The Room Nobody Expected - Sermon Transcript

Good morning, friends.

It's good to see y'all.

In season one of West Wing, I'm still watching West Wing, there's an episode called The State Dinner.

And the president is hosting...

 officials and the president of Indonesia.

And in the middle of this sort of formal dinner, Josh, Toby need to have a quiet off the record backroom conversation with one of the diplomats from Indonesia.

 It's simple enough, except in Indonesia, there's not just one language spoken.

There's hundreds of languages, different dialects, and there's a problem.

The State Department interpreter in this episode that they brought in doesn't speak that particular dialect, and so Donna

 who's one of the aides in the West Wing, is sent on a mission, essentially, to find someone who can interpret for them.

She finds someone in the kitchen who speaks this particular dialect in Portuguese but not English.

And so it unfolds kind of like you think it would.

You would have a member of the president's staff speak English that's then translated into Portuguese

 that's then translated into this dialect in Indonesia.

And it's exactly, it's rather painful to watch.

Ernst Morgan does a great job of this.

It's really awkward and Toby is losing his mind because every sentence takes like a minute and a half.

 in nuances like dying on the vine and you're just watching this exchange take place in a kitchen between the United States officials, kitchen staff, a State Department official and then this diplomat from Indonesia.

It goes back and forth for a while and then the diplomat from Indonesia more or less says, why don't we just speak in English?

 He knew English.

All the machinery and the sort of negotiating and the scrambling and the effort that's put in in this episode to build a good bridge across a distance that was actually never there.

 It is a hilarious and painful reminder, I think, of how much time we spend to try to get things right, to make sure that we're understood, to make sure that we can communicate with those that we may not know, the stranger in our midst, to ensure things are not lost at all in translation, and often we lose sight of the truth.

 lose sight of the truth that they're already speaking our language.

This is essentially, I think, the essence of church work because I've been in that room.

I've never been to a State Department dinner.

Not yet, at least.

But I have been in churches that are very good, ours included, very good at building elaborate systems to reach people that God is already talking to.

 So as we conclude our series, Pull Up a Chair, we do so, I think, here.

Because for three weeks we've been talking about making room.

How are we going to make more room at the table?

About what it means for a church to create space of belonging.

That is indeed our mission statement, isn't it?

To magnify God's love for all people by creating space for

 for belonging and purpose, justice and joy.

This is our work as a church, and I don't wanna hedge here.

This is important work.

We are called as a church to make room.

We state it clearly.

 Because we magnify God's love by creating this space.

But today, I think I want to ask us a harder question, or maybe it's a hopeful one.

I don't know.

What if we're never the ones who set the table?

What if our work isn't about the chairs or the place settings or the guest list?

What if that's God's work?

 To help us explore that a little bit, we're going to turn our attention to the book of Acts.

I'm going to be reading from chapter 10.

And yes, I'm extending the reading this morning.

We're actually going to read from 34 through 48.

Then Peter began to speak to them.

I truly understand that God shows no partiality.

 But in every people, anyone who fears him and practices righteousness, Peter says, is acceptable to God.

You know the message that God sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ.

He is Lord of all.

 That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced, how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, and how Jesus went about doing good and healing all who are oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.

 We are witnesses to all that he did, both in Judea and in Jerusalem, and they put him to death by hanging him on a tree.

This is where Peter is preaching, and you can tell he's really getting into it.

He's about, this is my commentary, he's about to make his point, and so was I until my iPad died.

Don't worry, I planned for this.

 So Peter is saying we are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem.

And they put him to death by hanging him on a tree.

But Peter says, but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear.

Not to all the people.

 but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.

He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead.

All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.

And Peter is about to make his point.

And while Peter was still speaking and preaching, the Holy Spirit fell upon all.

 who heard the word.

The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God.

Then Peter said, can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?

So he ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ.

 And then they invited Peter to stay with them for several days.

For the word of God in scripture, for the word of God among us, and for the word of God within us.

Thanks be to God.

Will you pray with me?

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing and acceptable to you, O God, our rock and our redeemer.

For you are already out ahead of us.

 May we have the courage to look for you.

Amen.

Okay, for us to really appreciate this text, we're going to spend a little bit of time unpacking the context.

So I'll try to do this as quickly and as efficiently as possible, but

 There was no way I could read the entire chapter to you all this morning.

And so I'm going to add some commentary because I think to understand this moment in its sort of power, this moment that is taking place in Cornelius's house, it's such a big deal.

And to understand that, we're going to have to sort of do a little bit of work.

It starts with Cornelius, our work, and the author who wants us to know exactly who he is.

Now, Cornelius is a centurion.

 And Saturian was an officer in the Roman army stationed in Caesarea.

Now, Caesarea is important.

It's not just another random city name in the text.

This is the seat of the Roman Empire in this region.

It's where the governor lives.

It's where the occupation is.

 is essentially organized and carried out.

So when the author introduces Cornelius, the people who would be hearing this story, their chest would get a bit tight because they have a particular view of who Cornelius is, who he works for, and what his real role is in the midst of this emerging church.

This is someone who represents the empire that crucified Christ, okay?

 Then the author says something surprising, that Cornelius is in fact devout.

He fears God.

He gives generously to the poor.

Cornelius prays often, constantly, the text says.

And one afternoon while he is praying, an angel tells him God has heard his prayers and that he needs to send for a man named Peter.

 Now, Peter is not hanging out in Caesarea.

Peter is 30 miles down the coast, actually, in Joppa.

He's staying with a man named Simon, who was a tanner.

Now, to appreciate how awkward that must have been for Peter, just remember tanners are taking the dead skin of animals and tanning them.

Hence the name tanner.

And...

 That would have put Peter in a precarious situation as a Jew, essentially right on the edge of being unclean, basically his entire stay at Simon's house.

It's a trade that kept you really close to death and to ritual impurity.

 So Peter is really right on the edge of his comfortability, I imagine, of the categories that keep him feeling secure and safe.

And yes, for those who know the story of Jonah, it is the same Joppa.

 The same port city where Jonah ran to catch a boat in the opposite direction when God told him to go preach to the Gentiles in Nineveh.

I don't think the author is being subtle here.

So Peter goes up on the roof of Simon the Tanner's house and he goes there to pray and he gets hungry like we all do when we're praying.

And...

 He has a vision.

A sheep comes down from heaven filled with all kinds of animals, clean and unclean animals.

And a voice says, get up, Peter, kill and eat.

And Peter says, no, by no means, Lord.

I have never eaten anything profane or unclean.

The voice says, what God has made clean, you must not call profane.

And this happens again.

 Three times.

Three times Peter is asked.

Three times Peter says no.

It's hard not to hear an echo there.

Another night in another courtyard.

Another moment with a rooster.

And the same Peter who denied Christ three times.

 And this is exactly where I think a lot of Christian preaching goes wrong because I think it's easy for us to hear the backstory to today's scripture.

It's easy to hear this story and decide that Peter's hesitation is just prejudice.

And that Jewish food laws were the problem that God actually came to fix.

That's why we have Jesus Christ.

No longer are we bound to the laws of the Old Testament.

 That the law for Jews is now incompatible with Christ.

That particular reading has done real harm.

And it's a very poor theological interpretation of the Gospels.

And particularly Peter's relationship with his own faith.

Because Peter is not a bigot in this story.

Peter is actually being faithful.

 The dietary laws, the practices of purity, these were ways the people of Israel stayed faithful to God.

Stayed faithful to God as a distinct people, often under enormous pressure from empires that wanted them to disappear.

Peter isn't holding on then to something that is bad, okay?

He's holding on to something that's rather holy.

 Which is exactly, I think, which is exactly what makes this story so disorienting.

God is not correcting bad religion.

God is doing something new.

That even the most faithful...

 Even the most faithful people did not see coming.

While Peter is still up on the roof trying to make sense of the vision, there's a knock at the gate.

Aaron Sorkin would be proud.

The men from Cornelius have arrived, and the Spirit tells Peter to go with them.

Don't hesitate.

I've sent them.

And here's where the story really breaks open and challenges us.

It seems as if God is working both ends of the story simultaneously.

Cornelius is getting a vision.

Peter's getting a vision.

 And the messengers are knocking on the door while Peter's still trying to figure it out, still confused.

God has arranged the meeting before either man has actually agreed to it.

So Peter goes, and when he walks into Cornelius' house, the first thing out of his mouth, right before today's text, the first thing out of his mouth is not the sermon we heard him preach, it's a disclaimer.

 This is what Peter says.

You all know that it's like unlawful for me to be here, for someone like me to associate with or visit someone like you.

But God has, Peter says, show me I should not call anyone profane or unclean.

And then he begins the words that we just read.

 I truly understand that God shows no partiality.

Now, as we get into Peter's preaching here, the Greek here is rather interesting because it's in present tense.

It's less like a finished theological statement that Peter is proclaiming.

It's more like he's beginning to grasp what God is doing.

I'm taking hold of this, right, as I work this out amongst you.

Peter isn't delivering a lesson that he's already learned.

 He's figuring it out loud.

Standing in the living room of a Roman officer.

It's a good thing for us who are verbal processors.

There is some benefit to that.

 And Peter starts preaching and he tells them about Jesus and about Jesus' ministry and about his death and about his resurrection.

And he's building towards something.

You can feel it.

He's setting them up for this like preacher moment.

He's got a point to make.

 He's got an altar call that he's about to give.

He's about to make that dramatic turn in the sermon where everyone becomes a faithful believer, a faithful follower of Jesus Christ, like I dream about doing every Sunday.

At God's point, Peter's going to make it.

And then what happens?

God interrupts the whole thing.

The Holy Spirit dies.

 prematurely descends upon the people and interrupts the whole thing.

God shows up before Peter is even close to being done with his sermon.

Verse 44, while Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word.

While he was still speaking, God interrupts the sermon.

And friends, as a preacher, I want you to know that is both deeply comforting and a bit threatening.

Laughter

 The Holy Spirit is descended upon the people.

God has given them the gift of the Spirit.

And notice, there is no altar call before they receive the Holy Spirit.

There are no right prayers to be prayed.

No one makes a profession of faith.

 No one gets baptized before the Spirit shows up.

The Spirit just falls.

And then the author tells us who is surprised.

It's not Cornelius.

Cornelius isn't surprised.

It's not Cornelius' family or friends or neighbors that are surprised.

You know who is surprised?

It is the faithful, the Jews who have accompanied Peter to Cornelius' house.

They are shocked, overcome with bewilderment

 and awe of what God is doing.

That's the reversal.

The people being converted in this story are not only the ones at Cornelius' house.

It's the people who walked in the door with Peter.

 We usually say Pentecost is the birthday of the church, and it is.

It's the birthday of the church.

It's great.

I love Pentecost.

But the crowd in Acts 2 is actually a familiar crowd for the disciples.

The text clearly says they were devout Jews from every nation under heaven, along with people who had already converted to Judaism.

It's gloriously diverse crowd, no doubt, but it is a Jewish crowd.

 Pentecost was a renewal of Jewish faith.

Acts 10 is where the circle is drawn wider and wider.

Some scholars actually call this chapter the Gentile Pentecost, and Peter makes the connection himself because in the next chapter, when the leaders in Jerusalem demand to know why he went into a Gentile's house and ate with them, Peter tells them the whole story and says the Holy Spirit fell on them just as it had upon us at the beginning of

 just as it had upon us.

So Pentecost is the birth of the church.

Cornelius' living room is where we find out how big this thing is actually going to get.

And the good news from today's reading is that the table, literally the literal table, and metaphorically the table, this table we keep talking about,

 This is not a table of our own creation.

It isn't our work.

The table on Acts 10 was set by God.

It was not set or planned or positioned by Peter.

Certainly not the church in Jerusalem.

Not by a committee on hospitality.

God heard Cornelius' prayers before anyone knew his name.

 For us as Wesleyans, this is what we call pervenient grace, the grace of God that goes before us, that is at work in our life before we're even aware of how God is at work in our life.

And it is at work in the life of every single person on the face of this earth.

Because remember, friends, Peter did not include Cornelius.

Peter simply discovered that Cornelius had already been included before.

