If God Gave Them the Same Gift

Transcribed from the sermon preached April 28, 2013

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

Scripture Readings: Acts 11:1-18

 
The first church I served in Houston was a bilingual, multicultural church, formed from a merger between an old Anglo congregation, Trinity and a Hispanic congregation San Pablo.  So they called it San Pablo Trinity.  One year we had a harvest festival near Halloween.  We were to dress up in costumes.  Feliciana was pregnant with Kevin, so I got the idea of dressing as a pregnant woman.  Well a few of the recent immigrants really thought this was a horrible thing for a minister to do.  I just kind of laughed it off, but I realized I had run into a cultural misunderstanding.

Around the same time, one Sunday morning I was going through my usual last read of my sermon over a cup of coffee and I received a telephone call.  It was a member from the old Trinity congregation.  She had stopped coming for one reason or another and wanted to be brought up to speed.  I told her things were going well, that the church had merged with the Hispanic congregation and we had a rich diverse, bilingual worship.  The lady said, what a tragedy, “I can’t believe you allow them to speak Mexican.” I said “Jesus was Mexican.” She said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Why do you think his name is Jesus?” No, I didn’t say that. I said I think God is happy he gets to speak to us in Spanish. Si Dios les ha dado a ellos el mismo don que a nosotros al creer en el Senor Jesu cristo, iquiren soy pasa pretende estorbas a Dios? If God gave them the same gift as he gave us, who was I to think that I could hinder God?

Since Easter, we have been following the story in Acts.  From the Resurrection and Pentecost on, the Holy Spirit is spreading out and touching people across the usual physical, language and cultural dividing lines.  The Priestly editors after the exile added in dietary laws to the Law of Moses.  So for some five hundred years before Luke writes, Jews had strict laws about what they could eat and what they could not.  They also had strict rules about how things must be cooked.  And these laws, like circumcision, were representational or symbolic of one’s entire cultural identity. 

Many of these laws make sense to us today, and remain, at least in part, part of our Anglo Saxon, Judeo-Christian cultural understanding of what we should eat.  Apart from pork and shell fish, Anglo Americans tend to avoid most of the same things that Kosher Jews do.  The things people are forced to eat on TV show Fear Factor, freak us out because it is uncommon for us to eat rodents, reptiles, amphibians, insects and intestines.  We tend to like eating animals with cloven hooves and who crew the cud.  We don’t go for carnivores or scavengers, whether birds or four footed animals.  I’m pretty sure none of you drink blood or eat bloody, raw meat or have eaten hyena or vulture recently. Not many of us have stopped at a road kill, shooed the vultures away, and taken the already dead animal home to eat. 

I am not being particularly Kosher in drawing similarities but my point is that we are culturally conditioned to think of some things good or pure, and other things not good or impure.  And there is an almost automatic, conditioned reaction to folks who do things different. I eat more Mexican food than a Mexican, but I still can’t stomach cesos or lengua.

As Presbyterians, we have religious emphasis and beliefs we have inherited from Scotland and Switzerland, many of which people fought, or were martyred for.  We are not fighting over them as much these days, but they remain a part of church culture.  Many of them also happen to coincide with middle and upper middle class American values.  Against the Roman Catholics we emphasize that Salvation is through grace by faith in Jesus alone.  We tend to resist the need for an intermediary like saints or priests or a pope.  Since we are all equal before God we share in leadership through Democratic form of government.  We have direct access to God, so we do our own confession directly to God.  Our sanctuaries are usually pretty plain, with a Bible, an empty cross, a pulpit and a baptismal fount.  Just the basics, no fancy stuff, not a bunch of show. The exception at St. John’s is obviously the organ.  The Bible is important, because this is where we get the Gospel message.  So then, we also prize education and literacy.  So we tend to get nervous around Pentecostal Holy Roller types because we emphasize focused, rational well-reasoned teaching over wild emotional movements and shouts. We are skeptical of emotions and feelings and the body.  They might get out of control.  In Presbyterian culture, containment, decency and order are good.  Since we believe the saved produce good fruit, several cultural understandings developed along with the rise of capitalism: diligence, time is not for wasting, hard work and cleanliness are important. Cleanliness is next to Godliness.

