Bible Text: Acts 11: 1-18 | Preacher: Rev. Jenn Geddes
Change can be hard. There are few cliches that are so true. “Changes”, however, is one of the most catchy of David Bowie’s songs. The song emphasizes the fact that Bowie had an incredible ability to adapt to change- particularly in his artistic career. This is rather interesting, since Changes is also considered Bowie’s official North American debut. It is a song about defying all those critics and being who you feel you were meant to be- at that particular moment. It also related to his family life in that he and his then wife were about to experience change with the birth of their first child. The song created a new trend in music as it was one of the first pop songs to include a stutter which would then inspire My Generation and Bennie and the Jets. This song actually changed David Bowie’s career too, in that it was supposed to be a parody of the ditties in nightclubs but as fans began to enjoy it, they began to chat for it, and Bowie had to put it into his live performance rotation. It was the last song that Bowie performed upon his retirement from live performances in 2006. And of course, as a Bowie fan, I mourned the change that took place on Jan 10th of this year upon his death. Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes/ Turn and face the strange/ Ch-ch-changes/ Don’t want to be a richer man/ Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes / Turn and face the strange/ Ch-ch-changes/ Just gonna have to be a different man /Time may change me/ But I can’t trace time. Change can be hard.
Change can be particularly hard when it involves faith and faith practice. In fact, change can not only be challenging but challenged and that is exactly what happens to Peter as he makes some major changes to some major laws within the practices of the early church. But before we being I want to point out this is not a story about the irrelevance of kosher laws. Rather it is a story about the importance of contextualizing the gospel, and the need for us to see the saving activity of God in all kinds of cultural contexts, contexts that can even be new, unfamiliar and vastly different from our own.
The reading we hear this morning is actually a synopsis of events that took place in the previous chapter. Acts 10 is the thorough details of the event in question. There are few stories in Scripture that take so many chapters to explain. That’s how massive this change was and how problematic it could have been for the early church. Most of Jesus’ actions or parables did not require such defences or explanations. So, it is important for us to touch upon the actual events so that we can tackle the synopsis.
Acts 10 begins by introducing a gentile named Cornelius, who happens to be a centurion of the Italian Cohort. It is unclear exactly how this man became a devouted man who feared God but we know that he has not been baptized and this is in part due to the current practices within the early church. He might have been unique or there might have been many like him who had heard about God, Jesus, and the Spirit and believed, but at this stage they cannot become fully engaged in the community of faith because, they are not Jewish. They do not follow the same holiness code and purity laws and they are not circumcised. At the same time Peter comes to town and while getting a bit hungry has a vision in which Peter is invited to eat some unclean meat. While at first he resists God clearly states, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” Clearly, a symbol of the changing and expanding rule of God. Thanks to this vision Peter is then able to go to the house of Cornelius and the Spirit is clearly present and the Gospel is rightly preached and all of a sudden the entire household is baptized regardless of their genealogy.
Word gets out that Peter, who has followed strict kosher laws since his birth, is not only eating with gentiles but consuming unclean meat. Then on top of that, he has baptized uncircumcised believers. When the apostles hear this news in Jerusalem they think that Peter has fallen off his rocker, it is one thing to preach the Gospel to gentiles but it is entirely another thing to eat with them and certainly a departure from the strong traditions of his faith to baptize the uncircumcised. We must remember that Jewish laws and practices were rooted within the early church as all the first believers were Jews. The focus on Jewish practices is still strong within the first half of the book of Acts and of course the Gospel was first interpreted within the larger context of Judaism. Even the story of Pentecost, the story celebrated as the birth of the church, happened in Jerusalem to Jewish followers.
This story in both chapters 10 and 11 changes everything. Luke wrote his Gospel to a gentile named Theophilus, which means “friend of God” in Greek, so that Theophilus may know the truth concerning Jesus. The book of Acts is the second letter to Theophilus and while, of course, it concerns the truth about Jesus it is also about the new role of the Holy Spirit. This story of Cornelius and Peter’s change of practice are Luke’s way of forcing the early church to come to grips with the limitations of their own ethnicity and cultural context in proclaiming a universal gospel. What stands out most to me is the clear question that Peter asks, “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” What a great question. When people come to us and tell us that they feel called by God to participate in ministry, leadership in the church, follow a certain passion, take on a particular project within the church, who are we to hinder? No matter how deeply rooted our traditions, our doctrine, our laws, God is so much more. And sometimes the Spirit inspires change.
We love our traditions and there is always a time and place for them. Humanity is good at creating categories and establishing boundaries. We like to make distinctions between us and them. But Peter clearly interprets his vision to say that traditions can sometimes create separations, that cultural behaviour can prove to deter the spreading of the Gospel, that our contexts can hinder God, and that these divisions like that do not exist in God’s realm. Mitzi Smith, early Christianity scholar points out, “Even as God corrects our faulty theological anthropology, it takes time to undue years of putting tradition above God…We need to allow our biases and stereotypes to be checked. It is imperative that we engage with others different from ourselves, in more than superficial ways. And most of the time it will not happen when “us” keeps our distance from “them.”…God’s spirit will work despite, through, or prior to our ritual constructions. This is comforting knowing how often we get things wrong and how often we persist in making distinctions.”
Our national church is facing change, change due to demographics, change due to religious commitment or lack there of, change due to economics, change due to the multiculturalism in our society, change due to questions about inclusivity and sexuality, change due to welcoming refugees, time may change us and we can’t trace time, but the church changes because that’s what the church does. The Spirit guides that change and thank God! For without that change we would not be here today. Amen