How Straight Is the Road That Leads to Life? (Acts 10:1-35, 44-48; Lent 4C; March 10, 2013)

How Straight Is the Road That Leads to Life?

Acts 10:1-35, 44-48
Lent 4C
March 10, 2013

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

Long ago in a faraway kingdom, well, to be more precise, twenty-nine years ago in Des Moines those of us who were going to be ordained at the 1984 Annual Conference met with Bishop Wayne Clymer to get acquainted.  He congratulated us on our journey to that point and gave us a chance to ask him questions.  The 1984 General Conference was about to begin and someone asked him what he thought would be the most important issues.  He replied, “Well, we’ll fight about sex.  That’s what General Conference is for: We get together every four years and fight about sex.” He went on to list a few other topics he thought would be raised.  I don’t remember them.

The United Methodist Church has been fighting about sex ever since it was formed in 1968.  In 1968 the very first words to express the new denomination’s rejection of homosexuality were inserted into the “Social Principles” of the Book of Discipline, declaring “the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.”  We’ve been fighting about it ever since.

We’ve written our condemnations into various parts of the Book of Discipline, our governing document.  We’ve made sure that “self-avowed, practicing homosexuals” are excluded from ordained ministry.  We’ve made sure that denominational funds will not be used to “promote homosexuality.”  The various provisions have been tested in our church courts, sometimes with rather bizarre results. 

In the meantime those who are convinced that the wideness of God’s love includes gays and lesbians and who are convinced that their relationships, like straight marriages, can be signs and means of God’s grace for them and their communities, have sought in various ways to remove or soften the denomination’s bans.  Most of the time the conversation has been difficult but respectful.

At last year’s General Conference in Florida, things took a turn.  Perhaps under the influence of the “anger-tainment” industry, the conversation has become uncivil.  Advocates for greater inclusion of gays and lesbians in the life of the church were heckled on the floor of the General Conference and verbally abused in committee meetings.  They couldn’t even pass a resolution that acknowledged that they disagreed about the issue.

On both sides of the issue, delegates came away wondering whether the “united” in United Methodist Church hadn’t become a bit of wishful thinking.  As I watched from a safe distance of fourteen hundred miles or so, the General Conference looked like a couple whose relationship has gotten so bad that no matter what either of them said it only made matters worse, a couple who badly needed a third-party to help them through this.  But there is no third-party for them and so they go on wounding each other. 

My own views have had a long evolution.  I started out with a whole fistful of misunderstandings and prejudices.  As a young Christian I took a legalistic stand that completely rejected gays and lesbians.  I thought that stand rested comfortably on a biblical foundation.

Experience, a great deal of study of the biblical texts, and a changing understanding of the nature of the authority of the Bible have led me step by step to another place.  My journey is not unlike Peter’s journey in our text for this morning, although for him and me the issues are different.  And yet not so different, either.

The story begins in Caesarea, a pagan city with a large Jewish population.  As in most cities of this sort the Jewish community had its pagan admirers who hung around its edges, attracted by the strong ethical content of the Jewish religion.  One such was named Cornelius, a centurion (probably retired) who had settled in Caesarea.  He is described in rather glowing terms as devout, generous and protective of the Jewish community.

He was praying and had a vision in which an angel told him that his prayers had been answered and that he was to send for Simon Peter who was staying at the home of Simon Tanner in Joppa.  So Cornelius sent some of his people who drew near to Joppa on the next day.

The detail that Peter’s host is a tanner should alert us.  The carcass of an animal was unclean in Jewish practice.  As a tanner he was engaged in daily contact with the untreated skins of animals that rendered him unclean.  Being unclean was not a catastrophe because it was something that could be fixed.  There were ritual actions that restored an unclean person to cleanness so that they could be around other people, but these were a hassle.  And the presence of a tannery rendered Simon Tanner’s home an ambiguous place, possibly clean, possibly unclean.  Simon Peter is a guest there in that ambiguous place where the boundaries between the clean and the unclean are a little fuzzy.  We are alerted that the story that follows will have something to do with cleanness and uncleanness.

Well, Peter is praying as Cornelius’ messengers are getting closer.  He’s up on rooftop at noon and he’s hungry.  He has a vision in which a sheet is lowered from heaven.  It contains all manner of animals that unclean, animals that may not be eaten.He hears a voice that tells him to kill and eat whatever he wants.  He protests that these animals are unclean and he has never eaten an unclean animal.  The voice replies, “Never consider unclean what God has made pure.”  And then the sheet was taken up into heaven.

Just to make sure that Peter really gets it, this whole thing happens three times.  Then Peter is told that there are people looking for him and that he is to go with them without asking any questions.

