Bible reading: Acts 10.

Message.

Simon Peter never thought he’d be famous; he just expected to spend his life as a fisherman (hopefully a successful one) at Capernaum. But that Jesus bloke had changed everything; he’d called Peter to follow him and that is what, with a few wobbles, he had done. As time passed, Peter had become one of the most prominent (or perhaps most outspoken) of the disciples. It was he who had first dared to say what they’d all been thinking: that Jesus really was the hoped-for Messiah, sent from God. It was he who was taken aside by Jesus as the others were eating their breakfast and told, “Feed my sheep”. And it was he who stood up in front of the Jerusalem crowd at Pentecost and tried to explain the amazing sights they had seen and sounds thy had heard. After his sermon, and after he and John had very publicly healed a lame man outside the Temple, Peter had become a marked man, the figurehead of this new and controversial religious sect. 

By the time we get to Acts 10, something like 6 or 7 more years have passed. The Church now numbers in the thousands and, because they think it’s preaching heresy, it has been attacked by the religious authorities. Matters have come to a head with the persecution which followed Stephen’s stoning; however this, as ch.8 tells us, has had the unintended effect of dispersing the believers, gathered until then in Jerusalem, over a wide area. You’d expect them to have then kept silent, for fear of further persecution, but they don’t: in fact they continue to chatter about their faith. Slowly, and just as Jesus had predicted, the Church is broadening its base: it’s no longer purely Jewish as Samaritans and even one Ethiopian have come to faith (although the Ethiopian doesn’t stick around). The believers struggle with the idea that God can accept the Samaritans (against whom the Jews had long-standing prejudices) into the Church, so send Peter and John to check out their spiritual credentials. When the apostles report back, declaring that, yes, the Samaritans’ faith is genuine, they are welcomed with open arms but also, I suspect, some hesitation.

I’m sorry to have spent so long giving you this chunk of the early Church’s story, but you need to know about it if you’re going to fully understand what happens in ch.10. For if the events of ch.8 have been unsettling to many of the first Christians, the ones in ch.10 are truly seismic. For this, I think, is the moment when the Church really starts to break free of its Jewish traditions or shackles and begin its journey to being a world religion. And our friend Peter is at the very centre of what happens – which somehow doesn’t surprise us at all!

We’ve heard the chapter so my recap will be brief. First we have the Roman centurion Cornelius who, after an angelic visitation at his house in Caesarea, sends his men to bring Peter from Joppa, about 40 miles away. (Interestingly we’re not told exactly what Cornelius expects to learn from the apostle). We also have Peter who, in defiance of Jewish law, is lodging with Simon, a ritually unclean tanner; he has an extra-ordinary vision (there seems to be a lot of this about in this chapter!) in which God commands him to eat food normally forbidden to Jews.

The two strands of the story converge when Cornelius’ men arrive at Simon’s door and explain why they’ve come. The following day these men take Peter, along with some other Jewish Christians, to Caesarea. There, feeling a bit out of his depth speaking to a Gentile audience (and knowing that, as a Jew, he shouldn’t be there , Peter preaches about Jesus. As he finishes, something unexpected happens: the Holy Spirit falls on everyone just as he did at Pentecost. The Jewish Christians are astounded; and Peter, whose thinking has already been blasted apart by his vision, cries, “I see it now: God has no favourites but regards everyone equally! What’s to stop these good people being baptised and joining our Church?”

I’ll come back to this story; but, as I promised last week, I first want to say something about these repeated mini-Pentecosts in Acts. One takes place after the Gospel is preached in Samaria; when Peter and John go to investigate, they discover that the new converts have never heard of the Holy Spirit. They pray, and he comes in power. In today’s story we see the Spirit being given to Romans; while in ch.19 we read of him coming upon a group of people in Ephesus who have only heard half of the Christian message. In this case it’s Paul who finishes the job and then – you’ve guessed it – “the Holy Spirit came upon them as at the beginning”.

So what’s going on? Should we all expect Pentecost, with its tongues and fire, to be part of our experience? Is the Holy Spirit always given in this dramatic fashion? Some Christians would say so, but I don’t agree. Instead, I’d link these manifestations to what Jesus said at the beginning of Acts, before he ascended to heaven: “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judaea, Samaria, and the furthermost places on earth”. What I believe we’re seeing here is God decisively marking the Church’s expansion from Jerusalem: into its hinterland, then to the despised Samaritans, then to the pagan Romans, and on to people in Turkey and beyond. God is demonstrating that anyone can believe in Jesus and receive his Spirit’s power. Barriers are being broken and frontiers are being crossed as God’s Kingdom is rapidly expanding in a way beyond the first Christians’ wildest imagination.

