Acts 11:1-18
I have a friend called Paul, One day Paul read a report in his local newspaper about his home town, Halifax. The headline for this news story was Halifax the wild west of west Yorkshire. Basically the report was all about how Halifax town centre had become a no go area for many locals for a night out because of the amount of violent crime, binge drinking, underage drinking and sexual assaults taking place, Paul drew together a number of people from organisations like Churches Together and the YMCA to talk about how the church could change the atmosphere and reputation of the town and make it a safer place for all. Within two weeks the first Street Angles project was launched and within the first year there was a 57% fall in violent crimes and crimes related to alcohol in the town centre. West Yorkshire police attributed this to the work of Christian volunteers being out on the street working with the most vulnerable people in our community. Since 2005 this project has been rolled out across the country and even to places like Tenerife, Australia and the USA, in each place that Christians have invested into working with people in the night time economy they have seen lives changed, communities improved and people meeting Jesus.
In 2004 a man called Dave Smith was moved by the plight of Asylum seekers in his area of Greater Manchester, he saw how poorly they were treated, how many of them were homeless with no hope of securing accommodation, how many were abused by passers-by and even physically attacked, moved by Jesus bias towards the poor and marginalised in society Dave decided to put his faith into action and established the Boaz trust which offers accommodation, support, financial and benefit advice, they are changing lives one at a time and impacting communities which go hidden in many ways with the love of Jesus.
We all live with preconceived ideas and notions about who we are called to reach for the gospel, sure we know that the gospel is for everyone but really, really we are only called to reach people who are just like me, and even then if we are really honest with ourselves we tend to think that we’ll share Jesus with people when they approach us, ask us a direct question or basically scream in our faces “we want to know Jesus please tell us about him”. We think that our lives will tell our stories and help people to be inquisitive about what makes us different. But really, are we that much different to how the rest of the world lives and thinks, or have we conformed our lives to the patterns of this world happily going about our own business not sticking out that much as that might draw attention to us and people might ask uncomfortable questions. Please do not mishear me here, I am not judging you or having a go, thinking that the way that I live my life is better and more radical then you, in fact this is quite the opposite I read and reflect upon this passage of scripture and I am gobsmacked about how far away I am from the place that God wants me to operate in, and it scares me to contemplate what I need to do in order to live in the radical manner that a deeper and fuller relationship with Christ will result in. Please don’t mishear me again on this, it is not because I think that God is just out to get us, he is not, God is for us in such a big way, it’s just that I know that God dares us to be more adventurous, more daring and far more radical than we operate at as a norm.
The thing is that God wants us to be shaken up, to be risk takers to be people who venture to the places and people who are unloved and who are hard to love. He wants us to live open and generous lives that cost us, not because it is the right thing to do but because we have been lavished with love before we deserved and richly rewarded since our adoption as sons and daughters.
This passage is essentially about this, Luke – the author of Acts – wants to stress to his readers the amazing love, the wonderful grace and the abundant life that is on offer to all who trust in Christ regardless of where they are from, their socio-economic background, their ethnicity, their housing, their diet, their health needs, their rituals, how they identify themselves, the peer groups they hang out with, our preconceived ideas about particular people groups or areas or addictions or appearance or sexuality. The good news about Jesus is for all people.
Now Peter has just had his whole theological world rocked to its very core. Peter was a devout Jew, how do we know this… well we know that he was waiting for the messiah to come because he followed Jesus when he was called, we know that he paid temple tax, we know that he worshiped in the temple following the resurrection we know that he continued to struggle between the rituals of Jewish law and the freedom found in the grace of Christ. So we’ve just had this episode in Chapter 10 where Peter is on the roof praying and he sees this vision of this huge picnic being lowered from the sky… my kinda vision! So on this picnic blanket is every gourmet delight to whet the appetite, amazing stakes, wonderful chicken dishes, delightful breads and pastries, fantastic wines with rich deep bouquets that just hit all the senses, salads, cakes, and… but uh oh, there’s lobster and langoustine, right in the middle, and some slow roasted pulled pork with extra crispy crackling, miles of sausages, and the best melton mulberry pork pies, and Peter hears a voice saying go eat… Old Pete’s horrified, can this really be God telling him to eat something that is literally not Kosha! We know the story don’t we, God tells him to not call things unclean which he has deemed clean… and then the Lord tells him that some folks are going to come and meet him to take him to Caesarea where he is going to share the good news about Jesus to some gentiles… This is even worse than in Chapter 8 when Phillip preaches in Samaria at least the Samaritans can trace their heritage back to Abraham, as a devout Jew Peter could wrap his mind around Samaritans being included in the plans of the Messiah. I imagine that some wouldn’t be over the moon about it but at least it made sense to them. But the idea of pagan gentiles being included in the plan of salvation for the world, that’s just going a bit far. I mean come on how is a good Jewish believer meant to stay ritualistically clean if they are mixing with unclean people. How can they worship God who can only be accessed when we are ritually clean… now we know the answer to this, Jesus Christ is the once for all sacrifice that makes us clean forever and means that we can have access to the Father through faith in Christ. But we know that because of the writings and revelation of Paul. But Peter didn’t have this at the time. So he had to take a massive leap of faith to go to a place that he would never dream of going and do something that in all his life he has been told you must never do. Eat a meal with those who are ritually unclean.
