Resurrection Ripples - 4 - Made Clean

Scripture Acts 11:1-18

Acts 11:1–18 NIV

1 The apostles and the believers throughout Judea heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God. 2 So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him 3 and said, “You went into the house of uncircumcised men and ate with them.” 4 Starting from the beginning, Peter told them the whole story: 5 “I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. I saw something like a large sheet being let down from heaven by its four corners, and it came down to where I was. 6 I looked into it and saw four-footed animals of the earth, wild beasts, reptiles and birds. 7 Then I heard a voice telling me, ‘Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.’ 8 “I replied, ‘Surely not, Lord! Nothing impure or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’ 9 “The voice spoke from heaven a second time, ‘Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.’ 10 This happened three times, and then it was all pulled up to heaven again. 11 “Right then three men who had been sent to me from Caesarea stopped at the house where I was staying. 12 The Spirit told me to have no hesitation about going with them. These six brothers also went with me, and we entered the man’s house. 13 He told us how he had seen an angel appear in his house and say, ‘Send to Joppa for Simon who is called Peter. 14 He will bring you a message through which you and all your household will be saved.’ 15 “As I began to speak, the Holy Spirit came on them as he had come on us at the beginning. 16 Then I remembered what the Lord had said: ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ 17 So if God gave them the same gift he gave us who believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to think that I could stand in God’s way?” 18 When they heard this, they had no further objections and praised God, saying, “So then, even to Gentiles God has granted repentance that leads to life.”

5/18/2025

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Mission Moment

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes:

Week 2: Mission Moment

Rebecca Moeller from First Choice Solutions

Opening Prayer:

Alpha and Omega, First and Last,

glory outshining all the lights of heaven:

pour out upon us your Spirit

of faithful love and abundant compassion,

so that we may rejoice in the splendor of your works

while we wait in expectation

for the new heaven and the new earth you promise

when Christ shall come again. Amen.

Made Clean

Unclean

Being physically and spiritually clean has been a focus point for our faith as far back as we have recorded in history. Sometimes we grapple with it without even realizing or understanding the issue. On a very basic level, most of us learn from a very young age the difference between clean and dirty, whether that relates to our clothes, the dishes or our bodies. As we grow, we discover that a lack of cleanliness can sometimes lead to sickness, which motivates us to clean up after ourselves. As we grow into adulthood, we discover that cleanliness can affect more than just our physical lives. It touches our mental, emotional, and spiritual lives as well. From before the time of Moses, God’s people believed that you had to stay spiritually clean to stay spiritually healthy and enjoy the blessing and presence of God in your life.

For the Jewish people, sins are equivalent to spiritual dirt. And the worst kind of sins were the ones that involved worshiping or honoring anyone or anything other than God. Some think that people who worship money become prone to stealing and dishonesty, those who worship various forms of human love can be drawn into adultery and other kinds of relationship sins, and those who worship power and authority can be tempted to abuse that power and authority. Many cultures make up gods and create idols to worship in those areas. The result is the same whether you’re focusing on the sinful behavior or the unhealthy attitudes and attention. We get spiritually dirty, and then we have to face the consequences.

One of the ways that the Jewish people saw the temple of God was as a place where they could come and get spiritually cleaned up. They repented, brought their sacrifices, and could walk away, spiritually clean. They protected the temple just as we protect places like hospitals. They didn’t allow the spiritually unclean to wander around and contaminate everyone and everything else. Yes, they were there to get clean, but there were rules and stipulations, and they were only allowed in certain places just as you and I cannot walk into the hospital's operating room any time we want.

But this idea of the temple being like a hospital was not from God. It developed over time as the Jewish people struggled to live in a fallen world, but stay spiritually clean and connected to God. Jesus got in trouble when he turned over the merchants' tables in the temple because those merchants were selling animals to give people the opportunity to become spiritually clean. We sometimes miss the last part of Isaiah 56:7 he quoted to them, stopping at saying that God’s house was to be “a house of prayer...” and forget to add on the last couple of words, "...for all nations." The temple in Jerusalem was not there for the Jewish people to come and feel good about themselves, hiding within its walls. It was there, and they, as the people of God, were to be a lighthouse to the rest of the world, drawing all people to God.

We continue to struggle with who is clean and who is unclean today. As I shared a few weeks ago, we judge ourselves and each other, even when we strive not to. And rightfully so. Truth is real. There is a right and a wrong way to live. And when you and I choose the wrong way, and find ourselves back in sin, we end up hurting others and ourselves, and everyone deals with the consequences. So we struggle with this idea of being spiritually clean and clean. We struggle even more with the way Jesus handles it because He has the power to redeem more than we can imagine.

