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Whose Table? What Party List?

Acts 11:1-18
May 6, 2007

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.”

The year is 1883 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and a regional gathering of many different Jewish
groups were coming together for celebratory dinner. There had been growing tension
between those who wanted to do away with the ritual and dietary laws that had formed
much of Jewish life for centuries, and those who wanted to simply modernize Judaism,
though not necessarily do away with those important parts of what it meant to be a
faithful Jew. Reform Judaism, the most liberal wing of the religion had been the most
dominant form of the faith in our country for decades, though there was also a small,
more orthodox community of Jews as well. At the dinner that night, in Cincinnati,
something happened that added a third branch of Judaism to this country—and it all
had to do with what was served for dinner that evening: shellfish, shrimp, and other non-
kosher, or forbidden foods as proscribed by the texts in our own Bibles, what you find in
Leviticus and other texts in the first five books of our Old Testament, or what Jewish
people call the Tanak. What was served for dinner that night caused such an outrage,
such anger and disbelief, because of the perceived insensitivity of some Jews to other
Jews, that dozens and dozens of Jewish leaders left the room in Cincinnati and began
the formation of a denomination that would eventually be the largest branch of Judaism
by the 20th century, the Conservative branch.

I share this historical tidbit because I took a class in American Jewish history while in
college, and, well, I thought I would never really get to actually use the information I
learned there, so this is a real thrill for me! But, honestly, I wanted to point out how
important these kosher laws were and are to many faithful Jews, even now in our
modern era. In the ancient Jewish world, in the world that Jesus and Peter lived in, the
laws about what was and was not allowable to eat were incredibly important, not only
because they were believed to be handed to the Jewish people directly back from God,
but also because they were one of the most important distinctive and unusual practices
that Jews were noted for in the Gentile world, the non-Jewish world that surrounded
them.   It set the Jews apart from around them, but it also had some obvious practical
social benefits—eating shellfish in a desert environment with no refrigeration—not a
good idea, Or eating disease ridden pigs—also, not a hot idea.

But beyond practical element, these practices set God’s people apart, as distinctive, as
different, and unlike any other religion in the Roman Empire, people of the Jewish faith
were given the right to ignore the rest of the rules around religion that the Romans had
set down in order to keep the famous Pax Romana, the Roman peace. These kosher
laws, these laws about cleanliness, about uncleanness, were as central as anything
else in the Jewish tradition. We Christians tend to dismiss how radical Jesus’ departure
was in sometimes, sometimes not following the strict kosher laws of his own tradition, or
many of the other traditions of Jesus’ own faith, like Sabbath-keeping, for example.

And so that is the backdrop of this text, and how Peter, hot-headed, passionate, single-
minded Peter, has his mind changed by a revelation, by God literally putting the very
things before him that he had been told all of his life never to eat, nor to even touch.
So stubborn is our friend Peter that he must be told eat and kill three times, matching
both his denials of Christ in the courtyard during the trial of Jesus and the three times
Jesus told Peter to feed his sheep, as they both sat on the Sea of Tiberias shoreline,
after Jesus’ resurrection.

This command to let go of all the laws that separated the Jews from everyone else, the
Gentiles, is so radical, and Peter so resists it, that the writer of Acts actually has the
story being told twice, because the passage we just read is condensing of a longer
story in Acts 10. It is almost as if at that very moment the church shifted its focus from
its Jewish roots to the larger Gentile world, to opening up its doors to those whom had
been historically excluded from the great gift of Yahweh. Amazingly, you also see a
shift, from a focus on Peter, the Jew who struggled with whether or not to include the
Gentiles, as seen in this story, to Paul, the Jew whose mission was spreading the Good
News of God’s love to all people, Jew and Greek, men and woman, slave and free. And
what we have in our New Testament is Paul’s witness to that inclusion, and his own
struggle with those in many of the churches he nurtured and planted who wanted to
keep the good news for themselves, the people who shared with Jesus a Jewish
heritage.

