Acts 11: 1-18
Years
ago, my mother and I traveled to Washington to attend her uncle’s funeral. After
we checked into our hotel in Crystal City, Mom called down to the desk for some
extra towels. We left the room to go eat and as we walked down the hallway,
another hotel guest who happened to be African-American came toward us. My mother asked her, “Are you going to room
313?” (our room). The woman looked
confused. In horror I realized what was
going on. Mom made the assumption that
because the woman was black, she was a housekeeper.
I kind
of pushed my mother along and said, “She’s staying here” and we kept
going. That night, I found a note under
the door. Several pages of a hotel
notepad were filled with a handwritten message calling out my mother for her racist
assumptions. The woman described at
length her own postgraduate degrees, her professional status, etc, along with a
few choice words for my mom. But through
this woman’s anger came a lifetime of deep, deep hurt. A hurt that a white woman like me will never
know because no-one has ever assumed I am the maid based on the color of my
skin.
We
humans have an innate tendency to categorize. In prehistoric times the ability to
distinguish between friend and foe was a matter of life and death. By
definition, categorizing things implies separation –“which of these things is
not like the other?” But what about categorizing people? We do this in order to
make sense (we think) of our world. We use binary boxes like male or female,
gay or straight, black or white, Democrat or Republican, documented or
undocumented. We think we know what they
mean. But boxes are often full of assumptions that can be misguided, ignorant, hurtful,
or even dangerous.
I myself
recall meeting a person going through transition from male to female gender
identity who had suffered judgment and rejection at another church and was literally
cast out. We sat in my office and at first I could feel my categorizing mind asking
unbidden silent questions “Are you male? Are you female? What are you?” I had to consciously focus on what she was
saying in order to hear her very real pain and suffering – to get past What are you to Who are you?
In our
reading from Acts 11 today, Peter has been recalled to Jerusalem where they ask
“Why Peter? Why did you go to the home of uncircumcised men – and eat with them?” You can practically feel
their squeamishness. The box labeled “Uncircumcised, Unclean” applied to
Gentiles. The Jewish followers of Jesus could not share table fellowship with
Gentiles because they ate foods that were forbidden in the law of Moses. Just to enter a Gentile home would make a Jew
ritually unclean.
So what
happened here is monumental. You can tell by the way Peter tells the story that
even he is still processing it. Listen to how the Holy Spirit used FOOD -the
very thing Peter is so religious about!- to get through to him : “I was
praying. I was hungry and saw a sheetful of “unclean” four footed animals,
reptiles, birds of prey, lowered down in front of me. A voice said “Arise,
Peter, kill and eat.” “Oh no Lord, nothing profane or unclean has ever touched
my lips.” And then the voice spoke again: “What God has made clean you must not
call profane. (stop calling common).”
Just
then, three men sent to me from Caesarea arrived. The Spirit told me to go with
them and not to make a distinction between them and us.”- So he goes and
what happens? “The Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us.”
Notice
what is happening here – the people Peter thought he could never associate with
have received the very same Holy Spirit – God decides what is clean and
unclean, God decides who is in and who is out, and God decides we are all in!
The
Spirit more than anything is the sign Peter gives his interrogators – “The
Spirit told me not to make a distinction between them and us...The Spirit fell
upon them just as it had upon us...If God gave them the same Spirit he gave us,
who was I to hinder God?”
Even
though we sometimes call this the conversion of Cornelius, it was just as much
a conversion of Peter in my mind. They needed each other and were brought
together by the Holy Spirit to be transformed, to be changed from “Other” to
“brother.”
One way
theologians define sin is anything that separates us from God, from each other,
from ourselves, and from creation. The boxes we put each other in do separate
us from one another. Like Peter and
Cornelius, like my mom and the other hotel guest; like me and the transgender
woman in my office. Boxes separate us from true communion.
But Jesus came to bring
us out of our boxes of fear and death and into the light of His life! He came
to restore dignity and right relationship. Remember his inaugural speech in
Luke 4:
“The
Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to
the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of
sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s
favor.”
Each of
us is in some way poor, captive, blind and oppressed by our own and others’
boxes. Jesus gave his life, his whole
life of teaching and preaching and healing – he gave his death on the cross,
and he gave his rising and ascending and the gift of the Spirit so that we
might be released from all that binds us and blinds us.
So
instead of asking “What are you?” out of fear, we can ask “Who are you?” out of
love. What are you is dehumanizing. Who
are you opens up the vista of a person’s infinite value and undefinable
essence before God. We are made in the image of God and even God called Herself
simply: I AM.
Because
of Jesus-in Galatians 3.28: There
is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer
male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.
In
Ephesians 2:14-15 For Jesus is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups
(Jews and Gentiles) into one and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility
between us.
In
Colossians 3: Your new self is being renewed in knowledge according to the
image of its creator – In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew,
circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all.
SO….
What is
the Holy Spirit up to here at COOS just now?
Where
are the growing edges of your love as followers of Jesus?
Who is
the person that puts you out of your comfort zone- like Peter and Cornelius?
What
might the Spirit be trying to teach you about them? About you?
Practice
noticing when your mind goes to “What are you?” and instead ask, “Who are you?”
I’d like
to leave you with the image of the resurrection icon from the Eastern Orthodox
tradition. In this we see Jesus at the center, clothed in white and shining glorylight
– arms stretching wide, as he reaches down to grasp the wrist of a man and a
woman, each emerging from stone boxes – tombs. Below his feet the gates of hell
are shattered and in the darkness are broken locks and keys and a skeletal
figure bound in chains -he has put Death to death once for all! The man and woman represent Adam and Eve, the
ancestors of all humanity, signifying the cosmic and eternal nature of his
redeeming work. What I love is that he is pulling them from the boxes that
separate them, and he is pulling them toward himself, and thus he is pulling them toward each other.
This is the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit
- to bring us out of our tombs of separation into his glorious light
where we can recognize each other as the brothers and sisters that we are.
In the
Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
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