I just came from a week on the west coast, with Sally, where we did very little else but read a lot of books, look at the ocean in all its different moods throughout the day, and eat a lot of fish – “red fish, blue fish, shell fish, tuna; clams and mussels, halibut, squid, shrimp…” Pardon the riff on Dr. Seuss, but I just love seafood of just about every kind; the fresher the better.
It was not always that way with me – and I know there are many who would want to run the other way if offered a salad of baby octopus and fresh field greens. As I was growing up in Indiana, fish came in only one variety and that was in breaded squares about the size of a box of playing cards. The lunchroom on Friday was always filled with that stink and I never ate lunch at school on Friday….not ever. Proud of my anti-fish bias, I never touched the stuff, not even an odd shrimp cocktail until I was well past my twentieth birthday.
I found myself in Athens, Greece, recovering from appendicitis in the late 1960’s. To celebrate my recovery, a Greek family that had been very kind and supportive of me throughout the ordeal, invited me to dine with them in a very special place. We wound our way through the extensive traffic to the port city of Piraeus where to my internal horror, we parked and walked out onto a fishing dock, lined with working fishing boats and sat at tables of a special restaurant which was set up each evening to serve the catch of the day in its freshest form.
I had a choice – offend my hosts or grit my teeth and dig in. I did the latter and starting with the fresh fried smelts, that one ate down to the tail fins, the broiled calamari, and the beautifully grilled sea bass – my mouth, my stomach, my soul rejoiced in a whole new world of which I had known nothing here-to-fore. The tastes of the gifts of the sea (lightly salted and refined with the odd fresh herb here or there) – it was almost literally a heavenly experience. To think, this world of wonderful tastes had been out there all along, and I had never ventured beyond my rejection of the lunchroom stink of fried, compressed bricks of some poor frozen white fish.
A word to the wise, now, this morning’s message is about eating – and about how God rejects our good reasons for refusing any good food when it is placed before us…. It is God who is the ultimate source of our nourishment, God who “preparest a table before us in the presence of our enemies,” whose good will we risk offending when we reject the bounty of the created world which from the start is planned so that all might be fed and filled according to God’s grace.
The portion of the book of the Acts which we read this morning, is about Peter coming before the council of the nascent church in Jerusalem. He is being asked to account for himself over some very unusual actions that he has begun to take on his journeys out into the world beyond the gates of the holy city as he seeks to fulfill his commission as a disciple. There has been in Christ a profound ripple in the otherwise seamless line of Jewish religious thought. He then proceeds to describe a vision or a dream, which he had, which completely altered his understanding of the future and of the church that was coming into being. While praying on a rooftop, Peter saw a vision of a great feast descending from heaven on a sheet, or blanket. (I like to refer to it as the “great picnic”) It was a feast consisting of foods that were not part of the strict kosher diet that was such an important part of the tradition and identity of the Jews. A voice from heaven commanded him to eat...and to cease being bound by the doctrine which declared some food...and by extension some people...clean and others unclean.
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." (Acts 11:1-11 NRSV)
One of my professors, Walter Wink, used to call this vision “the you all, everybody come…banquet.” That which had been one of the most divisive symbols which separated Jew from Gentile, the dietary laws and restrictions from free association with each other, was now to be laid aside. You all Come! It was in the early church the feast of love to which people were invited – and there were none of the restrictions of Torah or the rubrics or can+on laws or doctrine that the church would later devise to keep people out. It was a feast to be shared – and an opportunity to participate in the glorious gifts of God’s provisions. (Once again, proving that the Pot Luck supper is a Biblical phenomenon – even though deviled eggs and Jell-O salads were not to be invented for several more centuries.)
You all come! I like to call it the great picnic. Come and share in the bounty of God’s feast of Love!
The men that the story describes arriving at Peter’s door are a delegation sent from Cornelius who is a Centurion in the Italian Cohort of the Roman Army. It seems that this man is a devout man, and he has heard about Jesus and the ministry of the people of the way and he is interested in learning more, for himself. He is, remember, not only a Gentile, he is also Roman and a soldier of that dreaded armed force that occupies the country of Judea. He prays daily and receives one day a word from God telling him to seek out Peter and to listen to him.
