One of the cool things about today’s passage is that it is a story about precisely these two kinds of people. It is about one guy who is committed to Jesus but like most of still hasn’t totally figured out what that means yet. And it is about another guy who is not remotely committed to Jesus…but is honestly and earnestly searching for something transcendent…something he knows is out there but can’t quite identify yet.
First we have Peter. So most of you know we have been looking at the book of Acts, which is the story of what happened in the years immediately after the death and resurrection of Jesus. The disciples were on the steep learning curve all the way through the book of Acts. But I feel like there is this unhelpful Sunday school picture of the disciples that they were clueless until Jesus raised and the Holy Spirit fell on them and they go through this mystical transformation and suddenly have everything figured out. I ran into this perspective in an unexpected place this summer. I am in this reading group with Dan and a couple other guys and we read a little novel that I love, The Catcher in the Rye. Holden, the narrator, protagonist says this…
“Finally, though, I got undressed and got in bed. I tried to pray, but I couldn’t do it. I can’t always pray when I feel like it. In the first place, I’m sort of an atheist. I like Jesus and all, but don’t care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples, for instance. They annoy the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth. They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while he was alive, they were about as much use to him as a hole in the head….If you want to know the truth, the guy I like best in the Bible next to Jesus, was that lunatic and all, that lived in the tombs and kept cutting himself with stones. I like him about ten times as much as the Disciples.” Catcher in the Rye.Holdon is not what you would call a fan of the disciples. Yet even one of the disciple’s biggest detractors has this sense that they magically and totally changed the instant Jesus turned things over to them. Personally, I would find it really frustrating if that were true, because that has not been my experience. Very little suddenly changed when I turned my life over to Jesus. But that is not what happened at all. The disciples remain very human and very much ‘under construction’ by God throughout the book of Acts. The Bible does not whitewash its characters. We are about to find out that the great leader of the early church had latent racist tendencies that were based in his self righteous moralism and that God was not OK with this. It is tempting for Christians to simply see this as the story of how Jesus used Peter to respond to Cornelius’ spiritual longings without realizing that it is also the story of Jesus using Cornelius to confront Peter’s dark and broken religious impulses.
Cornelius, on the other hand, is a full on pagan. He is a Roman Soldier, which is everything that Peter as a good religious Hebrew had been raised to despise. But Cornelius seems to be a really good guy with a vague, unidentified spiritual hunger. He didn’t know why or who, but he knew that there was a personal force behind the universe that deserved reverence and could even be talked to.
But what this story teaches is that both Peter and Cornelius have flawed spiritual apparatus. The cool thing is that they receive the same prescription. The flawed Christian and the sincere seeker are both offered the gospel for their need. Acts 10 teaches that when Jesus’ invites us to follow him it is not an invitation to the morality of religion or to the vague spirituality of pluralism…but to something else entirely. The gospel
So we are just going to look at these two guys and see how Jesus skillfully subverts a couple common misconceptions about what he requires.
1. God Challenges Peter’s Self Righteous Religion
So Peter went to the roof where the Joppa view must have been breathtaking.
Ok, a brief aside…College life had a hugely successful Halloween party a couple of weeks ago.
There were a bunch of people who just walked in because it seemed like such a fun event. But I hear of one particular group who joined in but asked a number of people ‘Hey man, great party, but where’s the weed?’ I am glad to report that they did not find any and eventually they left. But I can’t help but feel like this passage has something to offer our friends the Halloween weed seekers. I might put it something like this:
‘Enjoy psychedelic visions and the munchies…try prayer.”
God essentially lays a buffet out before Peter full of all of the stuff he would least consider eating. These were all the foods that people like Peter considered themselves too good to eat and Peter was deferential because he was unexpectedly talking to God…but he held his ground. ‘Not me’ he says ‘I don’t do that kind of thing.’ Part of Peter’s self evaluation, part of criteria which he used to convince himself that he was a good and righteous person, was that he didn’t eat these kinds of foods. Other people did that sort of thing. I’m not like those pagans…I’m different. I’m better and the way I know it is that I don’t do the things they do. 
It seems like our hearts so desperately long for significance that they latch onto almost any criteria to tell us we are special, valuable, good or righteous. And they usually do so by comparison because, as we all know:
“If everyone is special, then no one is.”