And sure enough, there were three men newly arrived from Caesarea asking for Peter.  They explain their mission to him and he invites them into the house to stay overnight.  These are gentiles, mind you, non-Jews, whom Peter invites into this Jewish household.  So here’s some more stuff about cleanness and uncleanness, some more fuzzing of the boundaries.

The next day Peter went with the men and took some Jewish followers of Jesus, so now we have a mixed caravan of gentiles and Jews.  Fuzzy.

When Peter and his traveling companions arrive in Caesarea at the house of Cornelius they are met by Cornelius.  This meeting took place outside, not in Cornelius’ house.  Cornelius knew the rules.  He was a gentile.  Peter was a Jew.  Jews were not allowed to come inside the house of gentile.  Cornelius did not expect Peter to come inside his house and met him outside.

Cornelius knelt in front of Peter to honor him, but Peter made Cornelius get up and told him, “Like you, I’m just a human.”  Then Peter went with Cornelius into Cornelius’ house.  This was unthinkable, or it would have been unthinkable if the story hadn’t been preparing us to think it.  Peter said to the crowd, “You all realize that it is forbidden for a Jew to associate or visit with outsiders.  However, God has shown me that I should never call a person unclean or impure.”   

Peter continued to speak to the gathered crowd.  While he was speaking the Holy Spirit fell on the crowd in the same way that it had on the disciples gathered at Pentecost to show that these people, too, had God’s approval.  On the strength of this proof Peter gave orders for them to be baptized. 

This is a new thing in the life of Jesus’ followers: a baptized gentile.  Peter can get in a lot of trouble for doing this.  It’s against the Book of Discipline.  He will indeed have to give an account of his actions to the Board of Ordained Ministry in Jerusalem. 

This story is usually called the Conversion of Cornelius, but some years ago I noticed that Cornelius is never really converted.  He begins the story as one who loves God.  He ends the story as one who loves God.  That’s not really a conversion.

It’s Peter who is converted in this story.  His religious identity has been—at least in part—wrapped up in having firm boundaries between the clean and the unclean.  Eat the right foods, don’t eat the wrong foods.  Associate with Jews, not gentiles.  But all of that has been blown away in this story.  Peter the observant Jew travels with gentiles, accepts an invitation into a gentile home, and orders the baptism of non-Jews into what had been up to that point a Jewish sect.

After a few days Peter went home and tried to explain all this to his Jewish friends.  He was still a Jew.  Cornelius was still a gentile.  I don’t suspect that Peter started eating bacon cheeseburgers, any more than Cornelius started keeping a kosher kitchen.  These things simply faded into insignificance against the larger reality that Peter and Cornelius were now both baptized followers of Jesus. 

We cannot underestimate the fatefulness of this conversion.  Peter chose for himself, of course, but he also deflected the Jesus movement in an entirely new direction.  The Jesus movement had been a Jewish movement.  But now there were baptized gentiles in the movement.  It wasn’t that gentiles were invited to join this Jewish movement as long as they acted like Jews.  This was no longer a Jewish movement, but a movement of both Jews and gentiles.  The character of the Jesus movement was changed forever.  The church—their church, our church—would never be the same again.

We take that for granted.  Even more than African Americans who sit in any seat on the bus that’s open, we don’t have a second thought about the fact that we are here and none of us had to become Jews first.  God accepted us just as we were and as we are.

The issues have been different for Peter and me, but we’ve walked much the same path.  It wasn’t quite as dramatic for me, but in a number of insights I too have become convinced that I should “Never consider unclean what God has made pure.”  Over the years I have come to believe that the exclusive, committed and permanent relationships of gays and lesbians are means of grace for them and for our community no less than my exclusive, committed and permanent relationship with Carol.  I believe that the church should extend the outward signs of God’s blessing as an acknowledgement that the inner reality of God’s blessing is not withheld simply because a couple is gay or lesbian.  These are my convictions, arrived at by a long journey, nearly as long as the journey that Peter made from Joppa to Caesarea.

I am old enough and experienced enough that I no longer fall for what I call the Preacher’s Fallacy.  The Preacher’s Fallacy is to expect that I can reproduce in you in fifteen minutes the journey it has taken me thirty years to complete.  In our heads we preachers imagine we are that good, but reality is quite different. 

You have your own journey as I have mine.  None of us is finished.  None of us has yet become all that God longs and dreams for us to be.  But we are all of us begun.  We are fellow-travelers in this caravan we call First United Methodist Church.  No matter what our experiences have been, we support each other by hearing and honoring each others’ stories.  I ask that all of us try with all that is in us to stay open to each other and to the stories that we bear.  With God’s grace I know that we can.

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