Saugatuck Congregational Church, UCC
©Rev. Alison J. Buttrick Patton
Sunday, May 5, 2019
Scripture: Acts 10:1-17; 34-35 – New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
We are what we eat. That’s what they say, right? And it’s true, biologically: The food we consume is broken down into the sugars and proteins that power our systems and build our cells. So we become what we consume.
It’s also true that we are what we eat, culturally speaking. We all have foods that we associate with our family, home town, region or country of origin. One familiar aroma – cinnamon and nutmeg; smoky barbeque; cumin or salty pickles – has the power to stir up vivid memories of grandparents’ kitchen, or a family gathering, or that favorite deli around the corner from your childhood home.
We’ve been fortunate that so many of you have shared your favorite foods with Saugatuck Church, as we gather around these tables for fellowship hour, every Sunday:
- Martin Van Breems brings his meat balls
- On Easter, Sumi and Arvind brought homemade curry, made with curry powder hand-ground by Sumi’s mother in India
- During Advent, Stephan taught the children how to make Grittibanz – person-shaped-bread
- And earlier this spring, Mia Costanza introduced us to her friend Emily, who helped the children make Chinese dumplings.
- If you come to a deacons’ meeting, you are likely to be treated to some some sweet or savory snack made by AeRhee Lee – ginger crisps, or homemade donuts
The food we eat is also wrapped up in the faith we practice. Today, we will gather around the communion table, as we do on the first Sunday of every month. We’ll recount the details of the last supper that Jesus shared with his friends and followers. And we’ll remind each other that at the very heart of Christian practice is a meal. At the communion table, we practicing Christians become what we eat: Body of Christ. Love. Grace.
For Peter, too, food meant more than filling an empty stomach. As a devout Jew, Peter would have prepared and eaten food according to the rules laid out in the Torah… God’s law, given to Moses and delivered to Peter’s Israelite ancestors while they were still in the wilderness. “I am your God and you are my people. THIS is how you will eat…” As much as any other practice, keeping kosher was a mark of Jewish identity.
So the vision Peter had that day must have thrown him for a loop. There he was, up on his rooftop, praying while the midday meal was being prepared downstairs… Perhaps the mingled smells of lentils, onions and garlic, and baking barley bread wafted up the stairs and made his mouth water and his stomach grumble; he try to focus on his prayers but suddenly he had a vision of a sheet lowered down from the sky.
“Take and eat,” said a voice. But the sheet was filled with all manner of animal: hogs, shiny green lizards and sharp-taloned raptors – all those creatures Peter was forbidden to eat. “Surely,” he would have thought, “this is a test, a temptation I am supposed to resist…”
Three times, the voice urged him on, saying, “What I have made clean you must not call profane.” But only once Peter was startled from his revere by a knock at his front door, only once he opened that door to find Gentiles, non-Jews, inviting him to dine at the home of a Gentile, (non-Jew) Roman soldier, only then did it begin to sink in. Perhaps that vision wasn’t a test at all. Perhaps, God was doing something NEW.
In a matter of minutes, everything shifted. Imagine how hard it must have been for Peter to change gears like that, to relinquish what had been a lifelong practice. God, it seemed, had changed the rules, and with them, what it meant to be faithful. And the earth tilted on its axis.
You see, this wasn’t just about the food. It was about identity -Jewish identity, yes – but more specifically, the identity of the emerging Christian community – its shape and character. This was about whether everyone in that community had to journey by the same route, learn the same history, embrace the same practices in order to join the Jesus Movement…
Up until then, the Movement had taken shape in the context of first century Judaism. Everyone learned Torah, kept kosher, circumcised their newborn baby boys… After the resurrection, the followers of that extraordinary Jewish rabbi were sent out to share the Good News of God’s Love and Grace. And though the risen Christ sent them into ‘all the world,’ and though the Holy Spirit showed up on Pentecost and empowered the apostles to speak in multiple languages, so that Jews from every nation gathered in Jerusalem could understand them…Still, up until that day in Joppa, it was mostly Jews talking to Jews.
