male and Female, between star-bellied and plain-bellied, or any other dividing line that people have drawn over the years, at least not when it comes to whether someone's eligible to receive God's blessing, able to accept God's grace, capable to follow God's way, welcome to eat at God's table or qualified to be God's person.

And implicitly, Peter's message to those who confronted him was this: If you continue to deny these people, or anyone else, access to the gospel story, you are standing in the way of what God is doing… And I fear that sometimes as 21st century Christians we end up standing in the way of what God is doing. Which I believe is something that none of us want. So this morning I have two remedies… one from each of our scripture readings.

The first is simple, make space at the table… Jesus said in our reading from the gospel of John, by this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. Everyone must be welcome, to come precisely as they are… whether they have stars or not whatever those stars may be.

And second is to share what God is doing. Sometimes I think that evangelism is scary because it often seems like the goal is to make them like us. But it's not. Even in New Testament times, Peter's conversion story tells us that they didn't have to convert people to Judaism with all the associated laws and rituals. Whatever conversion is going to happen is God's responsibility… our responsibility is to share how we've experienced God made known in Jesus Christ, and allow God to work through that telling.

You see, we follow someone whose main way of teaching was by telling stories and sharing parables. And yet, how often are we afraid to tell our story because it's not the culturally accepted thing to do… or because we don't want people to think we're weird… we're afraid of how people will receive the story and what they'll think of us… So we wait and we tell what God has done in our lives only in measured ways, or only in carefully chosen contexts. And we forget that before we even knew the people we might share with, God loved them…

God is the one who can give the Holy Spirit, God's the one who can transform lives. God's the one who's at work in us, and God's the one who's at work expanding the circle so that one day, not only will everyone be welcome at the table, but everyone will come too. Thanks be to God.

The foregoing sermon was given by Rev. Dan Holland at the United Parish of Bowie on the Fourth Sunday after Easter, May 2, 2010.

© 2010 Daniel Holland