Ac 11:1-18
2 May 2010
5th Sunday of Easter
“Table Manners”
Enriched flour (composed of wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, and folic acid), soybean oil with TBHQ for freshness (by the way, TBHQ is tertiary butylhydroquinone), sugar, salt, leavening (which in turn contains sodium acid pyrophosphate, baking soda, and monocalcium phosphate), high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, cornstarch, and soy lecithin.
Would anyone care to guess what this list is all about? Well, it’s the list of ingredients on a box of Keebler Club Crackers I found on our kitchen shelf.
Recently, there has been renewed attention to the food that Americans eat. Or perhaps I should say: the food-like substances we consume, especially in processed food. There’s a witches’ brew of chemicals—some benign, some quite harmful—mixed up in it, along with added salt and sugar. And there’s the growing epidemic of obesity in our country.
About a week ago, I saw an interview with a retired lieutenant general who said that the number one reason people are refused admission to the armed forces is because they’re too fat. On a side note, he said something I hadn’t heard before. Apparently, in the 1940s, the main reason for Americans being physically unfit to sign up was malnourishment. The military considered it to be a question of national security, so it pushed for the free lunch program in public schools.
I guess it will take the military to push the food industry, and all of us, to get our act together and quit eating so much junk food!
Throughout history, cultures have addressed the stuff from which we gain sustenance in a multitude of ways. What one group of people reject as vile and disgusting is considered by others to be an exquisite delicacy. Ancient Israelites and modern-day Jews provide a classic example. Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 go into some detail on that point.
These laws regarding what is proper and improper, what is ritually clean and unclean, to eat—they’re just part of a comprehensive vision of life. Along with birth, death, sex, economics, and everything but the kitchen sink, instructions about food demonstrate the way the people of Israel, who are called to holiness, should live. In fact, the last part of Leviticus, starting with chapter 17, is referred to as the Holiness Code.
But perhaps you’re wondering, “What is all this talk about food? To remind us to eat healthy?” Okay, that’s part of it. Still, what we consume helps to define us. Remember, you are what you eat! It may be largely an accident of geography, but different cultures are associated with certain kinds of food. Thinking of cuisine, what comes to mind when I say Chinese…or Mexican…or Turkish?
However, there are other factors when it comes to eating. What we eat is also determined by any number of overlapping values, be they religious, political, ecological, or whatever.
So what’s going on with Peter in our reading from Acts? It looks like he’s behaving—and eating—the way he should be. It looks like he’s been doing his very best to avoid food that has been proclaimed ritually unclean. He hasn’t defiled himself by eating improper stuff. That is, until his eyes are opened!
In chapter 10, we’re told the story of Cornelius, who lives in Caesarea. He’s what people refer to as a “God-fearer.” God-fearers are Gentiles attracted by the Jewish faith and who live according to its principles. The Bible calls Cornelius “devout”; he gives alms generously and observes the hours of prayer (v. 2). During one of these times of prayer, an angel appears to him, telling him to send for Peter, who’s staying in Joppa, about 30 miles down the coast. He has a message that Cornelius needs to hear.
It just so happens, as Peter re-tells the story in chapter 11, that while he’s been praying, Cornelius’ guys show up. And he has quite a story of his own!
It seems that he’s had a vision of “something like a large sheet coming down from heaven,” which contains animals of all kinds (v. 5). Peter sees critters with feet that run, wings that flap, and scales that are…just scaly! (This vision isn’t very vegetarian friendly.) The heavenly voice rings the dinner bell, and says, “Come and get it!”
As
I suggested a moment ago, there’s
plenty of stuff on the menu that has Peter saying, “Thanks, but no
thanks!” Then we’re told this: “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” (vv. 9-10).
When Peter’s Gentile
visitors arrive and tell him about Cornelius, something clicks inside him. He has one of those “a-ha” moments. And after he returns with them, as he is
speaking, he says that “the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us
at the beginning” (v. 15). And by “us,”
he means Jewish followers of Jesus.
What has happened to Peter? Dan Clendenin lays the groundwork. He speaks of how “the purity laws lent themselves to a spiritual stratification or hierarchy between the ritually ‘clean’ who considered themselves close to God, and the ‘unclean’ who were shunned as impure sinners far from God. Instead of expressing the holiness of God, ritual purity became a means of excluding people considered dirty, polluted, or contaminated.”[1]
So
in case you hadn’t figured this out by now, this isn’t just about food; it’s
about people. Notice the language of
verse 3; notice the way Peter is accosted. “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat
with them?” The Good News Bible puts
it this way: “You
were a guest in the home of uncircumcised Gentiles, and you even ate with them!” Peter, what in the world were you thinking?
Clendenin goes on, “In word and in deed Jesus ignored, disregarded and perhaps even actively demolished these distinctions of ritual purity as a measure of spiritual status. And as Peter learned in his encounter with Cornelius, Jesus asked him to do the same.”[2]
I think our friend Dan adds the word “perhaps” Jesus actively demolishes these things for the same reason I would.
In Mark 7, when
the issue of ritual purity comes up, Jesus says to his disciples, “‘Do
you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since
it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?’ (Thus
he declared all foods clean.) And he
said, ‘It is what comes out of a person that defiles’” (vv. 18-20). Only Mark adds the comment about Jesus
declaring all foods clean.
Still,
regardless of that particular incident—or the way that it’s told—it is
definitely within the character of Jesus to cut to the heart of the
matter. Jesus is all about removing
distinctions that cause damage. It’s
inevitable that we do have differences and distinctions, but encouraging the
ones that crush human life are not to be tolerated.
One of the things that our passage in Acts deals with is the question of diversity. Diversity can lead to schism, to rupture, or it can lead to what Bruce Epperly calls “stature.”[3] He refers to stature as “the ability to embrace as much diversity as possible…without losing your identity. The reality of stature reminds us that identity is a process and not a static reality.” That means identity isn’t stationary; it continues to move.
Just like anything that is alive, our identity continues to change—one would hope becoming bigger in heart and spirit. Think about it. Do we describe ourselves the same way as we did when we were children? (I hope not! I hope we’ve learned a few things!) What about when we were teenagers? And through adulthood, our identity continues to evolve. As Epperly notes, “As we embrace more reality, we grow in wisdom and stature.”[4]
That’s where the church is in Acts 11. They have to decide if they will let themselves grow in identity—who they say they are, how they define themselves—or will they turn inward? Remember, this isn’t something that Peter has welcomed. He has struggled against this expansion of his vision. (It had to happen three times!) But despite his resistance, he realizes that this change in table manners is a good thing!
What about us? Do we need a change in table manners?
Do we have any
purity laws of our own, ones that crush human life? Do we have any convenient rules that we rely
on to avoid the love-affirming, community-building, Holy Spirit-obeying way of
life we know we should follow? Are there
any people, or groups of people, that we automatically think of as unworthy—and
we move heaven and earth to avoid?
I
can’t answer all these questions. I
suspect that, if we’re honest with ourselves, there’s a lot of it that is true.
“A
second time the voice answered from
heaven, ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’” As we’ll see next week, the New Testament
church has to deal with this again: “Who
will we welcome to the table?” It’s a
question that arises in every generation.
And
for next week, I would like for us to ask ourselves that question. What is it within us that seeks to
exclude? What is it that we fear?