Sunday, April 24, 2016 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Hindering

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 148
Revelation 21:1–6
Acts 11:1–18

Lord, our country is divided, our families are fractured, our relationships need mending. Convert our fear into love. . . . As your people we will share the pain and then share also in the joy—until the day in which we gather around your throne next to all the people we never thought should be there.

Nadia Bolz-Weber

“Who was I that I could hinder God?”

If you have been part of the Presbyterian denomination for a while, then you are familiar with conflict and controversy. Get ready for another round of both when our General Assembly meets again this summer in Portland, Oregon. My husband, Greg, and I are going for a few days, and I will report back what we see and hear.

Even though church meetings like our denomination’s General Assembly can raise my anxiety levels, the conflicts and the controversies actually represent some of what I deeply value about being a part of this Presbyterian Reformed tradition. Let me be clear: I do not relish church fights—not at all—and often I think they diminish our witness to the world. But I do value the reasons behind many of our conflicts and controversies.

We Presbyterians debate and argue at every level of church governance because we are convinced that God is not finished with us or with our world yet. The biblical canon may have closed centuries ago, but that does not mean that God is not still actively at work. Thus, one of our primary jobs as church is to spot that holy activity and participate in it. Remember our theological motto: We are a church Reformed—meaning we are part of the Reformed theological arm established after the Reformation, but we are also a church always being reformed by the work of the Spirit. Because we strongly trust that God is still at work—even doing new things or teaching us to see old things in new ways—because of that conviction, we are going to debate and argue. Hopefully our debates and family arguments will always be informed by scripture and prayer and conducted in ways that are respectful. As William Sloane Coffin always preached, “As long as our hearts are one in Christ, our minds don’t have to be.”

But if you want to be a part of a church denomination that strictly holds to time-honored limits and boundaries, that has well-established, crystal-clear views on social issues and cannot envision ever changing its mind on any of them—if that is the kind of faith community you seek, then being a Presbyterian might get on your nerves. As I’ve told new member classes in previous congregations, if you are uncomfortable with ambiguity, then it is difficult to be a Presbyterian. While we trust God is sovereign and we are not, we intentionally provide wide spaces for faith to roam, and we try to never think we have got it all figured out.

Yet our proclivity for debates and church family arguments over what God is or is not doing in us and in our world is not new. It is not even originally Presbyterian. Peter and his Jewish Christian brothers and sisters wrestled with the same thing. Peter had grown up in the Jewish faith tradition. He knew what his scriptures said. He had learned how to interpret them and how they should play out in his life. We know this of Peter, and it is precisely because of his fidelity to his faith that the vision he received in Joppa while praying completely jarred him and left him totally disconcerted.

Peter was doing what Jesus had asked him to do. You remember the story from last week: Peter was re-presenting Christ in his world. But then God gave him that vision. And being faithful, Peter acted on it, even though he knew full well that acting on it was going to bring him immediately into serious conflict with the other leaders of his faith community. That is exactly what happened. In our text from Acts today, we hear Peter’s version of how that conversation played out.

Why, they asked him, are you eating with the Gentiles? In response Peter tried explaining what had happened. We heard his report: “I was praying and saw a vision. The heavens opened and something like a large sheet came down. On it I saw every kind of forbidden creature—camels, badgers, buzzards, bats, crocodiles, lizards, a pig—all the things on the ‘don’t eat’ list in Leviticus 11, enough to make me lose my appetite or worse. But then I heard God’s voice and God told me to get up, to kill and to eat.

“Yet even though I knew it was God’s voice,” Peter testified. “I just could not do it. God’s command went against what I knew to be true. It went against much of what I had been taught about my faith and our important customs and marks of identity. So I respectfully told God no. Yet God replied, ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’ This happened three times and then the sheet went back into heaven’” (contemporary language inspired by Barbara Brown Taylor’s rendition of the dream, which she tells in The Bread of Angels, p. 77).

Then Peter told his fellow leaders how he went with Cornelius’s men and immediately received insight about that disconcerting vision. His revelation was not about food after all. It was about people. Peter arrived at Cornelius’s house and realized he was in a house filled with Gentiles. They were the kind of people he usually crossed the street to avoid or from whom he averted his eyes when he passed by them sitting on the sidewalk.

Those people gathered in Cornelius’s house were the kind of people whose politics turned his stomach or the ones he always avoided at cocktail parties because the small talk felt so stilted. Those people were the people who filled that house. So as soon as he walked through that door, even though he had a sense of what God was doing to him, Peter’s anxiety levels rose sharply.

Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber tells a story about her own experience walking through a door and encountering people whose presence made her anxiety levels rise. Nadia, a friend of Fourth Church, is the founding pastor of a Lutheran congregation in Denver called A House for All Sinners and Saints. Now, that congregation is, as Nadia describes it, “a little indie boutique of a church.” It typically attracts edgy, marginalized people who might never feel comfortable in a traditional congregation like this one.

But when they walk through the doors of A House for All Sinners and Saints, they usually feel welcomed home like family. Within the first year of that congregation’s existence, though, Nadia began to feel her quirky little church family was being threatened. It was being threatened by a certain kind of people she could not always stomach, people she typically avoided or from whom she averted her eyes, people with whom she shared little in common. Or so she thought.

