Dream and kill! (A sermon on Acts 11:1-18)

Sometimes that’s a very natural way to read the Bible: “Come to me, all you labored and heavy-laden”…hey, that’s me!

Some passages feel like a direct personal word from the Almighty, but others don’t, and today’s reading from Acts chapter eleven is surely one of the ‘not’ passages.

So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him and said, “You entered the house of uncircumcised men and ate with them.”

Starting from the beginning, Peter told them the whole story: “I was praying in the city of Joppa, and in a trance I saw a vision. I saw something like a great sheet coming down from heaven by its four corners, and I came down to where I was there. I looked into it and saw four-legged land animals, wild beasts, reptiles and birds. Then I heard a voice saying to me: “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.” “I replied, ‘Surely not, Lord! Nothing impure or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’ “The voice spoke from heaven a second time: ‘Do not call unclean what God has cleansed.’ (Acts 11:2-9)

Now I’m cutting the reading there because Peter’s entire story is one long story, and the story told in chapter eleven is actually a retelling of the story in chapter ten. Still, at the heart of both stories is this dream, and in terms of the Bible being a personal message to me, I have to say that this is not the kind of dream I can remotely identify with!

Peter dreams of all sorts of animals being lowered onto some sort of giant picnic rug and told to “kill and eat”. While I like food, I can’t imagine having to personally kill the things I eat. Also, I don’t have a problem with pork, and that’s the real problem here!

“Kill and eat,” says the voice, to which Peter replies, “Surely not, Lord! Nothing unclean has entered my mouth!” In other words, “Sir, I don’t eat pork” (no crustaceans, no birds of prey, no other animals with uncloven hooves, etc., etc.)

If this is supposed to be God’s personal word to me today, I have to say, “Lord, this is not my problem!” I already eat pork, I have always eaten it and most people I know eat it without reservation too!

Now, I’m not saying I don’t find this passage interesting and I’m not even suggesting there aren’t aspects of this story that I don’t find confronting, but what about lifting the ban on pork? do with me?

Of course I appreciate that there are people in our church community who abstain from eating pork, but I don’t think it’s for especially religious reasons.

I know, for example, that Ange (my wife) is concerned about the inhumane treatment of farmed animals used for meat production, and I know she has a lot of Facebook discussions about this. She tells me there’s a fair degree of hostility on Facebook between some of her vegan friends of hers and the evangelical Christians she’s befriended.

Ange showed me a photo of a dog and a pig, side by side, that one of her vegan friends had recently posted. The title below says “what’s the difference?” In other words, ‘why do we kill and eat one and not the other?’

Ange says she didn’t appreciate it when a certain well-known evangelical clergyman said ‘but the dog isn’t full of tasty bacon!’ (or something like that) since he felt he was trivializing the issue, as indeed he is.

I appreciate that there are genuine issues around animal cruelty, but I also recognize that this is a completely different issue than the one that bothered Peter and the other apostles. Peter wasn’t worried about killing pigs because he was cruel. He didn’t want to touch them because they were ‘impure’ and therefore forbidden creatures!

Of course, the real problem on display in the eleventh chapter of Acts is not about food but about people. The breaking down of food barriers is just the vanguard of a much more complete breaking down of barriers between people of different racial and religious backgrounds who eat these different foods, but even then, accepting Gentiles in our midst is not my problem. any!

For who are the ‘Gentiles’ in view in Acts eleven – the people the twelve Apostles feared would contaminate their religious community? they are us!

This is one of the jarring things I got stuck on when I read this story again this year.

I always tend to think of the Apostles (particularly Peter, James and John perhaps) as my friends! I had always imagined that if I could transport myself to the first century I would get along very well with those guys. Reading this passage again made me realize that if I approached Jesus’ disciples on the road, they would most likely cross to the other side of the street to avoid being contaminated by me!

That’s hard for a straight middle class white guy like me to accept, of course. Us fair middle class whites are used to being the ones showing the prejudice, not the ones receiving!

Of course we good church folk don’t do that, do we, and certainly neither do we progressive church-going Aussies? We would never be prejudiced towards people because of their skin color or country of origin, would we?…unless they are refugees, of course, or Arabs (Muslim Arabs, anyway), or maybe Chechens!

I don’t know if you’ve been following the propaganda closely lately, but I have a feeling that Chechens are the new group of people we are now supposed to hate!

