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Newness from God that Unlearns Family John 13:31-35; Acts 11:1-18; Revelation 21:1-6/Fifth Sunday of Easter Peter is the key character in this story in Acts, and he is in a deep crisis. In order to understand his crisis, we do well to consider the longer sweep of his life. We meet him first as a fisherman. We notice that when the disciples are in a discussion, he always speaks first; he no doubt became the leader of the early church, so that he is remembered by tradition as having been the first Bishop of the church in Rome, that is, the first pope. I We really know nothing about his younger years; we have some hints and can imagine the rest. On this Mother's Day, we can imagine that he was a family man who dearly valued his family. We are told only of his mother-in-law. But he had a mother, and she surely had him circumcised in good order. He grew up to be a good Jewish boy in a good Jewish family that kept a kosher kitchen. He kept to all the disciplines that his religious tradition had taught him. The crisis of our text comes when Peter has a dream that threatens everything he was taught in his family and by his mother. I suggest that this man Peter is very much like most of us who grew up in good families where our mothers love us and we love our mothers . And it is the way we grow our own children and watch carefully over our grandchildren. We teach our children the passions and commitments of our family, what we value, how we see things, what we trust, what we care about, how we live. We do what we can to tell our kids why we are a different kind of family, and why we think differently about money and TV and sex, and so on and on. And our kids believe us ... until they spend that first night at a friend's house and discover that another family does it all very differently. Until that moment they had assumed that the way our family did it was the right way, that everyone lived just like us. No wonder a little child gets 87 weepy at bedtime the first night away from home, yearning for what is reliable and familiar, weeping at what is strange and new that is seen to be very upsetting. II Peter was a church leader upon whom everyone counted to be reliable and orthodox and safe. Of late, he had been acting strangely and his best friends in the church had noticed. They had seen him eating with a Roman soldier named Cornelius, and they knew that Cornelius , because he was a Roman soldier, was not circumcised. Such a man as Cornelius may have been a good man, but he is "not one of us." He is excluded from table fellowship withJewish Christians who still kept the rule of a kosher kitchen and attended to what was proper and clean and holy for the people of God. To violate those norms would endanger the entire community. So they quizzed Peter in a tone of accusation. Peter explains to his church friends why he has undertaken this new behavior that seems odd, shocking, and dangerous. He says, I was resting one day and fell into a trance; we would call it a dream. The dream might be a fantasy, but they took it as a word from God, an interruption in his safe life with a new truth given when one's guard is down. In the dream, there came down from heaven a large sheet holding a bunch of snakes and birds. And a voice in the dream said to Peter, "Rise and eat." Have a snake sandwich and a bird salad. But Peter could not do it. He could not obey and eat a snake, because his Jewish mother had taught him that snakes are "unclean" and birds are profane; to eat them would violate his self-understanding as a person of faith who kept within the bounds of community practice . Peter had ringing in his ears the old rules from his mother and from his synagogue instruction and from the old Torah: These you shall regard as detestable among the birds. They shall not be eaten; they are an abomination: the eagle, the vulture, the osprey, the buzzard . . . These...

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