Acts 11:1-18
Used to be that when you’d get the family together for a long road trip one of the parents (usually Dad, who refused to ask anyone for directions) loaded up the glove box of the family truckster with those fold-out paper maps — you know, the kind that featured an oil company logo on the front and never folded back to its original configuration. Dad would go down to the local gas station and while the attendant filled up the car, checked the oil, put free air in the tires, and washed the windows, Pops would go inside and grab some free maps for the trip. If you were AAA members, though, Dad would most certainly have already ordered the TripTik, which gave him turn by turn directions and stamped on warnings about construction that would cause Dad to want to leave at oh-dark-thirty in order to “beat the traffic.”
These days, though, you can hardly find a paper map at the gas and sip and, even if you do, you’ll have to pay for it after you pump your own gas, check your own oil, and find quarters to activate the air hose. Then again, you probably don’t need the map anyway because you have a GPS on the dashboard or you downloaded the directions off of Google Maps or MapQuest, or you know you can look up your current location on your smart phone. Even if you’re off road, a handheld GPS can tell you where your current location within a couple of feet. With all that gadgetry available to you, even if you’re in the middle of nowhere you can determine that you are at least somewhere.
Paper maps seem to be going the way of the cassette tape and the black and white TV. I mean, how many of you have a paper map in your car out in the parking lot right now? Chances are that nobody under the age of 50 has one. Many would say that we’re at the point of simply not needing them anymore.
But are we there yet? Will paper maps someday be something we only see in museums? Well, not so fast, says Joel Minster, chief cartographer for Rand McNally, the nation’s largest mapmaker: “I don’t think paper maps are going anywhere, but people may be using them differently, more as a companion to the online or digital map.” In fact, the paper map may be the only truly reliable full-time form of navigation. Despite the ease and convenience of technology, batteries go dead, a spilled coffee can fry a GPS unit, or you may be in a place where the signal is weak, not to mention the fact that the GPS is sometimes just dead wrong. Ask anyone who has tried to find our church using the GPS. They wind up at the back of the property with a good look at the church but no road to get there. (I still say our tag line should be, “Worth finding!”)
The other reason why maps aren’t going anywhere is that they provide one thing that GPS and online directions for all their colors, detail, and satellite imagery cannot — context.
While a GPS can tell you where you are and what’s immediately in front of you, it can’t show you all the alternate routes, the possible shortcuts, the way to get around that traffic jam. It won’t lay out the whole trip for you in one panoramic view (unless you relish trying to read fine print while driving at 70 mph). “Paper maps offer big-picture geometry,” says Debra Turner, vice president of marketing for Compass Maps. “They can show you four or five counties, and not just the neighborhood you’re driving in.” Where a GPS chirps “Recalculating!” when you veer off the route, a paper map will quietly show you all the possible ways to get there that you may never have considered.
The book of Acts reads kind of like a travelogue for first century Christianity. Indeed, it’s helpful to have a paper map nearby when you’re reading it just to track where all of the apostle’s are going. This week’s text isn’t strictly a geographical travel narrative, though Peter does travel back up to Jerusalem from Caesarea on the Mediterranean coast at the beginning of the passage. Really it’s more of a spiritual TripTik outlining the direction God was taking the early church. When Peter goes to Joppa and eats with the Gentile Roman centurion Cornelius, the other “apostles and believers” think he has marched completely off the map, their criticism sounding like that voice on a GPS calling for Peter to “recalculate” his ministry back to the circumcised Jews and away from the pagan Gentiles (Acts 11:1-3).
But where the other apostles and believers only saw the narrow route laid out by their old downloaded GPS (Genesis to Prophets Scriptures) — a route that they perceived to be only about the way and law of God’s chosen people, the Jews — Peter explains to them that God had showed him the context of a much larger map that revealed the new road God was building toward inclusion of the Gentiles in the church. The context God shows Peter came in the form of a three-fold dream where a large sheet was lowered from heaven full of animals he and his fellow Jews considered to be unclean. God’s command to Peter was, essentially, to march off the long-held maps Peter and his people had walked for thousands of years by eating only kosher foods permitted by the law of Moses. “Get up, Peter; kill and eat,” says God, inviting Peter to eat food that was only suitable for Gentiles (v. 7). God was carving out a new route that would bring together Jews and Gentiles together: “What God has made clean, you must not call profane” (v. 9).
