By Father Casey
Life is always easier when you have people to look down on. You can be living in misery, but as long as there’s someone you think is lower than you, you can fool yourself into thinking things are not that bad. It’s like President Johnson once said to Bill Moyers in the 1960s, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
The Bible isn’t always helpful in this regard. Quite a lot of Scripture is filled with stories and instructions that would seem to want us to draw firm lines between us and them. Israelites and Canaanites. Jews and Gentiles. Disciples and Pharisees. Lots of boundaries and divisions. Which helps explain how even today, so many well-meaning Christians still fall into this trap. We look down on the ones who believe all the wrong things and preach about all the wrong things and fixate on all the wrong things. We may not be perfect, but at least we’re better “than them.”
Peter was as prone to this sort of thinking as anyone. Even after watching Jesus surround himself with sinners, even after the pyrotechnics of Pentecost when the Upper Room looked and sounded like the United Nations, even after all that Peter was still convinced that God preferred some people over others.
That is, until one day Peter had one of the strangest and most consequential dreams in history (Acts 10 and 11), which we’ll hear in church this weekend. In the dream, the heavens opened and something like a sheet was lowered down and on that big heavenly tablecloth were most of the animals in the zoo: camels and crocodiles, buzzards and bats, porcupines and pigs. Pretty much all the “do not eat” list of from the Book of Leviticus, except Peter heard the voice of God tell him to “kill and eat.”
Perhaps considering this a test of his fidelity to the Law, Peter responded, “Lord, I have never eaten anything unclean!” But the voice came back, loud and clear: “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” And to really drive the point home, the vision repeated itself two more times. “What God has made clean, you must not call profane…What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”
Around that third time, God’s point started to penetrate Peter’s thick head and hard heart. And it wasn’t so much about what Peter should have for lunch as much as who he should have lunch with. God was trying to shake up Peter’s certainty about the old lines of in/out and us/them. It led to the baptism of a Gentile man named Cornelius, and began the movement of the gospel beyond Israel to all the tribes and nations and languages and peoples of the world. It’s not a stretch to say that we are Christians today because of Peter’s crazy dream.
“The home of God is among mortals,” a voice from heaven once said in another crazy dream (Revelation 21:1-6). “The home of God is among mortals,” the voice said, and Jesus might helpfully add, all mortals. Not just the clean ones, the right ones, the ones we like. Not just the ones we would invite over to dinner and serve with our best china. But the ones on the sheet, too. The ones at some point in our life we were taught to despise. It’s like what Rachel Held Evans once wrote, “The gospel doesn’t need a coalition devoted to keeping the wrong people out. It needs a family of sinners, saved by grace, committed to tearing down the walls, throwing open the doors, and shouting, ‘Welcome! There’s bread and wine. Come eat with us and talk.’ This isn’t a kingdom for the worthy; it’s a kingdom for the hungry.”[1]
The more time I spend with the gospels, the more I understand that there is no eye-rolling in heaven. It’s people who do that. Instead, God’s the one lowering the sheet, begging us to grow our imaginations and our love. God’s the one saying, that which I have made clean – which is to say, everyone – let no one call profane. God’s the one saying, my home is with you, and not just some of you. All of you.
I wonder…if God were to surprise your afternoon nap with a vision of all the things you think are unworthy and unholy, what would you see? Who would God put on your sheet to show you who you’ve been keeping out of your life and out of your vision of the Kingdom? Christ loves them, and he wants them at the table, too, because in the end there really is no them. Only us.
Fr. Casey+
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[1] Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday, p 149.