Boundary-crossing God, we pray for your insight today as we seek to understand your Word and how it calls us to live in faithful service to you. Amen.
There’s been a social media campaign online over the past week or two. People are creating memes – pictures with witty captions – that complete the thought, you might be a Lutheran if…
You might be a Lutheran if fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and mac and cheese are traditional funeral foods.
You might be a Lutheran if your Vacation Bible School snack is tostadas.
You might be a Lutheran if you have elephants roaming in your backyard.
You might be a Lutheran if you serve roast goat for dessert.
This social media campaign was started because many of us are sick and tired of the assumption that all Lutherans are of Scandinavian or German heritage. Folks who posted these memes online were trying to break a stereotype that had no meaning for them, except to make them feel excluded.
Many Lutheran churches in this country were begun by German and Scandinavian immigrants, but that was a hundred and fifty years ago. We cannot continue to expect Lutherans to resonate with the northern European culture that was brought to this continent by immigrants in the 1800s.
Lutheranism is so much bigger than that.
Our church is about grace and faith, Word and Sacrament.
It is not about jello, casseroles, Ole and Lena jokes or lefse. If we limit our faith to a cultural stereotype, we are doing it a great disservice.
Someone created the hashtag #decolonizeLutheranism so that people could follow all of the alternative views of Lutheranism that were being shared online. She was making the point that Lutheranism isn’t just about the culture that immigrants and missionaries brought with them to new places, but is about the theology and how it is actually lived out in each culture that has embraced that theology.
After his vision today in the book of Acts, Peter could have created #decolonizingChristianity. Or, since the “Christian” wasn’t really used yet in Bible times, his hashtag could have been #decolonizingTheWay. That was one of the first names for the followers of Jesus.
Early followers of The Way were predominantly Jewish. They had been raised to follow the Jewish faith, and all of the men had been circumcised as infants. You had to be circumcised in order to be Jewish, you see. And you had to be Jewish in order to be a follower of The Way, according to everything that the apostles knew and believed.
And here was Peter, sharing sacred Christian community with uncircumcised Gentiles – outsiders, according to all the critical measures.
What were you thinking, Peter?
Sure, Jesus tells us to love one another – but surely he was talking about the insiders! Jesus meant for us to love people who look like us and talk like us, who were raised like us and who have a similar experience of the world to ours.
Peter’s friends and colleagues just can’t believe that the promise of Jesus is intended for those dirty Gentiles.
As with most protests against inclusion, the followers of The Way who criticized Peter were scared. They were afraid of persecution, which was a real threat to their community. They were afraid that they would lose control of their churches, and that their children wouldn’t understand the sacrifices they had gone through to get to where they were.
If Gentiles – members of the dominant culture, the occupying enemy forces – were allowed to become followers of The Way, wouldn’t the face of the faith change? Would it still mean as much as it had when Jesus was physically with his disciples and sharing meals with them?
Peter’s critics were afraid of Gentiles becoming Christian without first becoming Jewish.
It was like those people who expect that folks must first become Scandinavian before becoming Lutheran.
It’s unnecessary, and upon reflection, maybe a little bit absurd. But it isn’t anything new.
In Peter’s time, followers of The Way were concerned about losing their identity and letting the outsiders take over. They were afraid that the definition of what it meant to be a follower of Jesus would change.
It is the conflict that has plagued Christianity for two thousand years.
Every time that a church community is established, it draws borders around itself. We’re the Lutheran church, not Episcopalian, not Presbyterian.
OK, maybe we can play nice with those other denominations, but don’t ask us to work with those Missouri Synod Lutheran folks.
This one is particularly hard for me, as my ordination and call to ministry wouldn’t be recognized in the Missouri Synod church.
But OK – maybe we can try to play nice with other Lutherans, and with other Christian denominations. But surely God doesn’t want us to work with folks from other faith communities?
You get the picture. And I know that, for the most part, I’m preaching to the choir here.
