Acts 10:17-20; Acts 10:34-47; Romans 10:5-15; Isaiah 60:1-11

You know, I love a good story of redemption. A story where the main character goes through a bit of a change. Perhaps in character, perhaps in outlook on life, many times in outlook on other people. One of the classic stories in which this happens is the story of Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. If you’re not familiar with the intricacies of the entire story, I would imagine living in our culture, where it gets repeated almost every Christmas. You’re familiar with the main points. How Ebenezer Scrooge goes from a begrudging miser to a generous giver. Indeed, Scrooge’s story has given birth to other stories, namely Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Like Ebenezer Scrooge and his humbug, the Grinch and his greed undergo something of a transformation. He goes from stealer of presents to giver of love and his heart grew three sizes.

Why is it we always root for the underdogs? Why is it that when we read a story like this, we don’t automatically come out and judge characters as harshly as we might in real life? I think part of it is that we know that something else is coming. Why would the author write a story in which there is no change, in which there is no growth? That would be rather boring, wouldn’t it? The character in a story is going to change. For the better or for the worse, rarely do characters stay the same if they are the target of our author’s viewpoint.

Then how is it we are so unwilling to give others the grace that we give to a fictional character? How is it we are so quick to judge and form an opinion about a person’s eternal destiny before we’ve even had a conversation with them? This brings us into the realm of talking about our prejudices. Something that, for me at least, makes me uncomfortable. You see, we all have prejudice. Prejudice simply means a prejudgment based on certain characteristics. And not all prejudices do us a disservice. When we look at a snarling animal and back away, we are exercising prejudice. We have prejudged this animal to be vicious. That is our biology functioning as it should.

However, we all know prejudice doesn’t end there. Prejudice goes into something we call stereotyping, where we create a caricature of another person in which we feel that we have known them simply because of one characteristic about them. And it is from this kind of thinking that many “isms” come about: racism, sexism, classism, et cetera. etc. Racism is prejudice in which we surmise a person’s character merely based upon the color of their skin, the angle of their eyes, their accent, their diet, or any other unimaginable thing that we used to create an “us vs. them” system in which we are superior because of our inherent qualities. I would argue that sexism has been part of our society since the agricultural revolution in 4000 BC. When humans specialized in their occupations, they placed judgment on some occupations as more valuable, whereas when we were hunter-gatherers and everyone engaged in the same activity, it was easier to value everyone regardless of their gender.

And then we have classism. Classism is the view that because we are of a certain economic class, those that do not share our likes, predilections, and lifestyle are inferior. Again, when we all had to struggle for our daily existence, such things did not exist. But as time goes on and people specialize, inevitably it occurs that some have more, and some have less. While the Bible teaches us clearly not to judge based on possessions, we often do.  We have phrases such as “He who dies with the most toys wins.” Ignoring the fact, of course, that we all die.

We would think that having an encounter with Jesus would change some of these attitudes. We would hope that by living into the principles of the kingdom of God, we would recognize the inherent dignity and worth of all human beings. That we would see that the image of God is broader than we can imagine. That the diversity of people and places in this world would enlighten us to see the God in other people. But our story for today gives us some caution in that regard.

Last week, we talked about the day of Pentecost. It was the day that the Holy Spirit baptized the church en masse. And the evidence was the gift of tongues, the ability to communicate with those that are not like us, were not like the apostles, to reach out to those from various places and invite them to follow Jesus. In short, the Holy Spirit gave birth to a new organization, what we call the church, which is a word that simply means those that have been called out. Jesus calls us out from the world to enter the kingdom of God, and then returns us to the world to proclaim the message of the kingdom and invite others to come in. That is fine. That is as it should be. But the birth of the church was not without issue, was not without difficulties and strife.

One of the main issues to be settled in the ancient church was the relationship between Jews who adapted to the Greco-Roman culture and those that held fast to the entirety of their cultural and religious heritage. Remember that for 400 years, the time between the Testaments, the Jews had not been free except for a very brief period. They had always had someone lording it over them, if you will. The overlording heritage started with the Assyrians, followed by the Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, and with the Persians mixed in as well. So many empires fought for this one narrow strip of land in the hearts of the people that lived in it.

