No Favouritism

No Favouritism Acts 10:23-48 by William Klock Last Sunday we looked at the first half of the story of Peter and Cornelius in Acts 10.  Peter had gone down to the coast to visit the little Christian communities that were popping up there, and while he was there he had a vision.  He was hungry and waiting for his lunch and he fell asleep.  And he saw this great linen cloth, like a sail, coming down from heaven full of every animal he could imagine.  “What this?” he thought.  And the Lord spoke and told him, “Kill and eat.”  “But Lord, some of these animals are unclean.  They’re animals you forbade us from eating.  I’ve never deliberately broken your law.  I can’t start now!”  And the Lord responded, “Don’t be prejudiced, Peter.  Don’t call something unclean that I have made clean.”  Three times this was repeated.  And Peter, confused, was just trying to figure out what it meant when there was knock at the door.  There were three Romans there.  And they explained that their master, A Roman centurion named Cornelius, had been visited by the God of Israel in a vision and was told to send his people to go down to Joppa to fetch Peter and bring him back to Caesarea to talk with him. So it starts to click for Peter.  It wasn’t really about food.  It was about people.  Jews didn’t mix with gentiles.  They were unclean.  They didn’t live according to God’s law.  They worshipped idols.  You didn’t go into their houses.  You didn’t eat with them.  But Peter understood the vision now—or at least got the gist of it: It was God’s way of telling him to go with these Romans to meet Cornelius. And Luke explained: Cornelius was a God-fearer.  He was one of those gentiles, one of those people from the pagan world, who had seen something in the people of Israel.  He’d heard the stories about their God.  And he was drawn to them.  In the world of brutality and moral filth he’d come from, he saw purity and holiness in Israel.  In contrast to the distant, fickle, and immoral gods he’d know, the God of Israel stood out as radically different.  Cornelius couldn’t actually become a Jew and live by torah.  He’d lose his job and probably everyone he knew, but he drew near—as close as he could.  He had his face pressed against the glass, longing for the people, the community, the family, and the God he saw inside.  Even if he couldn’t get in there, he somehow found hope just in being as close as he could get—again, think of him pressing his face against the glass, longing to get inside. So Peter did the unthinkable: he invited these three Romans in, shared his lunch with them, and put then up for the night.  Now, continuing with 10:23 [page 1092 in the pew Bibles], Luke goes on and tells us. “The next day he got up and went with them.  Some of the brothers from Joppa went with him.  They reached Caesarea the following day.  Cornelius had summoned his relatives and close friends and was waiting for him.  When Peter came in, Cornelius went to meet him.  He fell down at his feet and worshipped him.  “Get up!” said Peter, lifting him up. “I’m just a man, too.” So they talked together, and Peter came in and found lots of people assembled. The temple came to Cornelius.  The thing he’d been longing for.  The place he wanted to go, to be in the presence of God, not any of his Roman gods, but the real God, the God of Israel who had made his glory known in history, it came new to Cornelius.  Brothers and Sisters, do you realise what we are.  What we are when we go out into the world.  What we are when we meet people out there?  We’re God’s temple.  A people purified by Jesus and made fit to be God’s dwelling place.  A people filled with his presence because he’s poured his Spirit into us.  Brothers and Sisters, when Peter met Cornelius, Cornelius recognised the presence of God somehow—in him, with him—he recognised it the way people who went to the temple recognised God’s presence there.  Cornelius recognised or sensed or saw that in Peter.  And you and I, we should be the same.  Maybe it helped that Cornelius was in tune with this.  It was his desire to meet the one, true, living God.  He’d had his face pressed against the glass for so long, was so wanting to be in that presence, that he was especially ready to know it.  But there should be something in us that the people we encounter see or sense or know the way Cornelius recognised the presence of the living God in Peter.  He was meeting the living temple of God and that is what the world should see in the church, in us.  This would be good to reflect on.  Ask yourself what people recognise in you.  Is it God’s presence or is it maybe worry or pride or anger.  Do they find the fruit of the Spirit or the fruit of the works of the flesh?  Do they see the glory of God in you? And so Cornelius did what came naturally.  He bowed down and started worshipping.  