Acts 11:1-18
(May 15, 2022) Last night in Buffalo, New York, a young man walked into a grocery store and shot 13 people, ten of whom died. Most of the victims were Black; the gunman was white. He broadcast his attack live and reportedly left a trail of racist hate propaganda. This isn’t the first such shooting this year.
I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but from time to time, it’s important to remind ourselves and others that the gospel of Christ does not support hate, or racism, or any sort of group superiority over others. Our passage from Acts this morning is a good and timely example.
In this book that we call The Acts of the Apostles, or usually just “Acts,” Peter and John form a strong team to carry the gospel to the world right after Pentecost. To be honest, the book known as the Acts of the Apostles doesn’t actually live up to its name. It doesn’t tell us much at all about the original apostles except for Peter and mentions John sort of in passing.
Acts details some of the very first challenges and barriers the early church faced, such as serious persecution. When Peter and John preached in the Temple, the authorities put them in prison and had them flogged. James, the brother of John, was later put to the sword. Stephen was stoned to death, with Saul looking on. Later on, after Saul’s conversion, he and others are imprisoned and beaten by mobs.
Those challenges were external to the church. However, possibly the biggest challenge in Acts was internal: the church had to struggle with the question of who is “us” and who is “them.” That may be the eternal question of the gospel. It certainly is the biggest question in the book of Acts. As a lawyer once asked Jesus, just who exactly is my neighbor? He assumed that most of the folks out there are not my neighbor, so I surely don’t have to concern myself with them.
I can’t think of a timelier question than “Who is my neighbor?” There has never been a time when everybody could just get along, even in church. The story of human history is the story of different groups fighting each other. When you read books like 1 and 2 Samuel or 1 and 2 Kings, you realize that the Israelites were always fighting somebody: the Amalekites, the Hittites, the Philistines, and often each other. These groups all lived together within an area roughly two-thirds the size of Maryland, and their story is one of constant warfare.
You might think that the early church wouldn’t have had serious conflict. Jesus’s first followers shared the same religious and social background: they were Jews of modest income who lived in the rural areas of Galilee. They spoke Aramaic, which was related to Hebrew and other Semitic languages.
Then Pentecost happened. Jews from the Diaspora, meaning Greek-speaking Jews scattered all around the known world, had arrived in Jerusalem for Passover, speaking many languages. Acts tells us that three thousand people joined the church that Pentecost day. Instantly, the early church became much more diverse.
It became apparent very quickly that the ‘hometown’ Jews treated the out-of-town, Greek-speaking Jews like second-class citizens. Acts 6 tells us that the church was distributing food every day, which was good news. The bad news was that the Hellenistic or Greek-speaking widows and children were often being left out.
Think about that for a moment. Many of us Protestants pride ourselves on trying to recreate the early church. The Disciples of Christ were formed out of an early nineteenth-century movement known as Restorationism. They wanted to restore the early church because it seemed to them that the New Testament church was ideal.
That’s all well and good, and we probably ought to restore and reform the church from time to time. But let’s not romanticize the early church beyond their due. They were as human as we are. Jesus had only been gone for a short time, possibly two or three months, and already we can see the unconscious cultural prejudice of those first believers. All of the group at this point were Jews; all were believers; but those who didn’t speak Aramaic were considered outsiders!
The apostles dealt with the problem by calling for the church to elect seven men “of good standing.” The seven who were elected all had Greek names; this may mean that they all came from the Greek-speaking culture. The social prejudices of some in the church hindered the gospel from its full impact. This was the first barrier that the gospel crossed, though it may seem small to us: the barrier between Jewish Christians who came from different lands and had different cultural backgrounds and languages.
Acts is the story of how cultural barriers fall before the gospel, one after the other. Philip, one of the seven who had been elected to make sure that the Hellenistic widows and orphans got enough to eat, left Jerusalem to escape Saul’s persecution. He traveled a bit north to the city of Samaria. He may have reasoned that Saul the Pharisee wouldn’t follow him there, where people didn’t keep the law properly to the Pharisee’s way of thinking. Samaritans were considered at most half-Jewish; their ancestors had intermarried with non-Jews and in many cases had blended their worship with that of pagan gods. Philip, however, took it upon himself to preach to crowds there, and many believed. When word of this got back to Jerusalem, Peter and John rushed to investigate this unexpected and shocking turn of events, then amazingly agreed to baptize the Samaritans when the story proved true.
That was the second barrier crossed: from Jewish Christians to half-Jewish Christians.
Philip then headed south toward Gaza along the coast, and encountered an Ethiopian eunuch on the road, reading scripture. The Ethiopian was an African court official, a man of importance and authority. We know he was already attracted to Judaism because he had just worshiped in the Jerusalem temple and was reading from Isaiah as he rode along toward home. Philip had no special authority from the church outside of serving tables, but he freely shared the good news of Christ and even took it upon himself to baptize the man.
