Encounter the Good
For Christians and especially pastors who hold a more inclusive view of Christianity there are few passages of Scripture more validating or exciting to preach on than Peter’s vision in Acts 10*. As the narrative reads, Peter is on the roof of a home in Joppa when he is overtaken by a vision of the sky opening, a sheet-like object descending to the ground covered in the unclean animals of Levitical and Torah Law, and a voice telling him to (almost disturbingly) slaughter and eat. When Peter objects, saying that he has “never eaten anything profane and impure,” the voice responds with something that we should more readily adapt and utilize in our understanding each other as humans who live in relationship to ourselves, each other, and Creation:
“Do not deem profane what God has made pure.”
Living in the age of babel or rather in a world where we are caught up in our dependence on the powers and principalities**, it should come as no great surprise when we realize that we are a people who tend to more regularly live by and for our divisions than our unity. The narrative of us versus them is simply easier. Someone is for us or against us. Friend or enemy. Clean or dirty. Safe or dangerous. Sacred or profane. Holy or unholy.
We live in a world where we tend to freely label people as our enemies, neighbors, coworkers, family members, political figures, it often seems as though no one is safe from being considered an enemy. Scripture and the witness of the early Church tell us something different though, they tell us that no human, no person is our enemy. Death is our enemy (1 Cor 15:26), the “spiritual forces of wickedness” are our enemies (Eph 6:12), and it is from these forces that Christ liberates us from. While humans have a tendency, and perhaps even a predisposition, to being caught up by if not outright possessed by these principalities, it is these principalities which are our enemies and which need to be resisted — or as the blog name suggests, disrupted.
Encounter the Good
It is an easy thing to take the route of principalities such as Focus on the Family, Answers in Genesis, and Pure Flix which rely on this sort of “us versus them” mentality, this tendency to be suspicious of, if not outright hostile towards, “the world,” substituting our “Christian” science for their science, our “Christian” culture for their culture, our own “Christian” celebrities in favor of the images surrounding us but this seems a lazy and inefficient way out as it seeks to wall us off rather than send us out***. Instead, we may have to do the work of dropping this Christian/secular binary as we no longer live in either and age of easy divisions or Christendom. No, we live in a mixed society, where the two forces of secularism and Christiandom have mixed and despite what some may say it is difficult to examine the world around us as being uninfluenced by Christian ethics, thought, or philosophy.
Every advance in the development of Judaism rested in the people’s being taken away and returning as something new — returning to the land and claiming that they, the diaspora, were the true Jewish people. There has always been this attempt to sequester ourselves off from the rest of the world, and while it was a trend in the development of Judaism — to mix with the greater culture and bring its influences into the faith, so too do we as Christians continue in the trend. It would seem, as Christians, that we are in the same boat now. Our Christianity is impacted by our culture, our culture is impacted by Christianity.
At the end of the passage, the gathered brethren end up rejoicing over the news of the included Gentiles when Peter rhetorically asks, “if God gave them a gift equal to the one he also gave us when we had faith in the Lord Jesus the Anointed, who was I that I might hinder God?” And they respond, “Then God has also given the Gentiles a turning of the heart towards life.”
In my life as a pastor and as a Christian I seek to live in an attempt to see Christ in all people, in all things, meaning that rather than reject the world we live in, rather than simply write some things, some people off as unclean, I try to find the good, to find God. When I look at those who I might be tempted to write off as evil, as monstrous, I make an effort to see not merely that person as just someone who is evil, rather I seek to remember that the person is someone held in bondage, sometimes even possessed (as I’ve written about in my article referring to the president). I try to live amidst babel by remembering the humanity of others — the personhood of others. To live in an attempt to call others pure and not profane.
Lord, I come to you admitting that all too often I fail to be an obedient servant. As a part of your Church, I have not done your will, I have broken your Law, I have rebelled against your love, I have not loved my neighbor, and I have failed to hear the cry of the needy. Forgive me as I pray you would forgive all of us and guide me in forgiving others, seeing them — not as enemies with whom to compete, but rather as brothers and sisters in you. Amen.
* While the actual vision takes place in Acts 10 the lectionary reading pulls instead from Acts 11, when the body of the church comes together to validate his vision.
** The powers and principalities are those things in the world that are higher than humanity and yet less than God, they are what Paul and other New Testament authors would refer to as the rulers or archons in high places, as William Stringfellow argues throughout his work they are beings which base their authority in themselves and thus their authority and their morality can only lead to the only true moral reality, apart from God, Death.
*** Were not these organizations so prevalent at this point we might be able to simply write them off as fringe views, for instance, the Creation Museum (the main site of Answers in Genesis) reported over 800 thousand visitors in 2017 alone; the fringe is larger than we care to admit.
Scripture quotes are from
- Hart, David Bentley. The New Testament: A Translation. New York: Yale University Press, 2017.
