Peter’s Vision

Preaching on Acts 11:1-18

Almost immediately, the work of living out the resurrection became gatekeeping.

Jesus was Jewish, a member of a covenantal community. He preached a radical interpretation of the legal tradition, which emphasized core principles over incidental rulings, but clearly loved and respected the Torah.

As the Christian movement spread, through the Jewish diaspora, around the Roman world, into the broad discourse of traditions and ideas in the empire, non-Jewish people became intrigued, and vocally wondered how they might join. To what extent did they need to participate in the Covenant – what was core, what was incidental, did they need to get circumcised?

The apostles seem to have experienced this as an intractable split between insider and outsider, and found themselves working through the details of regulating access to the tradition. Factions advocate for deep hospitality, and a door thrown wide open, while others fight to ensure the standards of the community were upheld.

Almost immediately, the early Christian movement seemed to be rupturing.

There seem to have been factions only too aware of the history of imperial violence that led to the crucifixion, and felt that openness to Roman citizens was a genuine risk. And then there were factions who felt that their leaders had been complicit in maintaining that violence, and that there were risks in rejecting any help they might get.

Rulings arise out of relationships and contexts, none of which a messenger can effectively represent. Communities splinter from one another.

I can easily imagine that many of those embroiling themselves in debates about where to place themselves on that spectrum of openness felt it was also a negligent distraction from their actual responsibility to live out the resurrection in the world.

They were supposed to move through vulnerability to transformation, and then become the place where the Spirit of God dwelt in the world, the manifest embodiment of the hope and terror of the resurrection, the ongoing incarnation, each person a temple.

That peculiar historical context of emerging in a fraught position between two worlds and then struggling to delineate the boundaries of their movement means that the apostles seem like they are losing sight of that becoming.

Each of them was supposed to be an incarnate temple to a living God. Instead, they are collectively managing the boundaries of the beginning of a church institution.

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In our own way, we spend a lot of our time gatekeeping too.

For a long time, up to when some of you were children, pretty much everyone in white North America went to church on Sunday morning. It was what people did. Together, the community would come together and collectively receive instruction and encouragement on how to live a good life. It was the way things were.

One day, that stopped. People got busy, hockey practice began to take place on Sundays, marginalized people began holding the church accountable for upholding destructive social structures, everyone got a television.

Since then, the church has struggled with what our role is supposed to be.

Often, we are explicitly and implicitly motivated by a desire to bring the community back. We ask what we could change, and try out different styles of worship, and programs and leadership styles, we try out different political and theological stances. If we can discover the right alchemy, we will be able to transmute our dross into gold, our logic seems to be, and finally, we will be appealing again.

I visited a church once where they met me at the door with fresh-made espresso served in white paper cups stamped with “For God so loved the #six.”

Just as the apostles struggled to determine how much an outsider must change before they could be assimilated, we seem to be struggle with how to change enough to make assimilation appealing.

Our focus on boundaries and assimilation, even on becoming truly welcoming, creates an ‘us’ to which a ‘them’ might participate. We create a unit, identify as a concrete thing with which other people might engage or disengage, and stop engaging with them.

All of which makes us fragile when crisis comes.

We struggle to answer tough questions, and have limited access to the identical conversations others are having, we don’t know our neighborhood’s assets or needs, we find ourselves without a lot of institutional connections, it becomes tough to pivot.

My suspicion is that this is not just the experience of the church. My guess is that there are lots of communities and institutions that find themselves focusing on entry-criteria and the alchemy of appeal – and, in so doing, become self-oriented and fragile.

In crisis, when we need it most, how do we return to becoming the resurrection?

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In the resurrection, the Spirit had been poured out on the disciples, which they had found to be an awesome and terrifying responsibility. They had persevered, thinking that, as a covenantal community, they were the only ones capable of and responsible for living out its mandate.

In the midst of this, a Roman, and Centurion in the Italian Cohort, named Cornelius invites Peter to his home. He is, iconically, an outsider. I wonder how Peter, who had denied knowing Christ in terror of the torture that Centurions might inflict upon him only a short while earlier, would experience the invitation into a Centurion’s house?

As the Spirit is nudging him and the Centurion together, Peter receives a vision in which he sees iconically unclean food, forbidden by the covenant, and hears a voice say three times: ‘What God makes clean, you shall not call unclean.’ It’s not his decision.

Peter receives a vision, responds to it, and then witnesses God’s Spirit poured out on each of the members of the Centurion’s household in the same way that it had fallen upon him and the other disciples in the glory days of the very beginning of their experience of Jesus and their life together as a community.

Here, God deconstructs the insider/outsider dichotomy that had been so fundamental to their attempts at clarifying what the appropriate edges of their tradition should be and just pours out the Spirit onto all people.

As the disciples contend about which Gentiles are in and which ones are out under what conditions, God works through the Gentiles, just as they are, without them having entered in to anything, to do the work of the disciples themselves.

In the resurrection, the Spirit had been poured out upon them. They had felt its small, familiar and intimate nudge, and had been led by it into authenticity and vulnerability.

They had known it as the nameless and unknowable guide who met them when their courage failed them and brought them to a place of transformation of hope.

They had experienced it as the indwelling presence of God through which they were invited to become a temple in the world, to become be the place of God’s continued incarnation, Christ’s ongoing mission – the manifest embodiment of his resurrection

Here, that Spirit was out in the world beyond all their control or capacity to manage it.

Here, all people are living into that resurection.

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Here’s where I see that resurrection now.

Ketri, the Spirit of God is upon you and is working through you as you put on your clown costume. Lawrence, the Spirit of God is upon you as you take another Zoom meeting to ensure we all have water coming through our taps. Renée, the Spirit is upon you as you support sovereignty movements in Indigenous nations. Maggie, it’s there as you connect educators to resources. Shelley, it’s there as you call up anxious families.

Cathie, it’s upon the kids you’ve shaped, but it is also upon your neighbours as they throw you block parties and check up on you. Carol Lewis, it’s upon the kids you’ve shaped, but it’s also in your kids as they make sure you’ve got food.

Carol Watson, it’s in the buildings that stand because of your care – and in all the dishes you’ve done and meetings you’ve chaired. Pat, it’s in your advocacy work, and in the young people you’ve equipped with resiliency. Nick, it’s in your research, and in all of the ways you push the church to reform. Heather, it’s in your support for the arts, music and theatrical communities.

Moms – and mother figures – the spirit is upon you and is working through you as you nurture children in the world; children, it is upon your gratitude to the families – including the ones you chose – that formed you.

The Spirit is upon DECA, and Mosaic, and Woodgreen, and Access Alliance and it is working through them. It’s upon Foodshare, and the Canada Summer Jobs Program, and upon the Carrot Commons and East for East.

The Spirit cross-pollinates. It gathers and shares. It listens, echoes and inspires.

The Spirit winds its way through the conversations about distancing and opening dates and viability and longing. It is there as we try to make sure that people can eat, as we try to make sure they are housed. It is there as we try to ensure people have hope.

I don’t think we are a church community because we gather on Sunday to receive the Spirit, but because we spend our week chasing the Spirit down and being led by its dance and then getting together to talk about what we witnessed and encountered.

In crisis, we are not fragile, because each of us – along with the Spirit – are cross-pollinating, gathering, listening and sharing, because you too are making sure that people have food and housing and hope.

Again, we’re drawn outwards into connection, where even in crisis, resurrection awaits.