Acts 11:1-18 (Revelation 21:1-6)
Seeing Visions and Dreaming Dreams
James Sledge April
28, 2013
Longer
ago that I like to admit, I spent a year as a high school history teacher. One
day in World History class we covered a unit of European history that included
the Protestant Reformation. As we discussed Martin Luther and his church reform
attempts that led to a split with the Roman Catholic Church, a young woman in
the class raised her hand.
She
was a popular student, a cheerleader, and she had a confused, befuddled look on
her face. “Mr. Sledge, do you mean that Roman Catholics are Christians, too?” I
have no recollection of how I responded to her. All I remember is how stunned I
was by her question.
In
retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have been. This was Charlotte, NC in the early
1980s, and in much of the South, Catholics and Jews were somewhat rare until
the late 20th century. This young woman was from a rural background,
and she likely knew of Catholics only by stereotype. To her they were those
strange people who worshiped the pope rather than God. They were, in some
fuzzy sort of way, an enemy, and so naturally they weren’t Christian.
Now
clearly this student’s understanding of Catholics was rooted in bigotry that seems
almost comical in this day and age. But of course us versus them divisions are a part of just about everyone’s life.
We may laugh off some as harmless, like those connected to sports teams or
colleges, but many are not.
Racial
divisions are still a huge problem for our country. And right now, our
partisan, political divide seems to be a particular curse. Having contrasting
political parties and ideas can be a wonderful thing, bringing different
perspectives to difficult issues or problems. But when the other side becomes a
“them” whom we demonize, declare an enemy, and dismiss as evil, the beneficial
side of such divisions largely disappears.
For
the early Christians, the division between Jew and Gentile was the ultimate us versus them. Jews could not even eat
with Gentiles, which caused huge problems as Gentiles began to hear about the
risen Jesus and wanted to join the movement. It’s hard to appreciate in our day,
but those first Christians did not think they had stopped being Jewish. They
did not think they had started a new religion. And so when Gentiles wanted to join,
they had to become Jewish first, males be circumcised, abide by Jewish dietary
restrictions, and so on.
When
some Christian missionaries, notably Paul, challenged this, it caused a bitter
dispute that roiled the Church for decades. Many scholars believe that Paul’s
arrest and eventual execution was orchestrated not by Jewish opponents to
Christianity but by Jewish Christians upset with Paul for welcoming
uncircumcised Gentiles into the churches he founded.
This
conflict lies behind the story that Luke tells in today’s reading from Acts.
Luke writes years later, after the Church had embraced Paul’s thinking. And he
uses that conflict to show how the Holy Spirit pushed the Church to move beyond
the divisions and boundaries that constrained it.
We
heard how Peter saw a strange vision and was led by the Spirit to a Gentile
named Cornelius. As he told the story of Jesus to Cornelius and those with him,
the Holy Spirit came upon them, just as it had the apostles at Pentecost. At
which point baptizing them seemed a foregone conclusion. God had clearly
embraced them. How could Peter not baptize them?
But
when the Jerusalem folks found out, they were not happy. “How could you
associate with them?” demanded the members of First Church Jerusalem. And so
Peter tells his story, concluding with the question, “Who was I that I could hinder
God?”
Who
am I to hinder God? Who would possibly claim to be such a person? Who could
possibly want to be the person who tried to stop God? And yet, for all those
times the Church lived into God’s new thing, there were numerous times the
church has been on the wrong side, standing against God. It tried to keep
Gentiles out. Later, when the church became Gentile, it decided to persecute
Jews. It justified slavery and called separation based on race “God ordained.”
It insisted that God couldn’t use women to lead the church. It said the same
about gays and lesbians.
The
list goes on with issues large and small. At times church people have resisted translating
the Bible into the language of the people, adding pipe organs, singing hymns, adding
instruments other than pipe organs, using new Bible translations, and on and
on. And all these, from those Christians who fought to keep out Gentiles to
those fighting against women or gay’s ordination, did not see themselves trying
to hinder God. They understood themselves to be defending God.
There
is something about religious folk that wants to believe our way of being
religious is the right way. Some of this is just typical human resistance to
change, but some of it is a faith and imagination problem. Even though the core
event of our faith is resurrection, God’s impossible, unnatural bringing life
out of death, we often find ourselves constrained by how things are, by the
usual, the conventional, or what we think is possible. We have a hard time
imagining or envisioning the truly new or truly different, and so all too
often, we struggle to see God’s newness breaking forth.
But the story we see today in Acts and
the vision shared with us from Revelation insist that God can do, is doing, and
will do more than we can even imagine. The Spirit is not bound by the limits of
usual or conventional or possible. And we are called to go with the Spirit, to become
bearers of God’s dream in Jesus, envisioning the impossible, seeing beyond the
bounds of convention and the way things are.
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Just
the other day, the US Senate failed to pass a bill to tighten background checks
for gun purchases, something that 90 percent of Americans say they favor.
Perhaps there are better ways to deal with the epidemic of gun violence, but it
seems that Congress isn’t going to do anything. And this is just one of many issues
that makes it tempting to become cynical, to throw up our hands and say that
problems of violence, poverty, homelessness, and more are too big to tackle,
too intractable. It’s just how things are, and we must live with that reality.
It can be tempting for the church simply
to turn our energy inward. After all, who are we, a handful of church folk, to
confront the ills of society? It’s impossible, like tilting at windmills. Let’s
just work on our personal faith or spirituality, and leave it at that. Who are
we to see visions and dream dreams?
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But
what of those who have seen visions and dreamed dreams? Who were Peter and Paul
to confront how things were? What led Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, Jr.
to think they could confront the impossible? Who were they to take on the
impenetrable boundary between Jew and Gentile, to challenge the power of a
corrupt Roman church, to confront the deeply held cultural, religious, and
legal enshrinement of African Americans as less than full citizens? How was it
they could glimpse a vision of something new that demanded their lives embody that
dream, live toward it, and call others to join them in doing the same?
But perhaps a better question is how
could they not have glimpsed
it? How could they have failed to dream dreams and see visions? After all, they
professed faith in a God who has entered decisively into human history in
Jesus. They proclaimed a Christ in whom they became new creations, a Christ who
says to them, and to us, “See, I am making all things new.”
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When
the book of Acts tells the story of Pentecost, where Jesus’ followers receive
the Holy Spirit, it says that this is a new day, one promised by the prophets
where God says, “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your
daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old
men shall dream dreams.”
Jesus
is making all things new. The
winds of the Spirit are blowing. As followers of Jesus, how can we not catch God’s
vision? How can we not dream God’s dream?
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