Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God. So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, saying, “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?” Then Peter began to explain it to them, step by step, saying, “I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners; and it came close to me. As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. I also heard a voice saying to me, `Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’ But I replied, `By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’ But a second time the voice answered from heaven, `What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’ This happened three times; then everything was pulled up again to heaven. At that very moment three men, sent to me from Caesarea, arrived at the house where we were. The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us. These six brothers also accompanied me, and we entered the man’s house. He told us how he had seen the angel standing in his house and saying, `Send to Joppa and bring Simon, who is called Peter; he will give you a message by which you and your entire household will be saved.’ And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning. And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, `John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” When they heard this, they were silenced. And they praised God, saying, “Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.”
A trance, angels, and the spirit. Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann describes this twice-told story from Acts chock full of divine agency as “a…narrative on which the future of the church pivots.”
In this telling of the story (and it is told twice in Acts), Peter has just returned to Jerusalem after visiting Joppa and Caesarea and comes under attack for eating with Gentiles, something forbidden by Jewish purity codes. Peter explains that he did not come to do this on his own but through extraordinary circumstances. He tells his detractors that he was praying while hungry on a rooftop in the city of Joppa when in a trance, he had a vision of a large sheet being lowered down from heaven full of the animals that Gentiles eat but that would be forbidden to Christians still living by Jewish purity codes. In the vision, a voice tells him to get up, kill and eat these animals. And when Peter protests, the voice tells him “What God has made clean, you cannot call profane.” This happens three times.
At that very moment three men from Caesarea arrive. They have been sent by the Gentile Cornelius, a Centurion and devout man who was told by an angel to send for Peter. Peter goes with them and once at Cornelius’s house, begins to speak about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus at which point the Holy Spirit comes upon the Gentiles and a kind of mini-Pentecost occurs. Peter then puts it all together, realizing that if God gives these Gentiles the same gifts of the Spirit, the same renewal of life that God gave Peter and the other Jewish Christians when they believed in Jesus, who is he that he should hinder God?
And so once again we hear about the strange and wonderful ways that God breaks open the notions of who is in and who is out, who is acceptable and who is unacceptable. And we see that within Scripture, itself, we find stories about the church’s own reformation or as Richard Buhrer put it in our recent course on Homosexuality and the Bible, we find within Scripture stories of the Church’s own capacity for innovation.
On one level, then, what this means is that within the Bible, the book that is often referenced by some to delineate justify who is in and who is out, we have a story about the early church prodded by God to be more expansive in who it includes as full recipients of God’s grace. And so this is (as Richard asserted in our course) an important and affirmative story related to what some see as a current innovation facing the church, that is, the full inclusion of gay and lesbian people in aspects of the the life of the church.
But what I find equally fascinating about this story is the way that God brings about that innovation. It doesn’t happen through logic or through some linear means. Rather the way that Peter comes to understand how wide and all encompassing God’s desire is to be one with humanity and to have humanity realize its wholeness in God is through trances and visions, Angels, and a Spirit that both guides Peter to go with the men to Cornelius’ household and pours her gifts out upon the new Gentile believers, believers who themselves have demonstrated a desire for and openness to that spirit.
I take this to be more than just the author of Acts reaching for convenient and fantastic ways to move the narrative along and get things into place so certain actions can occur (although he is certainly capable of doing this.) Rather, I believe that it’s only through a kind of contact with the numinous, the mysterious power of God that presses in upon us that we are able to innovate in this kind of expansive way. In other words, it takes the world of the trance, the intervention of angels, the rush of the spirit, that world, touching us and our openness to it for us to be able to get beyond our own tendency to circumscribe, to delineate, to put limits on who is acceptable and entitled to be blessed. And so God’s expansive inclusion is not something we can think or argue our way into or we can do by ourselves. It’s a gift given by God through prayer that accesses God’s voice and vision that are always stretching us beyond where we tend to be, and it unfolds through the rich interplay of holy coincidence and holy responsiveness we see in this story.
And so what does this mean for us?
I’d like to suggest a number of things it might mean for us in terms of both the spiritual life and in terms of our life as a spiritual community.
First, if we as individuals and as a community are to participate in and witness to God’s expansive inclusion of all people, we should open our attention on prayer—participation in Eucharist, prayer for the world as it struggles with this same issue, prayer for the church as it struggles to be faithful and, importantly, openness in prayer so that we can be stretched by the Gospel, God’s union with all humanity through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus that comes to us as a gift, as a scandal and as a confrontation.
In some sense this may be stating the obvious especially at St. Paul’s. But sometimes the obvious needs be stated especially in the context of the contentious national and international scene. I believe the core of what we’re capable of in this area lies in the depth and faithfulness of prayer that allows God to en-trance us in the gospel
Secondly, out of that prayer, we need to allow ourselves to be escorted by the Spirit and influenced by angels. What I’m getting at here is the importance of the rich interplay of holy coincidence and holy responsiveness that I mentioned earlier. In other words in our own lives and here at St. Paul’s it’s important to recognize the invitation to listen and be guided that is often right in front of us, especially in our relationship to and conversation with others.
I’ve told this story a number of times and I want to tell it again. Our intern Meredith and her husband Steve came to St. Paul’s out of their own religious backgrounds not entirely sure about the full inclusion of gay people in the life of the church. Meredith and I had touched on this in our meetings, and I had just encouraged her to hold onto her questions and be with us. Then after a meeting, she and Steve met two angels by the names of Morrie and Scott. After being in their presence for thirty minutes, Meredith and Steve found that they had worked through any questions they may have had on the issue.
Yes, Walter Brueggemann describes our story from Acts “a narrative upon which the future of the church pivots.” I would agree with this. I would also say that the narrative describes something about the way spiritual life works: enlarging our minds and hearts through direct contact with God’s desire for the world and through the mysterious unfolding of our life with one another.
In Flannery O’Connor’s short story entitled “Revelation,” we get to see these two things in action in a kind reverse order from our Gospel story. The story centers on a self-satisfied Southern woman with a rigid sense of who is acceptable and unacceptable and who gets a wake-up call through a book sailing across the room and hitting her on the head while she is in a doctor’s waiting room. This happens as a result of her having glared disapprovingly at a young woman (whose name, by the way, is Mary Grace). This holy coincidence elicits a holy response in Mrs. Turpin. She is in turmoil and just can’t figure out why this young woman would be so rude to her. Her turmoil sets the stage for a vision. Mrs. Turpin is outside at dusk when she looks up and sees a new and expanded vision of who is acceptable to God. It is a gospel vision, at once shocking, reassuring and convicting.
“There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dark. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast hoard of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black (folks) in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those, who, like herself and (her husband) Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away…..
At length she made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah
Works cited or consulted
Christian Century’s blog called “Theolog” in which Walter Brueggemann comments on the readings for Easter 5, Year C. For his comments, go to http://www.theolog.org/blog/2007/04/blogging_toward_2.html
Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation”
