Sermon Tone Analysis

What God has made clean, do not call common.

The charge against Peter in this passage is clear: He’s been hanging out with those people.

You know the ones: They eat weird food, they dress funny, and they have no idea what the unwritten rules of the congregation are.

They haven’t even followed the written rules like circumcision!

It would have been one thing if Peter had been talking to them or telling them what to change in order to come be a part of the religious community, but to go EAT with them!

That’s too far.

Peter was starting to act an awful lot like Jesus.

And we all know what a rabble-rouser Jesus was.

Sure, Jesus ate with drunks and prostitutes,

The text from Acts begins with Peter reporting to the church leaders in Jerusalem.

It sounds as if he was being called on the carpet for breaking the rules.

He had been eating with “the uncircumcised.”

A similar change had been leveled against Jesus for eating with sinners (Luke 15:2).

So Peter was in good company, but that did not make his confrontation with the Jerusalem leaders easy.

The church community has, since the beginning been arguing with itself about who is “in” and who is “out”.

What does a Christian look like and how do we change those who don’t look the way we think they should?

For a place meant to be a center of healing, the church is very good at setting strict, legalistic boundaries that hurt people.

Have you ever been to a church meeting when you could feel the tension in the air?

Such meetings often center around who is “in” and who is “out.”

In the present case, the tension was between those drawing a narrow circle of inclusion around the gospel and others who were busy expanding the circle until all God’s children had a place at the table.

I just finished a book yesterday.

It’s called “Shameless” and it’s written by a tattooed, pierced, divorced, recovering alcoholic Lutheran pastor named Nadia Boltz-Weber.

Until recently, she was the pastor of a church in Colorado called “The House For All Sinners and Saints”.

About this passage in , she says, “And God says something that forever destroys legalistic dualism and erases the boundaries between us and them: “What I consider clean, do not call impure.”

What God claims to love, do not deem unworthy of that love.

What God has called good, do not call anything other than good.

What God has animated with God’s own breath and endowed with a soul and God’s own image, do not treat with anything less than dignity.”

(Shameless, p 181)

I just finished a book yesterday about legalistic boundaries that hurt people.

It’s called “Shameless” and it’s written by a tattooed, divorced, recovering alcoholic Lutheran pastor named Nadia Boltz-Weber.

Until recently, she was the pastor of a church in Colorado called “The House For All Sinners and Saints”.

Now that her writing and speaking career has taken off, she’s left there to focus on that.

About this passage in , she says:

And God says something that forever destroys legalistic dualism and erases the boundaries between us and them: “What I consider clean, do not call impure.”

What God claims to love, do not deem unworthy of that love.

What God has called good, do not call anything other than good.

What God has animated with God’s own breath and endowed with a soul and God’s own image, do not treat with anything less than dignity.

(Shameless, p 181)

I love the Psalms that declare the glory of God through their awe over creation.

Today’s Psalm calls every living thing to come join in the joyful praise of God’s name!

I find that very easy to get behind.

Francis of Assisi is probably my favorite saint.

Bridget was said to have turned a bathtub of water into beer, so she was probably a load of fun to hang out with, but Francis talked to animals, so I feel a real kinship with him.

He was really connected with creation and honored the idea that our connection with nature strengthens our connection with God.

The story goes that once he was walking down the road and saw a tree full of birds.

He was so moved by the tree full of birds that he stopped and preached to them.

It is easy to get swept up in the excitement and beauty of creation like Francis did.

But people?

Ugh.

It’s much harder to give all people the dignity that they deserve.

Especially because there are so many people who have already been robbed of most of their dignity by society, or worse yet, those who have robbed themselves of their dignity.

Giving back dignity to someone who has lost it somehow goes against the grain and is just plain uncomfortable.

It’s so much easier to see God in creation than in other people.

It’s easier said than done to follow in Peter’s footsteps and reach across the boundaries we put up between one another.

I’ve told you about the group of people in Rwanda - the Light Group - who are working to create real Christian community based on forgiveness.

We met with people in similar organizations in Israel and Palestine.

Israelis and Palestinians literally reaching out across borders and getting to know one another.

One that is particularly striking began when some imprisoned Palestinian activists and Israeli soldiers serving as prison guards met and realized that the ones on “the other side” were not the evil monsters they had been told by their political leaders and media that they were.

It’s not easy for groups like this to go on.

Members are often disowned or mocked by friends and family.

The fear of the “other”, the “unknown”, the “different” is strong and it is real.

Ugh

The fear for Peter and his cohort was that by eating with these weird others, he would become unclean as well.

Often that is our fear in these sorts of conflicts.

We are afraid that being with the different will change us or maybe even harm us.

In Murchison Falls Park in Uganda, we had a hilarious pair of guides.

They had us cracking up the entire trip.

They were also a wealth of local knowledge.

Uganda as we know it today was, once upon a time, many smaller kingdoms.

When European colonists took over there, they drew arbitrary boundaries and declared places to be countries.

Suddenly, all these separate kingdoms found themselves governed by one government.

Today, these kingdoms operate a bit like states or territories to in the US or Canada, but there is still some tension between people in different parts of the country because they don’t really know or understand the culture of the other kingdoms.

David, one of our guides said that growing up, there was a place in the north of the country that every said was the most dangerous place in all of Uganda.

They were warned not to go there because the locals would kill them and possibly eat them.

So, of course, when he first started working as a guide and cook for a safari tour company, he was almost immediately sent there.

He said that when he got there, he realized it was totally fine.

And when he got home, everyone was amazed that he was ok and he wasn’t hurt while he was there.

He told his friends and family that he had learned that the people there looked like them, ate similar food, spoke English like them, and were friendly and welcoming.

They didn’t harm him.

Although, venturing into the different did change him.

He went from living in fear of the different to living in the freedom that comes with acknowledging that all people are worthy of dignity and friendship.

We do not just do this to other people: deny them their dignity.

We’re very good at denying ourselves our own dignity.

We are great at forgetting that we are made in God’s image.

Which is probably why we spend so much time in fear of what is unknown.

Of course we’ve sinned.

Of course we have baggage.

Not a one of us has lived into God’s image perfectly.

But that doesn’t mean we have to walk around carrying all that baggage!

That doesn’t mean that God can’t do wild and incredible things through us!

Just because you have a past of some sort and aren’t perfect doesn’t mean God doesn’t have a good and loving new name for you like he did for Saul, now Paul.

Just because you don’t have the same set of flashy skills other people have doesn’t mean God can’t do great things through you like God did through Tabitha.

Just because you are different doesn’t mean you don’t deserve the same dignity that every other person alive on this planet deserves.

Aha

A similar change had been leveled against Jesus for eating with sinners (Luke 15:2).

So Peter was in good company, but that did not make his confrontation with the Jerusalem leaders easy.

When we sell ourselves short, we try to justify it as saying that low self-esteem, lack of confidence, beating up on ourselves for our past or our shortcomings or whatever doesn’t hurt anyone else.

So we allow ourselves to not bother working through that with God.

And that is a lie straight from the adversary.

Wallowing in our own perceived unworthiness absolutely hurts the people around us because we cannot love others the way Jesus calls us to if we can’t even figure out how to love ourselves.