What God Has Cleansed

 

Text: Acts 11:1-18

Focus: Cleansing

Function: to see how the Spirit sets people free

11:¹Now the apostles and the brothers and sisters 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.”

Good morning to the beloved of God.

For those of us who are not born Jewish, this is a pivotal passage as it is the story whereby God includes all races in Their kingdom instead of just the Jewish peoples.

Except for the leading of the Holy Spirit with the early church, this could have become an huge issue of conflict and debate for the early church that could have split it and stunted its growth. Instead, it was the spark that ignited the flames of the Spirit to spread the gospel across the world.

Now that history has settled the issue and we are past it, let me explain the story a little bit because this was huge for those in the Church from the Jewish faith, which was most of them at this time.

I’ll give you a short history lesson of the people of Israel to help us picture the importance to them of circumcision and racial purity.

Abraham had a vision whereby God promised him that he would have children and they would possess the land of Canaan which was occupied by nations that refused to give justice to the weak and marginalized among them. God, knowing the future and how corrupt they would become sent prophets to warn them and when they didn’t listen, according to the Old Testament, God decided to make an example of them with perhaps the hope that others would see what happened and fear God enough to have a just government and welcome the stranger.

By the way, welcoming the stranger, a biblical command has always been the Mideastern sign of the righteousness of the host. Lot proved this when Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed.

So after Abraham died, and his two sons and the Israelis went to Egypt to escape a famine and then were made slaves and brutally treated until God miraculously delivered them from their slave-masters, they came back to the land of Canaan, claiming this divine mandate to wipe out the inhabitants of the land because if they didn’t, they would accept the wicked ways with which God was displeased.

But destroying everyone is a tall order and they didn’t have the heart to do it. And true to the predictions, they started worshiping foreign gods instead of Y*W*H. And the problem with these cultures was that was that their pagan worship included evil things like institutional rape, child sacrifice and other acts of injustice or evil against innocent peoples. The cultures didn’t care for the least of these. They violated God’s law of treating other people as well as you treat yourself.

So, the Hebrew faith got corrupted with these evil practices and God allowed them to be punished like the nations they were to dispossess. And the punishment was severe, most of them were murdered in the war they lost to the Assyrians around 400 BCE.

But God is faithful, and after 70 years, a remnant returned to Jerusalem and rebuilt the city.

All that happened only 400 years before this time when Jesus walked the earth. And in their memory and religion they held it dear that if only they had refused to mingle with non Jewish people, they would not have been corrupted and suffered so terribly.

So when Peter went to the house of the uncircumcised, it was indeed a huge sin in the eyes of the Jewish people.

Keeping themselves separate from Gentiles was one of their most important commands. So, in this passage, Peter is fending off a conflict brewing in the church about spending time with non Jewish people because Peter had blatantly broken an important Old Testament command. They wanted to know why.

And of course, Peter gives a great defense, which we read in today’s passage, about how the Holy Spirit gave him this vision about unclean food and it was a metaphor about unclean people.

By the way, the Jewish people also had very strict dietary restrictions and the vision that Peter has is God telling him that the dietary restrictions the Jewish people had no longer apply because God makes the unclean clean.

God makes everything new.

In this story, we see two examples of where God changes the OT law in order to bring mercy to the NT peoples.

Peter sees that God is able to cleanse the non Jewish person as well as the Jewish person.

God cleansed the Gentile crowd that Peter had been preaching to and the proof of it was the way the Holy Spirit fell on them. They sensed the Spirit’s presence even before Peter finished preaching and a visible demonstration of the Spirit happened to them just like it did in the beginning of the book of Acts on the day of Pentecost when they saw what appeared to be tongues of fire.

The Holy Spirit moved and a very important Old Testament law against fraternizing with other races is abolished because God wants to redeem everyone, the world entire.

In order to include us non Jewish persons in the Kingdom of God, God reversed an OT law.

In order to fulfill the principle of loving others as much as we love ourselves, the Holy Spirit removed the barriers set by the scriptures.

And God’s Spirit is still moving and setting people free and including them in God’s family.

The principle Peter was to follow was that when God cleansed someone, then we must include those persons in the fellowship.

And God’s Spirit is still moving today.

In the last 20 years, several of us Christian leaders have felt the moving of the Holy Spirit to include those whom we used to call sinners in the family of God.

Pray for us at Annual Conference this year as we will be discussing how to include us folks from the LBGTQ+ community in the Church.

I know for me, the Holy Spirit fell on me in a dramatic way, first when I was baptized and subsequently several times since then, and cleansed me, and accepted me in the Kingdom.

I have spent time with my LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters at Annual conference and witnessed the moving of the Holy Spirit with them as well.

The conflict was avoided when the Apostles realized that the leading of the Spirit can override a Scripture in order to include more and more people in God’s family.

So I realize that what God has cleansed belongs to God and is a part of the Church regardless of their sexual orientation.