Unlike Peter, Nadia had not experienced a vision that had her knocking on a stranger’s door. Rather, strangers had experienced a vision that had them knocking on her church’s door. The Denver Post had featured Nadia on its front page and told the story of her congregation, with all of its edginess and quirkiness. As soon as that story came out, those people came in. Nadia described them this way: “Here were a bunch of people, baby boomers who wore Dockers and ate at Applebee’s, who had driven in from the suburbs to consume our worship service because it was neat and so much cooler and more authentic than anything they could create themselves. It felt horrible and I became angry,” she said (Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner and Saint, pp. 178–187).

Nadia eventually admitted to her congregation that she had been worried the weirdness of her church was going to be diluted by all of those “normal” people. In truth, though, that combination of normal and self-described weird made the diversity of her congregation even stronger. God apparently knew what God was doing. Yet in the beginning, to Nadia, it felt like their identity as a congregation was at stake.

Peter would have completely understood Nadia’s dilemma. There he stood, in that Gentile’s house, knowing full well that if those people walked through the doors of his faith community, his fellow leaders would inevitably feel like their identity was at stake. Yet Peter knew he was in that house because of God. He had not wanted to come. God’s Spirit had compelled him into that place with those people.

So Peter did the only thing he knew to do: he spoke of the God he had come to know in Jesus. He told them who Jesus was as God’s Love Made Flesh and what that meant for their world. Just like he had done with other folks, Peter re-presented Christ even to them, to the Gentiles. And he was astounded at what happened in response.

Immediately God’s Spirit went right to work, and a Gentile Pentecost unfolded before his eyes. Suddenly all those people—the ones he avoided, the ones whose politics made him sick, the ones who scared him by their difference, the ones who bored him with their normalcy—all of them received the gift of the Holy Spirit, the same gift he and his fellow Jewish Christian leaders had received. Apparently, without asking for permission, without taking a vote, God simply decided to give the same gift of new life and intimate presence to those outsiders, just as God had given it to Peter and the other insiders.

That is the way our God is. God takes our boundaries; God takes our stereotypes; God takes our rules; God takes our expectations; God takes all of that and often God looks at all of it and says, No. I don’t have favorites. Your limits, your litmus tests, your fears—none of that limits me. I embrace whom I embrace and guess what, God says, I have got really long arms.

Peter came face-to-face with those really long divine arms. Through his prayerful vision and his experience with all of those Gentiles at Cornelius’s house, his eyes were opened even wider, and he started to see the limits of his limits. He began to understand the wideness of God’s mercy. He realized God would call and love anyone and everyone God chose. So who was he, Peter, to hinder God, he asked out loud.

This story asks us that same question, you know. Peter’s experience and the experience of his faith community insist we ask ourselves if we are unintentionally hindering God in our lives and in our life together. What do you think? Do we have spoken or unspoken expectations about the kind of people we think fit best in the life of this congregation? Are there people we intentionally or unintentionally try to keep out by not making them feel welcomed or wanted because we are afraid they might dilute or threaten our congregational identity?

My first reaction, and perhaps yours, was “Of course not. We are an inclusive congregation.” But then we remember Peter and Nadia, so let’s try to be honest. How are we hindering God from shaping this body into an even fuller expression of diversity and inclusion that goes beyond our usual categories?

How are we trying to hinder God? I wondered that when I read on Friday about the one-thousandth shooting in our city, a number we ought to never reach, and yet we have. Children, old people, young people—no one seems to be off limits. Well, unless you don’t live in the neighborhoods where most of the violence tends to occur. Now, some of us do live in those neighborhoods, but according to our zip codes, most of us do not.

So I have wondered, how does that distance—physical and emotional—between most of us and most of those affected by the regular, ongoing violence in our city, how does that distance hinder what God might do for justice and peace? We all know that “personing” an issue makes a difference. So if we don’t really know anyone who goes to sleep scared of gunshots outside the house, then how motivated are we to act? If that emotional and physical distance exists, then how motivated are we to get involved in protests or in legislation or in learning about all the factors behind the violence? How are we, usually unintentionally, trying to hinder God from bringing shalom to all parts of our city?

Now, I cannot ask that question without being confessional. The longer I live here, the more I have to ask myself, how does the fact that I tend to live most of my life in a two-mile radius from Fourth Church—how does that hinder God from transforming me into a more faithful, more-willing-to-take-risks-and-to-serve, kind of disciple? Who am I to hinder God, I wonder, especially when my resistance is based on fear—fear of messing up or getting in the way or actual fear? What might God do if we decided to be not afraid and instead asked how could we be of use in God’s work for shalom in our city? After all, who are we to hinder God?

It is a question posed by this text. I have only given two applications for it, but it is a question we are to constantly ask ourselves, because our truth is that we Presbyterians know God is still very active in this world. God is not done yet. Just because we haven’t added any more books to the Bible does not mean that God stopped working God’s purposes out. We are a church Reformed, always being reformed by God’s Spirit. Right? So we need to consistently ask, Who are we to hinder God?

One more thing. Here is what else we know about our God: as both Peter and Nadia discovered, the only ones actually hindered by our limits or our expectations or our rules or our fears, the only ones honestly hindered by those things, are us and our ability to fully participate in God’s healing of the world. God is going to get the job done, with or without our help. But I sure would hate for us to miss out on our opportunity to participate in what God is doing. Wouldn’t you?

Who are we to hinder God? Or rather maybe the better question is, How do we try to hinder ourselves from being fully who God calls us to be as God’s disciples and coworkers in this world? It is a question worth asking. Amen.