"No Distinction"

April 28, 2013

Acts 11:1-18

¹Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God. ²So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, ³saying, "Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?" ⁴Then Peter began to explain it to them, step by step, saying, ⁵"I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners; and it came close to me. ⁶As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. ⁷I also heard a voice saying to me, 'Get up, Peter; kill and eat.' ⁸But I replied, 'By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.' ⁹But a second time the voice answered from heaven, 'What God has made clean, you must not call profane.' ¹⁰This happened three times; then everything was pulled up again to heaven. ¹¹At that very moment three men, sent to me from Caesarea, arrived at the house where we were. ¹²The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us. These six brothers also accompanied me, and we entered the man's house. ¹³He told us how he had seen the angel standing in his house and saying, 'Send to Joppa and bring Simon, who is called Peter; ¹⁴he will give you a message by which you and your entire household will be saved.' ¹⁵And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning. ¹⁶And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, 'John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.' ¹⁷If 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?" ¹⁸When 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."

Sermon: “No Distinction”

When you have a vision, you can’t live the same way again.  I know it often seems like visions, such as Peter’s in our Acts reading this morning, only exist on the pages of the Bible, and not in the ordinary days of our lives.  But I know that this is not true.  I’m going to tell you the story of my vision, a story I don’t normally share with others and that I’ve never preached on before.  But when you have a vision, like Peter’s, it’s not meant to be kept to yourself.  It’s meant to be shared.

So, here I go:  I was seven years old, and it was April 11, a Spring day not unlike today.  I was worryingly small for my age and so my doctors determined that I needed to be tested for a growth hormone deficiency.  They did this by giving me an i.v. and dropping my blood sugar rapidly, so that my body would then respond by producing growth hormone, if it could.  It couldn’t.  When that i.v. went in, I felt immense pain.   And then I did not feel anything.  My mother tells me it was 12:34 p.m.  The pain just stopped, and I had a vision. 

I saw Jesus – honestly, I did – and he looked kind of like the Jesus in my Precious Moments Children’s Bible, a comforting Jesus for a child to see.  He was sort of glowing, and there was the outline of a gold city behind him.  He looked at me, a gentle smile on his face, and, with eyes that knew the very depths of my soul better than I ever could, he shook his head, “no.” 

And then I hurt again, and my parents’ hearts started beating again.  I had a grand mal seizure, and basically died.  Except that I didn’t.  My mother still calls me on   April 11 every year, wishing me a happy “second” birthday.

When you have a vision, you can’t live the same way.  I don’t force my faith on those who don’t believe Jesus is real because I happen to have actually seen him.  I don’t believe that’s what my vision was meant to do.  But I never doubt that he is there, especially in those moments of greatest pain, whether our eyes can see him or not.

When Peter had a vision of beasts and hunger, of the Spirit making “clean” what culture and religion had called “profane”, he shared it.  My vision meant new life, and a purpose.  Peter’s meant the same.  You see, the church was dangerously close to dying in that moment. 

Though the Spirit had been poured on all people, the followers of Jesus had decided to keep to their own, only sharing the good news with other Jews.  They were basically going to just stick a new label on an old identity, without changing or including anyone different from them.  When the church does that, it dies.

Peter woke up from his vision and was immediately called to change his behavior because of what he had seen and heard.  Strangers from Caesarea came and the Spirit told him to go and to “not make a distinction between them and us.”  And so Peter made no distinction, but shared the good news with them. 

He later explained it to the disciples, saying, “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?” 

All of their prejudice, all of their racism and pride, all of their self-righteousness, dissolved in the face of such a vision.  And the church that nearly died at its childhood…began to thrive.  Because of a vision and the courage to follow it. 

Only then, only when outsiders looked in on this strange motley crew of Jews, Gentiles and Greeks, of poor and rich, of young and old, of female and male, did they give them a title.  They were the birth of something completely new, and so like all newborns, they needed a name.  It was… “Christians.” 

It’s incredibly important to realize that this diverse gathering did not call themselves Christians, like some sort of banner of pride or mark of faithfulness.  They simply followed a vision, and let others call them whatever they chose.

Like I said earlier, visions do not just live in the pages of this book.  They are all around us, anywhere the Spirit is calling us to remember our belonging to God and one another, any time the Spirit is calling us to “not make a distinction between us and them” and “not call profane what God has made clean.” 

Many in these days speak about the church as a dying entity, as a symbol of a time-gone-by that will never be revived again.  Perhaps this is true.  But there is only one way to discover life again, one which I learned as a seven year old, and have tried to learn again and again ever since. 

It is not perfect programming, or a congregation of people who look, worship, vote and think exactly alike.  It is not a lucrative outreach effort or a competitive mission project.  The only way to new life is a Spirit-led vision of welcome and diversity, and the courage to follow it. 

Do we believe that the Spirit is still speaking?  Do we believe that God is still bringing visions, those that are otherworldly and those that come in the form of an ordinary moment? 

For the sake of the life of Christ’s fractured church, for the sake of a death-dealing and sorrowful world, for the sake of a community desperate for acceptance and purpose, for the sake of our very lives, I hope so.  If we do believe, then all of those things we have hindered God with: bigotry and anger, self-preservation and us-and-them politics and religion, they will melt away until all that is left is an inclusive love, fired by a vision, that cannot be described as anything but “Christian.”  Alleluia! Amen.