"Profane"

Rev. Matthew Miller

FROM THE ACTS Acts 11:1-18 Click here to watch the Sermon – “Profane” Rev. Matthew Miller

The comedian Bill Maher, whose current events show Real Time has been running on the cable service HBO since 2003, made something of a stir last month when he talked about a private dinner that he and the musician Kid Rock had with the President. Maher is widely regarded as a political liberal and has been a frequent critic of the President. So, it came as quite a surprise to many of his fans and peers that he would defend the dinner and the President, let alone sit down and eat with him.  Some people declared that the entertainer has switched sides. Others contended that doing so was akin to dining with Adolf Hitler.  They said it felt like a betrayal. Our reading this morning contains a similar complaint. Word has gotten back to the apostles in the home office that "Gentiles had accepted the word of God." When Peter returned to Jerusalem, they were laying in wait for him. "What do you think you're doing, Peter? You want to tell those people about Jesus, fine. But how could you eat with them? We don't do that." It's a pivotal moment in the life of the church, because at its outset the Jesus movement is a decidedly Jewish affair. In his earthly life, Jesus was an itinerant Jewish rabbi. Jesus' birth narrative as related to us by Luke includes a trip to Jerusalem for his circumcision. The twelve are all Jewish. The apostle picked to replace Judas is Jewish. And in first-century Judean Jewish culture, who a person ate with was a big deal. Jesus faced his own criticism for eating with the wrong kind of people, although they were still the wrong kind of Jewish people—tax collectors sure, sinners yes— but still Jewish.  

Samaritans weren't that far removed from Jewish culture, and it was a scandal when he talked to a Samaritan woman at the well. But what's the big deal? Why is this such an issue? When I was in seminary, the World Religions professor brought in a Jewish rabbi from San Antonio. This rabbi was from the Reformed branch of Judaism, which takes a far less stringent attitude than its more conservative relatives when it comes to things like Sabbath and kosher dietary practice. Still, he shared that while he didn't keep strictly kosher, he avoided eating pork. He went on to talk about the historic incident known as the "desolating sacrilege" when the Seleucid King Antiochus IV set up a pagan altar in the Jerusalem Temple and sacrificed a pig on it, desolating the most sacred of Jewish spaces. His decision to avoid pork wasn't about ritual purity, he told us, as much as it was an act of solidarity with his ancestors in the faith who had had their dietary practice weaponized against them. Some things are about more than food. Last year, our family took a trip to Barcelona and Lisbon for Thanksgiving. One of the things that was a little difficult to get used to was the practice in some restaurants of hanging one or more legs of Iberian ham. I wondered what that was all about. Well, back in 1492, when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella came to power in Spain, they signed the Alhambra decree to expel Jews from Spain. The hanging of a ham leg in the window of one's business was an effective way to signal one's allegiance to the crown as adherents of the Christian faith and the exclusion of Jews and Muslims who do not eat pork, or ham. From the Jerusalem Temple to a rooftop in Joppa, to the Iberian peninsula, to the private dining room of the White House, there is a deeply human belief that we are who we do (and do not) eat with. For the Jerusalem Christians who were still Jews under Roman occupation, eating with the enemy was off limits. In Peter's account of what happened, he doesn't include the detail that the man who had been told to send for him was a Roman Centurion, a soldier of the occupying army. Maybe they already knew, but Peter certainly wasn't going to make the situation worse by disclosing that fact. If eating is seen as an act of solidarity, how can a person sit at the table of their oppressor? Since their entry into the land, the people of Israel had experienced a steady stream of threats to their existence from the Philistines, to the Assyrians, to the Babylonians. By the time they found themselves in exile, they concluded that they had allowed too much: allowed the worship of foreign gods in the Temple of the Almighty, allowed the blurring of lines that distinguished them from their neighbors as God's chosen people. Keeping kosher was not just about ritual purity; it was what separated them from these aggressors. To sit down with someone outside the covenant was to risk compromising who they were. Would the food served adhere to Jewish dietary law? I know there are a few folks in our congregation who have their own dietary restrictions. Some are chosen, others are necessary to avoid terrible sickness and even death. To sit down to eat with someone you don't know can be quite risky. If you have celiac disease, you cannot eat gluten. If you're vegetarian, you don't eat meat, or if you're vegan, you don't eat animal products of any kind. Will your dining partner remember? Do they even know what does and doesn't have gluten in it? Will they serve you meat or dairy? And if they do, do you decline what's for dinner and, by extension, refuse the hospitality it represents? 

