May 18, 2025
Acts 11:1-13
John 13:31-35
Simon Peter had had some really good days. As I mentioned last week, the wave of hostility to followers of Jesus led by Saul had subsided when Saul, himself, became a follower of Jesus. That had allowed Peter to travel to Lydda where he’d healed Aeneas, then to Joppa where he’d raised Tabitha. If I were Simon Peter, I’d have been really excited. Safety. Healing. Resurrection. That’s a hat trick to me.
Not that Simon Peter would have heard of a “hat trick,” of course.
As Luke told the story in the book of Acts, those events led to another event, an event so crucial that Luke couldn’t tell it just once. Just to give you something to compare, Luke told the story of Aeneas’ healing in five sentences. He told the story of Tabitha’s resurrection in twelve sentences. He told the story of Saul’s conversion, the person we know as the Apostle Paul, in nineteen sentences. But this story? The story of Simon Peter’s visit to Cornelius, the gift of the Holy Spirit, and the baptism of the household?
Sixty-four sentences.
What we read today is about a third of the text. One of the reasons it takes so much space in the book is that Luke repeated this story. He described it as a narrative, “as it happened,” and then he had people report on their dreams in the narrative, repeating a portion of what happened “as it happened,” and then we get this section in which Simon Peter reported on what happened to his fellow leaders in Jerusalem.
If you’re tempted to let this story glide by as if it weren’t important, Luke has put up a great big sign and has waved flags at you, saying, essentially, “Important story here! Do not pass it by!”
Kyle Fever writes at Working Preacher, “But this is not just repetition for repetition’s sake. Each time the acceptance of Gentiles is relayed a different aspect shines through, depending on the audience and particular situation. The constant remains, however, in that each telling focuses on God’s initiative through the Spirit and its effects.”
When he told this story to the church leadership, Simon Peter had already had time to digest these events. He’d had time to consider his vision in which God declared unclean foods clean. He’d had time to move past the shock of being summoned to visit a Roman centurion, an invitation that he might have expected to lead to his own arrest and crucifixion. Romans had executed Jesus, after all. He’d had time to absorb the warm welcome he’d received in Cornelius’ house, a welcome that actually included the centurion kneeling to him. He’d had time to feel relief that he’d found words to describe Jesus’ life, ministry, purpose, and meaning.
Most of all, he’d had time to reflect on the movement of the Holy Spirit among people who he had known, for a fact, couldn’t be moved by the Holy Spirit. Jewish men? Certainly. Uncommon, but if it was going to be anyone it would be God’s people, and, let’s face it, God’s men. Jewish women? Unlikely, but look, it had happened a couple times over the centuries, so they could cope.
Non-Jews? No. Not possible.
Simon Peter knew that. Tabitha’s friends had probably known that there was no relief from her death. Aeneas had probably known that there was no likely relief from his pain. Ananias had known that there was no way that Saul could change his ways. Saul had known that there was no truth to the message about Jesus.
Sometimes it’s nice to be wrong. That doesn’t change the shock of it, but when you know that something can’t be, how nice it is to discover that it can.
“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.’”
Six years ago Brian Peterson wrote at Working Preacher, “The church’s Spirit-led experience has brought new insights regarding things like slavery, racial equality and justice, women’s ordination, and LGBTQ dignity. Some of that may look obvious in history’s rearview mirror. Still, encountering the Spirit who is alive and pushing the church in new and astonishing directions can be frightening. However, the Spirit is not random or incoherent. The Spirit always pushes the church into greater practice of God’s love for all people of the world.
“This is a text about crossing borders. We know how contentious that can become! We put up walls, concrete or steel or metaphorical. It would have been more comfortable and seemingly safer for the early church to keep Cornelius and his Gentile household at arm’s length.”
Boundaries and borders, it must be said, have their uses. They are necessary. If you look at the simplest forms of life, those single-celled creatures we can see only through microscopes, they have a cell wall. Take away the cell wall, the creatures cease to exist. The reality of a boundary makes life itself possible.
We ourselves consist of somewhere around 30 trillion cells, give or take a few trillion. They’ve all got cellular walls to permit them to perform their different functions around the body. A red blood cell without a cell wall won’t carry oxygen anywhere. A skin cell without a cell wall won’t hold all the other cells in. Skin cells, in fact, are pretty remarkable for establishing a boundary that preserves the life of the other cells. During COVID we saw the results of a virus that could get around the skin barrier, and it wasn’t pretty.
Boundaries have a function.
Boundaries, however, are rarely absolute. A cell wall that won’t admit oxygen and nutrients is one that spells the death of the cell. I just talked about the way skin cells keep other organisms out, but it turns out there’s a bunch of organisms in the body already, and they do very useful things there. Research has shown that bacteria in the digestive tract actually help digest food. There’s plenty of germs that don’t help, but there’s also a lot that do, and our bodies don’t produce those bacteria. They’re with us for the ride.
Boundaries mean that we can have relationships of mutual support and benefit at the cellular level.
Boundaries mean that we can have partnerships at the human level.
Some years after Cornelius had his encounter with the Holy Spirit in Simon Peter’s presence, the Apostle Paul wrote that the Church is like Christ’s body, and like a body, it is made up of many parts, and the many parts aren’t the same, but they support one another. One part can’t do without another, he said.
It turns out that men can’t run the Church without women, though God knows we’ve tried and God knows how badly that’s usually turned out. It turns out that God has called gay men, lesbian women, and transgender persons into the community and into leadership, and God knows we’ve struggled as much or more as the Jerusalem council did at that. It turns out that Micronesians and Filipinos, Hawaiians and Fijians, and people from all the Pacific have been summoned by God.
Mitzi J. Smith reminds us that we do not fulfill God’s welcome without coming to terms with our failure to welcome. She writes at Working Preacher, “Many white brothers and sisters and some people of color deny that they ever perceive or treat people who are racially or economically different from themselves with bias. This is despite being entrenched in racialized, class-conscious institutions and traditions that presume people of color, women and others to be inferior. But the only way we begin to put an end to making distinctions between ‘them’ and ‘us’ is to learn to recognize and admit our biases and their impact on human relationships. Racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, and other biased behaviors and thinking are not godly; they are motivated by fear of the other and not by love of humanity. ‘God shows no favoritism’ for one human being other another.”
“I truly understand that God shows no partiality,” said Simon Peter in Acts 10:34. He understood it then, but he knew he hadn’t understood it before. He had to learn to extend a welcome, and he had to keep learning it all his days.
Cheryl Lindsay writes at UCC.org, “What proof do we offer the world of our discipleship? How do we wash the feet of our companions? How do we extend hospitality? How might we organize our local church for reaching out and creating a more inclusive and engaging community within? How do we show up when the world is looking for love?”
There’s our challenge. There’s our summons: to extend ourselves in welcome to those seeking a home for their spirit and healing for their souls.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric preaches from a prepared text, but he often improvises while preaching, so what you hear in the recording will not precisely match the text above.
The image is Saint Peter Baptizing the Centurion Cornelius by Jan Erasmus Quellinus – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59323889.
