What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, May 2nd, 2010

Fifth Sunday of Easter
Acts 11:1-18 • Psalm 148 • Revelation 21:1-6 • John 13:31-35

Now 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.”


When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. ³²If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. ³³Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ ³⁴I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. ³⁵By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

We live in an amazingly diverse community. This past week the Chicago Tribune reported that our metropolitan area still ranks as one of the top areas in the country where foreign languages are spoken. Chicago ranks among the top four cities in the country with speakers of Arabic, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Polish, Russian and Spanish. We are situated in one of the most multi-cultural contexts that exist in the whole world! In this beehive of culture, we can’t help but bump into one another in Chicago—when we stop for a moment, we can see how many cultures and languages are here when we’re in line at the grocery store, or walking around downtown on Michigan Avenue, or listening to conversations taking place in the park. These moments when different languages are heard, when different cultures are interacting, can be dizzying. They can be so overwhelming, they can even put us in a trance.

Several years ago I found myself in a trance as I witnessed a scene of such cross-cultural proportions, it only could have happened because of the grace of God. One summer I was a counselor for a program at the seminary called Beyond Belief. This is a program that brings youth groups into Chicago for a week to do service projects and study the Bible. One group came from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. This group of fifteen had never been to Chicago before. Being on the south side of Chicago was a true eye-opener for these “yoo-pers”. Many of them had never seen black people in person before. Many had never seen the kind of poverty that can exist here before. They truly had their minds blown away.

One night, we were coming back from a prayer service at a south side church, and we were looking for ice cream. We couldn’t find one anywhere. The neighborhoods we drove through did not look like safe places to stop, but we were tired and had been working all day…and we needed a reward. So we pulled into a place somewhere near about 80^th and Stony Island Boulevard. And here at this ice cream shop, deep in the heart of an African-American enclave on Chicago’s South Side, there were pictures of black heroes like Harold Washington, and Martin Luther King, Jr. on the walls. And in this shop, rural white teenagers from the U.P. were served ice cream by the employees—who were all Latinos! I looked around and thought to myself, only God could have made this kind of scene possible.

Now today’s world says that that situation could not have happened peacefully. The world says that that kind of situation should have caused someone to get angry, and someone should have gotten into a fight, or been shot. Today’s world says that hicks and urbanites can’t mix; that Blacks, Whites and Latinos need to mind their own business; that these wealthy youth didn’t need to bring their money into this dilapidated part of town. But at the end of the night, everyone got their ice cream, no one was hurt and some of the youth even started to talk and befriend a black man selling popsicles outside the store.

This trance of diverse hospitality is not all that much unlike a trance Peter that experiences. God sends him a vision of animals that by Jewish law and custom were unclean and forbidden; and God tells Peter to “get up…kill and eat.” (11:7) Peter resists. That can’t be! But God speaks to him a new verdict: “What God has made clean you must not call profane.” (11:9) All has been made clean and declared good, God says. Then the Spirit urges Peter to go and share a meal with Gentile people…people that Christians said were not “clean”, who did not follow the Jewish food laws that early Christians followed. But, as Peter goes and shares table with these Gentiles, “the Holy Spirit [falls] on them just as it had upon [Peter and the disciples at Pentecost].” (11:15) Peter baptizes these Gentiles, and forever opens the door of Christ’s church from then on to no longer make any cultural distinctions. God makes everyone clean—all are acceptable. God offers to all the same gift of repentance that leads to life in Christ.

These trances of the Spirit are indeed the work of the risen Christ, a sign of his presence. Jesus himself is known for crossing barriers. It is Jesus who breaks through the world as it is to reveal to us the world as it could be… It is Jesus who breaks through the distance between the mighty and the oppressed by building his kingdom not from the top down, but from the bottom up…Jesus breaks through past the barrier of death with the resurrection power of his risen life. Jesus can bring together that which has been separated. He identifies with all of us in a way much deeper than our tribe, much deeper than our culture, and much deeper than the language we speak. Jesus’ resurrection life transcends those who are just like us to reach everyone …so that he can meet us all first as human beings, as people, as redeemed sinners whom God claims as beloved. Who are we to hinder the Spirit from bringing together people of every tribe and nation in the name of Jesus? (11:17)

The Spirit did not just put a cross-cultural trance on Peter, or the early church. The Spirit has put a trance on United Lutheran Church ever since its inception in 1928. The Spirit did the amazing work of bringing together three very different kinds of Norwegian Lutheran Churches from Chicago to unite around a common mission in Oak Park. It was the trance-inducing Spirit that brought together the conversion-experience emphasis of the Hauge Synod at St. Paul’s, and the strong liturgical traditions of the Norwegian Synod at Our Savior’s, and the lay-based focus of the United Synod at Bethlehem. In the 1950’s that same Spirit urged on this congregation to look beyond its Norwegian-speaking-cultural identity to make no distinction (11:12) in orienting its ministry towards the surrounding non-Norwegian Lutheran “Gentiles” of this multi-cultural community.

And today, once again, as we are in a time of seeking to build faith and future, that trance-inducing Spirit is at work among us, setting our hearts on fire and urging us to re-orient ourselves towards the gifts and assets God has blessed us with that we can share with this diverse community. The Spirit grants us a vision of the “Gentiles” who do not sit among us this morning. Who is the risen Jesus calling us to reach out to? Who are the “Gentiles” whom we have chosen all too quickly to label as “unclean” but whom God has already declared “clean”, through the work of the Spirit that makes “no distinction”?

Jesus crosses through any barriers to bring his love to us, and to bring us together. He empowers us with the Holy Spirit to cross any barrier that would keep us from sharing his life with the world. Maybe one place we can look for the Spirit to show up is at our tables, the place where Peter saw his Spirit-induced trance of God making what was forbidden clean. Maybe we can transcend the ties to our tribe and culture by the welcome we give to a Gentile to dine with us at our dining room tables. Maybe today, and every time we are at this table in church, we don’t have to go to the South Side of Chicago to catch a vision or be put in a trance like Peter; perhaps as we all are invited to come forward today to be at this dining room table with Jesus, we will catch a vision and be put into a trance…a trance that the Spirit pours out onto everyone: where no distinctions are made, where no one looks exactly just like us, but where at the end of the day, everyone will get fed. Amen.