Some things are about more than just food. We are who we do (and do not) eat with. If we cross that line, do we risk losing ourselves, losing who we have always been and thought we were? And of course, the irony of this question posed to Peter—"Why did you eat with them?"—is that eating is at the heart of Christian sacramental practice. We may enter the community once through the sacrament of Baptism, but we are sustained as a community through the regular sacramental practice of coming to Christ's table. Because there is one body, there is one loaf broken just as Jesus' own body was broken for us. And there is one cup of salvation from which we all drink. Nowhere is it made more clear that we are who we do, and do not, eat with than at the Table. And our history suggests that the church has conveniently overlooked this story in its own sacramental practice. 

Years ago, I attended an Orthodox liturgy in which only the Orthodox faithful were invited forward to receive the elements. I attended a Jesuit high school where we were required to attend Mass every Wednesday. Not knowing any better, I would come forward with my classmates to receive the wafer the priest offered, until one fall our school principal got up before Mass and informed us that it was inappropriate for the non-Catholic students to partake in the Eucharist. For years it was the practice in Reformed Christian congregations to receive a communion token or card, signaling that one had been properly taught the meaning of the sacrament in order to receive it. I was talking to a friend this week whose neighbor belongs to the Missouri Synod Lutherans. My friend shared his experience of not being able to receive the bread and cup at a Missouri Synod church, even though he himself was a Presbyterian minister. His Lutheran neighbor nodded sympathetically and related how they had once had a pastor who simply stopped celebrating the sacrament because it was too hard to keep track of who was, and wasn't, allowed to come to the table. 

Among the many issues that the apostle Paul addresses in his first letter to the church in Corinth, one has to do with how that community is practicing communion. And Paul admonishes them saying, "whoever eats the bread and drinks the cup in an unworthy manner will be answerable for it." This may be where the rules and strictures about who can and cannot take communion come from. Just like the apostles and faithful of Jerusalem, the church in its many forms over the centuries has thought it knows best who we should and shouldn't eat with. But the unworthiness Paul is trying to address has to do with a practice that is excluding some within the community from sharing in the very symbol that is meant to bring them together. 

The whole point of what happens to Peter is God's way of letting him and us know that whatever the reasons for certain exclusive practices in the past, the good news of Jesus Christ no longer allows us to divide the world up in that way: into categories of clean and unclean, holy and profane. "What God had made clean, you must not call profane," Peter is told. In Paul's second letter to Corinth, he goes so far as to tell them, "in Christ God was reconciling the world to God's self, not counting their trespasses against them." God wasn't reconciling us who believe in a particular way. God wasn't reconciling this denomination, or that tradition, this people, or that nation. God was reconciling the whole world. And every time we get in the way of that—every time we decide that this or that person doesn't belong, or should be denied access, or can't possibly call themselves one of us—we are hindering the work of the Spirit and the work of God. Every. Single. Time. What God has made clean, what God was reconciling to God's own self in Jesus, we must not call unclean. The gifts God has given us are for the whole world. Who are we to hinder that? Who are we to get in the way of that? 

The repentance that leads to life is the change that happens in us that happened in Peter, that happened in the rest of the apostles when they heard and understood this story. It is the change that recognizes if all our old ways of dividing the world and doing things are a hindrance to the reconciling love of God in Jesus Christ, we have picked the wrong side. Turning away from all the habits and attitudes that would divide us and turning toward the unending love of God that would have us see each other as God sees us is the very repentance that leads us and this world to life and life abundant.