What God Has Made Clean

"I was in the city of Jop'pa 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. As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. I also heard a voice saying to me, "Get up, Peter; kill and eat.' But I replied, "By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.' But a second time the voice answered from heaven, "What God has made clean, you must not call profane.' This happened three times; then everything was pulled up again to heaven."--Acts 11: 5-10

This is among my favorite scenes in Acts. OK, I admit: I actually find almost everything in the Acts of the Apostles really cool. I am a big fan of the way things played out with Saul's conversion to being Paul. Phillip's "a-ha" when he encounters the eunuch on the road... that's a good one. And then there's this moment when Peter is trying to tell his fellow circumcised Jews how he reached the conclusion that the uncircumcised are worthy of inclusion in the family of God's chosen children.
Interesting to me is that Peter, in his argument with God, tries to say that he has never let anything profane or unclean enter his mouth. That statement, for me, recalls the passage in the Gospel of Mark, when the scribes and the Pharisees wanted to know where Jesus and his disciples get off eating food with "unclean hands". Jesus answers, "There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile." According to Mark, this was Jesus' declaration that all foods were made clean. And once more, we see how little the disciples really understood Jesus until after he was no longer there with them.
In our Sunday readings, I saw this lesson as one piece to a bigger puzzle. Next came the words in Revelation, again starting with the proclamation of a "new heaven and a new earth":

"See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them as their God;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away."
And the one who was seated on the throne said,
"See, I am making all things new."
--Revelation 21: 3-5

I put these words together with that idea that what "God has made clean, you must not call profane." Because, for me, this statement in Revelation is the affirmation that God is not some absentee landlord, deadbeat dad, or far-away entity. God is with us... dwelling within us... and as God emerges from behind the curtains in our minds, and reveals God's self to us by whatever means necessary, then do we experience what it means to have things made new. I think this might have been a little of what Peter was going through with his vision. The veil pulled back, the sheet lowered with the various animals, Peter learns the lesson Jesus had hoped he had understood the first time in Mark's recounting of Jesus' actions. An action that I think gets summarized nicely in the Gospel reading from John:

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." --John 13: 34-35


For Peter, that meant learning that this love... the agape type... needs to be extended beyond his own kind to include those who are "other". And Peter had to learn to see in those who are of the "other" variety the light of God that shines out through their eyes. Accepting this will lead to "things" in Peter's world becoming "new"... and the old earth and old heaven give way to the new.

Of course, the context, purpose and timing of the writing of Revelation lends itself to other understandings. Nonetheless, in light of all-things-gay being seen as a "threat" to some "christians" in my fair city, I found the timing of the readings prophetic. How can a person encounter these readings and not hear the call to all of us to stop labeling those who we don't like or don't agree with as the "unclean" of our society?

How dare anyone say they are Christians while referring to fellow members of the body of Christ as pedophiles. Is that the love that we were supposed to follow?

I don't think so.