I can imagine that some folks in the Jerusalem church would have considered Philip to be a loose cannon, running around preaching to and baptizing Gentiles! The Ethiopian continued on home instead of becoming part of the Jerusalem church. But he represented the first Gentile to be converted – the third social barrier that the gospel had crossed! In literature, that’s known as a foreshadowing of the conflict to come.
Acts next tells us about a Roman centurion named Cornelius. We’re told that he worshiped the God of the Israelites in his own way and was a good man, but he had not formally converted to Judaism. He had a vision in which an angel told him to send messengers to Joppa further down the coast for someone named Simon, also called Peter, to come to him. Like a good soldier, Cornelius promptly did just that.
The next day down in Joppa, while Cornelius’ messengers were on their way, Peter had the vision described in our passage today. A sheet was let down with different kinds of animals, some that were ritually clean mixed together with ritually unclean. Peter was invited to “rise, kill and eat” without distinguishing between them. Unlike the Roman Cornelius, who only had to be told once, Peter had to be shown the same vision three times before the message began to sink in! Peter’s exclusivist religion kept him from hearing what God was trying to tell him, that no human beings are to be grouped or separated out as clean or unclean.
Peter finally gave in, heard the messengers, and Cornelius and his whole household were baptized and received the Holy Spirit, as evidenced by their speaking in tongues. The believers with Peter were shocked and amazed! God apparently wanted Gentiles in his church, too! They hadn’t even become Jews first!
When word got back to Jerusalem of what Peter had done, it caused a huge uproar. Peter had committed a grievous sin in the minds of the traditionalists: he has sat down and eaten a meal with Gentiles. And not just any Gentiles: Roman centurions! Part of the occupying army! Not only their piety, but their nationalism was offended.
It’s hard for us to imagine just how offensive this was to the traditionalists. For one thing, Peter had violated the religious purity code and probably an even stronger social code. That just wasn’t done! Peter acted as though those unclean people, those Gentiles, were just as acceptable as we are! But we’re God’s special people, they thought. The chosen people. Mixing with Gentiles violates God’s law! Doesn’t it?
If that sounds strange to you, I can remember very similar talk from my childhood in the 1950s. When African-Americans asked for equal service at lunch counters and bought houses in white neighborhoods, I heard lots of white adults say almost exactly the same things and even misuse scripture to back up their opinions.
I suspect that the emotions involved in Acts and those from my childhood were very similar. The point is that the early church was no more immune to those attitudes and feelings than we are. It’s just that the ethnicities were different.
The book of Acts ends with Paul under house arrest in Rome but “teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and unhindered.” The gospel has gone out to the Gentiles, having crossed all social barriers on the way.
That’s the whole point of Acts. Some form of the Greek word for unhindered occurs seven times in Acts. It’s also the very last word in the book. The point is that the gospel is to be taken to all people. We are to love all people. But we believers throughout history have kept throwing up barriers, trying to circumscribe the gospel and restrict it only to those who belong to our own group, but again and again, the gospel breaks through the barriers and purity codes.
The gospel is about bringing people together, but too often the church has distorted the gospel, just as those early Christians tried to distort it to include only their own kind.
A more modern distortion is that we’ve come to see the gospel as only a matter for the individual. The entire thrust of many churches is to get the individual soul into heaven. Churches become collections of individuals coming together for an hour or two and then leaving to lead separate lives during the week. A genuine community is stronger than that.
Yet we were not created to be solitary individuals. In the second chapter of Genesis, God sees that it was not good for the first man to be alone, so he creates woman and tells the couple to be fruitful and fill the earth. Cornelius didn’t become a believer all by himself; he and his entire household became believers together. It’s still not good to be alone, but we seem to be bent on severing connections with the people around us, just as technology has given us the chance to be more connected than ever before possible.
Relationships are not easy. People are going to disagree, sometimes over important issues. But we were made for connection. Our spirituality begins with an openness to connection with God, which leads immediately to a connection with the universe and with other people.
Jesus said that the most important two commandments were to love God and to love our neighbor. You can’t love someone without connecting with them. Love means identifying with our neighbor. It means acting in real time to help our neighbor and being helped in turn.
We are blessed to have people in this congregation who understand that and are active in their love for God and for others. But sometimes we all need to be reminded and encouraged along the way. We choose to be a place of radical love, where all are invited to connect, with God and with each other. Such is the message of the book of Acts.
Let’s pray.
Lord, we have so many choices. We can choose to avoid people who don’t seem like us. We can choose to surround ourselves with only people who think the same way. We like to be comfortable, Lord. But you have called us out into the world to share the message of your kingdom. Forgive us for the times when we avoid others because they’re different. Forgive our failure of discipleship. We pray for the courage and the energy to step beyond our comfort zones and show your love to all. Give us eyes that see your image, Lord, in every neighbor. We pray in Christ’s name, amen.
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