In all likelihood, the new community that Peter and the other apostles envisioned looked a lot like the community in which they had all grown up, but with a little Christ mixed in. Surely they’d still celebrate Hanukkah, and eat unleavened bread on Passover. That’s what they knew, what they’d always done. “Eat pork? With Gentiles? But we’ve never done it that way before…”
This is the story of the church in every generation: the rules are set by one gathering of faithful people who believe they’ve got it right. But somewhere along the way, the rules no longer serve us well; they might even get in the way of building God’s Beloved Community; then the Holy Spirit shows up and rewrites the playbook.
To be clear: It isn’t that keeping kosher is wrong: God had a covenant with the people Israel – one which I believe remains intact between God and our contemporary Jewish cousins. But that afternoon in Joppa, God declared a new rule for a new community. For those called to follow the Jesus Way, food would play a different role – to gather rather than to set apart a faithful people. Peter would need to learn to break bread with Gentiles.
All these generations later, the Holy Spirit is still at work among us, stirring up our convictions about how we ought to do things, challenging our expectations and upending our assumptions about what it means to be faithful.
So in or around 1965, the members of Saugatuck Church gathered for a congregational meeting, to discuss another earth-tilting rule change. Up until then, all deacons at Saugatuck Church had been men. “There were no women at the Last Supper,” some of our members argued. “Women serving communion would create a distraction,” a few men claimed. Still, a new-old idea was taking hold in our midst; the realization that we needed to widen the circle. The congregation took a vote. Shortly thereafter, the first two women were elected to Saugatuck’s board of deacons.
It happened again several decades later, when we asked ourselves whether we needed to extend a more intentional invitation to people who are Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered. Confronting Christian claims that being gay is an aberration; that same gender love is somehow profane: We asked: have we gotten it wrong? Is there something we’ve missed? Again, the congregation responded with a resounding yes, and we became an Open and Affirming congregation.
Our ancestors could not have envisioned what Saugatuck Church would be like in 2019, how it would be transformed by the leadership of faithful women, and members of the LGBTQ community, and every one of you that makes up this congregation. But it’s clear that we are better, richer, more faithful, because we responded when the Holy Spirit knocked on our door.
Beloved in Christ, that’s why it is vital that we remember those ground-shifting moments and remain open to the movement of the Holy Spirit in our midst. We need to remind ourselves that not everyone journeys by the same route or shares the same history… Some of us grew up in the church; some walked through the door for the first time the day before yesterday. Some were baptized as infants; some were dunked as adults. Still others have not yet chosen to be baptized. We all bring our own stories, questions, struggles and insights to the table.
Which means that our Christian community will continue to change shape. The rules will keep changing. Next week, we will welcome new members into our community. We will exchange covenant promises – to embody the love and justice of Jesus and to support each other on this journey of faith.
And I will remind all of us: That we will become, in part, who they are. They will bring gifts to the table, gifts that we need.
Peter accepted the invitation that afternoon. He went to the home of Cornelius, to share what he knew about the love of Christ and God’s promise of new life. His testimony inspired Cornelius to join the Jesus Movement. But he was not the only one to be converted that day. Peter had a conversion, too. The moment he walked across that threshold, sat down at Cornelius’ table, and ate what he was served…
THIS is the lesson of the Holy Spirit:
It’s not just about moving over to make space in the same old pew. Every time we accept an invitation; every time we who think we are insiders defer to people we have regarded as outsiders, every time we welcome someone new and join them at a table that they have helped to set… we are changed.
If all goes well: if our hearts are sufficiently open, if we are brave enough to allow the old rules to fall away, if we are willing to pull up a chair and eat the food that has been laid out for us, well, then, we will be transformed. Because we are what we eat: we are garlic and lentils, curry and cumin, nutmeg and cinnamon, salsa and guacamole. We are love and hospitality and comfort and pleasure and laughter and connection and justice and inclusion…
We ARE the Body of Christ…defined, finally, not by our boundaries but by our center: This table. This meal. This host, persistently calling us widen the circle. May it be so.
Thanks be to God.