 Hawaiian Missionaries associated becoming Christian with wearing body covering clothes, school, and loading cargo ships. As capitalists looking to maximize profit, they wanted to load ships for international trade as fast as possible and get them on their way.  Of course missionaries had no idea what a good swell, tide or wind for surfing looked like, so they got pretty upset when, at what appeared to them to be random times, male and female Hawaiians would throw off their clothes and head rushing for the waves.  When the Hawaiian’s own purity system of taboos was violated by the king and queen, male and female eating together, and the gods didn’t kill them, the Hawaiian cultural taboo system crumbled, Christianity gained converts.  Unfortunately, Christian missionaries shared their own cultural bias, and surfing came to be seen as a pagan sport and almost went extinct.  Never mind that Jesus frequently went off by himself for a break and walked on water. 

So in our scripture this morning, Peter goes to sleep hungry and has a dream.  All sorts of animals come down from the sky and a voice says kill and eat.  Peter, a faithful Jew says, no way, nothing unclean has ever entered my mouth.  But the voice says, what God has made clean you must not call profane.  After this happens three times the animals get whisked back up to heaven and Peter wakes up.  Just then three men came to his house and invited him to go to the house of Cornelius.  Now we learn earlier in Chapter 10 that Cornelius is a Roman soldier, but nevertheless a devout man who feared God with all his household, gave alms liberally to the poor and prayed constantly.  In other words, even though he worked for the occupying forces, was not circumcised and didn’t follow the dietary laws, he was a good, well respected by Jews and a Godly man.  Cornelius had a dream that God was calling him.  Peter showed up to share the grace of Christ and the whole household was filled with the Spirit. 

So Peter, speaking to a group of Jewish Christians about how God has included the gentiles into the covenant through Jesus tells the story, “As I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning. ¹⁶And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ ¹⁷If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?”

What we see here is the realization that our cultural bias and prejudice should be distinguished from the message of the gospel and the presence of the Spirit within our heart.  We should withhold judgment of cultural difference and allow the grace of Christ to flow where it will.  We ourselves would not be part of God’s covenant people if it were not for God’s grace.

It is especially important for new folks to hear this message.  Maybe you haven’t been into a church in a long time, maybe never at all.  Maybe you are not sure when to stand up or sit down, or you have to mumble through a few words of the Lord’s Prayer.  Maybe you don’t know the slightest thing about Presbyterianism or our Jewish and Scottish cultural roots.  Maybe you like wearing dresses better than pants, or vice versa.  Maybe you were taken out of school by your parents to work and you ate anything that would fill your stomach.  Maybe you like flaming hot salsa better than Hummus.  Maybe your baby decides to cry during a prayer or likes to wander around or say random things during the simple Gospel.  Maybe you root for Stanford.  Maybe you don’t even know that around here, rooting for Stanford is about as taboo as eating lizard. You are forgiven, maybe not by the Cal fans, but by Jesus Christ.  Seriously, none of these things amount to a hill of beans.

Something brought you in this morning and it wasn’t any of that.  For all our possible differences, we have one thing for sure in common, Jesus laid down his life for the love of each and everyone, and has risen to offer cleansing from sins and call us to a new and beautiful life.  Maybe you have had more than your share of death or tears; maybe you had a dream that God is calling to you.  The Holy Spirit calls and forgives us all, and invites us to a New Heaven and New Earth, where God is not set apart but shows up where we are, to speak Mexican, or American, to eat our food, to sing our songs, whatever it takes, that we might know we are forgiven and loved, here and now, and forever and ever.  Yet even as God is among us, where we are, God remains beyond us, transcendent, beyond any particular culture, not captured or contained by any ritual or language, image or people.  For She is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.  Amen