Call Inside

It seems like Peter was always struggling to follow Jesus. While that may seem like a bad thing, I think Jesus saw Peter‘s willingness to struggle and stick with Him and honored that persistence by calling him closer and giving him more than he could handle or understand by himself.

Our passage today is about Peter, sharing with the Disciples in Jerusalem about the new work Jesus did in His life and the lives of the Gentiles. They heard that he had been in the house of an unclean Gentile family and had even shared a meal with them there. In fact, they were probably hearing about other Jewish christians who were forgetting or ignoring sooner of the most important parts of their Jewish heritage. So they ask Peter to explain himself, trying to get to the bottom of this behavior that looked like people compromising their faith.

Peter tells them he received a call from Jesus in a dream. In his dream, he saw a sheet filled with all kinds of animals before him, and he heard the Lord’s voice telling him to kill and eat them. (That makes me wonder if Peter went to bed hungry.) However, rather than being excited to get a huge meal, Peter was disgusted. One of the most prominent marks that set the Jews apart from others and kept them spiritually clean, was what kind of animals they were allowed to eat. On that sheet were many animals that were considered unclean. Jews would’ve been revolted by the idea of eating some of those animals, just as we probably would if someone offered us dogs or cats or rats to eat.

Peter passionately rejected that call, telling Jesus, “Lord, nothing unclean has ever passed my lips.”

Then Jesus responded just as passionately, “Do not call unclean anything I have made clean.”

I don’t know if Peter had heard rumors about some Gentiles beginning to believe in and follow Jesus, or, if so, what he thought about that initially. It’s hard to tell if Peter was picking up the hints from this dream about what it would mean for those who follow Jesus and were allowed into the Church fellowship. But here’s what we do know: Jesus had to give Peter that dream three times before he was ready to do anything about it.

Jesus speaks to us from the inside, in our dreams, in our prayers, and in the voice of our conscience through the Holy Spirit to transform our minds and prepare us for the work he has for us. And sometimes we are like Peter, and it takes more than once for it to sink in and for us to accept that call.

Call Outside

How do we know if it is really Jesus speaking to us?

When we recognize the voice of Jesus in our lives, calling us to change how we see and think about things and to take action accordingly, that call from inside us will also meet a call from outside. Jesus always goes ahead of us, preparing the way. As soon as Peter woke up from having that dream three times, someone knocked at his door, inviting him to go to the home of a Gentile. For a good Jew, that might not have been as bad as being invited to a pork barbecue, except that they all figured the Gentiles had pork barbecues in their homes all the time, and you’d probably get spiritually dirty and spiritually sick just by being around those places. But, since Jesus had already been working on him, Peter said yes, and went with the messengers to the house of Cornelius.

Cornelius had also been given a vision from God and God told him to go find Peter. Remember how I said call meets call? There you have it. There’s a miracle about to happen in this place. Peter and Cornelius will probably think the miracle is when the Holy Spirit fills the hearts and empowers these Gentiles just like he did with the disciples at Pentecost. But God can pour His Holy Spirit out on anyone anytime. In the Old Testament, he spoke through pagan prophets, and even the donkey that the pagan prophet was riding. I think the real miracle here is that for the first time in the history of the Jewish people, you have a Jewish man of God, going into an unclean gentile house and inviting all of those unclean Gentile people to follow Jesus and join the family.

There are some beautiful examples of Gentiles joining God’s people throughout history, but it’s almost always one at a time, and they usually have to go to the home of the Jews. God’s people didn’t go looking for them. The story might not just be a First. It might be The First. It was almost as if Jesus transformed Peter into a miniature version of his temple — not in a sense of cleaning up these unclean Gentiles — but in the original sense of being a house of prayer for the nations, drawing all people into relationship with God. That’s a little hard for me to wrap my head around, and I’m sure Peter would not have understood it if Jesus had just told him. So Jesus gave Peter a dream about the wildest barbecue picnic he never wanted to go to — three times in a row — and he sent Cornelius a message telling him to send for Peter, because Jesus was going to do something incredible when they met. Can you imagine the friendship forged that day between two men and their families who had lived their lives trying very intentionally never to share a meal together?

Made Clean

I have heard people say that when God closes one door he opens another. But the devil opens doors for us too. Sin didn’t stop in the garden. Satan has been leading people from one sin to the next simply by convincing them to walk through anything open in front of them.

