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Acts 10:1-48
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2:Good morning. Good morning. Thank you. I'll try it again. Good morning.
Speaker 2:Good morning. Thanks, folks. I need the validation. Many of you don't know me, so I thought I'd start with a bit of an introduction. My name is Jim Croswell.
Speaker 2:I've been attending Commons for about a year, and my wife, Natasha, I, we lead a home group. Now some of you may remember that Joel, and his family moved on to a different ministry, opportunity. When that was announced, I contacted Jeremy and and and the church, and I said, guys, if you need any help kind of like doing some stuff, managing some background things, emailing people, I'm happy to help out. I had not intended to be preaching, but here I am. Hey.
Speaker 2:Hey. Don't clap till you've heard it. Trust me. Alright. Alright.
Speaker 2:So I also wanted to just say a little bit about myself and my own orientation. I'm a professor. I'm an academic. I teach at a university, and I'm a devout questioning believer. One of the hardest parts of my job is that once a year or so, and I've been in Christian higher education for about ten years.
Speaker 2:And once a year or so, some student will come up to me and tell me that she or he is praying for me. And it's usually this kind soul sees me as some sort of apostate that's lost, what this person considers to be authentic faith. And so where does this sentiment come from? You see, I'm a PhD in psychology. And this means that I'm a doctor, but I'm not the type of doctor that fixes your medical conditions.
Speaker 2:I'm a researcher. I study language, culture, religious experience. And I'm a psychologist, but I'm not a therapist. That is, I can't give you therapy, and I'll probably make you worse if you want therapy from me. Bottom line.
Speaker 2:But I'm an intellectual, and I deeply care about being an intellectual. But it means that part of who I am is that I cultivate an attitude where I'm always slightly out of step with the status quo. My service to the Christian community is to ask authentically hard questions, and my job is to challenge blind spots that get in the way of our authentic search to understand God and ourselves. So I tell you this because I want you to know where I'm coming from. I'm not coming from a place where I'm authorial about what the bible says.
Speaker 2:I'm not ordained. I'm not a pastor. Okay? So I'm not a religious scholar, and I'm not I don't feel like I have the right to speak about the truths of the bible. What I want to do today is present my experience, and you can take what works and leave the rest.
Speaker 2:I'm going to invite you to walk with me through a section of the Bible that expresses principles that ground me and connect me to the Christian faith. So together, let us pray. God, we come to you today to talk and learn together. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, oh Lord, our rock, our redeemer. Open our minds to hear the message that you're expressing to us in your word.
Speaker 2:Amen. So this summer, Commons is a has been doing a series on Acts. We have seen the forward momentum of faith in the book of Acts. The first Christ followers couldn't go back to a time when Jesus was in their midst. They had to forgive they had to forge new paths into a new place with the spirit's help.
Speaker 2:Last week, we saw the story of Ananias and Sapphira, and Bobby spoke about this terrifying story. It reminds us of the seriousness of being people, being temples of God, being a place where God's spirit dwells. So today is our our fourth Sunday, and we're headed into Acts chapter 10. Now when it comes to the Bible, one question that people are often fond to ask is, what happened? What happened?
Speaker 2:Acts chapter 10 involves a story about a convert to Christianity named Cornelius. And Cornelius, to my understanding, is the second non Jew that's converted to Christianity. And it tells us that Cornelius fulfills two criteria. And these are two criteria set out by Christ to what it means to be a a Christian. One, Cornelius is described as being a non Jew, but he was oriented towards God because he regularly prayed and engaged God.
Speaker 2:Two, he's described as being oriented towards caring and giving for others because he regularly helped out the poor and the people in the community. So we see how he loves God with all his heart, and he loves his neighbor as himself. And that's what it largely means to be a believer. So the text presents us with a scene where this angel appears to Cornelius, and the angel says, go find the Apostle Peter. Around around the same time, Peter, and he's staying with a tanner, that is somebody who works with animal skins, and he went up to the roof to pray.
Speaker 2:He became hungry and wanted something to eat, and while the meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance. He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. It contained all kinds of four footed animals as well as reptiles and birds. Then a voice said, get up, Peter. Kill and eat.
Speaker 2:Surely not, Peter replied. I've never eaten anything impure or unclean. The voice spoke a second time, do not call anything impure that God made clean. This happened three times, and immediately the sheet is taken back up to heaven. What happens after that is some messengers from Cornelius arrive where Peter is staying, and they say, come visit Cornelius.
Speaker 2:Peter says, okay. He goes to Cornelius' home. He enters into the home, and he starts off. He says, you know what? I realize that whatever, all people are are clean, there's no one I can call unclean.
Speaker 2:And then Cornelius tells a story about this angel and that he obeyed and sent for Peter, and Peter responds, and he says, I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism, but accepts from every nation the one who fears and does what is right. Peter then talks about his experience and tells a story, his testimony. Those that are with Cornelius, they have this powerful experience of some sort, and the story concludes with Peter baptizing them. So we have a nice story about what is supposed to have happened. Now here's the thing.
Speaker 2:Far too often people stop at this point, and they're not explicit about what is actually the most important question. You see, I think it's a huge mistake to stop at asking what happened because it's not really helpful for many reasons. As we tell a story, it is not really about the past. A story, whenever it's told, is about the present because it's told to some person for some purpose. Even when it's a text like a novel or the Bible.
Speaker 2:So we keep telling the story about Cornelius and Peter because it has meaning for us today. It is a story told to us and we see some sort of purpose in it. So really, the question that I would like to move us towards is not what happened, but I think the question we want to move towards is what does it mean? What does it mean? To talk about this question, why it's the most important, I'm gonna have to put on my professor hat for a bit.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna talk about my area of expertise, which is language and human behavior. I need to talk about how language works in everyday life. That is, I wanna talk and use a phrase called living language. This phrase refers to how language is used in everyday life and everyday conversations. It is language as it shows up in life.
Speaker 2:So I'm not the abstract notion of language, but how do we use it in everyday life? And I'm I'm drawing on several sources, and one of them is one of Canada's most well known intellectuals, Charles Taylor, in his book, Human Agency and Language. So there are two general theories about language and meaning. One theory is called the referential theory of language, the referential theory. This approach can be thought of as finding meaning by looking at the literal meaning of a text.
Speaker 2:So this approach says that words have meaning because of the things that they stand for. So the referential approach, words have meaning because of what they refer to, the referent. So let me give you an example. In our home, we have this thing. Many of you would call it a cat.
Speaker 2:This beast, of course, I have other names for it that I won't use in the house of God. However, this this beast also has a name which is fuzzywump. Now, the word cat, c a t, has meaning on the basis of what it refers to, a thing called a cat. That's the referential theory of meaning. The word cat has meaning because of the thing it refers to.
Speaker 2:Fuzzywump, moreover, has meaning by virtue of the thing to which it refers. This animal that I'm sure would eat me if I were unconscious in the apartment. Okay? But the point is fuzzy wump has me words have meaning by what they refer to. Are you tracking with me, ladies and gentlemen?
Speaker 2:Yes. Okay. So think about the story from Acts. On the referential approach, the theory of reference, figuring out what the story means is just about uncovering the happenings. The meaning of the story is basically about Cornelius having a vision, Peter having a vision, good for them, and then they so forth to get together and they talk.
Speaker 2:That's all that the text means if you take the referential approach. But, you know, folks, there's more to meaning than the referential theory gives us space for. Think about what I just did. I talked about this cat and fuzzy wump. What am I doing there?
Speaker 2:As I tell the story, I'm using a joke, and I'm playing with polemics. I'm playing with rhetoric, and I'm doing something in the present. That story I told doesn't just mean or refer to the cat. It does something in the present with us. So there's more than just reference going on.
Speaker 2:So there's more the stories about fuzzy one fuzzy wump is an element of play that I strategically use. It's not a neutral observation. Think closely about Peter and what we just read. He's not dealing with referential meaning either. The literal the literal meaning of the vision that Peter sees is eat these animals.
Speaker 2:Why was he pondering it? Why was he wondering? You see, he knew that there was more at stake than just literal meaning. We see that he knew that it was about more than just eating food. And Peter, the way he's expressed is just like us.
Speaker 2:Peter is described as pondering the meaning of points, the meaning, and he points out that there's more at stake than the literal meaning of the vision. And folks, this is how living language works. Living language, the way you all use language every day, is rarely about reference. Why is that? Well, an important reason why we always do more than just refer is that looking at meaning in a referential way, it actually kills text.
Speaker 2:It kills speech. It limits us to a discussion of the past as something separate from the present. Most of you are like me. You hear this text and you'd want to do something with it. It is you immediately bring the text into your present and you start to think about what it means.
Speaker 2:Living language is used in life in a way that is much more sophisticated than the referential theory admits or literal theories admit. So here's where another theory of meaning becomes really important. And there are several different terms to the approach. I'm gonna use, the term expressive. Expressive theory of language.
Speaker 2:The expressive approach addresses meaning by looking at what is being expressed in talk, in living language. It is about much more than the literal meaning expressed in our use of language. So what I want to do instead of going right back to the bible, I wanna start with a bit of an example from our lives. So my wife's name is Natasha, and we've been together for over two decades now. And we've had the same conversation for nearly two decades, and it goes something like this.
Speaker 2:It's the morning. K? She has made toast and jam for herself, And like most mornings, she has made the toast and the jam, and she places the knife with the jam on the counter. So the jam petrifies. K?
Speaker 2:On the counter. She walks in, and I say to her, hello, betrothed. I just say I say the jam is on the counter. And she responds to me, so? Now there is nobody in this room that's gonna be naive enough to say that I have been making the same neutral observation for twenty years.
Speaker 2:That's not what's happening. I'm not just saying, look. There's jam on the counter. And she's not saying so. There's more to it.
Speaker 2:There's something going on there that's much richer. Right? And so what's happening is that this expression, it's not a neutral observation. It involves our entire history and time together. Its meaning involves this two decade frustration of me with a petrified jam, and it expresses her two decade frustration of my anal retentive behavior.
Speaker 2:K? The meaning of these sentences is understood in the context of and our history together in the moment, and that's the expressive view of language. So the expressive view of language adds more because it points out that meaning is not about relationships among people, but it's about their history, their time together, who they are, and they're bringing everything with them into the moment. A living language does not have stable meaning because it depends what the words mean, depend upon the who's speaking to whom they're talking to, and what's going on. So the interlocutors are what matter, the people that are talking.
Speaker 2:When we look for meaning in the expressive view, meaning becomes unstable because people, their past, and what they're doing is all expressed together in the present. Let me give you another example. Years ago, I was doing my PhD at the University of Alberta. And now in Edmonton, of course, we don't have the Chinooks that you have here in Calgary. So in November, there's always this particular snowfall in November.
Speaker 2:You you you spend September, October saying winter is coming. Yeah. And then, where he's looking out the window, my friend's looking out the window. It's snowing hard. We know winter's here.
Speaker 2:He looks out the window, his name is Chris, and Chris goes, well. And I go, well, and we walk away. Now think about what's the meaning there? What do the what does the word well mean? Well, for him, it meant snowing, winter is no longer coming, it's here.
Speaker 2:For me, it meant, yeah. You're right. There's nothing we can do but put our heads down and slog it out until April. So the meaning of well was tied to the speakers in the history. So you see the same word in a very real human conversation is dynamic and flexible.
Speaker 2:And this is how real language works. More than literal meanings inhabit every linguistic expression. It's for this reason that the expressive approach is a much better match to how language works in everyday life. So if you wanna take seriously the idea that the Bible is an expression of God's voice, his language, the logos, it becomes hard to stick to the theory of reference. Asking about the literal meaning is a way to deaden the text because it can cut us off from the present.
Speaker 2:It is a way of shutting down the voice of God by avoiding what the text means right here and right now. So when we ask what something means, the expressive approach reminds us that the histories and experiences of the people matter because they are part of what is being said. So, of course, you know, we're not speaking directly to Peter, but we are engaging in a text that carries experience of the past with it. It expresses ideas through the hero of Peter, and the central theme is Peter's relationship to the rules and dogma of Judaism. What does Peter bring his relationship to what's going on in Judaism at the time?
Speaker 2:The Jewish tradition had a lot of rules, dogma, and it marked who was part of the community and who was not. Rituals and rules, like following food rules, these were the kinds of communities that weren't just, things that weren't just about rules, but they're about identity markers. They tell you who is part of the community and who is not. Who's Jewish and who's not. And so these these rules and the tacit ones that the people were kind of obeying at the time, they mark who's in and out of the group.
Speaker 2:So this story, folks, is not just about food. What's going on in the text here, it's expressing how it's about who's part of the community and what rules do we care about as the community. It's about being part of the community. It's marked by rules. The story presents a man that is struggling with rules.
