Experience As Revelatory

"Experience As Revelatory"

Acts 11:1-18
May 2, 2010

Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also
accepted the word of God. So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised
believers criticized him, saying, “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with
them?” Then Peter began to explain it to them, step by step, saying, “I 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.
As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of
the air. I also heard a voice saying to me, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’ But I replied, ‘By
no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’ But a
second time the voice answered from heaven, ‘What God has made clean, you must
not call profane.’ This happened three times; then everything was pulled up again to
heaven. At that very moment three men, sent to me from Caesarea, arrived at the
house where we were. The 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. He told us how he had seen the angel standing in his house and saying,
‘Send to Joppa and bring Simon, who is called Peter; he will give you a message by
which you and your entire household will be saved.’ And as I began to speak, the Holy
Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning. And I remembered the
word of the Lord, how he had said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized
with the Holy Spirit.’ 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?” When 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.”

Today, we arrive on the fifth Sunday of Easter with the gift of this text, this wonderful
text from the book of Acts, the book itself simply a continuation of the Gospel of Luke,
written by the same author, telling us the story of the church after telling us the story of
Jesus. At the beginning of the Gospel of Luke, the writer of the book informs us the
readers that he has decided to put together an orderly account of the story of Jesus
and the early church, hinting perhaps that there were many free floating, and disorderly
stories being told about Jesus in those early years after Christ’s resurrection. That is
something to attend to, this desire to tell stories, that forms the heart of so much of the
human experience. For those of us in the West, stories are the lifeblood of our culture,
forming even the way we think of time, which is that there is the beginning of a story,
the middle, and the end of it, the end of the story. We forget that even our concept of
time is formed by the place and space we are born into, since some cultures have
much different understanding of time, where instead time being understood
symbolically as a line with events etched on it, they understand time as a circle, cyclical,
things coming back again eternally.

You see, stories with a beginning, middle, and end are the stuff of our tradition, of the
Biblical tradition, and yet today we are gifted with a story that is told not once, but twice,
almost word for word, a retelling in the chapter before us of an event that had
happened just verses earlier, in chapter 10. And for the writer of Luke and Acts, if he
bothers to tell you the story twice—and sometimes in other places, he repeats the
same stories three times—if the writer repeats the story twice, that is his signal to us,
his readers, to pay close attention to the story, that what has just happened is
important, is huge, is something worthy of paying attention to in detail.

And I think this is especially true for this text, in which you have a pivotal moment,
where the past and future are about to be determined in the present moment, when
Peter begins to tell the story of his experience, his vision from God, concerning the
Gentiles, the non-Jews, who are becoming attracted to this message, this Gospel that
the Jewish apostles speak of. You see, at the beginning of the church, it was all
Jewish, because, well, Jesus was Jewish, his disciples were Jewish, and thus the
disciples first sought to convince their own people of the truth of their experience with
this Christ. And yet, this story of God’s love as embodied in this Jesus of Nazareth, this
Good News, it was never really going to be contained, because, let’s face it—Good
News always gets out, one way or another, and in this case, the Spirit of God, kicks
open the door in order to make sure it does. Peter has a vision in which many of things
designated as unclean, things that Jews were forbidden to eat by the very laws most
believed God had given them in Leviticus, things that were viscerally seen as repulsive
to Jewish tastes at that time, these animals were put before and Peter was told to eat,
to plunge right in, and instinctively, from years of cultural and religious training, he
refuses, repulsed by the very thought of it. He claims purity, of course, something
valued in his culture—he has never eaten the kinds of animals set before him in that
vision, he has been a good Jew, a faithful Jew. And yet, a voice from heaven confronts
him, telling him that what God has made clean, has made attractive, maybe even tasty,
is not profane, is not dirty, spiritually or otherwise.