In Peter’s life (as is probably the case in most of ours) Religion was still the enemy of the gospel. You see, religion goes like this:
“I obey so I am accepted.” Where the gospel is the exact opposite: “I am accepted so I obey”
But that is the really radical thing about the gospel. God’s approval of us is based on the things 
HE has done. So any self-righteousness that I claim apart from the work of Christ is illicit. In the first half of this story we see that even though Peter was a Christian, fully committed to Jesus, God was exposing areas in his life in which he was still just a self-righteous, religious moralist…and not really tapping into the implications of the gospel. There were still corners of Peter’s heart where he was trying to earn God affection though his efforts.
This is one of the really astounding things about the gospel. The message of absolutely free and totally undeserved reconciliation with God through Jesus is as much for those of us who have made a commitment to follow Jesus as it is for those outside the church. There is a temptation to believe that God’s offer of free grace is a one time gift basket we get upon entering the Church, but after that, you better behave if you want him to love you. But the gospel never stops being the story of God’s undeserved grace towards you and we never stop needing it. It obliterates the value of the little rules we set up to make us feel better than other people. And it is still challenging to me years after my conversion. Shoot, Peter is THE prototypical Jesus follower, but he still has trouble getting a hold of the idea that God’s grace is offered 100% free. He still tries to earn God’s favor by performing morally.
What you need to see from the first half of Acts 10 is that the gospel isn’t just for those who don’t believe. It is still the power of God to set Christians free
Here is an example of how this has worked out in my life. When Amanda and I got married we decided to go without a television for a year to get the most out of being newly weds. We thought it would force us to take walks and communicate and come up with creative cheap dates. And it did all those things. I highly recommend it. We were enjoying ourselves so much that several years passed and it never occurred to us to get one. But somewhere along the line this behavior took a dark turn. It started to become part of my identity. At some point I started feeling self righteous and self assured and began feeling more spiritual than people who had TVs. My heart was so desperate for significance that it had taken something helpful and valuable and turned it into something ugly and dark…it had bought into religion. But any righteousness that I claim apart from the work of Christ is illicit. The solution is to let the gospel wriggle its way into the corners of your heart where you hold out those little idols of performance based significance and allow them to be replaced with the extravagant, undeserved love of Jesus.
The evidence that this has gone poorly in your heart is that you find yourself feeling all superior or condescending to some other sub-culture. For example, if you harbor substantial resentment or self righteousness towards, say ‘liberals’ or ‘agnostics’ or the homosexual community, or maybe another denomination or someone in the church, that is evidence that there is a corner of your where the gospel hasn’t fully taken hold yet.
So God Challenges Peter’s Self Righteous Religion and he challenges ours. He confronts the Christian and reminds him that he needs the gospel. But then he turns to the seeker who is not committed to the Christian story, and offers the same thing – the totally undeserved, totally free work of Jesus.
2. God Challenges Cornelius’ Moral Spiritualism
The first thing we notice about Cornelius is that he is a really remarkable guy. Caesarea is an important Roman port – so he was probably an accomplished soldier and leader. He was generous, kind, and seems like a devoutly spiritual guy.
Actually, I love the detail that we get here. We find out that he is ‘of the Italian regiment’ and that he is there ‘with his whole family’. It is as if the next line was:
It makes you think, that maybe he looked a little like this:
Apparently he was not only moral and spiritual but disconcertingly handsome.
There are two really important things to notice about Cornelius: The persistence and sincerity of his search for God and the insufficiency of his religion.
The picture Luke is painting here of Cornelius is here is that of a really good guy. He is generous and noble and is a person of faith. I suspect that makes him a lot like many of you who are with us today…but there is still a fundamental incompleteness to his search.
The angel comes to Cornelius and essentially recites his resume back to him. You are a good guy, you pray, you are generous; on the whole you are a remarkable specimen of humanity. So what he says next is really unexpected to a reader steeped in religious pluralism. We would expect the angel to say something like “So we just wanted to say ‘keep up the good work’ and we’ll see you on the other side.” But he doesn’t. He tells this important, generous, prayerful Roman soldier to send for a Racist Hebrew fisherman and to listen carefully to what he has to say.
And here we find out something fundamental about Cornelius’ spiritual seeking. It’s the real deal. You see, he totally could have been a poser. It could have been totally possible that he was just spiritual because it was trendy or convenient (for example, helping him to deal with the Jewish population in Caesarea). And, honestly, I feel like a lot of spiritual seeking is like that these days. It is trendy. Being vaguely spiritual makes you appear cool and insightful. But Cornelius wasn’t just spiritual because it was convenient or trendy. He was really after God. This is the sign of legitimate spiritual vitality. Are you really after God?