Speaker 2:Placing Peter with a tanner is really important because you know tanners work with dead bodies, and that was unclean at the time. According to the rules at the time, the tanner was someone that would be considered unclean, and any good member of the Jewish community would know this rule and not spend time with the tanner. So the text is already expressing some sort of tension in Peter. We see that Peter's already positioned as somebody that's ambivalent about the rules, and the text expresses some sort of struggle. You see, we have to engage the text now in relation to where you and I are today.
Speaker 2:A contemporary reality is that religious communities are often painted as being about rules and behavior that mark someone as belonging or not belonging. Many Christian communities have rules that people feel compelled to follow or else they might not belong. I've certainly seen this in my own life and the lives of others. The sad reality is that a lot of people, me, have been really hurt by communities that care about little more than my ability to act and talk and look the right way. That's a reality.
Speaker 2:So to determine the meaning, what is this text expressing, we bring together Peter's experience and my experience and our experience and say what's happening. We have to interrogate our own relationship with the rules and the other things that mark a community. There may be unwritten rules that compel me to act in certain ways. I'm inspired by this text because it expresses something important to me right now. Authentic relationship with God matters more than the rules.
Speaker 2:It matters more than the dogma, whether the explicit rules or the subtle ones we all follow. The text expresses hope because it shows how a pure form of Christianity is not about dogma or rules. Christianity is a faith that places faith and rules secondary to relationship with God. There is freedom to the question the rules, and I love this about my faith. Because what matters is authentic relationship with God and others.
Speaker 2:For me, this expression, it pushes against dogma, and it's part of why I remain a Christian is this type of text. Let's keep going and think a little bit more about Peter. He's a hero, and the writer positions Peter in a very subtle way by telling us the sheet was lowered three times. K. I've never had a vision.
Speaker 2:But were I to have a vision, I'd say one is enough. Is Peter dense? Three times, this sheet comes down. Each time Peter tows the party line and he says, I'm not gonna eat that stuff. You would think that one strange vision would be enough, but the writer presents it three times.
Speaker 2:And what are we seeing here? We're seeing somebody, and the text is expressing the experience of somebody that's having a hard time breaking out of preconceptions. Peter is presented as so dense that it happens three times, but the writer's not saying Peter's a fool. What the writer's expressing is the idea that we often can't see the obvious because of our own preconceptions. He looks like something that's having a hard time getting past what he thinks he already knows.
Speaker 2:How does our life interface with this story? Well, I'm a psychologist, and something that I love about my job is humans capacity for self deception. Humans capacity to to kinda change what they see in the world around them. And I've gone grown to appreciate that we should never trust our perceptions. We almost never see what's really out there because our minds always bend what we think we are seeing.
Speaker 2:This is fact of human psychology and how it works. You don't have direct access to reality. You bend and shape a lot of what you see. And guess what? We do this even more so when we're dealing with something that matters to us.
Speaker 2:Politics, religion, keep naming them, the things that we care about, these are the things where we really misperceive. And this is what's going on with Peter and with us. So there are two very powerful moments where the writer positions Peter as somebody who's breaking through preconceptions or presuppositions. One moment is where Peter, he walks in and he says, no person should be considered unclean. This is a moment of epiphany where the hero says that he was wrong to judge people by their backgrounds.
Speaker 2:If we consider the present time, in my own experience, there are many opportunities where I've been challenged to change my preconceptions. My own preconceptions are hard to break. They're very powerful. And I don't think I'm alone in saying that I've those preconceptions have shaped me to look at other people as being unclean because they don't fit what I think they should be. The present reality is that people there are many people that are considered unclean, and the Christian community has a long tradition of treating people with different backgrounds as more or less worthy.
Speaker 2:Consider someone who's gay, a sex addict, or from a different culture. We often implicitly, through our own presuppositions, look at these people as being unclean. What I see in the story is an expression that confronts the temptation to say such a person is unclean. The story expresses, and here's where it gets really tricky, and the challenge in the Christian faith. The story puts us in a place where we have to risk our preconceptions.