This congregation is full of members who have come from other Christian denominations, who are married to people from various religious traditions, who appreciate a wide range of cultures and traditions.
But you’ve heard these arguments before. It’s hard not to hear these arguments, if you ever listen to the news and to the politicians and the talking heads who try to instill fear in their listeners by preaching a gospel of exclusion.
But a gospel of exclusion is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
From the very beginnings of Christianity, Jesus has encouraged his followers to love everybody, to include anyone who wants to join, to reserve judgment on others, and to be respectful of all cultures.
What God has called clean, we must not call profane!
Who are we to hinder God?
Don’t put limits on God’s love. We have no authority to do that, and when we do, we end up alienating the very people God sent to us.
When we experience conflict like the church did in Peter’s time, the proper response is to show love to others – to shift our understanding of God’s love to include the new evidence of community around us.
As one of my pastor colleagues says, “shift happens.”
A shift in our perspective is evidence of the action of the Holy Spirit.
And the Holy Spirit is all over today’s reading from Acts.
The Spirit gave Peter the vision of the animals, and told him that all of them were ok to eat – even the ones that were un-kosher.
The Spirit told Peter not to make a distinction between himself and the Gentile believers.
The Spirit led Cornelius to summon Peter to his house.
And as Peter was a guest in that house, the Holy Spirit fell upon everyone gathered, just as the Spirit had done with the disciples on Pentecost.
The Gospel that God would have us proclaim – the one that has been sent from God, embodied by Jesus, and proclaimed by faithful Christians for the past two thousand years – is a Gospel of inclusion, love, and welcome.
Jesus is the important thing that unites us with other.
How we follow Jesus – the kind of music we love, whether we commune with wine or grape juice, the style of our prayers, what we serve at our church potlucks – these things hardly matter in the grand scheme of things.
Our job is to be inclusive.
Now, this is difficult sometimes – many times, actually.
First we have to overcome our stereotypes and assumptions.
But we do work really hard at this – we already know not to categorize people, and to respect everyone as a child of God.
The hardest part comes when the people we are trying to welcome don’t actually respond to our invitations.
Imagine that today’s Bible story had happened a little bit differently.
What would it have been like if Peter had had this vision, and the Holy Spirit had sent him to Cornelius’ house, but Cornelius hadn’t received a message from the Spirit about welcoming Peter in?
How could Peter have shared his message if he had been rejected by the people he was trying to serve?
This is the question that plagues many progressive churches like ours.
We want to include people of all sexual orientations and identities, but most people who come through our doors are heterosexual folks who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.
We want to work on racial reconciliation, but our congregation remains largely white.
We want to work on interfaith dialogue and we want to welcome immigrants to our community, but we don’t know where to begin.
And sometimes, when we do begin, it seems like our efforts bear no fruit.
Cornelius may not trust Peter. But that doesn’t mean that he should be left out.
Recovering Catholics, transgender folks, immigrants, those who have been hurt by the church in the past… these people may choose to stay away from us, no matter how welcoming we try to make our ministry.
But we leave the door open to them.
Jesus tells us to love everyone.
Peter’s dream tells us not to draw distinctions between people, but to have an open and inclusive community.
And so we do our best.
And it’s because people have been doing their best at making a welcoming community here at this church for years that many of us came to be members here.
We fail sometimes. There are people who leave this place feeling like they were not heard or respected or loved for who they are.
But when we hear about that happening, I know that we do our best to fix the situation, and to make sure that it never happens again.
That’s the lesson from Peter today.
Welcoming people from all walks of life isn’t easy. Sometimes God needs to tell us many times over before we get the message.
But we continue to work on shifting our understanding of the Gospel, of what it means and who it’s for. We continue to expand our understanding of insider and outsider. And we continue to show the love of Jesus to other people in the ways that will be most meaningful to them.
Praise God for the inclusion that we have come to discover as followers of Jesus.
And may God give us the grace to show that level of welcome to others.
Amen.
Amen.
Easter 5C, 4/24/16
Acts 11:1-18; John 13:31-35