Acts 10

Here is the rough draft for a sermon on Acts 10, more hastily written than I prefer but a text that I quite enjoyed working on:

[note: Before reading the text, instruct the audience to be listening for the theme and the main character, like the old English 101 exercise. Perhaps some contextual notes, Luke and Acts written by the same person, in the genre of historiography, etc. In the larger context, a couple of chapters before this we have heard about Philip and the Ethiopian, then the conversion of Saul, and a few short episodes including Simon the Sorcerer. Shortly after this the focus will shift from Peter to Saul/Paul.]

The job of a story teller is to take the naked facts and events of life or history and clothe them and arrange them in relation to one another so that meaning and beauty begin to emerge. As humans we are drawn to stories, whether through songs or books or movies, because they help us to transcend the realm of fact or even of meaning and to enter into a realm of beauty and understanding. At their best stories not only bring us this sense of pleasure but are able to help us make sense and beauty out of the plain facts of our own lives. The most powerfully written stories are not simply well written, but have power themselves to cause us to write and re-write the story of our lives in new ways.
Sometimes I fear that we approach the bible with a much smaller vision than this. Sometimes we read the bible as a collection of facts or truths, as if the main purpose of the bible was to communicate sheer fact. Other times we read the bible because we want a simple and easy answer to a question or a challenge that we face--how to raise our kids, or how to vote in an election.
One of Satan's old tricks is to get us human beings to settle for less than what God intended. He is quite happy to have us get part of the way to where God intends for us if it means we never get all the way there. This is quite tricky because he does not even have to get us believing or doing anything explicitly wrong, he just has to get us to settle for not going all the way right. For example, he is quite happy to have us raise obedient, compliant and polite children, provided they never come to love and honor their savior and Lord.
And so with reading our bible--Satan is quite happy for you and I to read the bible, as long as we don't read it in such a way that our very lives are transformed. He is quite happy for us to read the bible as a set of rules for our lives, even good rules, rules God would certainly want for us to live by, as long as that is all we ever get out of it.
As a mater of fact, I'm sure Satan would be quite happy for me to preach a sermon tonight titled "Peter's five Practical Proselytizing Principles for a Pentecostal People" (it's only too bad there isn't a number that starts with P...), including five true and biblically based methods of evangelism, if it meant that you and I went home tonight with a few nice ideas to try out but with our life stories fundamentally untouched by the transforming power of God.
The reality, people of God, is that God did not inspire the Holy Scriptures simply to communicate some historical facts and some basic rules for living. His intention is that by reading this book he might shake up our very lives; that by reading these stories and accounts the story of our lives and even the grand story of human history might be re-written.
So as we reflect for a few moments on the story we have just read I would like us to first off open ourselves up, to be ready to encounter something that has the power to inspire and shape us, and then look closely at the story itself.
Before we read the chapter together I asked you to keep your ears open for hints about who the main actor is and what the events are all about. And as I've just said, there are many levels we can look at here. At the most simple level, these words tell us that sometime over two thousand years ago a Roman Army officer who prayed to the Jewish God had a vision that told him to call the Apostle Peter to his house, and the events that followed this vision (Peter's own vision, the trip to Caesarea, Peter's message, baptism). On this level the key characters would seem to be Cornelius and Peter, and the main events are their visions and then the meeting that takes place because of them.
If we were to stay at this level of the story we could probably find some good lessons in how Peter acts: he prepares for his ministry through prayer for one, he listens to the spirit of God when it directs him, he demonstrates an amazingly humble leadership when the other Christians question him in the next chapter. All of this is worth noting and important, but if we do not bother to go any deeper we actually miss the main character of this story. Peter is not the main character, neither is Cornelius. The main character in all of Acts is as subtle as he is powerful, like the air he is both vitally important and yet so easily overlooked, and we meet him in verse 19: "While Peter was still thinking about the vision, the Spirit said to him..."
The Spirit of God is the main character of Acts and is certainly the primary character in our story today. To illustrate this, think back to your high school or college English class and what you learned about plot and story. The main character typically is the character that gives unity to the story, the one around whom all the episodes hang. Often you can look for who drives the action of the story and in doing so find who the main character is. It is the main character that the author wants to tell you something about.