It’s an incredible moment, a moment where past and the future are about to meet, and
Peter’s acceptance or rejection of this vision, his acceptance or rejection of all that he
had ever known, everything he had been told God wanted from him, was now on the
line, and in the balance, in the balance, was all of us, us Gentiles, those of us who were
not Jewish. Would we have access to the story that God was writing in the life of Jesus
of Nazareth? Who would be included—certainly, the Jewish outsiders would be
included, the Jewish prostitutes, Jewish tax collectors, the Jewish irreligious, but would
we, the Gentiles, the others on the outside of the Jewish religion, Jesus’ own religion,
would we be included in this great story God was weaving into the tapestry of the
universe? Up until that moment, if Gentiles, non-Jews, wanted to become Christians,
they first had become Jews, and then they could become Christians, and for men, that
could be a painful prospect, if you consider the whole circumcision requirement.

The answer to the question of whether or not we Gentiles would be included is, of
course, yes, and in this moment, this moment, when Peter trusts his vision, trusts his
story, trusts it enough to tell it as the reason why he has eaten with people whom days
earlier he would have never deigned to eat with, in this moment, he trusts his
experience of that vision, and he begins to tell the story of what has happened to him,
his truth, that flies in the face of all that he has ever known. The truth found in the
midst of that moment thousands of years ago is that ALL moments of great change,
and inclusion and welcome, come out of a moment when a story, an experience
changes everything.

Think about this for a second—God does not disclose God’s plan of welcoming all by
pointing out the relevant texts that might hint at this radical departure in tradition but
instead God gives Peter an experience, a story from which to speak this new word of
hope and welcome to all. The reality is that God could have given Peter all the right
arguments, all the right rhetoric to make his case, in order to try to convince him and
his fellow Christians into the truth that God welcomes all, but it would have likely been
to no avail, because, let’s face it: people don’t change their minds because other
people have better, more logical arguments about things—they change their minds
because of their experience. Every time the church has had to go against its own texts,
its own Scriptures, when it had to go in a different direction than the clear word of the
text, it had to rely on some experience, some revelation from God that came out of the
text of someone’s real life experience—that is the way it was with human slavery, even
though the Biblical text is sadly clear that it was not seen as evil in the eyes of the
people who wrote the Bible; it was that way when many in the church came to the
conclusion that it was and is God’s will to welcome the obvious gifts of women into the
ordained ministry—re-welcome those gifts, I suspect, since there are hints that in the
very early church, women were often seen as co-partners in ministry. Again, that move
towards welcoming women into leadership in many of our churches came to be, despite
the words of Scripture, because it was obvious to so many that God had called this
woman or that woman into the ranks of ordained clergy.

But, of course, that is the way it is in our own lives—it is experience that changes us,
moves, transforms us, moves us from point a to b, a truth I’ll never forget witnessing as
a young child in Indonesia. My parents are from the deep, deep South, Mississippi,
actually—we Mississippians consider Tennessee to be part of the border states, and
possibly Yankee sympathizers—and my mom and dad grew up right before the height
of the civil rights era, and thus they were the child of all of the prejudices and bigotry
that their parents had, though, of course, perhaps not as bad. When we were living
overseas, in Indonesia, an interracial couple moved into Rumbai, the oil camp where we
lived, in the mid-to late seventies—he was African-American, and an engineer, and she
was white, and, at that time, a housewife. What was so amazing was that this African-
American man was from Meridian, MS, my parents home town. The odds of that…well,
they are amazing, really, but even as young child I wondered how my parents would
react to that situation, an interracial marriage they had grown up believing was wrong,
fundamentally wrong, obviously wrong in their eyes, eyes that had been trained to see
these things in a certain way in that era. Remember, again, this was the seventies, not
that far away from the most tumultuous times in the civil rights era—and yet, here were
my parents having to confront all those issues thousands of miles away from home, with
a black person from their hometown! Friends, God has a wonderful, wonderful sense
of humor…

But, you know, I’m pleased to tell you that they absolutely came to love this couple, and
became good friends with them. That was a huge thing, and I think it happened
because my parents put away all the old stories about the way the world should be or
ought to be, that they had learned at their mother’s knee, stories that were believed to
be true at the time they were told, of course, and were willing to be taught something all
together in this new experience, this experience of knowing a mix-race couple of the
same time. Listen, I don’t want to lead you on by implying my parents found themselves
marching for racial justice the following week, but it took a lot for them to move beyond
an old story they had always believed to a new one that life, life in the real world, was
teaching them in that moment.