The Greek general Alexander the Great won remarkable victories in his early twenties and conquered most of the known world, from Europe to Asia and everywhere in between. And one thing that made Alexander successful is that he realized that unless there is some commonality among the people who he conquered, there would be no unity in his empire. And so, one thing that Alexander did is to spread and enforce the adoption of Greek culture. This is a process called Hellenization. The Jewish folks did not escape the net of Alexander’s cultural imperialism. But the Jewish leadership held conflicting views on the extent to which they could integrate into the Greco-Roman culture without sacrificing their religious identity. Some felt that any compromise gave up your rights. Those people withdrew from society. But there were others that thought, yes, you could be a member of this society and remain faithful to God.

Earlier in Acts, the apostles had to deal with this divide within the church as well. Those that remained purists of the Hebrew ideology and those that accommodated to the Greek culture were in conflict. The historic church had to make some concessions to preserve unity. And so, the idea of the deacon came to be to help the apostles deal with this cultural issue. Deacons performed acts of service, but they did so across cultural lines. This was a way to unite the people through mission service. One might think, as chief among the apostles, that Peter would have gotten the message. That Peter would have seen that there is room in the kingdom for a variety of viewpoints. That the central thing that unites Christians is not culture, is not even religion, but the centrality of Jesus Christ.

As we come to our story for today, however, we see that simply is not the case. We see that Peter’s cultural prejudices are still active, that his religious scruples are still fully online, that the encounter with the risen Lord and the commission to be chief among the apostles has not yet shown Peter the full implications of the gospel. Peter still has a prejudice, and that prejudice is that there is a firm dividing line between the categories of Jew and Gentile. In Peter’s thinking, there were Jews, and then there was everyone else. The Jews, after all, were God’s chosen people, weren’t they? And if so, they could claim a closeness with God that the rest of the world could not.

If we only had the Old Testament, that argument might stand. God has a special role for Israel, and indeed enters a special relationship with Israel, where she becomes the treasured possession among the nations. But as we study the ministry of Jesus Christ, we see something different. We see Jesus constantly pushing the boundaries of who is acceptable in society, of including those that others, including the deeply religious, would exclude. These people go by a multitude of labels, tax collectors, prostitutes, sinners, drunkards, idolaters, people who practice debauchery, sexual immorality, and a myriad of other things that were forbidden by Jewish law. In short, the Jews were folks who did not do those things, and the Gentiles were people that often did.

This distinction is important to keep in mind as we turn to the story of Cornelius. You see, Cornelius is an anomaly, isn’t he? Our story calls him a God-fearer. Now, among scholars, this is a technical term, and it was in Peter’s Day as well. To make this clear, the God-fearer was neither a Jew, fully, or fully a pagan, a Gentile.Y ou see, a God-fearer acknowledged that the God revealed in the pages of the Bible, in the story of Israel, was indeed the true God, and that he was alone. There are no other gods, not in reality. They worshipped and loved and accepted that fact, but they had not yet fully become Jewish. They had not undergone the rites of circumcision. They did not keep all the stipulations of the law in terms of dress or clothing. And so, one could say that they are not fully Jewish, certainly. The Jews would not welcome them in certain parts of their worship, but they were not pagans either, because they did not worship the gods of Rome, or Egypt, or Greece. They were in what scholars call a liminal space, a space that lies between two fixed boundaries. They were, indeed, a shade of gray unto themselves.

And because they stood in the middle, in a cultural and religious no-man’s-land, they received flak from both sides. From the Jews, they were cowardly, because they had not undergone the full rites to convert, to be accepted, as people who wished to follow the God of Israel. And yet, to their former pagan neighbors, they were odd, strange, people who had rejected the cultural tradition of their childhood, who had rejected them, in a way, because they followed a god not of their nation, not of their culture, not of their people.

