We are living in a time of deep polarization. If we think about the issues that are part of our public discourse right now, we see dividing lines everywhere … in trade and tariffs, in election campaigns, in support and in opposition to pipelines, in immigration policies and practices, in international relations, in political leadership and political parties. Even over the course of this week, we have seen the painful polarization within the LGBTQ2S community between those who support the protest at the Pride parade and those who opposed that same action. The rhetoric in all of these matters quickly becomes heated and personal. Discussion and debate are displaced with hostile lines that creating communities of “us” and “them” … communities of “for” and “against.”
It’s not like any of this is novel territory for us. The issues have been different over our history but we have been at this same intersection many times. The corner of “us” and “them” is a busy intersection we have to navigate over and over again.
That was the very intersection where the world of the story has these two first centuries characters meet one another. Peter was a good Jewish boy … raised in a good Jewish home … with a good Jewish mother … staying in Joppa with a good Jewish family … he’s in town teaching a new way to be Jewish … he’s become a leader in a sect within 1st century Judaism that is compelled by the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth … so here’s Peter, one of the key organizers of this movement having a nap before dinner and dreaming of eating every unkosher thing he can think of … badgers, buzzards and bats to name only a few … In his dream he promises to remain faithful to the lifelong teachings of his tradition and never under any circumstance to eat such forbidden things … but the voice in his dream is quick to teach Peter to never say never … the nature of life is change … anything is possible … osmosis happens …
Of course as Freud and Jung would both be quick to tell us … the dream is not really about what’s on the table but rather it is about who’s at the table! It’s not about the menu … it’s about the guest list … it’s not about what you eat as much as it is about those with whom you eat …
Peter has spent several transformative years of his life in the company of a radical peasant teacher who was critiqued for his eating habits by the religious leaders of the day … not for his table manners, not for his diet but for his table mates … the religious authorities dismissed Jesus as a drunkard and a glutton not because of what he drank or how little or much he ate but because he ate with nobodies and nuisances … with gentiles and women … with prostitutes and tax collectors … with thieves and slum dogs … with the great swath of outcast humanity they simply called “tax collectors and sinner” and with all manner of humanity
After three years or so, you’d think, if anything, Peter might have developed some different eating habits … some different dinner companions … but apparently, he needs to be invited three times to order the unthinkable from the menu to get him ready for the three strangers that are about to invite him to do something unpalatable … to have dinner in a Gentile home … with a roman officer and his family and friends… in other words … with those who are ‘them’ … who are the ‘other’ … who are not his people … who are not of his faith … who are not of his race … who are representatives of the enemy empire occupying and oppressing his people.
He was barely awake when a knock came on the door. Of course, it was three representatives sent from a Roman official who lived up the road in Caesarea. Cornelius had called for Peter because he, too, had the strangest dream. The next day, Peter undertakes the unthinkable and agrees to go to that extravagant Roman city that embodied everything Roman … baths, all weather port, Caesar’s palace, an amphitheater … all things pagan and all things Roman … all things built on the backs of his people … all things that put the empire right in his face … all things unclean to an observant 1st century Jew … He goes to Caesarea to meet Cornelius, the gentile on his own turf.
He entered the house. The place was packed with every shirt tail relative and all Cornelius’s closest friends. They were all waiting for this Jewish man to cross the threshold and tell them about his experience of his teacher and friend … and what this movement he was leading was all about. They are poised to hear him … to listen … to understand. And what is the first thing Peter does … open mouth, insert foot. “Y’all know I really shouldn’t be here. It is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile.” Didn’t he learn anything up there on the roof? Imagine how Cornelius and his guests must have felt. Their guest turns out to be racist and xenophobic … he walks into the house and treats them like dirt or like he might catch something awful just by being in the same room with them.
And then comes the word we’ve got to love … “but” he says … BUT … ‘but’ means things can change. But’ means the past doesn’t prescribe the future. The way things are is not the only way for things to be. ‘But’ means we don’t know everything there is to know … ‘but’ means things aren’t immutable, unchangeable. “But”, he says “ I have just had an experience that I didn’t understand until now … “I have just been shown my own prejudice” … but I am opening to a new understanding … I am Bu beginning to see that there is more to see … but I’m beginning to see who has been missing from the table … but I’m starting to imagine another possibility … but I’m starting to understand why our teacher gathered us around tables we’d never have imagined ourselves eating … but I’m beginning to see that there is enough room in this movement for all of us (adapted from Barbara Brown Taylor in her sermon, “How Not to Hinder God”) But means, I am where I never imagined myself to be. But means I can see things differently. But means, osmosis can happen.
“But” means everything can change if I will listen long enough, hard enough, deeply enough to allow my assumptions to be challenged. Claire Mulvany would have campaigned for the NO vote in the 1983 abortion referendum in Ireland. In 2018 she campaigned for the Yes vote. In that space of 25 years both she and her nation had changed its mind. It’s a story about change and where change begins …
It is easier to make assumptions about one another than it is to listen to one another. It is easier to hold ideas and opinions as singular truths than it is to recognize we need each other because wisdom and truth are always incomplete and none of us has the whole story.
And when the others in the early Jewish Christian movement heard what Peter had done, they called him up on the carpet to explain himself. What in the world were you thinking? Surely you can’t believe that the Jesus movement is open to gentiles? to roman gentiles? to anyone and everyone? What happened to you … we thought you were one of us.
When we open ourselves to really listen everything will become more complicated. We will no longer sit comfortably on one side of a line, a divide … we will stand in the middle of that busy intersection instead of safely on the comfortable curb of the us or them corner … things will be as simple as we thought and no one will be as wrong as we thought and we will not be as right as we thought.
But we will have changed the traffic pattern … the flow of being against one another. We will have created a meeting place in the middle of it all where the sides give way just like the walls of a cell give way to osmosis. We will have planted the seeds that can change a conflict into conversation … that can change our relationship with one another. This is a time to ask where it is that we need to plant seeds of change in our lives?
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