“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.’” (Acts 11:2-7)
When I was a younger man, and part of a Christian youth group, I was encouraged to read the Bible as if it were a personal letter from God to me. That made sense with passages like “Come to me, all you who labour and are heavy laden” (Matthew 11:28) which I assume was written specifically for me. Such an approach fits less easily though with passages like this one from the book of the Acts of the Apostles, detailing Peter’s dream.
Acts 11:7 – “Get up … kill and eat!” – has never been anybody’s favourite memory verse I suspect. Indeed, a dream based around an exhortation like this sounds more like a nightmare to me, and not only because I am too squeamish to actually kill the creatures I like to eat but also because the context of the command is a world that is completely alien to me!
Peter’s concern in the dream is not with whether he should kill but with what he should kill, because he is a good Jew and because good Jews don’t kill and eat certain animals, the most well-known to us being pigs.
And of course the issue isn’t really about food either (or certainly not just about food) but about being Jewish, or rather, about being godly, and about whether one needs to be Jewish in order to be godly.
Either way, however we reconstruct the context in which this dream takes place, the point is that the issues dealt with in the dream, and the issues that the early church was consequently forced to face, are issues that are not issues for us!
Do we need to be Jewish in order to be true believers? Of course not!
Do we, at the very least, need to follow the Jewish ceremonial food laws and have our male children circumcised in order to be genuine believers? NO! How could anybody ever seriously ask such questions? Aren’t the answers self-evident? What were these people thinking?
It all seems so obvious to us, especially to us who are male, middle-class and white, as we have probably never experienced real prejudice in any way, shape or form, and yet the reality is that if we were able to somehow transport ourselves back into the first century and locate those disciples in those early days when they were still fishermen, they would not have wanted to have anything to do with us!
We could try as we might to strike up a theological conversation with them but they would almost certainly refuse to talk to us, seeing us as their spiritual inferiors, and that’s tough to take!
They say that all truth always emerges in three stages:
- At first it is written off as ridiculous
- Secondly, it is violently opposed
- Finally, it is seen as self-evident.
Yes, of course we see the equality of all peoples of all races as self-evident. How could anyone believe otherwise? It is so obvious! And yet we know full well that it has not always seemed so obvious!
A generation or two ago the very idea that dark-skinned people could in any way be considered the equals of white-skinned people seemed ridiculous (to white-skinned people, at any rate).
“there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”
Who said it? Abraham Lincoln –the great emancipator of African Americans! Indeed, I believe he was a genuine opponent of African-American slavery but that’s not to say that he believed in the equality of the races!
As I say, these truths emerge by stages – transitioning from being laughable to being deeply offensive to being self-evident.
Not long ago that the idea that women should be considered the equals of men seemed ludicrous! What? Are we going to give women the right to vote? Next we’ll be allowing them to preach and to lead countries!
Of course there are some enclaves where it still seems ludicrous to consider women as being the equals of men. For most of us though the equality of the genders seems so obvious to be self-evident and does not need justification. Indeed, the very idea that we should have to somehow prove the equality of male and female seems itself highly offensive!
We are at a similar point in history now in this country with regards to how we perceive people who don’t fit traditional norms with regards to their sexuality. For most members of our church community, the equality of gay and lesbian people and their right to equal treatment under the law seems self-evident. Others still aggressively oppose this. Some still see the whole concept as ridiculous! And the point is that to our spiritual forefathers and foremothers who were our Lord’s contemporaries, the very idea that non-Jewish people like us could be considered to be their spiritual equals did not in any way seem self-evident. On the contrary, the very concept seemed outrageous!
I find this hard to accept as when I read the Gospels I feel an affinity with the disciples. I know they lived a long time ago but they seem like such affable characters, and I always figured that if I had been their contemporary, we would have been mates, and not that they would have crossed the road in order to avoid me lest they be contaminated!
The context of racial superiority out of which these sisters and brothers operated is something I find difficult to come to terms with, and the only thing I find more difficult than their apparent racism is the way they got out of it. The early disciples of Jesus change their minds completely about the whole race question and they do so on the basis of what? … a dream!
“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.’” (Acts 11:5-7)
This is the dream, and one might think it’s open to interpretation. Moreover, however you interpret it, it’s just a dream!
I can imagine how it would go down if I announced to the church one day “I’ve changed my mind about marriage again!” I’m sure people would be interested to hear what I had to say, right up to the point where I said “Well, you see, I had a dream …” at which point I can envisage expressions ranging from obvious discomfort to outright horror sweeping across everybody’s faces!
Now you might say “well, sorry Dave but that’s because you’re you and not St Peter” but I really don’t think it would matter who it was! Can we imagine the Pope or (higher still) the Archbishop of Sydney standing up in the pulpit of the Cathedral and saying “I’ve decided that gay marriage is the way forward! God told me this in a dream!” Even those of us who would want to enthusiastically support him wouldn’t know quite what to say!
Now you may be thinking, “well, they used to take dreams a lot more seriously in those days than we do now” and no doubt that is true. Even so, I’m pretty sure that some dreams back then were the result of indigestion, just as they are now, and I can’t imagine that everybody assumed that every dream was a message from God. Moreover, however seriously people considered dreams, we need to balance this with the seriousness of the belief system that was being called into question by this dream! For there are dreams and there are dreams, and this dream called into question some serious beliefs that were part of a serious belief system!
