God Hinder
Acts 11: 1-18

May 9, 2004

I apologize to those who have not seen the movie “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” but I hope I can describe well the mental picture. Those of you who have seen the movie should remember vividly, if not viscerally, what happened. Indiana and his cohorts have found their way into the palace of a suspicious local rajah (who declared he had been “up at Oxford” in younger days). Before any of the sinister events get underway there is a memorable banquet scene in which they are served a gourmet dinner of a very different sort - one of those campy events in which it is not always clear to me who is laughing at whom.

The cronies of this rajah are seated at the head of the table, oohing and aahing over the wonderful delicacies with which he has honoured them. Fried insects, soup with sheep eyes floating just below the surface like wonton, and the best are the stewed brains of a monkey served handily in the sheared-off skull of the unfortunate animal who doesn’t look happy.

Indiana and his friends are appalled nearly to nausea. We laugh because eating such things is repulsive and just plain unclean. People who eat unclean things are by definition unclean and therefore people to be avoided and shunned.

You are what you eat. And today we gather around the Lord’s Table to eat bread and drink the fruit of the vine. There is no culture where bread is unclean. Ironic that while Protestants do not believe in dietary laws, a lot of Protestants have made wine unclean in church. So it is grape juice today. You are what you drink.

The third Acts of the Apostles episode seems to centre on eating, but that is not what the controversy is about. Word, gossip and rumour had gotten back to the church leaders in Jerusalem that Peter was mixing it up with non-Jews or Gentiles and that these unclean peoples were accepting the pure Word of the Gospel. The leaders who still understood themselves as Jews confronted Peter hotly about his behaviour. How could you dare to eat with such pigs? That’s the gist of their comments, for being religious means a particular way of living and eating, and associating with only the right kind of people. Religion, it seems, is more concerned about how our status regarding other people than it is about our status regarding God. Peter responded to the accusations by reminding them about God’s table.

He repeats for these devout people the vision he had had in Joppa. A weird vision, to be sure, of a kind of table cloth lowered down before him with all sorts of unclean animals on it, perhaps like the table set before Indiana Jones. It’s a vision, so God is obviously talking to Peter, “Kill and eat.” Peter is a good boy, though, and passes the temptation test, “I never touch anything not kosher.” The voice comes back at him, “What God has made clean, you must not call common or profane or impure.”

The vision was over and three men showed up from Caesarea, asking Peter to accompany them. They were Gentiles, but Peter’s vision impressed upon him that there was nothing wrong with these people, that they were holy people too. When they arrived in Caesarea he met a man who had had a dream about Peter who was the right person to tell him about the New Life.

The Spirit came upon Peter as he spoke and the others felt it too, just like it felt originally on that Pentecost day. Then spirit, mind and body all came together in an insight. If God gives these people we consider barbaric and impure the same gifts of the Spirit as God does to us the chosen ones of Israel, then not only is it all right, but this is the way it is meant to be. We’ve tried to set God’s agenda and worked hard to decide who God will accept and not. But God has created a universe, and look, it is very good - and clean and pure and holy. If I want to hold back these foreigners as unworthy of God, I am hindering God. What human being has the power to really hinder God?

If I treat someone as unworthy of being Christian, I am hindering them from seeing the beauty and love of the God I have come to experience. Or rather, I am proving that I have misunderstood the nature of God all along, and am promoting a false God, an idol. A primary reason a Jew was not supposed to eat with a Gentile was that in sharing bread and rubbing shoulders, the Gentile’s worship of idols and false gods might well rub off on you and contaminate your soul. Peter does not say it out loud, but if I reject any thing of God, any one of God, as unclean and dirty and repulsive, I show that I have become the idolator. I have become the pagan who believes in a local deity who favours only those of the same colour skin, of the same language, of the same socio-economic status, of the same religion.

Mother Teresa, after all, worked her love with people who were clearly not Christian or anything close in world religion. They were obscenely poor people that their culture labeled irrevocably “untouchables.” In them she saw the love of God shining, and she was no one to hinder God.

This table we will approach in a few minutes is an open table. Everyone is permitted to come and eat, for this meal saves you and me by its nourishment. It does not matter what you and I think is going to happen. We do not have to agree about the nature of the bread and wine and exactly how the presence and spirit of Christ really happens as we share together the bread and wine. When we make distinctions and keep people away who think differently, perhaps think wrongly, we are hindering God. But we really cannot hinder God, for God will find a way to feed us from manna in the wilderness to the lunch at Soul’s Harbour. What God has made clean, you just can’t go calling dirty.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan