May 18, 2025 Sermon
Sermon title: “Peter’s Vision”
Scripture: Acts 11:1-18
(Other lectionary suggestions include Psalm 148, Revelation 21:1-6, and John 13:31-35.)
Acts 11:1-18
Peter’s Report to the Church at Jerusalem
1Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God. 2So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, 3saying, “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?” 4Then Peter began to explain it to them, step by step, saying, 5“I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners; and it came close to me. 6As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. 7I also heard a voice saying to me, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’ 8But I replied, ‘By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’ 9But a second time the voice answered from heaven, ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’ 10This happened three times; then everything was pulled up again to heaven. 11At that very moment three men, sent to me from Caesarea, arrived at the house where we were. 12The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us. These six brothers also accompanied me, and we entered the man's house. 13He told us how he had seen the angel standing in his house and saying, ‘Send to Joppa and bring Simon, who is called Peter; 14he will give you a message by which you and your entire household will be saved.’ 15And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning. 16And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ 17If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” 18When they heard this, they were silenced. And they praised God, saying, “Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.”
This vision that Peter had marks a giant step forward in the way the first believers saw themselves and then the Gentiles. The ancient Hebrews had believed that as God had chosen them, they had to be different, and their FOOD had to be different. This was really ingrained in the Jewish community of Jesus’s day, so for Peter to tell God, No, I don’t eat “unclean” things, shows exactly how deeply-held his dietary beliefs were. To be sure, the ancient Hebrew dietary laws may also have had a HEALTH concern as well as religious ones, but think back to a Gospel account in which Jesus says, “What comes out of a man’s mouth is what defiles him, not what goes into a man’s mouth.” So, Jesus had already called into question those dietary laws.
We have said before that the Judaism of Jesus’s day was very legalistic. Jesus and the Pharisees disagreed often about what “true religion” was. For the Pharisees, it was keeping the rules, including the dietary rules. Jesus seemed to be more concerned about compassion. But there is more. If you are going to insist that those who join your group must EAT a certain way, you have an uphill battle. Somehow Jesus recognized this, and eventually Peter as well. For the early church, that wanted to attract Gentiles, insisting that everybody who joined keep the ancient Hebrew laws would have failed.
I hope we don’t think that the vision Peter had was given so now we can eat anything we like! That was definitely NOT the point! The idea was (in my view) to point out that God had created everything, including Gentiles, and if God created everything, God also EMBRACED everything, including the Gentiles. If Peter and any others had stuck to the ancient dietary rules, Christianity would have been just another Jewish sect. What happened then was a big deal because the usual attitude was, “Those people are different, and they eat different food from what we eat.” Therefore, the logic was, if they are different, so must we be different, too. Remember the Apostle Paul saying, “Now there is neither Jew or Greek”? He was trying to point out that in Christ, each of us is a new creation. God had done a new thing in Jesus, and that “new thing” meant the old ways had passed away, including keeping the old rules of what is okay to eat and what is NOT okay to eat.
The preacher R. L. Stolberg says this: God uses a vision, and “Rather than directly telling Peter that the Gentiles are now to be accepted, God chose instead to use a symbolic vision in which He declared that formerly unclean meat was now clean.” Rev Stolberg says that this was an allegory: certain meat was once unclean, but now it’s not. The same for Gentiles: they were once thought to be unclean, but now they are clean.
Stolberg goes on to say that “The law given by God to Israel under the Mosaic Covenant was not intended to last forever. It was valid and binding for a specific people and a specific time. That time expired with the advent of the New Covenant ushered in....” by Jesus in his crucifixion and resurrection. And, he says, “The coming of the new covenant age of salvation means the full inclusion of the Gentiles in the people of God....((Peter’s vision)) here....opens the way for table-fellowship between Jews and Gentiles.”
Perhaps we need to talk about circumcision. Peter’s vision said nothing about it, but the Scripture which we read for today did. As you are probably aware, one of the signs of God’s covenant with Abraham involved the practice of circumcision. And the dietary laws were part of that same covenant. I mentioned that the Judaism of Jesus’s day was quite legalistic, meaning that if you didn’t keep the rules (observe the dietary laws and practice circumcision), then you weren’t a “good Jew.” One of the big controversies in the early church was whether circumcision should be a requirement. Since all of Jesus’s first followers were Jews, all the males had been circumcised, including Jesus himself. So, the question was, Should Gentiles have to follow the same rules we did? Luckily, the answer turned out to be NO, but the thinking was, If I had to obey these rules, then so should anybody who follows in my footsteps.
Did you notice the early verses of today’s Scripture? The Jerusalem Christians had wondered why Peter would DARE to talk to Uncircumcised men! “Good Jews” just didn’t do that! At that point Peter explained the vision he had. The clincher for those who were questioning Peter seems to have been the Holy Spirit, which descended on these uncircumcised men the same way It had descended on the Jerusalem believers. And that apparently was enough for the Jerusalem crowd. Peter said, “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we first believed, who was I that I could hinder God?” And today’s passage ends with.... “When they heard this, they were silenced. And they praised God, saying, ‘Then God has given even to the gentiles the repentance that leads to life.’”
This was quite an admission for those who had started out as Jews. It suddenly occurred to them that God works in strange ways! And one way was that the original legalism was no longer required. Personally, I’ll bet not everybody there was totally happy with what Peter had to say! But who am I to question Holy Scripture?! Amen.
Pastor Skip