Cornelius’ response raises the question: Does a pagan see enough of the Holy Spirit in us that he might just bow down and try to worship?  I can imagine how shocked Peter would be.  Jews knew better, but it was the natural response to encountering God’s presence.  So Peter pulled him up and set him straight and he got them up to speed on what had happened to him:  Verse 29: “You must know,” he said to them, “that it is unseemly for a Jewish man to mix with or visit a foreigner.  But God showed me that I should call nobody ‘common’ or ‘unclean.’  So I came when I was asked, and raised no objections.  Do tell me, then, the reason why you sent for me.” And now it’s Cornelius’s turn to get Peter up to speed on what this is all about.  Luke writes, “Cornelius gave him the answer. “Four days ago,” he said, “I was praying in my house at around this time, about three o’clock, and suddenly a man stood beside me in shining clothes.  ‘Cornelius,’ he said, ‘your prayer has been heard, and your almsgiving has been remembered by God.  So send someone to Joppa and call Simon, who is called Peter; he is staying in the house of Simon the tanner, beside the sea.’  So I sent for you at once, and you have been kind enough to come.  So now we are all here, in God’s presence, to listen to everything which the Lord has told you to say.” I would think that Peter and Cornelius’ men would talk on the journey and Peter would figure out that this is no ordinary Roman centurion.  But Cornelius makes it clear here: he’s someone who respects the God of Israel and it’s the God of Israel who has spoken to him.  Luke then says in verse 34 that Peter opened his mouth and began to speak. I think it might better to translate that as, “Peter took a deep breath and began.”  Because things are starting to get clearer for him, but this isn’t easy.  He’s starting to wrap his head around what God is doing here, and he’s realising that it’s a total game changer.  He’s about to say something that he probably never thought he’d ever say.  “It’s become clear to me,” he said, “that God really does show no favouritism.  No, in every nation, people who fear him and do what is right are acceptable to him.” Now, we need to pause here, because as modern people—I talked about this last week when we read about God telling Peter not to be prejudiced—as modern people what we’re prone to hearing Peter saying here that there are all sorts of paths to God.  Like Peter used to think that the Jewish people were God’s favourites and that only they had an in with him, a way to him, and everyone else in the world was doomed and lost forever, but now, somehow in light of Jesus, he’s realised that the ways that the gentiles—or at least some of them—go seeking after God, well, those ways are just as good and that Israel had nothing special.  And we think that, because this is the dominant view in our postmodern pluralistic culture.  Justification is by death—unless you’re one of those really obviously bad people like Hitler—so all paths lead to God and how dare anyone remind the world that Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me.” So, no, what Peter is saying is that when he—along with most of his fellow Jews—thought that they were God’s favourites and that everyone else in the world was simply doomed to one day know the wrath and judgement of God.  They were wrong.  They were wrong for thinking that when God came to visit his people as he promised, he would set them on top and rain down fire and brimstone on the nations.  There’s a sense in which that story is true, but they had the timing wrong.  God will come to establish the faithful and to judge the wicked—at the end, after the gospel and the Spirit and the Church have done their work and his glory fills the earth—but God had something else to do first.  He had a great act of amazing grace to make first in order to redeem both Israel and the nations.  This was the massive revelation that was now beginning to settle on Peter.  You can almost sense how Peter is thinking this through and working it out as he talked to Cornelius.  I think he’s explaining it to himself as much to these Romans. It’s important to understand: the gospel is still exclusive.  I think this was why it wasn’t easy for Peter to work this through.  Jesus changes everything.  Jesus opens the way to God for all.  And yet unclean, unholy, idolatrous gentiles are still on the outside.  What Jesus has done is to reconstitute the people of God around himself.  Faith in him, not torah, has become the defining characteristic, the mark of membership in this new family.  His blood purifies us, Jew and gentile alike and makes us new.  This is why Paul, writing to the gentile Corinthians, can describe them as having once been pagans, led astray by dumb idols, but now they’re part of Abraham’s family.  Jesus has brought them into Israel’s story.  