Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?
Jesus is gone, and Peter and the other disciples are continuing to spread Jesus’ good news about love of all. In Jerusalem, he runs into some ‘circumcised believers’. To be clear, this refers more to their status as good God-fearing Jews than to the status of their foreskin. The good Jewish believers are extremely concerned about why Peter’s hanging out and becoming ritually unclean by dining with the non-Jewish-non-believers.
In response, Peter tells them of a vision he had that is pretty kooky. It involves a big sheet, hooved animals, reptiles, birds of prey, and a voice that tells him to eat. Peter responds that he shouldn’t eat what’s profane. The voice repeats the command to eat, adding that “what God has made clean, you must not call profane”. He gets additional signals, including the Holy Spirit telling him not to make a distinction between ‘them and us’.
Given the prevailing thinking at the time, about clean/unclean, ritually pure/profane, circumcised/uncircumcised, us/them, this was quite a conversion story for Peter. From this, he proceeds to spread the love in all the places and to all the people previously deemed unfit, or outsiders. Since this started as a faith in Israel which was occupied by the cruel Roman empire, and now one of the major seats Christianity is in Rome, at a place called St. Peter’s, it is fair to say that Peter shared the message of love to the most hated, outsiders of the time – the occupying Romans – and everyone in between.
From Oregon, the distance from the circumcised in Israel to the Vatican feels small. Then, the distance was as far as imaginable, figuratively and literally.
From Oregon in 2019, nothing feels that far away – so far that I can’t reach them, can’t read about them. But still there are distances to cross, where the message of universal radical love is hard to share, or hard to hear. Where or who are my clean/unclean, us/them?
Right now, given where I am in my world, some of unclean other are represented in the seriously mentally ill. It’s not that I don’t think God loves them. Rather, it’s hard to show and share that love, particularly in my home.
This morning, I’m thinking about how to live as if every person I encounter is something God has made clean. It’s not my job to call anything unclean, or anything ‘them’. God has made all things. God loves all things. Even in the hard things. But because something is hard, doesn’t mean it’s not clean, or profane or needs fixing. It just is. I’m called to be here, to show love, to make every one of God’s creatures know God’s love. I am not called to name anything as profane, or to do anything less than share this incredible, irrational love. Circumcised or not.
No comments:
Post a Comment