 When Peter explains himself then to the church in Jerusalem, he ends with this question.

If God gave them the same gift that God gave us, who was I that I could hinder God?

That might be the most honest description of evangelism I know.

Who are we as members of First United Methodist Church of Dallas?

Who are we that we

 could hinder God.

Now, last night when I couldn't sleep, I read a very scary statistic that the United Methodist Church has lost over half of its members in the past five years.

 And in the midst of our fear and anxiety about what the future of mainline denominations look like and what it means for us as a church and what it means for our particular ministry in Dallas, Texas, it is easy to get sort of caught up and we have to do more so we can survive.

And we can keep hiring translators, no doubt, for people that God is already speaking to.

 We keep striving after proper table placements and we keep working to make room.

 We do, and yet God is already out in front of us working to make all things new.

And what a moment it is then in the book of Acts, what a revelation for Peter, a conversion of the highest order.

And I pray that we have moments where we are converted to see that what we are called to do as a church is not to do what is God's.

It is simply to remain faithful to what God is doing.

 Because God is at work beyond the walls of this church.

God is at work in lives of strangers and people that we do not yet know.

And we cannot be presumptuous enough to believe that we are giving something to them that they desperately need.

 We must trust that God's grace is far more at work in the lives of strangers and people we do not know than any one of our ministries ever could be.

 What a moment it is then, a revelation for Peter.

And you would think that that would sort of have set things right for Peter.

They would go on to live a very faithful, inclusive life.

That he would have an opportunity then to show the early church what it means to welcome Gentiles to the same table.

 But Paul would actually like a word here because Paul always wants a word.

In Galatians, Paul tells a story about the time Peter came to Antioch.

Jewish believers and Gentile believers are worshiping together.

And when Peter first arrives, he eats with the Gentiles.

 He sits at their table, exactly what he had learned at Cornelius' house.

And then some people arrive from Jerusalem, people who are connected to the council and to James, the leader of the church there, people who believe that Gentile Christians needed to become more Jewish before they could share full fellowship.

And you know what Peter does?

He gets up from the table and he goes and he sits with all the Jews.

 He pulls back, and Paul tells us why.

Not because Peter changed his theology, not because he stopped believing what he saw.

Paul says he did it because he was afraid.

And that fear spreads, and when Peter pulls his chair back, everyone else does too.

And Paul confronts him to his face in front of everyone, and Peter's failure takes place at a literal table.

The man who learned the lesson...

 at Cornelius' table, forgets it at another table the moment that the social costs become too high.

And friends, that is our real challenge as a church.

The future of our church will be directly tied to how much we are willing to stay at the table when the costs begin to rise.

 How much we are willing to admit when, like Peter, we actually get up and move because the social costs are too high and have the courage and the awareness to repent and return then back to the table.

That is where the future of our church lies.

 Because the challenge is that one conversion is never enough.

Wesley knew that, and we see that in the life of Peter.

Peter got converted over and over and over again in Scripture.

And he needed every one of those conversions.

And so do you.

And so do I. We are a church that is committed to welcoming God.

 folks, to hospitality, to creating a space

 But that work is not just one thing we check off the list.

It's a posture we take, keep losing, and then keep coming back to.

And the best news is this.

The table didn't close when Peter walked away from it.

The Spirit didn't wait for Peter to get it right.

The Spirit didn't wait for Peter to get it right twice.

God kept running out ahead of him, and God kept setting the table.

God kept calling him forward,

 And the church did not survive because of Peter's faithfulness.

The church survives because of God's faithfulness.

Grace always outlasts our regressions.

 And that's what holds this whole series together.

We are guests who keep learning how wide the host invitation really is.

Which means evangelism, the kind that this church is called to, looks a lot less like convincing people of something and a lot more like paying attention.

Noticing where God is already at work.

 noticing who God is already talking to and having the courage to sit down and stay seated even when it gets uncomfortable.

And once you do this week, just think about this one question.

Where have you pulled your chair back from a table that God has already set?

And if you can name it, maybe the good news is that the chair is still there.

 There's still a place for you.

The table is still set.

And God is always waiting for us to catch up.

May it be so.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Amen.