It’s hard for us to imagine the barrier between Jews and Gentiles in Peter’s world. Indeed, for first-century Jews, the animals the Lord lays out on the sheet are disgusting and those who eat them are thus disgusting by association. In fact, disgust is something endemic to our human nature. In his fascinating book about the human psychology of disgust, aptly title Unclean (which I read last week and couldn’t put down), psychologist Richard Beck says that at base our experience of disgust at something or someone is a form of “boundary psychology.” For example, he says, we swallow our own saliva thousands of times a day. We don’t see that as disgusting at all, it’s normal because it’s inside use. If we were to take our saliva and spit it into a clean Dixie cup, however, we wouldn’t dream of swallowing that, would we? It’s the same saliva, but now it’s outside of us even though it was inside of us only seconds before. It’s digusting, right? But that’s what disgust does—it marks objects as exterior and alien. And not only does it mark objects that way, it can mark people that way, too. When we encounter people outside of our tribe, our culture, our group, our way of thinking, we can view them as being outside our boundaries and, therefore, we can even grow to prejudge them as “disgusting.” In order to maintain the purity of our group, our tribe, we mark them as unacceptable. We erect a barrier.
Cornelius is a Roman, a military officer in the army which the whole world feared—he is an outsider to the Jewish tribe. He lived in Caesarea, a Roman city, built on the coast by Herod the Great with all the Roman amenities, including the theater and the bath house, which pious Jews saw as idolatrous entertainments. Even though Luke tells us in 10:2 that Cornelius was “a devout man who feared God with all his household [and] gave alms generously to the people and prayed constantly to God,” he was a Gentile outsider—an unclean person to a pious Jew. If a Gentile wanted to become acceptable, according to the law of Moses, he had to be circumcised, renounce his ethnic past, keep kosher in his diet, and become a Jew in every way. The outsider had to become an insider before he could be acceptable.
Now, it’s true that God had put these barriers in place during the time of Moses to mark out the Jewish people from the rest of the world. They were to be holy, set apart, in order that they might become a light to the nations. Israel failed in that mission, however, and instead of drawing people to God, they erected more boundary fences between themselves and the rest of the world. Israel was God’s chosen people to bring God’s great rescue mission to the world to light. In Jesus, Israel’s Messiah, God broke down the barrier between Jews and Gentiles by changing both their categories and breaking their barriers. The Jews had to step over the physical barriers that separated them from the rest of the world and the Gentiles had to step over faith in pagan gods and into faith in Christ. Indeed, as the rest of the New Testament reveals, faith in Christ is the unifying factor, the center of faith that unites people of disparate cultures, ethnicities and traditions. No longer would following God be a matter of where you were born or what marks you had on your body or what you ate, it would be all about following Christ. Now was the time when the whole world could be part of God’s family This is the hope that every Jew had been waiting for, and now Peter, the leader of the disciples of Jesus, witnesses the hope becoming a reality.
So, Peter marches off the old route and he begins to see how God’s plan for the whole world is unfolding like a huge gas station map. Cornelius had also received a vision from God, which also had to alter his maps as a Roman centurion and citizen who likely had seen a lot of the world. The Holy Spirit sent Peter, a Jew, and Cornelius, a Gentile, off their prescribed routes to meet each other as example of the new route God was showing the church. No longer would Jews and Gentiles run separate paths, but they would serve the same Lord as part of the same church. As Peter put it, “I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit. If 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?” (v. 16-17).
You know, I think that’s one of the most powerful statements in Scripture. Peter realizes that God’s categories are a lot bigger than ours, that God can work in surprising ways and will sometimes take us off the map if we’re willing to go there because sometimes following the map too closely can lead to disaster.