The ‘Boston Bombers’ were Chechens, we’ve been told, and suddenly I hear about Chechens in Syria, and I have a feeling that the way is being paved for some violent attacks against a lot of Chechens. people.

Or maybe we are supposed to hate them because they are Muslim? I’m not sure, but I have to say that sometimes it’s hard to keep track of where you’re supposed to focus your biases.

I know in Australia we often like to think of ourselves as a paragon of tolerance and harmonious multiculturalism, but in many ways we have one of the worst records in the world!

Let’s take a quick test here:

* When was the slavery of Africans banned in Great Britain? William Wilberforce and his friends saw the slave trade made illegal in 1807 and went on to pass the “Abolition of Slavery Act” in 1833.

* When was slavery abolished in the United States? December 1865 with the passage of the ‘Thirteenth Amendment’.

* When did Australia officially recognize its indigenous peoples as genuine human beings? May 27, 1967! Before then, Aboriginal Australians were treated under the ‘Floral and Fauna Act’!

1967 wasn’t that long ago! He was certainly alive then! He was five years old. I don’t remember that day anymore, but I bet some of the indigenous kids who were my playmates in kindergarten at the time will still remember it!

I remember the Irish comedian Dave Allen talking about his experience in our country. He said that the Australians he had met were among the most generous and open-hearted people he had met anywhere in the world and that it was only the white bastards he couldn’t stand!

It is confronting, this passage, as it is about changing prejudices but, in truth, what I find most confronting in this passage is not the change that the disciples had to make in their way of thinking, but the way in which they arrived! over there!

What puzzles me in this story is the fact that these people changed their minds about what God required of them regarding what they should eat and who they should mingle with, on the basis of what?…

* A piece of scripture you’ve never read before?

* An ex-cathedra statement from an early Pope (or its equivalent)?

* A direct word from Jesus himself?

They changed their entire understanding of their faith based on a dream Peter had and their insights into what the Holy Spirit was saying to them! This is really quite strange, as these people were dumping things that were written in the scriptures that were completely unambiguous.

In the book of Leviticus, chapter eleven, it is written: do not eat pork!

“The pig, though it has a split hoof, does not chew the cud; it is unclean for you. You must not eat their meat or touch their carcasses; they are unclean for you.” (Leviticus 11:7-8)

It’s not black and white! You can’t argue with that, right?

On the one hand you have the Word of God in all its clarity. On the other hand you have Peter’s last dream. Which would you consider authoritative? The disciples go with the dream!

This does not make me comfortable! As a good evangelical with great respect for Scripture, I know how you stand up for something new and innovative. Do as Keith does in his latest article on gay marriage (found at http://www.arestlessfaith.com.au).

* You make a deep exegetical analysis of the wording of the law in question

* You compare this Biblical law with other Biblical laws.

* See how the same biblical writers could have adapted similar laws to this?

Peter and the other Apostles of Jesus do absolutely nothing of this. They just go along with Peter’s dream and seemingly ignore everything else!

That is painful, since it is actually this method of Biblical scholarship that allows us evangelical Christians to draw our line on who are the legitimate interpreters of God’s word and who are not!

This is how we judge who can be taken seriously as a spiritual teacher. We seek this kind of scholarship and listen to those who play it and engage in intelligent conversation by the rules of that game, and those who don’t play that game (like the ones who wake up and want to tell us all the things God has taught them while slept) are canceled!

But we cannot rule out the Apostles, and we cannot rule out this dream, since we know that this dream came from God. And I don’t know why God couldn’t have revealed all this to the Apostles in a Bible Study, but He didn’t!

And where do we go with that? What principles for biblical interpretation can we draw from that? What divine communication template can we establish on the basis of this account? How can we use this experience to better predict God’s will and activities in the future? As far as I can see, there are absolutely no satisfactory answers to any of these questions!

What we evangelicals tend to forget is that God is God, and that God will do what God chooses to do. God will communicate with us in whatever way he sees fit, and in the end, there is absolutely no way to predict what God will do next.

And all that is very difficult to assume! I have enough trouble trying to find room in my heart for the homeless and refugees without having to leave room at the top for a God whose moves I cannot anticipate and whose mind and being I will never truly understand.

So maybe there is a personal message in this passage for me after all? The personal word for me today seems to be this: expect the unexpected, let God be God, and dream the dreams He gives you!

May God add his blessing (and his own personal message to you) to the reading of His word.