Bible Text: Acts 11:1-18 | Preacher: Pastor Dorry Newcomer | Series: Acts | In our scripture lesson today, we have two stories intersecting:  the story of Peter and his vision of the blanket of unclean animals, which we talked about in our children’s sermon; and the story of Cornelius and his becoming a Christian.  Luke records all of this for us in detail Acts chapter 10, but I chose to read the summary version of it from chapter 11 this morning.  In a nutshell, Cornelius was a Roman centurion–an officer in the Roman army.  He was used to taking orders and serving Caesar.  He even lived in a town called Caesarea, named after Caesar. We might assume Cornelius was all Caesar all the time.  But Cornelius was searching for something more in life, and he found it in Judaism.  He became a “God fearer”–he was not Jewish by birth and had not officially converted, but he prayed and did good as he felt God would have him to do.  This made him a great candidate to be the first Gentile Peter ever preached to.

Cornelius and his household were convinced by Peter’s preaching.  They declared their faith in Jesus, were baptized on the spot, and were awashed in a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit.  Many commentators call this a second Pentecost and mark it as one of the most important events in the early church.  The first Pentecost happened fifty days after Easter, which we celebrate every year.  We honor the birthday of the church, and remember the Holy Spirit coming as tongues of fire and as a mighty wind, and all different kinds of people being able to hear the gospel in their own native tongue.  That Pentecost was important.  But if it weren’t for the second Pentecost, Gentiles like us would never have been fully accepted into the church.  That second Pentecost was proof that God fully intended for Gentiles to be included into the good news of Jesus.

That doesn’t sound controversial to us—it actually feels very normal!  But it wasn’t normal at the time, and we’ve all been around church long enough to know that just about any new thing can be controversial.  I used to serve in Bucks County where there were two Mennonite Churches right across the street from each other, Deep Creek Mennonite East and Deep Creek Mennonite West.  Turns out they split back in the 1800’s because a bunch of liberal progressives wanted to install an organ instead of everyone singing a cappella!  Imagine!  They laugh about it now, but it was a big deal at the time.  There’s always a fear that if something new is happening, how can we be sure it’s from God?  We like the tried and true, because we can trust it.  If God is doing a new thing, how will we know for sure it’s really God’s new thing?

One help we have is to think about prevenient grace.  This second Pentecost didn’t happen out of nowhere.  God had been preparing Cornelius for quite some time.  And God had been preparing Peter.  When Cornelius sent for him, Peter was staying at the home of Simon the Tanner.  This is significant, because although Simon the Tanner was Jewish by birth, his job made him unclean because it required working with dead animals.  God had led Peter to stay at the home of an unclean person, which was revolutionary.  Peter was already significantly departing from what he had been taught about being a person of faith.  Then to have that vision of all the animals on the sheet, and hearing God say no one is unclean?  We’re talking big-time controversy.  All of these things are part of God’s prevenient grace, God’s paving the way for the good news to come to the Gentiles.

I am sure that if we could have asked Peter during Jesus’ ministry if he would have ever gone to the home of a Gentile, he would have said absolutely not!  But God had been preparing him.  He had already preached to thousands of people and seen many converted on the spot.  He had already healed dozens of people.  God even used him to bring Tabitha back form the dead.  I figure, if God ever used me to bring someone back from the dead, nothing would surprise me afterwards!  And talk about putting things in perspective.  After you’ve thought about life and death, what difference do a few rules about ceremonial cleansing matter?  What difference do food laws really make?  Peter knows he is at the heart of something that will change the world.

It must have been a huge thrill and privilege for Peter to preach to Cornelius and his household, and to be on hand as Pentecost came to Cornelius and his family.  But in the back of his mind, I wonder if he was nervous about how this was all going to go over with everyone else in the church.  Cornelius was a Roman officer, who were of course hated by the Jewish people for the way the Romans oppressed them.  And second, the Jews considered themselves the “chosen people”.  The Messiah was coming for THEM, and many assumed, only them.  The thought of associating with Gentiles, being religious equals with them, would have had Peter’s grandmother rolling over in her grave, so to speak!  All the things he had been taught his whole life about being a righteous Jew, he was throwing out the window.