Think about it, a GPS can be a great tool but it can also lead to a kind of tunnel vision that causes drivers to focus so much on the route on the screen and the directions given by the voice that they fail to see the full picture of the road in front of them. In 2011, for example, three women were in a rental SUV on their way to Costco convention in Washington State when they followed their GPS instructions to the letter: down a boat ramp and straight into a lake. Neither of the other two passengers in the car stopped the driver. They just did what they were told.
A lot of Christians may view God’s instructions the same way, focusing only on what we perceive to be our one and only path and not on the big picture context of God’s mission in the world. Many are the Christians who have doggedly stuck to their own theological or hermeneutical interpretation of Scripture without listening to the Spirit’s guidance for the larger context. As a result, they wind up off track and in deep water. We can become like the Pharisees whom Jesus called “blind guides” who “strain out a gnat but swallow a camel” (Matthew 23:24) — another way of saying that we sometimes miss the forest for the trees!
Indeed, when we look back at the ministry of Jesus, we see that his whole orientation was about boundary-breaking, about establishing different maps. How many times did Jesus touch a leper, for example, who was literally kept outside the community because of his disease? In doing so, Jesus doesn’t become unclean (as the law said), but rather the leper becomes clean. Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners—unclean outsiders. The Pharisees, the keepers of purity, criticized him for it, saying that Jesus was unclean by association. In response, however, Jesus challenges their categories. “Go and learn what this means,” he challenges the Pharisees in Matthew 9, “’I desire mercy and not sacrifice.” Mercy requires crossing boundaries, sacrifice, or purity, always erects them. Jesus understood that the love of God is inherently boundary-breaking; it doesn’t recoil in disgust from people who don’t look or act as we do. Instead, it moves toward them, seeking their redemption, offering grace, inviting them into God’s new world and God’s wide open family where there is forgiveness, community, and mercy.
This was the biggest lesson the early church needed to learn. We see that all the way through the rest of the Book of Acts. I think it’s still the lesson we need to learn continually. We live in a world that continues to polarize—politically, ethnically, socially. We are quick to point out the outsider, quick to label some group or practice “disgusting.” We recognize and point out the disgusting sin in others like spit in a cup but we don’t realize that very same stuff of sin is inside of us, too.
Jesus desires mercy of us because we are in need of mercy ourselves. We are all in need of repentance, forgiveness, and grace. We are all broken and in need of the healing that only Christ can give.
Richard Beck says that disgust is a learned behavior. Babies and toddlers don’t have a disgust reflex. A baby will put anything and everything into her mouth and a toddler won’t think twice about picking up gum off the floor of the Walmart and chewing it. We learn disgust from our cultural conditioning, which maps out for us what’s acceptable and what’s not. Even our diet is regulated this way. We only eat a small fraction of all the edible things in this world, and different cultures eat different things because of their culturally conditioned disgust reflex
The kingdom of God is a different kind of culture, as Peter found out—one where disgust is replaced with love. God invited Peter to unfold a much larger map that reveals a world of possibilities for people of all kinds united around the singular direction of God’s grace and God’s redemptive mission in the world. What is it that keeps you from seeing God’s big picture? Who are the people that you consider to be off the map and outside God’s grace? How will you, like Peter, listen to the Spirit’s direction and march off the map to reach those whom the rest of the world whizzes by? Will you extend them the same mercy you have received because of Christ?
Disgust erects boundaries. Love dismantles them. God so loved the world that he was willing to cross the boundary of heaven and earth to come among his sinful people. If we learn to love people like that, then we will truly begin to see the larger map of God’s kingdom. Amen.
Sources:
Anderson, Rick. “Life Imitates The Office. Woman Follows GPS, Drives into Water in Dwight’s Hometown.” Seattle Weekly, June 15, 2011. http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/06/life_imitates_the_office_woman.php. Viewed October 5, 2012.
Cabanatuan, Michael. “Paper maps crumbling in face of electronic onslaught.” The San Francisco Chronicle, October 12, 2007. http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Paper-maps-crumpling-in-face-of-electronic-2498037.php. Viewed October 5, 2012.
