Easter 5 May 2nd, 2010

Easter 5
May 2nd, 2010

When I was traveling in India 15 years ago or so, I frequently went out into the villages with professors or staff from the seminaries I was staying in. They would take care to prepare food for me and any other western guests to eat when we were invited into people’s home for a meal.
Every time it happened, it felt awful. I felt we were embarrassing, even belittling the our hosts in the villages, en though I appreciated the health risks this arrangement was designed to avoid.
One evening, late in my trip, on my own in far south India, I was traveling not with professors but with a local acting group to whom it didn’t even occur that there might be a problem.
After the performance, we were as usual invited into a tiny hut for a meal. No electricity—oil lamps on the floor, a cow lowing in the next room). A spotlessly cleanly swept dirt floor.
The hostess spread out banana leaves as plates and ladled a bit of stew out on each one. In South India, you don’t use forks—you dip in with your right hand.
So I did. In that circumstance, how could I, a white western woman, a visitor to their village, say no to these kind people who were expressing their welcome in food.
It was delicious and my digestive system survived. But when I got back home, a friend said, “You could have been sick for months! What were you thinking?!”

At the beginning of the lesson from the Acts of the Apostles this week, Peter is facing a tribunal of his fellow disciples and they are saying, in effect, exactly the same thing—“what were you thinking?!”
To backtrack a bit: It has been a few months or even a year since Jesus’ death and resurrection. The disciples still worship in the temple, but they are also vigorously preaching that Jesus Christ was the Messiah and that believing in him, following his “way,” led men and women to a radically new life.
Thousands of Jews in and around Jerusalem have listened to them and been baptized. That was the good news. All preachers like to know that their preaching has made a difference!
The bad—or at least confusing— news was that something else was going on. Their fellow Jews were not the only people listening to the disciples. Non-Jews, Gentiles (that’s what ‘Gentile’ means—simply a non-Jew), were also drawn to this story of Jesus Christ.
Because no one had expected this to happen, nobody had made any decisions about whether this would even be allowed. They were Jews and Jesus had been a Jew—the Jews were God’s chosen people. Enough said, right? And yet Gentiles were flocking to Peter and others to ask about Jesus.

As in my experience in Tamil Nadu, the flashpoint for the tribunal’s “what were you thinking?” question to Peter was about food.
Word has reached Jerusalem that Peter has not only been preaching to Gentiles, but also eating with them. Worse--at these meals he has been consuming “unclean” food, food by Jewish law, what in later Judaism is called “kosher” food.
The disciples didn’t know about germs and food poisoning, the things which worried my friend, but they did know that their Scriptures taught that some food was “clean” and other food was “defiled” or “dirty.”
So they have called Peter on the carpet to say, “God can’t want you to do that! You risked spiritual death by eating forbidden food. What were you thinking?!”

Peter could only defend himself by what he had seen and what he had heard. By a vision and a voice.
A tablecloth lowered from heaven filled with live animals hissing, roaring, chirping—every one of the animals a provocation since they were commonly eaten by Gentiles and forbidden to Jews. (A friend once referred to this passage as the “story about the pigs in a blanket.”)
As usual, at first Peter misses the point and self-righteously refuses them as unclean. But the voice, that so familiar voice of Jesus Christ, with, probably, that so familiar tinge of “just be quiet and listen to me, Peter!,” won’t let Peter off the hook. Instead he utters these game-changing words: “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”
“Game-changing” because suddenly the old rules don’t hold anymore. Suddenly God, the God Peter thought he knew, is doing a new thing.
With Peter’s vision, Christ declared that God was opening things up. New things, new people, were being given by God to nurture the body of the church.

Interesting, I hope, but can this story possibly say to us? Sure, as Gentiles, as non Jews, we are the beneficiaries of Peter’s vision and the disciples’ acceptance of it, but . . . ?
Yet I believe that Peter’s vision is highly relevant to you all right now.
At this time of transition, you might be tempted to close ranks and resist new energy and new ideas. The power of “we’ve always done it this way,” which has historically not been particularly powerful in this congregation, might begin to grow stronger. You might be tempted to reject new menu items in favor of the old tried and true.

There’s no way for us to predict what God will offer Church of the Holy Spirit during the next year or so.
Already we’re seeing change: What seems to be a strong cohort of new members? There’s God’s creative energy at work!
During the next months and years: New ideas about liturgy and outreach? God’s creative energy at work.
New leadership? God’s creative energy at work.
Who knows what else? All we know is that our God is the God of surprises who will set the table of your future with unforeseen delicacies,, then smile and say: “What did you expect, my dears—the same old thing? What were you thinking?”