The Spirit Moving: Breaking Down Walls - Acts 10-11: 18- June 26, 2011- Cicero United Methodist Church - Everett J. Bassett

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This past May 1 President Obama announced that Osama Bin Laden had been killed in a Navy Seal attack in Pakistan. As might be expected, our nation erupted in a spirit of celebration. Justice had been done, said our president, and almost ten years of pent up rage came to the surface. It was truly a moment to be proud of our Armed Forces, and to feel a step closer to some sort of closure over 9-11.

But after that initial surge of righteous vindication, many people started to express some
squeamishness about the extreme tone of the celebration. When T-shirts and bumper stickers went on sale with pictures of bin Laden with bullet holes drawn in his face, and the words, 'Gotcha, (and then a B word that not everyone likes to hear in a Sunday morning sermon)'; or when church signboards said things like 'Bin Laden is Burning in Hell,' then some of us started asking if this is the spirit of the America we love, not to mention the spirit of Christian faith.

To be a Christian in a violent world often feels like walking a tightrope. On the one hand, there are dangerous enemies to be faced. The Bible is well aware of that, especially in some of the earliest stories of battle, and in the Psalms. Some scholars believe the earliest words in the Bible are in the song of Miriam in the Book of Exodus, right after the Lord drowned Pharaoh's armies; "I will sing unto the Lord, for He has triumphed gloriously; the horse and rider He has thrown into the sea." In other words, the enemy is dead; let's celebrate. The Psalms, as they lift up those beautiful spiritual prayers we know and love, are also very concerned about overcoming the enemy, sometimes in violent terms. There are terrible foes to be faced in this world; it is right to defend yourself against them, and to pray for victory over them. Those celebrations of bin Laden's death would fit right in with many parts of the Bible.

But on the other hand, we profess our faith in a Savior who taught that we should love our enemies. And who said that those who live by the sword will die by the sword. And it wasn't just a bunch of words to Jesus. At the very moment that he was dying on the cross, he prayed for his killers, asking that they be forgiven for what they were doing. That brings a whole new attitude to the table. How do you dance on your enemy's grave, when Jesus taught us to love them? That's the tightrope we walk if we are dedicated to following the ways of Christ in a world where evil is real and violent.

At the very least, I believe we should notice that as bloody and triumphalist as certain parts of the Bible can be, there are other parts that show God working in a different way, and this morning's scripture lesson is one of those times. The whole story is too long to read in one church service, so (I'll be summarizing most of it. But the alternative I'm talking about is this: when confronted with a high wall of conflict, instead of bringing the two sides to battle, God raises up a visionary leader on each side of the wall, then brings the two leaders together to bring the wall of division crashing down.

In Acts 11, the wall we're talking about is the bitter, hostile division between the Jews and the Gentiles in New Testament times. From the Jewish perspective, Gentile people were polluted, unclean, corrupt. You were not to associate with them, do business with them, befriend them. It was forbidden by scripture. The Gentile perspective was much more diverse, in that it took in many nationalities and races. Some of them would just as soon see this bothersome Jewish presence eliminated, and that certainly has been attempted in history. Most just saw them as arrogant and bigoted, and were just as happy to avoid them as the other way around.

When Christianity came on the scene, it was initially a splinter Jewish group. Jesus and his disciples were Jews, and the first Christians saw their faith as something intended for only Jewish people. So the stage was set for the Church to fit right into the existing hostility.

What we see in today's scripture is God working on both sides of the wall to raise a visionary leader. On the Gentile side of the wall was a man named Cornelius, a powerful commander in the Roman army, living in the great Roman city of Caesarea. It's easy to see why God chose Cornelius as his Gentile leader - he was a devout and generous man, already striving to be closer to God. One day, according to Acts 10:2, God sent a vision to Cornelius. The vision was to send for Simon Peter, who was staying in Joppa with a man named Simon the Tanner, as we saw at the end of last's week's scripture story.

On the Jewish side of the wall is Simon Peter, the leader God is raising up -- and that wasn't so easy. Simon Peter, it turns out, is a biblical fundamentalist, and that's one of the toughest walls for God to break down. Peter is steeped in Old Testament law. He follows it to the letter, including the part about avoiding Gentiles. But God has been working on that. First, God gets Peter out of Jerusalem, where the Jewish influence is the strongest. He gets him to Joppa, on the Mediterranean coast, where Peter will be exposed to many diverse people. Second, he brings him to the house of Simon the tanner. We shouldn't miss that little detail. The Jewish law that Peter followed so slavishly forbids most direct contact with dead animals - it is one of the major taboos. Yet Peter finds himself in the home of a man who makes his living tanning the hides of dead animals - again, challenging Peter's old way of thinking.

But the biggest step comes in what we read today - this vision from God of a great sheet descending, with all kinds of animals on it. And a voice says to Peter, who is starving, 'Rise, Peter, kill and eat.' But Peter, the fundamentalist, realizes that the law says there are a whole bunch of animals that you are not supposed to eat. So he responds, 'No Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean.' Isn't it ironic that people can get so obsessed with their interpretation of scripture that they can't hear the voice of God? But God is persistent, saying in verse 15, 'What God has cleansed, you must not call common.' And then, we're led to believe, God and Peter argued - and God has to repeat Himself against Peter's objections three times. And Peter still doesn't get it.