But let’s get back to our story. Peter is absolutely convinced that what he’s seeing is God at work. The group of people who have witnessed what has happened are probably full of unanswered questions. All of them may be thinking, “This will cause problems when we tell our friends back in Jerusalem: they’re going to find it very difficult to accept what has happened”. And, indeed, the next couple of chapters of Acts tell us about the ensuing row which threatened to fatally split the infant Church – not every Christian was as open-minded as Peter had become! They’d have said that they were being loyal to Scripture and respectful of their Jewish tradition; but had they closed their minds to new understandings, were they afraid to leave the security of their long-cherished beliefs, were they reluctant to say, “Now we see things differently”? Were these Christians in fact behaving like the scribes and Pharisees who had so often taken issue with Jesus’ teaching? Were they failing to hear, or even rejecting, the voice of God’s Spirit?

Over the years, several beliefs which Christians vigorously defended as Biblical truth have in fact changed. For instance, many medieval theologians were happy to endorse the bloodshed of the Crusades. After all, if God had told Joshua and his army to massacre the pagan Canaanites who lived in the land he’d promised to the Jews, surely it was right for Christians to kill infidel Muslims in order to recapture the city of Jerusalem made holy by Jesus’ life and death. Also, in an appalling twist of thinking, wasn’t it right to harass and kill the Jews, who had put our Saviour to death? We’d never condone these ideas today, although as recently as Advent 1915 the Anglican bishop of London called the First World War “a great crusade” and declared that it was good to kill Germans because doing so would “save the world”.

Another stain on the history of Christianity is its attitude to slavery, based on what’s been called “a grotesque misuse of the words of the Bible”. Religious leaders used an obscure verse in Genesis in which Noah curses his youngest son Ham for seeing him drunk as justification for the enslavement of African people, regarded as Ham’s descendants. This so-called “curse of Ham” was taken as the Biblical basis for the horrific trans-Atlantic slave trade; it was believed that God had not only mandated slavery but actually predestined black people to be a “slave race”. And some Christian leaders went further, arguing that slavery was in Africans’ best interests because captivity would hasten their conversion, purifying their souls in readiness for Judgement Day. So, while John Wesley condemned slavery as “the most execrable of all villainies”, his evangelist contemporary George Whitefield campaigned for slavery to be made legal in the American state of Georgia – where he just happened to own a cotton plantation.

Slavery is one horror for which sincere Christians claimed the Bible’s support; another was apartheid in South Africa. Scholars (because we’re not talking about unintelligent people here) from the Reformed Church used the Babel story to argue that God created separate races with their distinct languages and characteristics; mixing the races was against God’s will. They also used a verse in a speech by Paul in Acts to argue that each race should have its own specific area to live in. An official statement of the Reformed Church said, “The principle of apartheid between races and peoples, also of separate missions and churches, is well supported by scripture”; ministers who spoke out against apartheid were ostracised and even put on trial for heresy. And remember: this isn’t ancient history but the 1950s and 60s, my own lifetime. Yet no-one today would dare to suggest that apartheid has any Christian basis, rather that people of all races are equal and “one in Christ”.

What I’m trying to say is there are many issues on which Christians (well, most of them) have had to alter strongly-held views. I could also remind you that Christians once firmly believed that the sun revolves around the earth rather than the other way round; I doubt if anyone believes that today, but in 1633 the famous astronomer Galileo Galilei was convicted of heresy for holding this view “which is contrary to the true sense and authority of Holy Scripture” and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life. Again in the realm of science, few people today say that the universe is only 6000 years old and was created in six literal twenty-four hour days – although some still do.

There are other issues on which Christians have shifted, such as the ministry of women or our attitude to the environment. Today’s “live” topics are sexuality, gender and marriage; you may know that the Church of England and the Baptist Union (of which this church is a member) are tying themselves in knots over these matters, with some folk insisting that “Biblical standards must be upheld” while others declare that the Spirit is giving us fresh insights and should be heeded. It’s not always easy to know who is right and sadly, as has so often happened from the earliest days of our faith, the debates get heated and acrimonious. Love and charity fly out of the window as one group seeks to gain victory over the other, while hearing the Spirit’s whisper becomes impossible. Such is human nature, even in Christ’s Church.

We seem to have come a long way from that house in Caesarea, with Peter, Cornelius and, of course, God who sometimes acts in unexpected and mysterious ways. Of course we must be cautious when this seems to be happening: we mustn’t simply accept everything new we see and hear as God-given because it may not be. The Bible must always be our yardstick and guide. But nor must we close our hearts and minds to God’s Spirit who may do things we never anticipated, who may give us fresh understandings which fly in the face of centuries of tradition, who may stretch our mind in unimagined directions.

In 1620 the so-called Pilgrim Fathers sailed for America aboard the “Mayflower”. These men, along with their families, had great (and we would probably say misguided) hopes of founding a society where they would have liberty to follow God in ways that weren’t at that time possible in Europe. Just before the Pilgrims sailed, a Pastor named John Robinson gave an address which exhorted them to break out of the narrow religion held by many and seek fresh insights from God: “I am verily persuaded the Lord hath more truth yet to break forth out of his Holy Word”. Our minds are imprisoned by what we think we know already, our spirits are constrained by our limited imaginations. God’s thoughts are broader, richer and holier than ours can ever be. Might he be seeking to change our thinking, today? Let’s have the courage to heed his discomfiting, puzzling but life-giving Spirit.