"An open mind, like an open mouth, does have a purpose: and that is to close it upon something solid. Otherwise, it could end up like a city sewer, rejecting nothing."
G. K. Chesterton - Autobiography
Cornelius is still lacking something, and he knows it because he sends for Peter and asks him to explain the Jesus thing.
So Peter immediately takes the 30 mile trip to Caesarea and when he arrives Cornelius gathers his family and asks Peter ‘what do I need to know.”Peter proceeds to summarizes Christianity into three basic ideas:
1. We are all the same – we are uniformly loved and beautiful in our reflection of the image of God yet also united in our common brokenness and desperate need of grace.
2. Jesus is Lord of ALL – a divine King who claims total authority and total allegiance – but the result of that allegiance is shalom – peace, with God and a path to the redemption of all forms of brokenness within you and between us
3. An invitation to reconciliation with God and others – as a result of accepting Christ’s Lordship and trusting in his death and resurrection on our behalf “everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” (v43)
It is important to recognize that this passage rejects religious pluralism. Cornelius was not ‘ok’ just the way he was. Being a descent, generous and religious guy was not enough. God honored his earnest and sincere search with the message of the gospel. He needed to repent accept Jesus as king and appropriate the forgiveness made available through the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus.
I think there are two really interesting implications in this text for the spiritually curious:
1. The main point of this story in its original context is that Cornelius did not have to adopt Peter’s cultural identity to follow Jesus. He did not have to accept Jewish culture to become a Christian. Now, I did not grow up in the Christian sub-culture so let me just say what many of you may be thinking…some of the stuff Christians do is freeking weird. I get it. But you do not have to adopt the Christian sub-culture to become a Christian. Here is the good news, you do not have to give up your environmentalism, your feminism or become a Republican. But here is the bad news that is actually great news: you will have to give up the feelings of value and moral superiority you felt by accepting these things. They may be true and worth pursuing, and if they are they will be even more if you are a Christian, but they do not make you good or valuable. Only Jesus does that.
2. Are you willing to accept a message from God even if he uses a deeply flawed messenger? Cornelius, for all his searching, had to do the surprising and humbling thing and learn truth from a racist, Hebrew fisherman. You will probably also find substantial flaws in the people you have heard speak about Jesus, be they College life students or speakers, maybe me in particular….but maybe God is answering your search in the same way he responded to Cornelius…by asking "are you willing to hear the incredible message of total freedom from your self righteousness from a flawed, self righteous, individual who is still in the midst of undergoing that transition themselves?"
And another cool thing about this text is that God will use you to challenge us. Keller “Isn’t it great to be part of a faith where not only the (Christian) converts the converts but the convert converts the (Christian)…If you get involved with people very different than you culturally, they will show you parts of your life where the gospel has not come.”
Which leads me, very briefly, to the last thing I want to mention about this passage.
3. God Challenges Homogeneous Christianity
So, I cut most of this point. I am going to talk much more about this when we look at the church in Antioch next quarter, but I at least have to mention it. Here is the interesting thing about the gospel. By challenging the stuff that we hold on to that makes us feel superior to those around us, God’s community becomes a really promising place to find unity in really dramatic diversity. This turns out to be one of the major themes of this passage as well as the book of Acts. John Stott says:
“It is difficult for us to grasp the impassable gulf which yawned in those days between the Jews on the one hand and the Gentiles on the other.” -Stott
But we begin to see that God’s hope for the Church is that we would actively subvert the bitterest, most deeply held cultural divisions that plague the surrounding society.
So this passage has something for both groups of people we hope come to CL. It tells the Christians to get over themselves…to recognize that their status is based totally on their acceptance of God’s free grace and not on the little rules we make to make ourselves feel better than those around us. And it says to those of you who are sincerely and earnestly seeking the truth, that God is really bad at hiding, he will be found by the earnest, sincere seeker…but that being “a good person” and/or spiritual is not enough. You need to give yourself to Jesus as your leader and appropriate the forgiveness that he made possible through the cross. And this radical message gives us unparalleled resources to transcend some of our culture’s most deeply held social divisions.
No comments:
Post a Comment