Peter was of this opinion himself. And that forms the basis of this strange vision that Peter has in Acts, chapter 10. Peter sees a sheet coming down filled with animals that, under Jewish law, are unclean, and he is told to kill and eat. And this happens several times because Peter is a little thick-headed. Jesus himself, in Mark 10 and other places, has said that all food is clean, because it is not what goes into a person that defiles them, but what comes out. Yet Peter has yet to internalize that message, to internalize that fact, and it is here that Peter undergoes something of a conversion.

Conversion, like salvation, is not just a one-time event, but an ongoing process, as God cleanses and purifies more and more of our heart and soul. Even for Peter, God had to work in and through him to cleanse his prejudices. Peter would not enter the house of a Gentile or eat with them. The apostle Paul writes about this tendency in one of his letters, and how he had to confront Peter on this point. Peter’s imagination had to be expanded to see that God is no respecter of persons, that God looks beyond what we humans categorize, to see the humanity as the central dictum, the central category, when sorting out the humans of the world.

But Peter had bought into the lie of superiority that God plays favorites. Some among the Jewish people thought that in the end, everyone would become Jewish and follow the laws of Moses. That their ethnicity, their culture, their language, their scriptures would become the basis of a newly restored society. And that Israel would rule the nations. The only problem is, God said none of that. God did indeed make Israel his treasured possession. A holy nation. But there was also something else in that commission. Israel was to be a kingdom of priests. And it is from this portion of the commission of Israel that we must take our lead when interpreting this passage. You see, a priest is not a king. A priest is not a ruler. A priest is a go-between. A mediator. A person who acts as a connector between the divine realm and the human realm. A priest intercedes on behalf of the people and works for the benefit of the people. And then likewise works for the benefit of the deity by communicating God’s wishes to the people.

In short, Israel was to be the middleman between God and the rest of humanity. You know, those Gentile people. But instead of becoming a middleman, Israel had become a bouncer, turning people away from the kingdom because they were different. God doesn’t need bouncers. God needs heralds, people who will proclaim the message that he wishes to communicate. And that is where Israel failed in her mission. Israel was to be a light to the nations, to show what it is to live in a covenant with God and inviting other people into that kingdom. The Jewish faith was to be a missionary faith. But they failed to grasp the mission. Among the Jewish leadership, it became fashionable to be a gatekeeper instead, to keep those out that were less desirable, to rule on who is in and who is out. Even Peter seemed to follow in those footsteps when he hesitated. As the vision began Peter slowly began to see.

My friends, God has a way of communicating with us when we become stubborn. Sometimes God speaks in a whisper, like he did to Elijah in that still small voice. But sometimes God uses a megaphone. And our incident for today, the conversion of Cornelius and his household, is one of those megaphone moments. God leaves no doubt that the boundaries that humans have created between us and them, rich and poor, black and white, and all those other things that we could name, have no bearing on our ability to enter the kingdom of God.

And let us talk about the world into which Peter entered when he entered Cornelius’ house. Cornelius, most likely a retired soldier from Italy, represented several things at once in the mind of Peter. First, as a Gentile, he represented the paganism that was so widely spread. Even though Cornelius recognized the importance of the God of the universe, his history was intertwined with the worship of numerous gods that constituted Rome, including the adoration of Rome itself and its emperors. And then, in another dimension, Cornelius represented the very forces that were holding the Jewish nation hostage. Like I said, the Jewish people had not been free and had not governed themselves, except for a brief stint under the Maccabees. Now Rome pressed its boots against the necks of the Jewish people. And Cornelius represented that military-industrial complex, that web of oppression that stretched from Rome to Judea, taxed the people to poverty, enslaved the people economically, crushed the people spiritually, and destroyed any resistance relentlessly.

For Peter then, Cornelius represented everything that he might resent. Everything against which his people had fought for generations. Cornelius represented not the answer to Peter’s prayers, but the opposite of that. How could Peter welcome into his own circle of friends and acquaintances, someone who had possibly used his people so harshly? In answer to these questions, the Holy Spirit does what the Holy Spirit does best and shakes things up.