I heard a helpful analogy recently that compared belief systems to the game of Jenga. For those who don’t know Jenga, it’s a game where you start with a tower made up of 54 wooden blocks piled up on one another, and then each player takes a turn at removing one of the blocks while attempting to maintain the structural integrity of the tower. The difficulty of doing this depends entirely upon which block you try to remove. Some blocks near the top can be removed without affecting the integrity of the tower while attempting to remove other blocks threatens to bring the entire edifice crashing down!
Belief systems are like that. Some beliefs can be discarded without causing any collateral damage while others play a far more significant role for us. Hence I can imagine myself announcing “I had a dream that it’s going to rain at the church barbeque” and while most people might think me a bit quirky, there may be some who think ‘ok. I’m going to pack an umbrella!’ Either way, whether you take my dream seriously or not, it doesn’t make much difference. Peter’s dream, on the other hand, threatened to make a lot of difference!
If Peter’s dream really were a message from God, did this mean that the Scriptures weren’t true? For it says very clearly in the book of Leviticus “The pig … is unclean for you. You must not eat their meat or touch their carcasses; they are unclean for you.” (Leviticus 11:7-8).
It’s all there in black and white! It is written!
‘Peter, are you saying that God changed his mind? Are we really supposed to take your word for this over the word of the Torah? If you’re right about eating pork, does this mean that none of the other laws matter anymore either? What about our holy practice of circumcising our male offspring? And what about the ten commandments – are you saying that they are defunct now too? Do we no longer have to worry about remembering the Sabbath Day and keeping it holy? And what about the adultery law? Is that passé now too?’
As I say, they may well have taken dreams more seriously in those days than we do today, but could they really afford to take this dream seriously? Taking this dream seriously was like pulling out one of those Jenga blocks that lies really close to the base of the tower! It meant jettisoning a belief that was intricately connected to a whole web of other really significant beliefs, and it must have felt to some of the early Christians that abandoning these beliefs would bring the whole tower crashing down!
Of course we know in retrospect that extracting those beliefs, no matter how central they seemed, did not bring the whole tower crashing down. On the contrary, what happened when they took up the dream was that the church began to make a remarkable shift from being a sect within Judaism to being an inclusive community for all nations!
Within a few short years the early church jettisoned the old food laws, abandoned the practice of circumcision, relaxed on the issue of the Sabbath, and made every effort to accommodate people coming from different background and cultures and language groups with their distinctive cultural practises and idiosyncrasies, even though this meant abandoning some laws and practices that were clearly mandated in sacred writ.
And it’s not obvious that the early church operated according to any straightforward logical formula by which they determined which elements of the old faith to keep and which to jettison. Sometimes there would be extensive debate and prayer before decisions were taken. At other times, a dream was all that they needed to set them on a new path, and at other times, when they really needed to know the will of God, they cast lots, which was the first century equivalent of rolling a dice!
None of this is to say, of course, that there isn’t room for solid logic and sound argument, and indeed the New Testament contains plenty of the Scriptural analyses of St Paul where he deals with exactly the same question that Peter raised through his dream. Paul argues for the inclusion of non-Jewish people into the community through a logical reworking of the ancient texts – the very same ancient texts that the new inclusive church seemed to be disregarding!
It’s worth keeping in mind though that when St Paul himself changed his mind over the whole issue of ethnicity, it actually had nothing to do with any of the arguments he later put forward to justify his position. Paul’s change of thinking came when he fell off his horse and had an experience of Jesus!
And so all this inevitably leaves us with the disturbing question: ‘how can we be sure?’ If God can still speak to us through dreams, and yet dreams can also still be the result of acid reflux, how can we know for sure when a particular dream is from God? How do we separate (as Father Eugene Kennedy put it) ‘the grain of inspiration from the gravel of human impulse?’
And the answer to that is that I don’t think we can be sure – ever. I don’t think we can ever have any great degree of confidence in our ability to fully grasp everything God is saying to us, but that’s OK, and it’s OK because while we can’t have confidence in the powers of our own spiritual discernment, we can have every confidence that God will move us forward anyway!
One of my favourite stories related by Garrison Keillor in his ‘Prairie Home Companion’ is of a time he was walking through the centre of town and saw a beautiful woman walking down the opposite side of the street – possibly the most beautiful women he’d ever seen. So he crossed the road to be nearer to her and pulled up on the pavement a little bit ahead of where she was going, and to gently disguise his motives he stood next to the big Cadillac that was parked there and examined the parking metre, and then took a coin out of his pocket and put it into the metre. To his delight, the woman stopped when she reached where he was standing, looked at him, smiled, and said ‘thank you’ and then got into the Cadillac and drove away.
The church is not our Cadillac – that’s the point. We think we are the ones in control and we certainly act as if we own it but (thanks be to God) it’s actually not us in the driver’s seat at all!
And I think we do see that when we look at the history of the church. We see it in the Book of Acts and we see God continue to drive us forward still today! Despite our miserable performance on so many occasions, we have moved forward, on the issue of ethnic inclusiveness, on slavery, gender equality and even in the area of sexuality. We have a good distance to go, but God is driving us slowly forward in spite of ourselves, and we can be confident “that he who began a good work in [us] will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 1:6)
First preached by Father Dave Smith at Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill, on Sunday the 24th of April, 2016.
Rev. David B. Smith
Parish priest, community worker, martial arts master, pro boxer, author, father of four. www.FatherDave.org