Luke records this story for us twice because he wants us to see what a critical moment this was in the history of the church.  Reaching the “ends of the earth” as Jesus called us to do required the first Christians to make a huge change in their thinking.  This second Pentecost was only possible because Peter was willing to be transformed from a being a Jewish follower of Jesus who kept kosher and observed all the Jewish laws, to being a follower of Jesus who understood that the holiest thing he could do in that moment was to embrace these Gentiles.  The spread of the gospel depended on the transformation of its disciples.

Peter’s willingness to receive Cornelius as a brother in Christ was the Church’s first Reformation.  From there on out, the gospel would be shared with Gentiles, and Gentile converts would be treated as equal brothers and sisters in the kingdom of God, because the early church embraced the idea that it was not by being Jewish that a person was saved.  It was by being open to God’s Spirit.

At the start of our scripture lesson, it sounds like the Jewish Christians are calling Peter on the carpet for what he did.  But listen again to what they said at the end.  “When the Jewish believers heard about Cornelius, they were silenced.  And they praised God saying, ‘Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.'”  The Jewish believers PRAISED God!  They were delighted that God’s grace was not for them only.  Think of the 180 degree turn-around this required in their heads!  Their whole lives they had been taught that they were the chosen people, they were the children of God, that only Jewish people worshipped the one true God, and because of that, they needed to be very wary and keep their distance from anyone who was not Jewish.  Now all of a sudden, they are asked to embrace what before was “unclean” and take it into themselves as if it were “clean”?  You know what they say, the bigger the ship, the longer it takes to turn around? Well this was a big ship–it had been 2,000 years since God make his covenant with Abraham in Genesis.  You would think that much history and tradition would take a long time to change.  But the Jewish believers saw that the Spirit of God had been poured out upon the Gentiles, and they immediately accepted this as the new normal.  That is a miracle if you ask me.

It would be great if that pattern of spontaneous and immediately changing to conform to the will of God continued throughout the history of the church, but sadly, it did not.  Somehow we went from expecting God to always be doing a new thing, to becoming suspicious of anything new.  When I took church history in seminary, I was appalled at how many Christians were put to death by other Christians for having differing views.  This week I remembered something about John Wycliff, who lived in England in the 1300’s.  He was very critical of the church and decided to translate the Bible into the everyday language of the people so anyone who could read could find out for themselves about God.  Today this is accepted as one of the most noble of all goals, translating the Bible so that it is accessible to everyone in their native language. But at the time, this was hugely controversial and the church felt extremely threatened by this, so they began to crack down on Wycliff and his buddies.  Wycliffe suffered a stroke and died of natural causes in 1384 before they could execute him.  Thirty years later the Church’s anger at him remained so strong, they dug his body up from its grave because they didn’t want him buried on consecrated ground, and publicly burned his body.  All because he had the revolutionary idea that the Bible belonged in the hands of anyone who wanted to read it.

I am sure you can think of times in your own church experience when you witnessed change being resisted.  I have personally experienced this at my second appointment, where a handful of people left the church when they heard their next pastor would be female.  I have seen this at seminary, where many of my classmates who attended urban churches felt pressure to still use the King James Version of the Bible, even though many newer and easier to understand, not to mention critically and scholarly more accurate, versions are available.  Churches are famous for saying, “We’ve never done it that way before!!!”  Don’t get me wrong, not every new idea comes from God.  But given how the church got its start, it is amazing to me how suspicious Christians are about new things, resisting them even violently at times.

Peter gives us a powerful example to follow.  His whole life Peter had been taught to stay away from Gentiles.  But God was preparing him for something new, resulting in a very bold pronouncement.  Peter said, “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism, but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right.”  Peter repented, turned away from his old way of thinking, and became a catalyst for the spread of the gospel way beyond his own people—a people that grew to include us!  What new thing, what new group of people, what change is on the horizon that God is preparing us for?  If we pay attention, God will reveal that to us.  And if we can see God’s hand, and hear God’s voice, and if we will align our wills with God’s, do you know what will happen?  Well given the history of the church, there’s a good chance we will put up a fight and resist the new!  But maybe, just maybe, God will use us to bring about the next Pentecost.  Amen.