Peter and Cornelius: God’s Answer to Our ‘Othering’ (Acts 10:1-17, 34-35; 3rd Sunday of Easter; April 19, 2015)

Peter and Cornelius: God’s Answer to Our ‘Othering’

Acts 10:1-17, 34-35
3rd Sunday of Easter
April 19, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Who are we? It’s a simple question that has no simple answer. Who are we? We’re Americans. Fine, but what does that mean, exactly? We’re Methodists. And who are Methodists? We’re Decoran. And what is a Decoran?

Who are we in an easy question with no easy answer. Maybe that’s why we are so quick to resort to “othering” when pressed for our identity. Who are we as Methodists? Well, we’re neither Catholic nor Lutheran. We’re not them; they are the Others.

Who are we as Americans? When I was growing up, the answer was, we’re not Communists, like the Soviet Union or China. They were our Others. With the collapse of the Soviet-style Communism we were left for a while with no Other, that is, until September 11, 2001, when Al Quaeda came to our rescue by providing us with a new Other. Now we’re not freedom-hating fanatical jihadists. That’s our new Other.

An Other is a mythic character, remembering my definition of a myth: a story we tell ourselves about ourselves to explain ourselves to ourselves. The Myth of the Other is the simplest myth, but it never seems to go out of style. We are not them. We love our freedom, but they don’t. We are civilized, but they are barbaric. We are kind and generous; they are mean and brutal. We value women and men as equals; they subordinate women to male oppression. We value science and reason; they are stuck in the dark ages of fear and superstition. It’s a simple myth to give a simple answer to the simple questions, Who are we?

The beauty of the Myth of the Other is that none of it needs to be objectively true for the myth to work. In fact, the less true the myth is, the more tightly we will cling to it as our way of defining who we are.

The appeal of the Myth of the Other grows when who we are is in question. I’ll risk a prediction: as we get closer to 2040 when English-speaking white people will not longer be in the majority in the United States, the Myth of the Other will kick into overdrive. In our history the Myth of the Other has always expressed as some form of racism. Therefore I predict that, the closer we get to 2040, the uglier and more common overt racism will become. As part of our country drifts into conscious racism, we would-be followers of Jesus will have to choose between going along to get along or publicly reminding folks that Jesus did not die and rise from the dead so that white folks could be in charge.

I see this coming because I know that the Myth of the Othyer gains its power from the fear people have when their group identity is threatened.

Now, if we can say anything about the Jewish people of Roman times, we can say that their group identity was threatened. In Judea, and in Galilee, too, Jewish identity was under pressure. Under Roman occupation Jews had little political or economic power and no military power at all. Greco-Roman culture was sophisticated and alluring and many Jews were simple melting into the populace at large. Any active resistance to Roman culture and rule risked bringing down the might of the legions.

Jews struggled with each other at to the best strategy to adopt. With divisions inside and threats outside, you can believe they were “othering” like crazy. Their Others were the non-Jews, the Gentiles, the “nations” or “goyim as it is in Hebrew. Mufh of their othering took the form of rule about contact with non-Jews. Jews did not have Gentiles as house guests, for example, and they didn’t enter their homes. Gentiles were ritually unclean. Jews were contaminated by contact with non-Jews and had to go through a ritual of purification. The rite was not really a burden, but it served to underscore that the division between Jews and everyone else was the same as the division between clean and unclean. Imagine that someone felt compelled to wash their hands after shaking your hand, not because it was flu season, but because of who you were. Or imagine that you felt the need for a post-handshake hand-washing because someone was black or gay or a Muslim.

If we let that sink in for a bit, we’re ready to consider the story of Peter and Cornelius. Cornelius was Peter’s Other. He was a Gentile, a Roman, a retired soldier. He had been responsible for oppressing Jews. He was everything that Peter hated about the unclean, non-Jewish world wrapped in ribbon and tied with a bow. Of course, the story says that Cornelius and his household were “God-fearers,” Gentiles who worshiped the Jewish God. I’m not sure that worked entirely in his favor, though. I’d be surprised if in some dark corner of Peter’s mind there were not a voice that said something like, “He and his kind took our land, our freedom, and our dignity. Why do they have to take our religion, too?”

The action begins with an answer to prayer, but, against our expectations it is Cornelius, the Gentile, whose prayer is answered. An angel appears with instructions to send for Peter. He is staying in Joppa with a man named Simon who is a tanner. A tanner is someone who turns animal skins into leather. Now, while leather is not unclean, animal skins are. The theme of ritual uncleanness is already firmly established in the story and it has hardly begun.

Cornelius sends servants as instructed to fetch Peter. The next day as these servants are nearing Joppa, Peter is praying while waiting for dinner. He’s on the rooftop and the cooking smells are wafting up and he’s hungry and the sun is warm and Peter falls asleep and dreams. Naturally, he dreams about food, but this is not ordinary food. Not a bit of it is kosher, clean, permitted. It’s all unclean. In this dream he is told to kill and eat something, but he refuses, protesting that he had never eaten anything unclean or impure. The food is take away. The dream repeats itself twice.

Peter is disturbed by this dream and is trying to figure it out when the messengers from Cornelius arrive. They are at the gate call out for Peter.

Gates are important in the story. They mark the boundary between inside and out, between us and them. The messengers are waiting at the gate. It’s only polite, but in this case it’s doubly important. The messengers are Gentiles. The household is Jewish. The Gentile messengers would pollute the house by entering it. Imagine that! They would render unclean a tannery, a place where animal carcasses are processed, just by walking through the gate.

Peter, hearing the commotion, is told by God to go with them without hesitation. but instead of going with them, he invites them into the house. I wonder how Simon the tanner felt about that.)

The next day they all went back to Cornelius’s house in Caesarea. Cornelius met Peter at the gate. Why? Because Cornelius knows that Peter can’t come into his house without becoming unclean. And yet Peter not only goes with Cornelius into his house, he stays for several days. Why? Because of what the voice told him when he was dreaming: “Never consider unclean what God has made pure!”

Because of this Peter invited the messengers into his host’s house, traveled with them them, went into Cornelius’s home, baptized Cornelius and his household, and stayed several days as his guest. In doing these things, Peter did not simply break a few rules. Peter dismantled his own world. He recognized his brothers and sisters in the faces of Others. The categories that he had used to make sense of his world collapsed and his world collapsed with them.

It is a kind of death, you know, when the assumptions on which we have built our world crumble. But what Peter is beginning to learn is that there is new life on the other side of that kind of death. There is resurrection on the other side of the loss of a world. There is hope even when optimism is impossible.

Peter faced a choice between keeping the safe and familiar world he had made for himself by othering Cornelius or finding his new life in the new world into which the God who makes all things clean was calling him. He chose the new world, new life, resurrection.

Again and again, as we encounter neighbors who are not middle class, not English-speaking, not white, not Christian, not straight, not a dozen other things we use to divide the world into us and them, we will face the same choice. May God grant us grace to choose new life over old comforts, strange new brothers and sisters over familiar Others, resurrection over safety.

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