He’s seen their faces pressed against the glass and opened the door.  If they’ll come through his door, they can finally know the living God.  And, of course, Peter’s also realising that since God shows no favouritism, his own people now need to come through that same Jesus door too. So Peter says, yes, there was something special about Israel.  Verse 36: “[God] sent his word to the sons of Israel, announcing peace through Jesus the Messiah—he is Lord of all!”  This was how it had to work.  God had chosen Abraham to be the one through whom he would make himself known to a world that had rebelled against him and forgotten him.  The intent all along was to work through Abraham and then his family to restore the whole human race.  By Peter’s day the Jews had taken that to mean that they were God’s favourites and he hated everyone else, but what it really meant, well, Jesus said in John 3:16: “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, so that whoever believes in him should not die, but have eternal life”—the life of the age to come, life in God’s creation set to right and, most important, life in his presence. So Jesus was born one of those people called to steward God’s word to the world and he brought God’s announcement of peace—of restoration.  He was the promised Messiah, the King, the one in whom God would return to his people and set everything right. So Peter goes on in verse 37: “You know all about this, and how the word spread through all Judaea, beginning from Galilee after the baptism which John proclaimed.  God anointed this man, Jesus of Nazareth, with the Holy Spirit and with power. He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, since God was with him.  We are witnesses of everything he did in the land of Judaea and in Jerusalem.  They killed him by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day, and allowed him to be seen, not indeed by all the people, but by those of us whom God had appointed beforehand. We ate and drank with him after he had been raised from the dead.  And he commanded us to announce to the people, and to bear testimony, that he is the one appointed by God to be judge of the living and the dead.  All the prophets give their witness: he is the one! Everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” Being so close to the people of Israel, I expect Cornelius knew about Jesus.  And I also suspect that wanting to have a relationship with the people of Israel while being an outsider and a Roman, would have made him very hesitant to think of or affirm Jesus as the Messiah.  All of the Jews he knew denounced Jesus as a fraud and laughed at these men and women going around claiming he’d been raised from the dead.  But God broke through that.  He spoke and he brought Cornelius and Peter together.  It’s really a stunning story of God’s providence working to fulfil his promises.  Jesus had told his friends that they would carry the good news of his death and resurrection from Jerusalem to Judaea, Samaria, and even to the ends of the earth.  In the First Century there was no better way of doing that then for the gospel to get hold of a Roman.  And so God prepared a Roman to hear it.  He brought this man to Caesarea where he saw something beautiful, something holy, something of the glory of God and was drawn to it.  And when the time was right, he brought an eyewitness to the gospel story to him and he brought him, he brought Peter in a way that Cornelius couldn’t dismiss. And the story here is interesting.  Luke doesn’t say anything about Cornelius asking, like others do in other places, something like, “What must I do to be saved?”  Cornelius was so close.  He just needed to hear about Jesus.  And Luke writes in verse 44: “While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit fell on everyone who was listening to the word.  The circumcised believers who had accompanied Peter were astonished, because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out on the Gentiles too.  They heard them speaking with tongues and praising God.” These Romans heard and they just believed.  The Spirit filled them up and as evidence—evidence that these Jewish Christians like Peter and his friends desperately need to see—the Spirit started speaking through these Romans in tongues.  I can imagine those Romans, they spoke Latin, they spoke Greek, they stumbled over Aramaic.  They didn’t know Hebrew at all.  And I picture the Spirit suddenly speaking through them to Peter, maybe singing Psalm 110 in fluent Hebrew, because that seems to have been the purpose of tongues in the New Testament.  The Spirit proclaiming the good news and God’s glory.  But the main point of this demonstration was to say to Peter and the other Jewish believers that God had seen fit to bring these uncircumcised gentiles into his temple.  