When the unclean becomes clean

 A sermon for the 5th Sunday after Easter

Text: Acts 11:1-18, John 13:31-35

I have prided myself on having a broad palate, appreciating different food from different parts of the world. I have my limits, like anyone else, and discovered two of them when I lived in France. My first experience was when my wife Kim and I arrived in a village in Alsace, and stayed with the parents of the graduate student we had welcomed to Bloomington a month before. Our first meal with them was cheese and cold cuts. I saw salami and sausage, and there was some other sliced meat that I didn’t recognize. At bedtime, Kim warily asked me if I was aware of what I had eaten: head cheese, and I had had seconds of it. It tasted that good, but knowing what it was has taken my appetite away for it. I graciously thanked her for not telling me at dinner what I had just eaten. My second experience of setting limits on what I would eat came several months later, when my Alsatian language classmates and I went out to a countryside restaurant that served the best waedele in the world (in Alsace). This time I had an idea of what it was, but was still shocked to see a cow tongue on my plate along with cabbage and potatoes. I respectfully ate part of the meat, but reached my limit soon after. Now, I’m a city boy, raised in Louisville, and my mother grew up in the northern Boston suburbs. There was no country cooking in our house growing up, so both head cheese and waedele were quickly put on my personal “unclean food” list. I have not knowingly had either since my days living in France.

I did not look down on the French for their preference for certain foods, and in fact I enjoy many other dishes that are part of their cultural heritage. I also love good kim chi, which many won't touch because of its smell. And, what is acceptable food to me is unacceptable to people in other countries, cultures, and religions. This is unlike the apostles who were scandalized by Peter for not only eating non-Kosher food, but eating it with Gentiles. Peter’s decision was the worst possible sin that they could think of, breaking several dietary and social laws that had been followed for centuries. But Peter led them step by step, as we heard in Acts, through the reasoning behind his decision. Peter knew what he was getting into when he was confronted by this group of Jesus’ followers, and understood that they believed that Jesus had come to save the Jewish nation. Peter also understood that he and Paul of Tarsus both saw Jesus as the savior of the world, Jewish and Gentile. Just when the apostles thought that they understood how God shows no partiality, Peter screws it all up when he breaks that fourth wall of Judaism and extends God’s impartiality to Gentiles. The encounter with the Syrophoenician woman showed that Jesus’ gospel was not just for the Jews; the gospel was also for the unclean, unholy Gentiles still held in contempt by some of the disciples. Peter challenged their piety and holiness and redefined them as love for one another, not as eating the right food, eating in the right places, and eating with the right people. Purity was now defined as faithfulness to Jesus, not faithfulness to the 613 laws in the Torah. There is a parallel, then, between what the law says about what is clean and unclean, and what God said was clean and unclean to Peter. The law that the others followed defined certain foods as clean and set apart. They were kosher. However, God said to Peter that what God had created is already set apart, and tells Peter to stop making them unclean by rejecting them because of the laws. By placing the laws above God’s commands, Peter had made unclean what God had made holy. God’s revelation to Peter was that all of God’s creation was clean and holy.

The apostles berating Peter had an us vs. them mentality that Jesus addressed at the last supper when he said “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples…” They saw a limit to the extent of this new challenge, to love those who were like themselves. And because there was a limit, their reaction to any change was to defend the purity of their beliefs and actions. The resurrection had been a pivotal moment in their lives, and would later profoundly affect the world. The Jesus movement took off after Jesus had appeared to his followers and after showing them how to see things in a new way. But, that newness was not without its challenges and that led to resistance to change and defense of the traditional. Why change everything just because Jesus died and was resurrected? Couldn’t we just fit that into the life we’ve been leading and are familiar with? It didn’t work that way because the change and newness was a recognition of the impact of the new way, and a sign of the new faith that they said that they believed. Their resistance came from having to give up the comfortable, the familiar things to follow through the implications of their professed faith. To accept the newness was to legitimize the changes that came with the gospel, and the apostles couldn’t decide where those changes should stop. Was it just for them, or was it for those undesirable outsiders? Did they really have to give up what they valued in life?

The pandemic has led us into a pivotal moment that has shaken us up like the Resurrection shook up the apostles. At my job, more than half of middle and upper management have elected to work at home full or part-time, going into the office only occasionally. Most of those people are women with children still at home, and they have challenged the company to look beyond the tradition of sitting in a cubicle farm as the only way to get work done. We have come face-to-face with social and health inequity that has been present for years, and are called to address it even as we try to turn away from it and deny it exists because we don’t experience it ourselves. Why change everything just because we had to avoid being infected with COVID? Couldn’t we just go back to the life we’ve been leading and are familiar with? When we look beyond the cultural rules that we have lived by for years, the answer is the same as for the upset apostles: no, we can’t go back, because the changes we have had to make go far beyond the limits of our family and friends. The changes we have made or were asked to make are for the whole world, God’s Creation, as our attempt to limit the danger and damage caused by an infectious disease. We can’t go back because we can’t unsee what the pandemic has exposed. Jesus’ challenge to us is to love one another so that the world knows that we are his disciples, and that means not expecting to express that love like we used to, but as the world needs us to express it now. That means that we do the "unclean" things that we didn't used to do because we are to be known as Christians, showing love for each other, not love for our human expectations or the rules we make.

We are now being resurrected from two years of a pandemic, and what we knew, and have since learned has taken on a new depth and truth. This is one of those moments where we live with both facts and faith, and in this case, we need to have faith in the facts we have learned. We need to have faith that the facts are not just for us, or not for us at all, but for the whole world. The newness that we are facing is pushing us to think beyond our smaller community to consider the whole world. That world will know us as Christians for our love of each other if we don't proclaim what is clean or unclean, but instead see that what God has done through us is clean and holy.