The community was gathered around a table, sharing a meal. There they are, gathered in Jerusalem in one of the believers’ houses, and the conversation turns to the rumors someone has heard.
“We’ve heard stories,” someone says. “We’ve heard stories that you went and ate with men who are uncircumcised. People beyond our community. And we’re more than a little concerned. It’s clear to us, Peter, that you have no regard for our tradition and custom. Of what is good and right. You’ve stepped beyond the boundaries that were set for a very good reason. Why did you go and eat with them?”
Peter takes a deep breath. Peter takes a deep breath, letting out an even bigger sigh, and starts to explain.
If we had been there with him around the table, I wonder how he would have appeared. Would he have been tense? Nervous? Or was he calm, open, ready to share? If it had been me, I would have felt a little ill at ease, not knowing how the community would respond. But Peter, he’s been through the ringer before. He’s been called out on the carpet more than a few times. And even after all these failures, Jesus calls Peter to feed his sheep. Perhaps in this moment we find Peter settling into his leadership, come what may.
Peter tells the assembled crowd of his ecstatic vision.
The story spills out. “I was praying, opening myself up to Divine inspiration,” he says, “and as I was listening for God, I entered a trance. I entered a trance and saw a vision.”
Peter shares the vision of four footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds in a sheet being lowered down by its corners. All animals considered to be unclean under Jewish dietary law. Animals considered—for a variety of reasons—the kinds that you simply ought not to eat. It was forbidden.
In the vision, a voice comes to him, and this voice Peter identifies as the voice of the Lord. He identifies the voice of God telling him to get up, to kill, and to eat.
Peter’s reaction is visceral, and you can’t blame him. His entire life, he’s been formed in a way of being, a way of thinking, a way of acting. His formation has been both implicit and explicit. He’s been formed by deep-seated traditions. He’s been guided by long-standing cultural norms and laws that have taught him to live in a particular way in relationship to food and to people. A way he just doesn’t question. These ways include the laws expressly forbidding him from doing what the divine voice is now telling him to do.
And so it’s no wonder he pushes back, ready to defend himself against such blasphemy. It’s no wonder, in the moment, he has the same reaction his friends have when they hear the rumors of Peter’s actions. And that’s why we hear him say, “By no means, Lord! I will not eat this. My whole life, I have kept myself pure, and nothing profane or unclean has entered my mouth.” This is madness. Leave me alone!
Time passes in his trance-like state. Peter continues in prayer. Two more times a voice speaks out of the void, out of the heavens, prompting him to wrestle more deeply in faith, and in faithfulness to step out into uncertain waters, following God’s leading into the unknown. And what does the voice say?
“What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”
There are the words, and then there’s the voice. And the thing about the voice? It sounds eerily like Jesus.
In my childhood, I grew up inside a fundamentalist church that had more purity codes than you can count. Rules about who to associate with. What to believe. Who had agency over whose bodies, and so much more. Fundamentalisms have their purity codes. Looking in from the outside, that’s easy enough to see.
And yet, as a broader society, we have our own codes too. We value particular things, particular people over others. The goal is never to step over the line. And what happens when people transgress those culturally-imposed norms? We dehumanize them. We strip them of their dignity. We do violence to them with our words and our actions.
What are some of the things our society values? Youth. Beauty. That’s a good place to start. But what else? What else does our society value?
[Take time to hear peoples' responses]
Our society values youth and beauty. It values wealth and status.
It also disproportionately values whiteness. It values maleness. It values straight folks, and folks who are cisgender. It values people who are married, and especially those who have children.
We stigmatize people who are single or childless, we silence those who have miscarried, and stigmatize those who have had abortions.
With all the strides that have been made in the last decades, our society still classifies humans according to some sort of moral pecking order. And yet, what does God say? “What I have made clean, you must not call profane.” All people are created in the Divine image. All have been created in and for love from the very beginning. All are worthy of God’s love—and ours.
There are lots of places today’s scripture might lead us. But this week, I’ve been led to keep it pretty close to home. These past few weeks I’ve had a lot of conversations with folks within and beyond our parish concerned about the increasing visibility of homelessness in our city. I think in some way, it’s been brought home by the reality of a person taking refuge in their tent on the edge of the church grounds.
And what does our society do and say about people without homes? All too quickly we write them off, or we impose a distance, rather than getting to know folks, their names, their stories, their hopes and fears. We start by presuming their addictions and the state of their mental health.
This is not exactly the place we’d hope others would start when they talk about us. It certainly isn't the place I hope you'd start when you spoke about me.
Sometimes it’s as a result of our implicit formation. Maybe we’ve internalized messages about who deserves what. Maybe we’ve heard someone say—in the face of great tragedy or pain—that everything happens for a reason. And maybe we’ve even believed that little lie without thinking through the consequences of doing so.
And in these attitudes, we subtly, and not-so-subtly deny that people living in poverty are created in God’s very image. And that they deserve the same dignity, agency, and worth that we seek for ourselves. And that our society is broken if it pushes folks to the margins. As I was dwelling in this story this week, I wondered how often we, like Peter, treat people without homes as unclean. The voice comes to Peter in a dream:
“What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”
In today’s reading, Peter tells that as his ecstatic vision ends, three men arrive at the house where he was staying. He’s just gone through this dissonant experience in which God’s Spirit has prompted a transformed vision. He had always come to believe that God’s economy worked one way. But now, it seems, God is doing a new thing. Just as Peter is coming to grips with this reality, there’s a knock on the door. There are Gentiles at the gate, and against his better judgment, he goes out to be with them, to hear from them, to learn from them, and to find out if what he has to offer might be of some use.
Throughout Acts, Peter is the one who is gatekeeping. He’s the one insisting that the Jesus movement is for Jews, not for Gentiles. He’ll end up in an all-out battle with Paul about this very thing. And yet, the people who come knocking, looking for good news, gospel news, Jesus’ good news of liberation, are Gentiles. To Peter they are outside the scope of the mission. Somebody else’s problem.
And yet when he hears Jesus’ voice in prayer, he’s led to rethink. There’s something in the vision that sets him up to say “yes” where before he said “no.” Those words, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane,” start to do their work on him. They continue to confront him, to challenge him, to problematize the way of thinking and acting he inherited. And so he goes from Joppa to Caesarea to meet the person on the other side.
When they arrive, Peter meets a man who also had an unlikely vision. The man he meets had a vision of an angel telling him to send for Simon Peter “who will give you a message by which you and your entire household will be saved.”
Peter isn’t prepared for this. It’s probably the last thing he wants to do. And yet, he speaks. And when he opens himself up, Holy Spirit shows up in power. The Holy Spirit, the scriptures say, fell upon them just as it had at the beginning. At the dawning of Creation. At the Annunciation. When Jesus is baptized in the Jordan. On the day of Pentecost. Here and now. God’s liberating Spirit is poured out in this place, for these and for all people. Liberation is available to all people.
Which brings us back to the present moment. Which brings us back to today, and the question that I’ve been wrestling with all week. And I'll admit I've had some sleepless nights as a result. What does this mean for us? How ought we respond as a Christian community to the people, and the situation of homelessness in our city that has come knocking on our door?
There were several times this week that I, like Peter, wanted to push that question aside. To not deal with it. And yet, it kept coming back. Kept intruding on conversations. In the eighteen months that I've been here, this issue has been the one with the most energy behind it. The one where people have been reaching out and calling me and sharing their concerns.
And so I’m taking that as a prompt from the Holy Spirit that we ought to dwell in this question for a bit. It’s not a problem for me to solve, but it might be one we can work through together.
After the service, I’m going to invite those who are concerned with this to stay, and we’ll have a brief conversation about next steps. We'll seek to respond to this question:
how might God be calling us to respond to our homeless neighbours with God’s love?
But first, I want to share a few things that seem important for you to know.
- I’ve spoken with the camper, and started to get to know him a bit better
- Last week, Lorraine and Marnie and I met with Deb McIntosh to talk about our relationship with the Food Bank. Each person around the table talked about the value of that partnership, and while there are challenges to be worked through, decided that we should intentionally work together to make things better.
- I have invited Deb to come speak with Parish Council on Wednesday, so that we can hear more about the realities of homelessness in Castlegar, and to talk about ways forward
- We’re talking about it today, and we will continue—with God’s help—to discern a way forward together.
- And we’ll pray. In your own personal prayer practice, and here at church, I’d ask that each of us would pray for God to give us a vision of how we might respond to the rising homelessness in our region.
Throughout Lent, a number of us read a book by Rachel Held Evans called “Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again.” Near the end of the book, the author writes this:
“The apostles remembered what many modern Christians tend to forget—that what makes the gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out but who it lets in.”
This passage came back to me this week as I was reading about Peter’s vision and his response in Acts. In heeding Jesus’ voice, Peter does something to deeply offend his own sensibilities, and the sensibilities of his friends. And how does the story end?
Despite all his resistance, Peter follows through. And in response to his community in Jerusalem, he says this “If God gave to them the same gift that he gave us, who was I to hinder God?” At these words, the community goes silent.
And then, after a time of silence, what do they do, but praise God, saying “then God has given even to these the promise of new life.”
May we, as we listen to God in prayer, respond in faith.
As we listen to the stories of our neighbours, may we see them as God sees them—beloved, beautiful, and holy.
And may we respond moved by God’s holy, life-affirming Spirit.
Amen.