Peter feels compelled to preach, inspired as he is by that same Spirit. The spirit has arranged a meeting here, between Jew and Gentile, between chosen and not, between in-group and out-group, between oppressed and oppressor, and the result is nothing short of extraordinary.

The Holy Spirit comes down upon Cornelius and his household in the same way as the Holy Spirit came down at Pentecost. Many scholars indeed label this passage as the Gentile Pentecost, as the Holy Spirit extends beyond individuals of Jewish descent to include everyone else, reaching even the farthest corners of the earth, and bringing about an everlasting transformation in the kingdom.

Remember that from the start, God’s desire for humanity was to have one great big extended family that covered the earth. God’s will is for people to live in harmony as they work to spread the glory of God across the land as the water covers the sea. But with that first rebellion, the questioning of God’s will, the questioning of God’s provision, came division, came strife, came prejudice, came fear, came doubt, came suspicion. All the things that help us set ourselves up over and against our fellow human beings. These are the things that we must fight against. And therefore, Paul says we do not struggle against flesh and blood, but against the principalities and powers that keep us in bondage.

Peter knew all too well that there would come a day when God would come to judge the earth, and he had learned that Jesus Christ was to be the judge. But what he could not expect is that God might leave the Jewish people on the sidelines. He would have considered it foolish that God’s chosen people would not receive the opportunity to enter eternal life at the end. And yet Jesus tells us clearly that we must set aside those things that divide us to be received into the kingdom. That those that love mercy, seek justice, and walk humbly with God will indeed find him. But those who maintain their pride and arrogance, their superiority complexes, whatever they may be, will face a reckoning that will clearly reveal to them whose side they were actually fighting on.

Let me say this clearly here today. You and I are not the arbiters of who is allowed to enter the kingdom. As much as my prejudices and predilections and preferences would like everyone in the kingdom to be like me, I don’t have the right to make that call. And neither does the church. Neither do you as an individual. God does not need bouncers. God needs heralds.

One way that we restrict access to the kingdom of God is by not sharing the good news. If the gospel really is good news for everyone, then it is not just our right and privilege, but our solemn responsibility to share that message with all we meet, not just with those we think would fit in a church. But we do that. Martin Luther King Jr. quipped over fifty years ago today that 11 o’clock AM on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in the country. And he’s still right. While civil rights have made great strides in this country, our churches often lag. A case in point is Bob Jones University, where until the recent decades, it was against school rules to date someone not of your race. What an egregious affront against the image of God. To use such criteria to control your students.

The most amazing thing about this passage that we’ve studied today is not the conversion of Cornelius, although that certainly is important. That Gentiles can enter the kingdom as Gentiles and don’t need to become Jewish first becomes the basis for the Apostle Paul’s ministry, in which he extends Christianity throughout the Roman Empire and the known world. It becomes the basis for the church of today, where 90 plus percent of the church comprises people who have never been Jewish, who have never had to observe kosher laws or dietary strictures. The church of the future became a unified community of Jew and Gentile together, all because God opened the eyes of the apostles to see the possibilities that the future would hold.

We love a story of redemption. And perhaps the most underrated story of redemption in the Bible is that of Peter himself. Peter goes not through one conversion, but through many conversions. A conversion of the heart, a conversion of the mind, and a conversion of the imagination, as Peter witnesses firsthand that God will go where God goes. That in the end, the kings of the Gentiles will bring their treasures into the storehouses of heaven as God makes one new family of believing Jew and Gentile alike. My friends, that is the mission to which we are called. We can never exclude what God has already included. When we do so, we go against God’s purposes, and God will very likely frustrate our efforts. But if we keep in step with the spirit, the spirit of Pentecost, the spirit that touched Cornelius and his household, then, and only then, will we experience the blessings, the richness of the community that God is calling forth every day as women, men, children, black, white, Asian, Middle Eastern, every shade, every flavor, every religious persuasion turn towards God and come homeward to the kingdom. Come quickly, Lord Jesus, but bring in the fullness of those who will know your salvation. Amen.