But who can blame them, really, those who wanted to keep the list of insiders to a bare
minimum? Who hasn’t wanted to simplify the world by culling the guest list of people we
invite into our lives, by limiting the conversations so that we wouldn’t have to deal with
the differences we have with others? I am one who sins most boldly, as Martin Luther
would say, when it comes to this particular sin. We protect ourselves by surrounding
ourselves with like minded souls: like minded in belief, in color, in politics, in ways we
make love in this world. We name as “profane” those whom we disagree with; we
designate “unclean” those we think will dirty us with their difference; we label as
“sinners” our fellow travelers on the road of life, those whose supposed sins are not our
own. We all want to draw in the circle, making it smaller, so that we will be comfortable
at the table with those that look like us, vote like us, love like us. The table is
manageable now, because it is small, and the guests are familiar and we will not have
to stretch myself too much or inquire too deeply with someone whose experience of the
world is not my own, someone who lives, believes, or loves differently than I do. We are
all guilty of trying to make the guest list manageable, aren’t we? I know I am. The rest
of that famous quote by Luther is “Sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even
more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world.” I am counting on the
boldness of my instinct to exclude being matched and overwhelmed by God’s desire to
include me, and the rest of us, in the divine embrace.

And so I think the events of the past week, with the furor around the entry of a float
from the gay and lesbian community, from an organization of which I am a Board
Member. I would have thought I would be used to it by now, but I never am, and
reading the letters like the ones in the Herald-Palladium is always heart-rendering,
mostly because I think sometimes they’re sometimes just plain mean, really, writing that
they won’t show up to the party, to the parade, if the float, if certain people, are
included in the party. They are quite sure that the guest list to the party that God is
throwing in this world doesn’t include gay and lesbian people, and only they and people
like them are on the guest list.

But it is the same sin I am guilty of sometimes—making sure that the parties I go to only
include those I agree with, and not showing up to the festivities if someone else has the
wrong politics, the wrong religion, the wrong color. The table must only have a certain
kind of guests, the kind of people we think Jesus would invite to the table…though
oddly enough, he was constantly getting complaints from the right kind of people
regarding the wrong kind of people who sat at his own table. We’ve got to remember
that, I think, when our instinct is to do what Peter wanted to do, to keep the gift for
himself, and people like him. In that moment, in that vision we just heard about, the
invitation list made by God included all the people Peter was unwilling to invite—the
guest list includes all of us, in all of our beautiful and troubling differences. And for us
in the Christian tradition, it the baptism we just witnessed with Katelyn and Nathan that
connects us, not our politics, not our race, not our sexual orientation, not even our
theology.   What connects us to each other is what connects us to the Christ, which is
our baptism, a baptism that even Jesus experienced at the hands of John the Baptist.

Will we ever get this right? I hope so, and I know we’re at least trying around, here at
this church. I am always fearful that the larger world has a better track record than we
Christians do when it comes to matters of inclusion and welcome. People seem to
leave the church in order to be welcomed, to be accepted, to not be judged, and so
they too seek out guest lists of like-minded people—I know I did that for many years in
my own life. But all of us are poorer for having the table be so small, and the guest list
so sparse, for looking across the table and only really seeing ourselves in the face of
our friends.

Fred Craddock, the great preaching professor who once taught at the seminary I
attended, shares a story that is pretty telling, I think, especially in a day and age when
overall church attendance is dwindling in this country, despite the growth of more
conservative and exclusionary brands of Christianity. Craddock tells of a church he
knew in his hometown that was known as a status church, First So and So Church,
Downtown, Somewhere, USA. It was the place you went to worship if you were
somebody in that town—you had the right kind of money, the right kind of family
connections, the kind of right color, the right kind of clothes. In Craddock’s childhood,
all the right kind of people went there, and each these right kinds of things—money,
color, clothes, family—were the unstated membership requirements of that church.
Well, it doesn’t take much imagination to know that this church didn’t welcome a lot of
new members over the years, and the present membership simply grew older, until
finally, First Church Downtown finally closed up shop. Craddock had an opportunity to
return to his hometown, only to discover that the church building was still standing,
though now it was a fish restaurant.   He walked back into the church, the big gothic
doors swinging open, and sure enough, where once there had been pews, now there
were tables, and waiters and diners, enjoying dinner. He looked towards the chancel,
and where the communion table once stood, there was now a salad bar. He walked out
of the front door, and down the steps, and, muttering to himself, “Now, I guess
everybody is welcome at the table.”   Maybe, maybe, if we get this right, if we do what
that church couldn’t do in Craddock’s hometown couldn’t, we will say with Peter, when
he gave witness to this new inclusion he had experienced in that dream, we will say with
him, “who was I, who was I, that I could hinder God?” Amen.