Now we know the outcome of this, we know that Cornelius and his family all come to faith and there is a second outpouring of the Spirit or as some theologians call it, Peter experienced the gentile Pentecost.
But now we have a problem. News travels, and although news didn’t travel as fast in those days as it does now, the news of Peters visit to these gentiles still travelled back to Jerusalem quicker than Peter himself did.
So Peter makes his way back to his home church, probably buzzing about all that the Lord has done and the fresh revelation that he has encountered and what does he get. Criticism and accusations.
So we get this re-enactment of the story that we have just read, in chapter 10 but in a slightly different order, this is because it is from Peters perspective.
The amazing thing is that he doesn’t enhance his part in the story. He tells it as it is, he explains that he only gets part way through his explanation of the gospel when the Spirit of God fell causing Cornelius and his household to talk in tongues. To me this is a sign to show that we can trust the testimony, because in every earthly sense you’d want to hype up your role in the story… it would be so tempting to be like, “yeah I preached the life into those guys, I was whipping up a storm with the words that I was using, there objections were just knocked out the park, BAM gone! And then the spirit came and they all talked in tongues...” but NO, what we find is that Peter is only half way through his gospel presentation, and the Holy Spirit just shows up and it’s Cornelius and his household who start to manifest, not Peter and his companions, it’s the folks who don’t know Jesus.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if we saw more of this, if we went out to our parish, to our neighbours, our colleagues, our friends and family, strangers in the street, people whom we are directed to be the power of the Holy Spirit and as we get part way through talking with them, telling them our stories, BAM the Holy Spirit shows up and they start prophesying, or talking in tongues, or their healed or better yet they heal someone else, or they have revelation about the bible or a word of knowledge because we’ve tapped into where the power of Holy Spirit is at work.
Friends I am not the only person to be thinking and feeling this, I was prepping this on Thursday and I was thinking, am I crazy to be believing that God will do this sort of thing and at the end of the day I was taking a few moments to catch up on social media and I come across this post which Pete Greig the founder of 24/7 prayer that very day.
He wrote “Reflecting on how the charismatic renewal taught us to pray 'Come Holy Spirit' and for many years he has come surprisingly willingly to countless meetings, conferences, services and even (dare I say it?) - prayer rooms.
But now the tables seem to be turning. Everywhere I go in the world I sense that it's a new day; its time for the renewal of the church to overflow into the renewal of the earth.
Maybe the Spirit is now saying to us, 'Come, holy people. Come to *my* meetings. Come to the streets. Come to the schools. The clubs and bars. Come to the marketplaces, the messy places, the prisons. You've seen the wonderful things that can happen when I attend your meetings, but you really ain't seen nothin' yet! If you will just attend my meetings, you'll find out what my power, my presence, my advocacy and gifts can do!'
And so the question we must ask ourselves is this: Will we stay in our safe environments being renewed and blessed, or will we go out and become a blessing to renew nations?”
This is the challenge that we have today, are we prepared to go to the places that others are not prepared to go, are we willing to love those society finds hard to love, are we willing to open ourselves up to ridicule, slander and abuse because we believe that the gospel is for everyone and not just those who are like us.
I genuinely believe that when we love to the extremes that the loveless and the unloved become our priority then we will see a greater and richer outpouring from Holy Spirit as he extends Gods kingdom because we will be partnering with him to reach the ones who are closest to his heart.
Our legacy is to be world changers, our call is to be a dangerous people who go to the places that others won’t, who open up their homes and welcome the stranger, who are generous to a fault with their time, talents and things including finances, to be a people who risk everything for the sake of one person because we know that the Lord Jesus did exactly that for us. Living life like this may bring ridicule and scorn, it may actually provoke other Christians to be offended by the audacity of the grace that you offer as you live life with the same freedom that Christ offers all who trust in him.
You see there are countless testimonies about Christians taking action and changing a culture of a place, a town, or industry, motivated out of love but hear me as good as social action is and as much as we should be spearheading a social move of reform and change, if we are not dependent on Holy Spirit, if we are not looking for him to move in power in the lives of those we encounter then all we are engaged with is mere social work and as worthy as that is how does that make us any different from the rest of society.
In our reading today we see this trial scene where Peter gives an apology for what he has done, as he faces his accusers he doesn’t rest on an argument based on compassion, or unity, or grace or righteousness, what he rests on and what convinces his opponents is the testimony of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.
I mean who are we to think that we can stand in God’s way.