But then the Spirit leads him to go down and meet the people who have been sent by Cornelius. And Peter goes down, listens to them, and finally invites them in as guests - another forbidden step. Jews do not socialize with Gentiles. But Peter is finally starting to get it: God wants to do something new. So now Peter is finally ready to break the rules - he goes to the secular city, right into the heart of the Roman power, and he goes to Cornelius' house. And after Cornelius tries to worship Peter, Peter is now ready to even recognize their common humanity - he says to Cornelius, 'Stand up; I too am a man.' And then, in Acts 10: 28, Peter says to Cornelius and his friends, 'You yourselves know how unlawful it is for a Jew to associate with or to visit anyone of another nation; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone common or unclean.' And then when Peter finally accepts the invitation to preach the Gospel in that foreign place, he begins with the words that God has been trying to hammer" into his consciousness - words that would be unthinkable for any Jew to say: 'Truly I perceive that God shows no partiality.' Then the Holy Spirit poured out on the Gentiles, and they were baptized, and showed all the signs of the spirit, and the wall was broken down. And in the first eighteen verses of chapter 11, Peter tells the whole story to the astonished Christian Jewish leaders in Jerusalem. And then there is a finishing touch to the story, at the end of Acts 11. There is a great famine, and people become desperate. And the Gentiles, who were hated for so long, take up an offering to save the starving people in Judea - the very Jews who had shut them out.

So isn't this God's alternative to always going into battle against each other? God works on both sides of the wall, raising a vision to break the wall down. I believe we have seen that many times.

Consider the wall of racial prejudice. Consider how on one side of that wall was a reluctant leader named Martin Luther King, Jr., who didn't know he was being prepared by God to be a wall-basher. And on the other side of the wall was another unlikely partner - a Southern politician known for his love of power and strong-arm stubbornness - President Lyndon Johnson. Two unlikely candidates, but God used this team to break down one of the most powerful modern walls-the wall of racial prejudice.

Consider the wall of South African apartheid. On one side was Nelson Mandela, imprisoned for over twenty-five years, but God used even that imprisonment to build Mandela's international fame, as well as his amazing character. And on the other side of the wall was F. W. de Klerk, who was raised and indoctrinated in conservative South African segregation, and then shocked the world when he became president of the nation, and called for an end to racial discrimination. Two visions on the opposite side of the wall, two surprising leaders - and the wall came down.

Or consider the Iron Curtain. On one side of the wall was Mikhail Gorbachev, with a peasant farming background, and a staunch dedication to Communism; on the other side was Ronald Reagan, a movie actor out of Illinois who became a political icon and President of the United States. This strange combination was what history needed to bring down the wall dividing East and West.

Historic changes have come to this world through military operations and wars. But I would suggest to you that even more profound transformations have come through this method God has of raising leaders of vision on opposite sides of a wall. Cornelius and Peter are an outstanding example from the early days of the church; the crashing down of the Jew-Gentile wall was a major moment in our faith. It expanded the power and vision of God a million-fold. I am preaching in this Pentecost season about the moving of God's Holy Spirit in those first days of the church, and breaking down that wall was a key moment. I believe wall-bashing power was set loose at Pentecost.

Maybe it's time to seize that power, and consider God's alternative. The political gridlock in our country is getting us nowhere - maybe it's time for a few more golf outings between the President and the Speaker of the House. Our Annual Conference spent yet another agonizing session a couple weeks ago dealing with legislation around homosexuality. As always, some people were adamant about literal interpretation of the verses in the Bible that prohibit homosexuality; other people point to scriptures like the story of Peter's vision as a way of saying that sometimes God wants to break through strict literalism in the Bible to reveal a wider truth. As long as I've been aware, this issue has been tearing the church of Christ apart. I wrote these words before the vote in Albany on Friday, and we know the law is changed now. But the wall will still be there, and I wonder: Is it possible that someday God will work on both sides of the wall to lead us forward to some new possibility - in this issue, and all the others that are tearing us apart? It seems impossible to us now; but I still believe in the Pentecost power to break

down the walls and bring people together around the love of Jesus Christ.

And what about the walls in your life? What about relationships that are broken? Or grudges that you've been nurturing? Or people you've not forgiven? Or sides that have been chosen? Every wall we construct between ourselves and other people shuts a part of God out. Every wall prevents some measure of grace from reaching us, and must agonize the Savior who died for all of us. That's not what God wants. In our own private battles, we may be praying for victory and vindication. God wants to give us something far greater- reconciliation and peace. Spiritual, physical, emotional peace. So why would we choose otherwise? Because sometimes it seems easier just to keep behind the wall- to try not to have to deal with the confrontation, the personal transformation that would need to take place if we were truly one community of grace. Peace is not cheap or easy in this chaotic world. And, more specifically, the justice required for true peace is not cheap or easy.

But blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for what is right. Blessed are the King-Johnsons, the Mandela-de Klerks, the Gorbachev-Reagans, the Cornelius-Peters -- who see the vision of what might be, and then break down the walls that divide us. Victory is sweet, they say, and so it is. But far sweeter is the just peace that God envisions. And maybe this is God calling you and me to take the first step; to say the first word; to make the first gesture toward someone on the other side of the wall. To ignore the wall-builders we can hear every day on the radio, or see every night on TV. Let them make their millions on someone else's time. We listen to Christ, and we follow the Spirit. And the Spirit is moving. And where the Spirit is moving, the Spirit is breaking down walls.