Jesus’ sacrifice was so powerful, his blood so powerful that it can purify even the gentiles and make them fit to be the dwelling place of God’s Spirit.  Cornelius didn’t have to get circumcised or change his diet or start observing the Sabbath to fit for the Holy Spirit or to be part of God’s new creation.  Because that’s going to be the big debate coming up soon in the story.  What happened that day at Caesarea sent a clear message: this new Israel, this new people of God is not defined or marked out by torah, by the law of Moses, but by faith in Jesus and Jesus alone. And Peter gets this.  And so Luke writes, “Then Peter spoke up. “Nobody can deny these people water to be baptized, can they?” he said. “They have received the Holy Spirit, just like we did!”  So he ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus the Messiah.  Then they asked him to stay for a few days.” Usually it was the other way around: believe, be baptise, be filled with the Spirit and incorporated into God’s new temple.  But in these early days God was sometimes mixing up the process to communicate important messages to the early church.  In Samaria it was the opposite.  The Samaritan had believed, but the Spirit didn’t fill them until the apostles paid them a visit.  Here the Spirit fills these new believers before they’re even baptised.  And so Peter makes it clear: Let’s baptise these people. Not, let’s circumcise them to bring them into the people of God, but let’s mark them out by baptism.  You don’t have to be a Jew to be part of this people.  Just the opposite in a way.  Be baptised, be united with Jesus the Messiah, you become a part of this new people of God, and the Spirit circumcises your heart—he does for you really, and deeply what circumcision and the law had always been external symbols of. As I’ve been reflecting on this story over the last weeks, I’ve been moved by how it reveals God’s faithfulness and his glory.  This is God taking the first steps to fulfil his promise that through Israel he would bring the nations to himself.  And when you think about the context of this story: the Romans and Judaism in the First Century, it’s amazing to reflect on God at work, not just setting his own people to rights here and bringing them to a point where they’re accomplishing the mission he’d given them two millennia before when he called Abraham, but he’s set things up so that it’s just the right representative of the gentile nations who meets Peter.  A man already pressing his face against the glass, a man already valuing the very thing that God had given to his people and that so many of them took for granted.  And now he’s brought into the family—not through circumcision—and oddly enough not even through baptism, but directly: hearing the gospel and being filled with the Spirit.  Peter has to rush to catch up with the baptism part—because that’s essential too.  And giving the gospel to a Roman centurion.  It’s like putting the gospel on a high-speed train to the rest of the empire and from there to the world.  This and what comes next are the setup for the rest of Acts and for Paul’s story. But here—I’ll just say this in conclusion—here we’re reminded what the gospel is and what it’s about and how we become part of its story ourselves.  Brothers and Sisters, it’s not through what we do.  It’s not through who we are.  It’s through Jesus.  Through faith in him as the Messiah, as the King, as creation’s true Lord who has come to set the world to rights, to drive away the darkness, to defeat sin and death, to bring light and life—and most of all God’s presence back to men and women.  His blood is what purifies us from the stain of sin and death.  And when he’s washed us clean, he fills us with God’s Spirit—with new life and a new way of life.  The Spirit in us is God’s glorious future in the present.  And it’s Jesus who brings us into that life and into the presence of God. Someone recently asked me why we drink wine in the Lord’s Supper and whether it was really necessary.  Why can’t we just drink grape juice?  Brothers and Sisters, it’s because Jesus’ blood is powerful.  And because, like alcohol, Jesus’ blood is purifying.  Like the wine that hits your tongue with a bit of a shock, the power of Jesus’ blood ought to get our attention—the way it did for Peter that day in Caesarea.  Brothers and Sisters, Jesus’ blood is powerful enough to wash away the greatest stain—of sin, of idolatry, of death—to make us sons and daughters of Abraham, sons and daughters of the living God.  Come to the Table this morning.  Eat the bread.  Drink the wine.  And give glory to God. Let’s pray: Keep, O Lord, your Church, with your perpetual mercy; and, because without you our human frailty cannot but fall, keep us ever by your help from all things hurtful, and lead us to all things profitable to our salvation; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.