Peter’s Vision

Eric Lemonholm

October 23, 2011

Proper 25 A – with altered First Lesson

First Reading Peter’s Vision          Acts 10:1-16

Psalm Psalm 1

Second Reading 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8

Gospel Matthew 22:34-46

 

Almost every time you read a story in the Bible, you hear something different than you heard before.

In every Bible story are the seeds of many different sermons.

God speaks to your heart through the words of the human writers of the Bible each time you read.

And because you are in a different place in your life each time, God speaks to your heart differently.

God’s word is richer than we can possibly imagine.

You can never exhaust the depths of meaning in the Bible.

Every time you read it you’ll find something new.

One of the reasons we come to worship each week is to hear the word of God spoken and proclaimed.

God’s word does not change.

But we change.

We grow.

We age.

Our world changes.

So how we hear the Bible changes.

The Holy Spirit speaks a different word to us at different times.

 

We’ve just heard part of the story of Peter and Cornelius.

I don’t know how the Spirit is speaking to you through this story.

But let me share with you how God is speaking to me through this story today.

In some ways, this story is so familiar, almost too familiar.

We live on the other side of history from this story.

Peter is a righteous, faithful Jew, and a follower of Jesus.

He’s probably never met Phillip’s friend the Ethiopian eunuch.

All the Christians he knew up to this point were Jews.

Peter followed the Old Testament laws about food.

So eating with Gentiles, non-Jews, in a Gentile home was very difficult.

Peter assumed that followers of Jesus would continue to follow the Old Testament law in its totality.

He was wrong.

 

Two people in this story have visions.

Visions sent from God.

 

The first was Cornelius.

He was a centurion, a leader in the Roman army, a Gentile.

He was stationed in Caesarea, the center of the Roman government of Judea.

Listen to how Luke describes Cornelius:

He was a devout man who feared God with all his household; he gave alms generously to the people and prayed constantly to God.

Cornelius was devout.

He feared God, giving God honor and obedience.

The evidence of his devotion to God was in two things:

First, he gave alms, gifts of money, to the poor.

Second, Cornelius prays.  He lives a life of prayer.

 

Cornelius has a vision of an angel, who comes to him and speaks.

The angel says, “Your prayers and your alms have ascended as a memorial before God.”

You see, this vision did not come from nowhere to just anybody.

The angel appeared to a person of prayer and compassion.

Love for God and love for one’s neighbor.

That’s what Cornelius lived out day by day.

It reminds me of the old question, “If you were on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”

And what does being a Christian mean but to love God and love our neighbors?

As Jesus said, “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

 

Let me start with loving God, with prayer.

How do we show our family and friends that we love them?

We spend time with them.

We talk with them, in person or on the phone.

We write a letter or an email.

If I said I loved my parents, but I never called them or spent time with them when I could, my love would be dormant.

If I said I loved my children, but I never bothered to get to know them and share myself with them, my profession of love would ring hollow.

If I said I loved my God, but I never spent time in prayer, sharing my heart with God, and listening for God in the Bible and in God’s world, my love would be dead, and so would my faith.

 

That’s why prayer is so important.

Never talking to God is like never talking to your best friend.

It just doesn’t make sense for Christians.

We do not all pray in the same way.

There are many different prayer styles.

But prayer is not optional for followers of Jesus.

It is a core practice, basic communication with God.

 

The second thing that Cornelius does, and which God notices, is that he gives alms to the poor.

He helps the people, especially people in need.

That’s something that God notices.

God has a heart for the poor and needy, the hungry and thirsty, the imprisoned, the alien, the widows and orphans of the world.

There are over 3,000 verses in the Bible that speak of God’s heart for the poor.

Cornelius is a man after God’s own heart.

 

In the vision, the angel tells Cornelius to send for Simon Peter, who is in the town of Joppa.

Meanwhile, Peter has gone up on the roof of Simon the tanner’s house to pray.

Peter was also a person of prayer and action.

While he was praying, he gets hungry.

And then Peter also has a vision, a vision that overturns the whole Old Testament system of purity laws.

The voice in his vision says to him, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

This happens three times in Peter’s vision to make it stick, and then the vision ends.

While Peter is trying to figure out what the vision meant, three messengers from Cornelius arrive to ask him to come to Caesarea to meet Cornelius and his household.

Peter shows the messengers hospitality, welcoming them in and giving them a place to spend the night.

 

Let me tell you the rest of the story, which we did not hear this morning.  You can read the whole story at home, too.

The next day, Peter goes to meet Cornelius and his household, and he tells the centurion, “You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.”

Peter understood that his vision was not just about food, but about people: if the food of Gentiles is no longer unclean to Peter, so the Gentiles are no longer unclean.

And so, Peter shares the good news of Jesus with Cornelius and his whole Gentile household.

Here is what Peter said in verses 34-43:

I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.  

You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ — he is Lord of all.  

That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: 

how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power;

how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.  

We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem.

They put him to death by hanging him on a tree;

but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. 

He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead.  

All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.

 

That is the good news of Jesus Christ in a nutshell.

The story concludes:

While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word.  The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God.

Then Peter said, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?”  So he ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Then they invited him to stay for several days.

Peter’s vision prepared his heart to be open to the mission to the Gentiles, without imposing on new believers in Jesus the purity laws and circumcision.

His fellow Jewish Christians could not deny the evidence of their senses, when they saw the Gentiles receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

So they baptized them right there.

And then Cornelius welcomed Peter to stay with them for a while.

Huge barriers of religion and culture had been overcome in that meeting.

As Peter said, “God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”

God is the God of all nations, all cultures, all races, all religions.

We are all God’s children.

That is what God spoke through the two visions of Cornelius and Peter.

 

Let me tell you how this Bible story convicts me today.

I have a tendency to keep very busy doing many things.^[ii]

We hear that a lot these days, don’t we?

When you ask someone how they are doing, they answer “Busy.”

If someone isn’t busy multitasking, we think something is wrong with them.

We measure our worth by how busy we are.

We don’t just work 40 hours in a week.

We work 50, 60, or 70.

Last evening, for example, my family was going to the Lao Evangelical Church for dinner, and I almost stayed home to prepare for worship this morning.

But then, I realized, what better way of living out this morning’s text than by going for dinner with our friends in the Lao community?

I am thankful I went.  A big part of being a faithful follower of Jesus is showing up and taking time for others.

 

I think God is calling us to be less busy.

To stop and pray.

To stop and spend time in conversation.

To stop and care for ourselves and for others.

To stop and focus on what is essential: faith active through love for God and service for our neighbors.

To step back and discern how God wants us to spend our time, wisely and well, not doing more and more but doing less, but doing it well.

So stop and listen for God.

Open your heart to God.

Spend time with God.

And then, by God’s grace, the Holy Spirit will lead you to act for the sake of others, to be Christ to your neighbor, and to see Christ in your neighbor.