Speaker 2:We have to risk what we think we know to be true, and it means that we have to have courage to radically challenge our presuppositions and our pre perceptions. This is core to the Christian narrative, especially in Acts and the book of Matthew. This challenge applies to our faith and what we think we know about God. My experience of being a Christian has been coming to understand that what I preconceived and thought was the truth was wrong. And that's hard, folks, because authentic engagement with God means you're always gonna be put in a position of risk and necessary position of faith.
Speaker 2:The story expresses how we need to, risk our preconceptions because one thing that we have to realize is everybody belongs in the church community. Full stop. No qualifier. Okay. There's another moment where where Cornelius is described as worship via Peter's feet, and the story goes that Peter asked Cornelius to stand.
Speaker 2:He treats him as an equal. Instead of indignation, the writer expresses humility of somebody that struggled with preconceptions. Presently, coming to realize that others are radically equal to me means that the story expresses humility that leads to repentance. See, I've mistaken repentance for the practice of staying saying sorry when I've broken some rule. This is a shallow and naive expression of repentance for me.
Speaker 2:True repentance is when we come to a place where we're humble enough to go through the change in our preconceptions. The story is about being rigorously honest about past prejudices. It expresses how Christians need paradigm shifts, and this is the stuff of true repentance. It illuminates how repentance is a path to making amends to people that we have hurt. Perhaps you're like me.
Speaker 2:Maybe you've hurt somebody by virtue of how you want to uphold the rules. Perhaps you're like me and you've hurt someone with your own self centered behavior. Repentance is not about asking for forgiveness so much as it is about being completely humble and transparent. The kind of attitude is powerful. It can reduce destructive anger, and it can start to heal hurts.
Speaker 2:Consider, for example, we're on a Blackfoot territory right now. I can't say sorry to my indigenous neighbors. It's not enough. All I can do is be willing to be humble, say I was wrong and we were wrong. Let's move forward.
Speaker 2:Perhaps this can maybe deal with some of the pain that we deal with. Okay. Let's move on. Think about Cornelius. Cornelius is painted as somebody who is faithful to God.
Speaker 2:He ensures those in his home, they've all heard the scriptures. He's described as someone that feared God and attended the synagogue even though he wasn't Jewish, and the text is really subtle about what life was like for Cornelius. He wasn't a Jew, he was part of an occupying army. He was he was this officer in the occupying army, but he was sympathetic to the Jewish community. You have to be careful though.
Speaker 2:The story is not about somebody that was part of the community. The story involves someone that would have been considered unclean to members of the Jewish community, and they wouldn't even go to his house. No matter how faithful he was. He would have been used to snubs from the community. He's presented as somebody who is faithful to God in the community even though that very community probably reciprocate.
Speaker 2:So what does this tell us in relation to us? There are many people that have been hurt by communities that exclude them. There are many people who deeply care for God, but they're rejected by the communities that are supposed to be committed to God. Yeah. I'm an academic, and this has been my experience.
Speaker 2:I'll be honest with you. The twentieth century evangelical Christianity has about a hundred years of of anti intellectualism, and people like me are often not welcome in many churches because we ask authentically hard questions. The story expresses something, however. I can't hide behind that. It expresses how I can be challenged to let it go and remain faithful to God nonetheless.
Speaker 2:You see it takes courage to face situations where the where being faithful can hurt. It takes courage to stay true to convictions when others may reject us from the community that we should belong to. The story expresses hope because the courage that Cornelius embodies resonates with the courage many people are called to practice. So let me kinda wrap up here and say thank you for walking with me through Acts, and there are kind of there are four take home points that I'd like to share. One core point is that understanding the text like the Bible involves asking what does it mean, and not being content with what happened.
Speaker 2:Another point is that we should not judge others as unclean ever. Faith is not about dogma or rules, even the ones we take for granted. My third point, we need to cultivate humility. Repentance is about being willing to change or taken for granted preconceptions. Fourthly, the last point I I think we might wanna talk about is that there are people in communities like churches that probably wouldn't agree with the first three points.
Speaker 2:If you don't feel like you fit because of people like these, have courage. Don't run from or hide behind the narrow mindedness of others. This is a space for you to be. Folks, I appreciate your graciousness and your willingness to let me, listen to me and let me talk and speak from my experience. So let's pray.
Speaker 2:God, you have shown us what is good and what you require of us. Enable us to face what is expressed in this story so that we can act justly, love mercy. Give us willingness to walk humbly with you and our neighbors. Amen.