Again, I tell you another story, another one out of my own experience: one of my great
spiritual mentors was Ronnie Adams, a Southern Baptist youth minister, who when I
came out to him as gay, told me, as lovingly and gently as he could, that I had two
options—celibacy, or some sort of miraculous change. Well, both options were off the
table for me, so our relationship became strained, and we lost touch with each others.
Years later, I found him again, sent him a letter simply telling him how much I
appreciated his ministry to me, and that I was now in the ministry, etc, and three days
after I sent that letter I got a call from him, stunning me, and he told me had been
looking for me for years so that he could apologize to me about our earlier difficult
conversation—on this side of heaven or the other, he said. What had happened to
make him change his mind about me, about this issue? He told me the story of
involvement in an AIDS ministry in West Texas during the mid-nineties, and how he
been a pastor to two men, partners, who were both dying of the virus, and he told me of
the obvious love and devotion they had for each other, especially during this time, and
he came to realize that if he ever found love like that with a woman, he knew he would
have found real love. People change their minds because of what they have
experienced in this life—and our best efforts to argue people into some truth, some
understanding, it will never work, because the heart the must be changed before the
mind will ever catch up.

So it is with Peter, wonderful Peter, whose mind is changed in that moment, or, actually,
a series of moments, because it took Peter three times of seeing the same vision to get
the point of what God was trying to tell him with that sheet full of supposedly unclean
creatures. Sometimes it takes us humans one time to get the point, sometimes three
times, and sometimes it takes a lifetime, but when God is trying to tell us something,
trying to give us an experience that will change our hearts, we ought to pay attention.
But fundamentally, this points to the truth that we must, MUST pay attention to our lives,
to our experiences, to our stories, the ones being lived through right now and the ones
from our past, and we have to learn to tease out what new thing God might be saying to
us in those moments of revelations, those ordinary visions that my parents had with
that couple in Indonesia, with Ronnie’s ordinary experience with those two good men.

The reality is this, I think, this truth that is true for the church and for us, us human
beings living our lives as best we can: we bridge the past and the future by paying
attention to the present, by seeing what kinds of stories God is telling us now, in our
lives, and in the lives of others we are gifted with the opportunity to bear witness. So
often we live backwards or forwards, instead, of just listening and watching in the
present moment. It’s as if we are in a car racing, with our eyes forward, with a few
glances in the rear view mirror looking towards the past, and yet, maybe God is asking
us to drive a bit dangerously, and instead of always looking forward, straining to see
what is ahead of us, and instead maybe we should look to the left of us, to the right of
us, maybe even strain to see what is in our blind spots, so to speak—we should look
out the doors to see what we are passing, to pay attention to the moment, rather than
just the future and past. This moment is that place where God is trying to tell us
something, you and me, and not our ancestors, and not our children, this is the
moment when God is trying to tell us a new thing, some new word that was never
supposed to be spoken, we were told. But we’ll miss, we’ll miss it, if we’re not willing to
drive a bit dangerously, which means taking our eyes off the road, off the future, off the
past, and looking to see the stories God is telling us on the side of the road, on the
path of our lived lives. It’s a dangerous thing, this paying attention, to this Sabbath
keeping in a way—and of course, Sabbath is God’s invitation to us to pay attention to
our lives, to our stories. But I think it’s worth it, it seems to be worth of it, if we believe
this story from the book of Acts, and frankly, I do, because it mirrors my own story of
faith and life. God has so much new to say to us, this still speaking God, and I don’t
want to miss a word of it, not a word, of this beautiful and wondrous and difficult story
that is God is telling me, and not only me, of course, but you, telling you as well,
always. Amen.