The Picky Eater

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 04.28.13 

Scripture Lesson: Acts 11:1-18

It used to be that I could go just about anywhere, and I wouldn’t have any trouble finding something to nosh on.

Back in the day, I was a full-on omnivore.  Well, actually, I was mostly a carnivore.  I’d eat pretty much anything you set in front of me, particularly and especially if it was beef.  Burgers and roast beef and steaks, you name it.  If you could hack it from the flank of a cow, I’d eat it.

When I was a college age devourer of flesh, one of my very favorite things was to wander over to Big Jim’s, this joint off Route 29.  It served up the Big Jim’s Platter, which was a mess of slaw, a pile of fries as big as your head, and a half-pound burger.  I liked that, but even better was the Barbeque platter, which was a monstrous sloppy mess of a beef barbecue sandwich, a mess of slaw, and a pile of fries as big as your head.

Big Jim’s is gone now, but so is my twenty year old metabolism, so that’s probably for the best.

But shortly after getting married to my vegetarian wife, I began to eat meat less and less.  That dwindled to nothing just about fifteen years ago, and now?  Now I’m studiously and fastidiously vegetarian.  Not vegan, mind you.  If the good Lord hadn’t meant us to eat ice cream, he would never have created Ben or Jerry.  I’m just vegetarian.

I am that way for a variety of reasons.  Oh, sure, it started as habit.  I began mostly because I was too lazy to make my own food.  But then all those reasons that my wife had began to stick, and I layered on ecological, moral and spiritual reasons of my own.

That’s made me carefully observant of what I consume.  Is there meat in that, I’ll ask.  What’s in that, I say?

On occasion, I’ve accidentally taken a mouthful of meat.  And like a five year  old who in a distracted moment accidentally eats some broccoli, I’ll subtly attempt to spit it out.  Or sometimes, not so subtly.

It’s just such a part of my identity now that I have a hard time accepting that I’d actually eat anything that involved animal bits.

Strange, how something can come to define you, so much so that you sometimes can’t imagine life being any other way.

It does mean, though, that I can feel where Peter is coming from in today’s passage from the Acts of the Apostles.

Here we are, eleven chapters in to this story of the early church, and we’re already getting a sense of deja vu.  The section of Acts you’ve just heard is a section that a reader of this story would have already heard, all the way back in chapter 10.  What we’re getting is a recap, not quite an “in the last episode of the Acts of the Apostles,” but pretty darn close.

This chapter is important to the author of Acts, and so instead of just telling us something like, “And Peter told them what had happened,” he chooses to spin the entire story again.

Why?  It’s not laziness, or a desire to bump up the word count of his manuscript.  The repetition here serves a specific purpose.  Here we have one of the most significant events in the development of Christianity as a world religion.

What’s happening here is the movement of Christianity from being a subset of Judaism to being a related but free-standing faith of its own.  Peter, we hear, is being challenged by a group of Jewish Christians.  He’s been hanging out with people outside of the faith, they claim, and worse yet, he’s brought them into the fold.

For this action, Peter’s been called on the carpet to ‘splain himself.  There are a couple of details in the chapter 11 story that are missing, though, ones that are worth resurfacing as we get into the story.

In describing events to those in Jerusalem, Peter somehow manages to completely leave out the name of the person involved.  But this is a story being told by a man to men, so name schmame.  The storyteller who brought us the acts of the Apostles doesn’t forget, though.  The man was named Cornelius, who is described not as Jewish but as a Roman centurion, one who commanded a force of 100.  He’s also described as  a “God fearer,” a term which has specific meaning.

It doesn’t just mean someone who has a church phobia.  As a term, it specifically describes someone in the first century who found Judaism fascinating.  God-fearers were spiritually moved by the stories of deliverance from Exodus, and by the powerful calls for justice they heard from the prophets, but they just couldn’t quite bring themselves to take that last step to enter into the Jewish community.

Adult baptism is one thing, and adult circumcision entirely another.

Cornelius had had a vision, one that made him seek out Peter, who just so happened to have another vision.

Sitting up on a rooftop, Peter’s feeling a mite peckish, and while waiting around for room service, he falls into a trance.  

Or, rather, he falls into what is described as an “ecstasy.”  The Greek term used is “ekstasis,” which literally means “outside-standing.”  He was no longer in himself, but was in a different state of being, no longer part of the reality he normally inhabited.

And from that place, he found himself encountering something fluttering down from the sky, not a sheet but  "something like" a sheet.  It was a vision, and most visions described in the Bible don’t just say, it was this, or it was that, but instead use analogous imagery.  “It was like this,” or “it was like that.”

What he sees is a cornucopia of living creatures, wildebeests and wombats and lemurs, fruitbats and llamas and the majestic moose.  And he hears:  Get up, kill, and eat.  He does not hear that it all tastes just like chicken, but that is implied.

There is no textured vegetable protein, nor is there any tofu.  It’s not quite my worst nightmare, but it’s getting close.

What it is is a challenge to the kashrut laws as a boundary.  As an observant Jew, Peter would have consumed some of the creatures on that fluttering platter.  Other foods, though, would have been off limits, the bacon and calamari and even cheeseburgers, which blend milk and meat in a way that is forbidden.  Peter is repeatedly pressed to embrace the possibility that things that he has viewed as profane might in fact be sacred.  Particularly bacon.  Crispy, crispy bacon.

Profane is an interesting word.  We tend to think of it through the lenses of our word “profanity,” those seven words that George Carlin told us we would never hear on T.V.   How quaint, think we in this blankety-blanking era of cable and internet television, but still.  We hear Peter protesting it in verse 14.  Nothing profane has ever entered my mouth, he says in the NRSV.  Nothing impure has ever entered my mouth, he says in the NIV.

But the word for “profane” is “koinon,” and it more accurately means “common.”  The Greek used in the ancient world, for example, was called koine...it was the common tongue.

Peter does not kill, nor does he eat.  He is not required to.

But what he is required to see is that those who are not him, who do not share his history or his culture or his specific faith practices, those people are just as worthy of the path of Jesus as he is.  He is challenged to see the presence of God’s spirit, even in these souls who are not as he is.  And he is particularly challenged by the radical assertion that God is at work not just at work in the obviously holy, but in those things we might consider common and plain and everyday.

This was a deep struggle in the early church, and it is something we too struggle with.  Our own sense of our identity, those behaviors and patterns that establish who we are and how we come into encounter with God, these things can be destructive of our own  ability to convey the grace of God to others.  

We can fold in on our own social connections, 

We can cling to our own party or people.

But none of those things reflect the reality that Peter encountered, the transforming truth that in the message of Jesus of Nazareth.  Just as he opened himself, we are asked to do the same.

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.