Four weeks ago today, we all came to church, and the music was louder, the crowd was bigger, the colors were brighter. In one voice we sang "Alleluia." In many voices we said to each other, "Happy Easter." Four weeks ago, and here we are, still at it. From ancient times Christians agreed that we should give not one Sunday but seven weeks to celebrating Easter.
I'm glad we've got that long. The great surprise of resurrection warrants as long a party as we can throw. But more important, after the party has settled down a bit, after the great early fun of it and some have gone home and we've turned the music down, we need some time to talk. We could use this time to reflect on the implications of Easter, to trace how far the effects of this resurrection reality ripple outward, to get a better sense of where this thing is leading.
We'd better. Jesus is loose in the world and he is bound to be up to something. In his original ministry Jesus was a kind of earthquake. In him the divine upheaval was moving things, shaking us awake, shaking up all our old ways. Then God raised Jesus and even death was shaken open. So what else now gets shaken or thrown down or blown open by the earthquake Christ? Does resurrection power ever arrive at church in the form of a shaking and a threat and a blowing open? Of course it does. Jesus has been shaking up the church for a long time and is far from finished. Today we listen to one of the first great upheavals that the explosive Christ brought to his church.
As our text today begins, the curtain rises on a roomful of Christians fighting with each other. Imagine that! Isn't it nice of the New Testament to console us with the news that our people have always been boneheads?
People at this meeting are angry with Peter. They are angry because he has done a renegade baptism of people who are unqualified to be Christians. He has done things forbidden by the Bible. The Bible clearly says that to be one of God's people you must agree to obey certain rules. One of them is: if you're a man you have to be circumcised, and male or female, certain foods are forbidden. The Bible says it and Jesus said nothing to repeal those laws; he said he wasn't changing one stroke of the law. But Peter went to some people who did not meet the criteria and welcomed them all the way in. Now they were baptized, and worse, he had joined them in eating their forbidden food. That's the part of this scandal that galled so many in the church. The question they ask isn't, "Why did you baptize them?" It's "Why did you eat with them?" The church had chapter and verse saying, Don't. And Peter did, as if being pure meant nothing, as if the church's Bible meant nothing. I don't blame those people for being upset.
Neither did Peter. "Look," he says, "this wasn't my idea. You think I'd have thought this up? But listen," he says, "to the story." And he tells them the story.
He'd been minding his own business in a town called Joppa. Joppa. Anybody recall another Bible story with that town in it? Joppa is where Jonah went to escape God's call to go and preach to unclean people. Come to think of it, Jonah happens to be the name of Simon Peter's daddy. So here is a son of Jonah in Joppa once more.
He's up on the rooftop devoutly saying his prayers, and he falls into a dream. He sees a kind of tablecloth lowering down from the sky like an upside-down parachute filled with food for him. He thinks, "Mmmmm, food!" But then it opens up and he sees frogs, lizards, snakes, exotic birds, buzzards, and pigs." "Get up and eat," says a Voice. "It's nasty," says Peter. "Bible calls it nasty, mama called it nasty, I don't eat nasty." The Voice replies, "If God makes it clean, don't call it nasty." Up goes the cloth and down it comes again. Same conversation. "Eat." "It's nasty!" "Not if God calls it clean." Again it goes up, it comes down. This is dinner on a yo-yo. It's the Holy Spirit as mother with a spoonful of something that the kid in the high chair isn't about to try.
Then someone knocks on the door. "It for you," says the Spirit. "I sent them. Go where they take you and try not to screw it up with your scruples." Downstairs Peter finds three men. Gentiles. Nasty. Italians. Nice suits, jewelry, sunglasses, talk with their hands. "Our employer wants you to come with us." Peter thinks, "Definitely not kosher." But the Spirit has spoken.
Where they take him is to the national headquarters of the empire, Caesarea, into the house of a career military officer, one Cornelius. The house is crammed with the whole big family, including the cousins. He walks into a room full of Italians all looking at him. It smells of garlic. And Peter, with the church's typical sensitivity, begins by saying, "I shouldn't be here."
"Well, an angel has been here," says Cornelius. "And the angel said you should be here and talk with us. Talk with us, please." So Cornelius says what he knows, so Peter now starts to say what he knows. He begins to speak of Jesus. But he hardly gets started. He has only begun to speak when the Holy Spirit interrupts and takes over, falling on the Italians with the same power that fell on the first day of the church. It was Pentecost redux, but this time with people who didn't keep biblical law.
Most paintings of Peter depict him as bald. Legend has it that it was because this kind of thing kept happening to him and he just couldn't stop scratching his head. The history of the Holy Spirit is largely the story of the church being baffled by the blowing down of walls and the forging of unforeseen family and the radical revision of old scripts. Old Peter scratched his balding head and went to the church in Jerusalem saying, "Who was I to hinder God?"
On one level the story tells us that the church of Jesus Christ has no business being, in any sense, exclusive. The only condition for belonging here is to be a total mess, in biblical terms to be a sinner. This is the church: we are a collection of certified stinkers, amazed by how loved we are by God, devoted to living that love like Jesus, and sharing it with any other stinker who'll have it. So all those labels that the world is so busy manufacturing and enforcing poor and rich, white collar and blue collar, righteous and wrecked, young and old, liberal and conservative, gay and straight, educated and uneducated, black, white, brown, yellow, name it, none of it has any business separating us, for Christ is risen and the last word is in, the only word standing: grace, grace for all sinners, grace for sinners all. The story of what happened at Cornelius's house is the story of the church learning this means no exclusions.
At an even deeper level, the church was here learning that the living Christ revises old scripts. Even some scripts written in scripture, the risen Christ was and is quite big enough and free enough to revise. It sounds pretty scary, doesn't it? It sounds dangerous, and it is, because if we are not held to the letter of what is written, we could make mistakes, we could go too far, we could be too free and too inclusive and . That's what the early church was worried about, understandably; and some of us worry about it too. But here it is in our expanded Bible, a story that Christ can abrogate paragraphs of scripture, can teach us to read the Bible in radically new ways. And if Christ can revise that script, what other old scripts assumptions we've always held, behaviors we've always repeated is the risen Christ calling us to let go and replace with new assumptions and new behaviors?
We are like Peter, sitting on our rooftop saying our prayers and, if truth be told, half asleep. We don't intend to be unfaithful people. We've been mostly boxed in by a sad failure of imagination. Like him, we could stand to be shaken by strange new dreams. We could stand for the Holy Spirit to blow new winds into our sails and push us out of our passiveness.
I heard about a strange prayer that someone long ago was heard to pray one day in a Scottish church. "Lord, we pray that we never find ourselves in battle on foreign soil. But if we do, and if our maps do not match the terrain, help us to believe the terrain."
Or as Peter put it to the Jerusalem church, fresh back from terrain that didn't match his maps, "Who was I to hinder God."
At this point, says Luke, the meeting turned doxological. "They glorified God." So do we. For the perfectly unhindered God, for the Christ who outruns us and calls from new terrain, for the Spirit still blowing a strong new wind to set our hearts on fire, we give glory to God.
