Scripture text: Acts 10:34-43 (More accurately the whole chapter of Acts 10)
It’s funny how we form our impression of other people. Who are they? What do they do? There’s a reason people say that first impressions are the most important, because we humans do tend to “lock in” the way we look at someone based entirely on the way we first encountered them. They become frozen, unchangeable; They are only who we thought them to be at the onset.
I’ll use a few Hollywood celebrities as an example of this. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who had been channel surfing and had stumbled onto the 1950’s sci-fi classic “Forbidden Planet.” Truly, a monumental film, incredibly influential, but what my friend couldn’t get past was its star. It was Leslie Nielsen, better known to most of us for slapstick comedy and spoof. Naked Gun. Airplane. Dracula: Dead and Loving It. These are the movies he’s best known for, but to see this actor in his early career as a heroic leading man instead of a buffoon was almost too much for my friend.
We all, whether we care about it or not, have heard about the controversy surrounding Mylie Cyrus. A controversy that is almost entirely based on this tendency of us to look at people as only who they are when we first encounter them. Our children first came to know her as a child TV star and pop star. Innocent, safe. But now she’s an adult and doing adult things and people are freaking out about it. Did we honestly think Ms. Cyrus or anyone else would stay frozen in time, a child forever?
We do this all over the place. We do it with celebrities as I’ve noted. We do with the people we know. I still struggle to some degree with the transformation of my libertine best friend in college into upright ultra-conservative family man. We do it with the figures of history. Thomas Jefferson is our third president, a founding father, a brilliant academic, a hero by all accounts, but the truth of his slave-ownership and his defense thereof is something we struggle with.
The characters and great people of the Biblical story are no different. We too lock them in as we first encountered them. They are all “good people,” righteous and holy. Decent and without flaw or vice. Well, like so many of these others, if that’s what we believe, we have them wrong.
It is not an easy thing for us to see someone like St. Peter as a bigot, but that was indeed what he was. It’s hard to blame him for it. Like most haters, he’s been taught from a very early age that “his people” and only “his people” are special. In his case, he was taught that only his people were the Chosen, blessed by God and only they were worthy enough to receive that blessing. He’s far from alone in that. The early history of the church bears that out.
On the mountaintop, Jesus declares that the disciples are to “go forth into all the nations.” And they seem to get a good start on Pentecost, when all the people from Parthia, Medea, Elam, and all those other tongue-twister nations our poor lectors have to read on that day come to believe. But Luke makes a point that all those people who showed up on that first Pentecost were only foreign in the sense of where they lived. All of them were the same ethnicity as Peter and the other disciples. It would be like one of us going to Tokyo and only hanging out with the American ex-pats who live there, never once talking to someone who was actually Japanese.
That was not quite what Jesus had in mind.
So Jesus has to get his apostles over themselves, in a sense, and actually get them out into the world amidst all those people they’ve thus far refused to talk to. You know them: Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Germans, Indians, Chinese, and so forth. All the peoples we call by the blanket term Gentiles.
Luke records two stories about how Jesus goes about doing this through visions and his Spirit. The first is in Acts chapter 8 when Philip encounters the eunuch of Ethiopia. The second is two chapters later when Peter is told to go visit the household of the Roman centurion Cornelius, the tail end of which is our second lesson today.
We typically look at these stories as tales of conversion: pagans becoming Christian, but I think there’s another way to look at it. Those pagans aren’t really pagan; the Scriptures record that they were already believers in God. And I think they are there not to be converted, but instead to convert those apostles into a new way of thinking and seeing the world.
Peter witnesses something remarkable, something he never believed possible. God’s Holy Spirit amidst people who were not chosen. God at work in Gentiles! And if God could do this and was doing this, what couldn’t he do and wouldn’t do?
Peter realizes that he was wrong. He was wrong about God and he was wrong about people. His first impression of the Gentiles did not hold up. He never thought this was possible. God blessing THEM! That’s why he speaks with such astonishment in the lesson that we have before us. God and his blessings are bigger than he ever realized.
Each of us carries within us our own prejudices, our own frozen first impressions about people and groups of people. We may be suspicious of those who espouse a particular political ideology or are of a certain economic status or whose skin color or sexual orientation is different from our own. Through the stories of Scripture, God continues to challenge each of us to see in the other God’s image and blessing just he did with Peter. But there’s another lesson we can take away from these stories beyond “don’t be a hater.”
You see, it’s not just others we are prejudiced towards. Not just others that we lock in, frozen and unchanging in our first impressions. We do it to ourselves. At various points, the voices of our mind have told us that we are worthless, idiotic, a failure, no good. And we’ve believed it. In the deepest recesses of our minds, in our heart of hearts, our view of ourselves is often far more negative and hateful than anything we project onto others.
But when Christ says that his Gospel, his salvation, his love is for all nations, all peoples, he means it. He means it for the alien and the strange, but perhaps most radically of all, he means it for you. If he can love them, he can love you. If he has died for them and rose again on the third day, he did it also for you.
Peter was challenged to see that God’s love and blessing are far bigger and more welcoming that he ever imagined. We join him in receiving that challenge and hopefully recognizing God’s wondrous image not just in those around us, but in ourselves as well. For all our flaws, vices, and yes, our prejudices, God loves us enough to die for us. If God’s love is big enough to include everybody, it’s big enough to include you. Amen.
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