What do you do when God moves the fence?

6th Sunday of Easter     May 25, 2025

Texts for this sermon are John 13:31-35 and Acts 11:1-18

SomeOne was shaking up the Middle East world

God shows up in the form of a man, allows himself to be crucified, then rises from the dead
demonstrating God’s power and authority over all things created, over powers and dominions and death.

Then God shows up as Spirit issuing forth fire and wind moving the followers of Jesus from perplexed believers huddled in a room out into the world as animated disciples preaching a clear, unequivocal message of God’s salvific work and mercy.

A zealot who arrests and kills those vocal disciples is himself met by God and flung into the holy upheaval.

Then Peter, enters the house of and stays with Simon the Tanner of all people. Simon’s a believer, yes, but he’s a Jew and thus unclean because he works with dead animals.

The ground is shifting beneath the feet of the Chosen of Israel. The Jews.

We come now to another seismic tremor. Peter is hungry, waiting for lunch. He rests on the roof patio of Simon’s house where he is visited by a vision. A sheet, stretched by its four corners, lowers from above and holds an array of animals, both clean and unclean.

Mosaic Law prohibited Jews from eating certain animals and sea life. Yet the Voice that accompanies the vision says: Peter, kill and eat.

Nay! Peter says. I’ve never eaten anything unclean.

God says What I’ve made clean you must not call profane.

This conversation is repeated 3 times when there’s a knock on Simon’s door where three Gentile men ask to see Peter.

Go, the Spirit says to Peter and don’t regard these Gentile men as different from you (in other words don’t see them as Gentile, as unclean, as profane, as unchosen). This command rips through a 1,000 years of Mosaic Law, it tears into Jewish identity, assumptions, and belief. This command casts new light if you will, sets forth a new implication of what Jesus meant by: I have not come to abolish the Law but to fulfill it. Jesus had answered the experts in the Law saying that fulfilling the Law by loving neighbor meant loving neighbors you think unworthy or other or different from you.

Peter obeys. He and six of his Jewish friends go with the three Gentiles to Caesarea and are invited into the home of Cornelius: a Gentile Roman General of all people.

Two cultural codes, two social norms, two theologies, two world views collide when Peter crosses that threshold. I love the way Willie James Jennings describes this moment in his commentary on the Book of Acts:

God brings Peter to one outside of the covenant,
transgressing God’s own established boundary and border. (p 116)

To obey this command meant that Peter had to set aside beliefs, perceptions, codes, he’d held his entire life. He had to set aside what he’d been taught about who’s within the fold, who’s out, who’s clean and who’s unclean. Peter had to enlarge his understanding of God’s covenant.

And then, low and behold, the Spirit of God descends on that household and anoints these
Gentiles just like God had anointed those Jews in the upper room.

In this moment, Jennings says,  

Jew and Gentile share one Spirit and are joined in one covenant.

This is not a moment when God suddenly decides to love and accept people heretofore beyond God’s grace. No! Rather this is the moment when Peter recognizes that God’s love and grace has always embraced all. Peter is called to kill old thinking, old interpretations, assumptions, entitlements and even the identity of Chosenness. He was to ingest something new.

Now Peter is charged with another task. He must return to Jerusalem and tell the devout Jews of the Way, these followers of Jesus, whom they believed to be the Jewish Messiah, that God had rewritten the script, expanded the theater, and introduced new members of the cast.

Peter must face a company who would see what he has done: communing, worshiping, eating with Gentiles, as a transgression to the Law; a betrayal of Jewishness; an anathema to all they held as holy and right.

These good people: these devout believers were rightly agitated. This that Peter did threatened everything. What would it mean if their Messiah, Jesus, the One promised to them—the Chosen—not only fulfilled a Divine promise by vindicating and redeeming them would also be Messiah for Gentiles? Where would be the distinction between chosen and not chosen, clean and unclean, righteous and unrighteous, God’s people and not God’s people?

All Peter can do, the wisest thing Peter can do, is recite his experience: to relay what he witnessed, not argue, not quote select scripture, not theologize, but simply relay his lived experience.

Peter concludes his account with If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus the Christ, who was I that I could hinder God? (v17) It is then that his audience declares: God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life. 

Now, let’s bring this home – to our home. There are many ways this text speaks to us today. 
Consider the 17th verse of Acts 11: If then God gave those who are fill in the blank the same gift that God gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus the Christ, who are we that we could hinder God?  

Do not many Christians today say, for instance, that people who are queer and not celibate, or people who have had or who support abortion are beyond God’s grace? They take it upon themselves to declare such as these unclean as it were and refuse to welcome them into the body of Christ.

Now I want us to understand this: When God said to Peter “What I have made clean do not call unclean” God wasn’t saying that the animals named unclean in the Jewish dietary prohibitions were in and of themselves unclean. In the dawn of creation, God named all things Good. 

So it is now, in applying this text to this context, as we consider people or groups of people
long considered outside the pale we might be tempted to think maybe they’re clean now, but they were unclean once or they’re only clean so long as they adhere by my definition of clean. No. They were always clean in the sense of being human: God breathed God’s own Spirit into humankind and blessed humankind.

We might want to remember that God’s Word, is not a frozen word. It is a dynamic, an
ever living and fresh Word. And God, God’s self, has reinterpreted the Scriptures.

We might want to visualize ourselves in Jerusalem and reflect on which side of the debate 
we might have been? Are we among those, who, thinking we’re upholding something inviolable, long held, firmly and forever given when in fact, we may be standing in God’s way of bringing forth something new and so desperately needed.

And it isn’t just our fixed interpretation of scripture that can cause us to impede God. It can also be our fixed idea of what church looks like: when and where and how worship is to be expressed. 

Did you take note of the fact that when the Gentile emissaries appeared, God called Peter to go with them. God called Peter to leave his patio quiet time, to set aside his own agenda and to-do list, leave his packed lunch, and go fellowship with and take God’s Good News to people who needed his help, people foreign to him, foreign to his community, foreign to his culture.

Did you take note of the fact that God told Peter to make no distinction between himself as a Jew and Cornelius’ household as Gentile?

Did you take note of the fact that once Peter returned to Jerusalem from his venture he told his fellow Jewish believers of the encounter? He told of the risk he took to obey God; he testified that this risk opened his eyes to new Good News about God and God’s call? And Peter’s, testimony opened their eyes as well and gave them the wherewithal to embrace this new revelation, this expanded call.

Did you take note of the fact that this wasn’t just a change in their beliefs. They’d already changed those when they accepted that Jesus was the Messiah and that their Messiah wasn’t
going to overturn Rome.

They were, however, still captive to the belief that Messiah was just for them, the Jews. This that Peter inaugurated was not just a religious shift but also a cultural one. They had to move beyond their culture and embrace, accept another culture. In fact, some days after this the People of the Way made this shift when they realized that Gentile believers did not have to be circumcised to be accepted by God. While we make distinctions between cultures, God does not. 

We’re not just called to be people who say we love God. We’re to make ourselves accessible to God and to Others. We are to understand that distinctions we make are not distinctions God makes. We’re to heed God’s call however unexpected or intrusive, or beyond the norm or risky it may be.

Do we have the courage to ask ourselves:

Who am I that I should hinder God?