Day 10 • The Week of Peace

Scripture Readings:
Psalm 27
Isaiah 4:2-6
Acts 11:1-18

Who is on the inside and who is on the outside when it comes to God? This is a central question not only in Christianity but in many major religions. We human beings find safety in our categories, our hierarchies, and our structures. We like to have everything analyzed, named, and in its proper place. We are inherently uncomfortable with things that seem outside of what we know and what we control.

Then there is God. Again, in many major religions, the concept of God is often described as beyond our understanding, mysterious, and uncontainable. So much of God is beyond us and especially beyond what we can control. In the Bible, God refuses to be named, categorized, and contained. When there is an attempt to name God, God goes by a name that is both ambiguous and unlimited, “I am.” When there is an attempt to build a tower to become equal to God, minds, and languages are baffled. When there is an attempt to contain God to the rich and powerful, God always shows up among the poor and vulnerable.

Yet this same God also gave really clear guidelines and purity codes all throughout the divine law that gave clear separation for days to be kept sacred, foods not to touch, and even certain people to avoid. How is one to be faithful to an uncontainable, mysterious God and the laws of God at the same time?

This is the central question we see being wrestled with by the early church in Acts 11:1-18. Peter causes a controversy by eating particular foods with uncircumcised Gentiles, both of which had a long-standing precedent of being against God’s law for faithful Israelites. In response to his critics though, Peter humbly describes how God had confronted his thinking about this in a vision, in which a voice from heaven said three times, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” (Acts 11:9). Peter ends his explanation by saying, “So if God gave them the same gift he gave us who believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to think that I could stand in God’s way?” (Acts 11:17).

This passage in Acts is such an underrated scripture in the Bible. As we read it, we are to be challenged by how open Peter is to allow God to change his mind about an entire history of theological and political precedent. Peter! The same guy who rebuked even Jesus for not doing what he thought he should do (Matthew 16:22). After his vision from God, he was prompted to look for how the Holy Spirit was working in the most unexpected places and people. In the areas Peter had always thought of as unclean, and the people he had always thought of as impure, God was directing him to see how God was at work.

This is such a profound picture of God’s ever-expanding work of grace. God is always at work growing and fulfilling, growing and fulfilling. So often, we good and faithful people get so preoccupied with the precedent that God has already set with us that we forget that this same God is also unfathomable and uncontainable. We are so often tempted to hold so tightly to the precedents God has already set that we won’t even allow God to move beyond them. We become like Peter rebuking Jesus rather than Peter open to the new work of the Holy Spirit.

Imagine if the moment Moses saw the burning bush and heard God through it, everyone refused to see God as anything but a burning bush. Imagine if the moment the Israelites saw God working through a pillar of fire by day and a pillar of smoke by night, they refused to see God work in any other way. Now imagine if a whole group of people did that with their particular interpretation of the Bible. I guess that last one isn’t really all that hard to imagine, unfortunately.

Precedents are safe. The unfathomable is uncertain and unsettling. Yet, the mistake is to think we have to choose between them. It isn’t an either/or; it is a both/and. The word “Israel” means “one who wrestles with God.” We who are called to follow Jesus are called to continue to wrestle between the work God has already done and the work God is doing here and now! It is a call to see the goodness of structure, yet to be faithfully expecting our unfathomable God to expand the boundaries of what we already know by the work of grace. It is a call to not cling to our ideas of “whose in and whose out” but to always be looking for how God is actively working to include those who we think should be “outsiders.”

This season of Advent, we are being called to make more room for the arrival of Jesus in our own lives. Yet, we can’t make more room for Jesus without preparing to also make room for each other and creation. We see this so clearly at the manger scene. It isn’t just a young couple making room for their new baby. No, as Mary and Joseph quickly discovered, making room for the Christ child was to make room for shepherds, people from other religions (Magi), people whose politics were different (foreign rulers), all sorts of animals, and even the stars in the sky would move in close! Preparing a room for the Christ child is to prepare a room for the interconnected life of Emmanuel, “God with us.”

Reflection Steps

How does this concept of God setting a precedent, then God expanding, and making room for others by grace sit with you? When was a time in your life when you felt like an outsider? How did it feel? In contrast, when was a time in your life when you felt incredibly included? How did it feel to be fully accepted by others? I want to invite you today to think about a person or group you have a hard time believing God could possibly be at work among them. Then try to find just one thing that you can sense: the presences of the Holy Spirit within them. Just one thing. Because if what we say is true and the Holy Spirit is in and through all things, we must begin to train ourselves to look for the Holy Spirit everywhere, even within the people we least expect.