So in Acts, if we step back and take a look at the whole, at both Luke and Acts, we see that the big picture is about the movement of the Kingdom of God. The first book, Luke, takes as it's main character Jesus, the Son of God. The whole of the book is about the birth of Jesus, events of his life and ministry, and ultimately his death and resurrection--all of which are portrayed to show us the even bigger picture that the Kingdom of God has come to earth and that God is establishing his Kingdom here. So in this second book we find that the main character is the Holy Spirit. What does acts start with? The ascension of Jesus and his promise that he will send the Spirit. Almost in perfect parallel with the book of Luke we read about the advent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost in chapter two, just as we read of Jesus' birth in Luke 2. And just as the rest of the first book was filled with stories of the ministry of Jesus, the rest of Acts is filled with stories of the ministry of the Holy Spirit as the Spirit goes ahead of us into the world and empowers the church to minister, spreading the message of the Kingdom out like ripples from Jerusalem all the way to Rome.
All of which brings us back to our text tonight. If there is a unique message from this chapter I would say it is something like this: I am there ahead of you and where I am present there is holiness.
I am there ahead of you. As we spend this month focusing on prayer and on evangelism it is crucial that we recognize this point. In our passage we read that Cornelius is a "God-fearer" or a gentile who respected the Jewish religion, prayed to it's god and attempted to live by the most basic ethical standards. In fact, when we look at the rest of Acts we will find this is fairly typical: the Ethiopian to whom the Spirit sends Philip is reading Hebrew scriptures but doesn't know the god of whom they speak; Lydia, whose story Pastor reminded us of just this Sunday, was also called a "god-fearer," the philosophers at Mars Hill who Paul preaches to have statues to all kinds of gods including the one they did not know but presumably sought all the same.
How many of us have friends or family like Cornelius? People who believe in God, maybe even in Jesus, who pray, who try to live ethical lives, but at the end of the day do not have a real relationship with the living God? When the Spirit tells us, "I am there ahead of you," he reminds us that we are not bringing God to these people. God has probably been right there with them for a long time; but the Spirit will call on you and I to bring in the harvest that he has already ripened.
And the Spirit reminds us that wherever the Spirit resides is holy. As the Spirit tells Peter, "do not call anything impure that God has made clean." The key theme of the book of Acts is tracing how the Kingdom of God is moving not just in Israel but even to Gentiles and to the ends of the earth. Chapter ten and eleven mark a crucial turning point in that story, a point where Peter and the rest of the church leaders begin to realize where the Spirit is moving them.
To me, perhaps the most astonishing part of the story in chapter ten is how readily Peter accepts the movement of the Spirit. Peter, a life long Jew who followed Jesus believing him to be the Jewish messiah, almost seamlessly accepts the fact that the Spirit of God is working in a very different way. The old religion, it's laws and customs and the distinction between Jew and Gentile no longer apply.
In practice this message means that God will mess with our most deeply held convictions and our dearest prejudices; not simply prejudices we have about other people, but perhaps most pointedly prejudices we have about who and what God is and how he is allowed to act.
Peter's example of total obedience and the deep awareness of the Holy Spirit's activity raises the question: what was it that enabled Peter to respond the way he did? What made it possible for him to have a vision one day and accept Gentiles as brothers and sisters the next?
One way of answering this question takes us back to the beginning of this sermon, to the power of stories. Peter was able to respond so quickly because he had spent years living with Jesus, had spent hours and days in prayer after Jesus left. For Peter, the story of the Kingdom of God was something that had shaped and defined his life, it's story was his story. First walking with Jesus, then deep in prayer and communion with the Holy Spirit, Peter was a person shaped by the main characters of Luke and Acts, one who was inspired by the theme of this amazing story he found himself caught up in.
The story of Luke and Acts therefore supplies us with both our method and our message. The method we see here for evangelism is to allow ourselves to be inspired and captivated by the Gospel story of the Kingdom of God. It is only once we are truly inspired [an interesting word: literally, in-spirited, breathed into by God like the dust that made up Adam] by the story that our own lives begin to be rewritten. Perhaps most important is to learn to allow the main character of this story to be the main character in your own, to learn how to live as a supporting character and not the star.
The story also provides our message, because the story is the message. It is the same story that John the Baptist preached—the Kingdom of God is moving on earth! It moved decisively when the Son of God took on flesh; a new movement started that day in the upper room when the Spirit was sent to lead and inspire the church.