There is a third important step to verify that your personal experience (and the opportunity you see before you) are truly from God. This third step is looking at it through the lens of scripture… especially the teaching of Jesus. You don't have to memorize the whole Bible to do that, because Jesus interpreted the Old Testament with his words and actions. You can be sure that if Jesus teaches against your idea you should drop it immediately and if his teaching supports it you are on a firm foundation. It’s not always easy, but, as Peter pointed out to the other disciples in this passage, Jesus taught about the holy spirit baptism from the beginning. (And there was also that scripture from Isaiah 56:7 he quoted about the Temple.) They had just forgotten about all of that until the Holy Spirit was given to the Gentiles. In fact, the more Peter thought about the incident, the more he realized Jesus had been doing this with him and the other disciples, some of whom would have also been considered unclean.

And finally, Peter took others with him to help him discover what God was doing in his life. We hear God clearest when He is speaking through all of us. Don’t try to figure it out on your own.

I want to say there’s nothing normal about Peter’s experience in our pasted today. But the truth is, when you line it up through the lenses of that internal and external call and then compared it with the teaching of Jesus in scripture —this might be one of the most typical ways Jesus works in our lives every day. While we and the world battle and debate over who’s right and wrong, who is in and who is out, Jesus is very much at work, bringing all people to him. He’s forgiving their sins, bringing them healing and help, walking with them, and they deal with consequences, and redeeming and transforming them into the people he wants them to be.

And none of this is happening in isolation. He speaks to me, working on my attitudes and behavior, calling me closer to him and into greater surrender and obedience. And at the same time, he’s speaking to you through your times in prayer, listening to him, and your time in his word, as it helps you get to know him better and shapes and changes who you are. And then he brings us together, and we experience the confirmation of that call even as we struggle to accept it. Sometimes, in those small steps of obedience, we see our calls come to life, and we are finally, fully able to walk in them and follow Jesus the way he’s been leading us the whole time.

And the end result is this: people who never had any business being together become fast friends and family — Brothers and sisters because of Jesus. That’s the best kind of family there is. And it becomes normal, expected even. Things like this have happened dozens of times in my own life, and I could spend all day telling you some of the stories. I’ve never traveled outside the country, but I’ve been given personal invites to come and stay with people on all over the world, and not all those people call themselves Christians. We say only God can do something like that. But I tell you, Jesus does that all the time.

The Jews often treated the temple in Jerusalem as if it were a hospital for the sick and unclean. We frequently think of the church that way, also. I did chaplain training in Indianapolis with a couple of hospitals there, and I discovered that it's a powerful ministry, but it’s different from the church. I had free rein at the hospital, going into almost any room whenever needed. Usually, when I walked into the room, I was greeting someone who was a complete stranger to me, and I was meeting them at one of the most vulnerable times in their lives. Emotions and anxiety were often high and I had to figure out what they needed to get them spiritually healthy as quickly and as efficiently as I could. I would listen and pray with them, and when I left, I would continue praying for them. And my prayer typically was that God would bring them the healing they needed, get them back to strength, on their feet, and home again. And I prayed that I would never see them again, because if I did see them again, that was probably a bad thing. That’s hospital ministry.

That’s not the church. Maybe we’re a little bit more like a school: Bringing people together who wouldn’t usually end up together, learning and growing and working together with the hopes of one day graduating and going off to share our gifts. Some of us grow up to go work in other schools, and some of us go and start our own schools where there is no school to bring new disciples for Jesus. Some of us get to be the school nurse and do some hospital work in the school, helping the sick get back on their feet again so they can join in fully with everyone else. And even all that might be too limiting of an illustration of what Jesus wants to do in and around, and with and through all of us as we follow him and his vision of the church.

What has Jesus been sharing with you? What are those growing edges of your faith that you may still be struggling to understand or not quite willing to act on?

Where have you seen Jesus working in the lives of those around you: your family, friends, those you work with?

What scriptures has Jesus been bringing to you and where are you finding yourself connecting with them?

As you get answers to those questions, write them down so you can see them all at once, like four corners of a puzzle Jesus is revealing to you. You will begin to see glimpses of the way God is calling you out and connecting you into that redeeming work he’s about in our world.

Closing Prayer

Let’s take just a moment to listen to Jesus.

Lord, thank you for calling us out of sin and darkness into a holy relationship with you. Thank you for helping us stay in that relationship every day. Thank you for all the ways you work with us and for inviting us to be a part of your redeeming work. As slow as we are some days, we thank you for your patience in teaching and guiding us to see things more the way you do. To see each other more the way you do. And thank you for working in the lives of those around us and for how it encourages and confirms your call on our own lives. We know you are weaving all things together in ways far greater than we could ever understand. We trust the might, brilliance, and craftsmanship of all you do. Please help us do our part and follow you faithfully. In Jesus' name, amen.