Salvation by contamination? (from Sunday, May 19, 2019)

Reading:  Acts 11:1-18

Christianity began within Judaism.  Jesus was Jewish.  So were his first followers and at first they assumed the body of Christ would naturally remain Jewish.  They believed they were “the chosen people,” that their traditions and rituals (especially circumcision and avoiding unclean people and unclean food) made them clean and superior to others, and that therefore they were chosen and prepared by God to be the new community of God’s kingdom in the world.

But then Gentiles, without first becoming Jews, also began to believe the message of the kingdom of God on Earth.  They began to show evidence in their lives of the new life that Jesus invites us to live, without accepting any of the Jewish traditions and rituals.

In the Acts of the Apostles it is Peter who is led to see this.  Through encounters with a variety of so-called unclean people and a dream from God, Peter comes to see that God is at work in all people regardless of their culture, religion and any kind of “otherness.”   And he accepts them as brothers and sisters in Christ.

But then, he has to explain his acceptance of “unclean” people into the church to his friends back home, especially the Church Council in Jerusalem.

In hindsight we know, and the early church eventually knew too, that Peter was right.  He was just trying to keep up with what God was doing – with where the risen Jesus and the Spirit were going, and was a good church leader because of it.

But for a while he was in trouble with his church because Cornelius was not exactly the kind of person they had in mind as their target demographic to try to grow their church.  He was the kind of new member more likely to give them a bad reputation among the people they wanted to attract and have the support of.

Not that Cornelius was a bad person.  But he was Roman, not Jewish; he was heathen, uncultured in his habits, and knew nothing about proper, holy dietary and purity laws.  And he was a centurion – a servant of the emperor, an enforcer of the empire, committed to uphold goals, visions and structures in the world very different from the kingdom of God.

The first disciples and Cornelius really lived in different worlds.  They moved in different circles.  Obeyed different kinds of orders and rules.  And they had no reason to have anything to do with one another; every reason, in fact, to want not to have very much to do with one another because it could only be trouble.

Like when I was growing up in a conservative, near-fundamentalist church in Winnipeg.  We really emphasized missions and evangelizing the lost, but we also had pretty clear ideas of what it meant and what it took to be an acceptable, “clean” church member.  So even though our youth group went a few times a year to the Union Gospel Mission on North Main to preach, sing and share testimonies with what 50 years ago we described so terribly as the “Indians and other drunks” who lived in that part of town, if at the end of the service any of them had come up to us and said, “Thank you for coming and sharing your faith; God has touched me, and I wonder can I be baptized and join your church?”, I am not sure how on earth either we would have handled that.  How we would ever have been ready to accept that kind of conversion by God of the kind of church we were at that time.

But you know, that church has changed and grown.  When I was in Winnipeg a few years ago and went to worship there, I saw a lot of the same people I knew from growing up there.  And I also saw a whole lot of others – others who were really other: Filipino families from the neighbourhood, South and Central American families who also had moved in, and Indian and Chinese medical students from the nearby medical school, all worshipping the one God whose children we are regardless of colour, creed or culture.

Which makes me wonder if what Peter saw when he met Cornelius face to face, eye to eye, and heart to heart, was not only “the other” but also in some way a reminder and a reflection of himself, his own story and his own journey?  Triggered maybe by the number three – the number of holy presence, and of holy fullness and fulfilment, and the number of times it keeps reappearing on his way to meeting Cornelius. 

In the dream Peter has, three times a sheet descends from heaven with all kinds of unclean animals and creepy crawly things that Peter dares not eat because he thinks they will contaminate him.  So three times he refuses to eat, citing the law of God.  And three times God insists that what God declares clean, Peter dare not declare unclean.

Three times.  After which he awakes to find three men at his door, saying they’ve been sent to fetch him to see Cornelius who was told by God to send for him.  Three again.

Just like three times Peter denied Jesus because Jesus wasn’t turning out the way his tradition told him a messiah would, and then after his resurrection, on that morning by the seaside three times Jesus gives Peter a chance to say he loves him – each time undoing one of the denials.  And then three times calls him again to ministry and mission in his name.

Along the way, in his desire to follow Jesus and stay with him, Peter’s spiritual and religious tradition was as much a hindrance as a help, as was sense of his own unworthiness and weakness.  But Jesus, God and Spirit found ways, in threes, to help him through.

And who was to say this was not true of Cornelius as well?  That regardless of his particular culture, identity, way of life and place in the world, Jesus, God and Spirit were leading him as well on a journey into something bigger, better and more open than either he or Peter could imagine or create on their own?  And also that they were meant to discover it together?

Accepting Cornelius as a brother in faith and sitting down to eat with him – treating him as a full and equal member of the household of God just as he was, was a stretch for Peter and cause for concern among the other church members. 

And it was also the best thing to happen to them, saving them from becoming just one more kind-of-open-but-kind-closed congregation, and saving Christianity from becoming a mono-cultural institution rather than a living and growing body of all God’s people in the world.  God saves us from ourselves through encounter with “the other” – and the more “other” the other is, the more we are saved.

And it’s interesting how this kind of freedom can get expressed in different churches.

Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber is a Lutheran priest who began and still pastors a church in Denver called House for All Sinners and Saints.  And the name is accurate, because somehow as a church they’ve been able to live into the freedom of God’s grace to all.  And it shows in one of their outreach ministries. 

For a few years now at Thanksgiving they make bag lunches to take out and share with people in the city – all kinds of people, who have to work on Thanksgiving Day – at all kinds of jobs.  In the bags they put turkey sandwiches they’ve made from fresh-cooked turkey, pumpkin pie bars, muffins made of stuffing, along with salt, pepper, mayo and mustard packets, a napkin, and a note that says, “It sucks to have to work on Thanksgiving.  Operation: Turkey Sandwich is brought to you by House for all Sinners and Saints.”

One year they made 600 bag lunches and, in Nadia’s words, “after assembling them, we loaded them into our cars and dispersed to find any gas station cashiers, security guards, strippers, bartenders, bus drivers, or hospital janitors we could track down.”  She mentions one person in particular – a clerk in an adult bookstore in a seedy part of downtown, who when he was given the bag and read the note, teared up and said, “Wait.  Your church brought me Thanksgiving lunch … here?”

Yes.  Because God says, “What I declare clean, you are not to declare unclean.”

I’m not sure what this means for us here.  But I wonder about the number three. 

One evening recently a young homeless man came into our building while some of our women’s group was preparing the Lower Hall for the church sale.  After a bit of conversation and a gift of a needed belt for his pants, he left and things ended without incident or injury. 

And I wonder. 

One homeless person at our door… we feel unsettled, and grateful that nothing bad happened.  A second … we start to say “Hmmm, is there something going on here?”  And a third?  How can we not start to recognize ourselves in him, and him in us – and see ourselves together as brothers and sisters of the Christ ... all in need of a safe and warm home ... where we’re loved by God and accepted by others  ... no matter who we are, where we’ve come from, and what we struggle with ... no matter how often we mess up along the way ... just because we really are, all together, beloved children of God part of something bigger, better and more open than any of us can ever imagine or create.

That’s the good news we all count on no matter who we are – the love of God for us all, for us and for other folks not at all like us.  And that’s the mission we are given – to know and to share this love of God for all.