As a result of Peter’s vision – the blanket spread with food, both kosher and not kosher – a vision which it says came three times, Peter had a clear understanding of God’s intention to break down the barriers to faith which had existed between the Jews and the Gentile world. He would not have responded to Cornelius’ emissaries ordinarily – but filled with this message of “you all come – eat and enjoy the feast” Peter does go to the Roman. In fact he baptizes him and thereby Peter, acting in faith, risked everything and as a consequence the truly inclusive Church of Jesus Christ was born. That which we thought God was sure about – and therefore, that which we thought was etched in stone, is that which can and often is transcended by the leading of the Holy Spirit among people of faith. Possibilities of transformation for our world, our communities, even our churches, are without limit.
Now, down to us… One of the attributes of our founders as Presbyterians – predominately John Calvin and the community of Geneva, Switzerland that he pastored, was the conviction that the church is reformata semper reformanda. That is, “Reformed and always reforming.” It is a concept learned in this 11th Chapter of Acts where Peter begins to interpret to the elders of the Jerusalem church that although it seemed to be God’s law before to be exclusionary – and to maintain separation from our neighbors by our exercise of the dietary laws of Israel, a new generation of thought has been sanctioned by God – a new opening of relationships and of the church has come about by virtue of Peter’s dream of the “great picnic.” Calvin was convinced that the church should always keep in balance that sense of orthodoxy – what is correct tradition – and the creative challenge to be faithful to the Holy Spirit, which is always leading us to something new.
In Calvin’s church, and then in the Church of Scotland which it birthed, “Invitation” to the table spread before us in communion was for many generations an exclusive invitation meant only for those who had been engaged in “right living” in and among the faithful. As early as the mid-1700’s that notion began to change as the sacrament was thrown open – not only to all church members, but also even to those baptized Christians who had not yet become part of the community. We who celebrate an open communion, welcoming all who have “Experienced the Love of our Lord Jesus Christ in their lives…” may look at this development rather “ho-hum” but it rocked the church for years – decades of writing back and forth, so that it has been within my lifetime, for example, that the Presbyterian church first indicated that children, previously excluded, would be welcomed to the sacramental table.
William Willimon, a Methodist Bishop in Alabama, tells the story of driving through the state on church business, which took him on the back roads; he and a companion were hungry and stopped at a road house in the middle of nowhere. The lot was filled with pick-up trucks…the light through the restaurants windows showed silhouettes of mostly men in baseball hats. Upon entering, it was clear that this place was a favorite among road crews and construction workers, everybody had a CAT hat and coveralls on as they sat in groups of three and four at the booths. What was unexpected in this part of Alabama, was the fact that each group of diners was racially mixed, black and white not separated in their booths by color, but scattered about in equal numbers among all those enjoying their lunch with loud conversation and laughter.
Willimon says that his companion leaned over to him and said something to the effect, “We have stumbled into the Kingdom of God.”
In an era when we talk with such blithe indifference about poor of the world who eek an existence in the shadow of America and Western Europe and we struggle with what to do about aliens, we should ask ourselves what does the Kingdom of God look like – who should be around the table who isn’t being fed. When we judge people by what they wear or their weight, the color of their skin or the nature of their sexuality, we might want to think about Peter walking into the home of a Roman Centurion - the most frightening of enemies - only to find there a new brother in Christ.
As someone has said, when we look only at differences, then we lose sight of the real issue of what God is doing among us. It takes a hungry heart to come to the table not only expecting to get something to eat, but also expecting to experience the joy of being stretched by the spirit of God to new experiences and new levels of community.
Either you eat what the potluck – the picnic - has to offer you, no matter what it is, or you don’t fully share in the body of Christ. When you come to the table spread before you, friends, come not only with the expectation of finding the sacrament, but also of being fed and filled as you come better to understand how God is always opening a renewed vision of the Kingdom of God for each of us in challenging and exciting ways. Amen.
