My mom loves to tell the story of when I was about ten years old or so and she found some old letters at my grandparents’ house that she had sent to them at different times when I was younger. She started reading a few out loud to me so I could hear how she had described life was when I was a toddler. In one letter, she was writing to them to thank them for a bunch of produce that they had picked from their garden, which was a serious garden with all kinds of vegetables in it.
“J.C. especially loves the squash that you sent us,” she wrote;
“he’s eating so much so fast that we’re already about to run out!” I looked at my mother in surprised indignation as she read these words aloud. “Mom!” I chastised her; “you lied to Granny and Granddaddy!” “What?” she replied, confused and a little taken aback by my accusation. “No I didn’t; what do you mean?” I looked at her with my best imitation of her own “you’re not going to talk your way out of this” expression. “You told them that I ate all their squash. I’ve never eaten squash!”
And then she smiled in understanding. “Oh, sweetie,” she said, “yes you did! You loved squash when you were little.” Now I was the one that was confused and taken aback. “No…no I didn’t; I hate squash!” But she kept smiling serenely. “You do now, but not back then. You were a good vegetable eater back then. You loved them! You ate squash, and butter beans, and snap peas, and…”
In that moment, I was like Matt Damon in the first Jason Bourne movie, discovering that he had amnesia and he was actually a remorseless and highly skilled assassin, even though he couldn’t remember it. Actually, in some ways even that would have seemed more likely as my background than me being a squash-eater. What she was describing seemed fundamentally irreconcilable with my own self-identity. I wasn’t proud of having a very limited palate at the age of 10, but I certainly understood that to be who I was.
I would eat essentially no vegetables, and certainly no cooked ones. I wouldn’t even eat potatoes unless they were French fries! And even when it came to meat and dairy, fruits and grains, I was decidedly conservative in what I was willing to even try, much less enjoy. I mean, I didn’t even eat pizza until I was in middle school because my first experience of it was in an elementary school lunchroom, and that was enough to turn me off for years.
I slowly got a little better in high school and college, but it wasn’t until I was living in Australia after college that I began to become truly adventurous. And I can even point to the breakthrough. It was Christmas Day, and I had been invited over to a friend’s place for a traditional Aussie Christmas barbeque; Christmas, of course, is in the summertime there, and so I took my place with the other guys standing around the barbie while our host grilled a range of chicken, steaks, prawns, and fish. Before he really got going on that, though, he took me aside.
“I’ve got a special Christmas treat today, mate,” he said in his very broad Aussie accent; “Wanna see?” “Sure,” I agreed, of course. He opened up a container and inside were piles of tiny octopuses marinating in a teriyaki sauce. “Delicious little things!” he exclaimed, and then detailed how he had gotten them, cleaned them, and marinated them, and would now place them on a hot grill for just a few minutes. “You can eat them like popcorn!” he assured me.
Now, I knew popcorn. I liked popcorn. And one of the things I liked most about popcorn that I hadn’t fully appreciated until this moment is its complete lack of tentacles that one has to chew. But I also didn’t want to offend my host, so when he dropped the first wave on the grill and offered me a freshly cooked one just a few minutes later. I set my face with a very false grateful grin, popped it in my mouth, and began to chew. And it was…amaaaaazing! The texture was perfect, the flavor was incredible; in a moment I went from not being able to imagine putting it in my mouth to wondering if we really had to share them with everyone else or could we just eat them all standing at the grill.
And from then on, I ate everything that was offered to me in Australia: grilled sardines, raw oysters, crayfish, crocodile, kangaroo, camel, even live green ants that tasted exactly like tiny lemon drops. In a moment, my whole identity around food had transformed, from a picky eater to an adventurous one, and it has been that way ever since.
It’s hard to overstate how central food is to our identity, no matter who we are. They tap into our deep senses of who we are, where we belong, who we belong to and with. Lindsey and I were laughing the other day as we were planning for a meeting that includes a meal that we should probably get unsweetened iced tea for people. “I just don’t see the point,” she said; “It’s an abomination before the Lord,” I declared, “but you’re probably right.” Both of us know that God intends iced tea to be sweetened generously during the brewing process, as do all Southerners.
And there are literally thousands of examples like this, hills that people are willing to die on about food because of how it intertwines with their identity: Taylor ham vs. pork roll; whether you prefer your grits with salt, sugar, or used as an alternative to grout your bathroom tiles. If you say that you enjoy “gravy,” that could mean something that accompanies roasted meat, biscuits, or pasta, and your answer is like a shorthand dissertation on your specific regional and cultural background. And so on. What we prefer to eat, what we are willing to eat, what we refuse to eat, what we would not even imagine eating in the first place, is not simply a matter of personal preference or even morality, but are also all tied inexorably to our families and cultures and regions of origin.
And our faith: for many religious traditions, what followers can or can’t eat is crucial to their identity as members of their faith. In the United States, we’re most familiar with Judaism’s kosher laws, but Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and others all have various dietary restrictions for both ethical and ritual reasons. To outsiders, these kinds of restrictions can seem somewhat arcane or arbitrary, but to adherents of these faiths, keeping to those requirements is absolutely central to their identity. Even upon self-proclaimed secular Jews, many note that long after they’ve given up every other practice of religious life, they are reluctant to eat pork, because that is such a central line of demarcation for Jewish identity.
All of this, ALL of this, is why the events of the tenth chapter of Acts are among the most important in Christian history, perhaps only surpassed by the birth, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. To modern Christian ears, that may sound like a surprising overstatement, which is why it’s important to understand just how significant food is to anybody’s identity, and how much more that is true for most religious traditions, and especially Judaism. Christians struggle to understand this precisely because of the events in our reading today, because that is why we don’t keep kosher, as well, perhaps even why we don’t consider ourselves Jewish. You see, up until this point, the Christian movement was almost completely contained within Judaism.
For that reason, Peter has remained in and around Jerusalem, preaching and healing. He’s unaware that God has spoken to Cornelius, a centurion who appears to have a devout faith in God, and told him to send for Peter. Between this and the story about Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, God is orchestrating something fundamentally new: ensuring that Gentiles hear the gospel of Christ and can respond to it not just with intellectual belief or even concrete practice, but by receiving baptism, the mark of full and equal welcome into the church of Christ.
Which is why God blows Peter’s mind with this vision of being commanded to eat the kinds of animals that he studiously, even proudly, avoided his entire life because they were considered unclean by the Jewish dietary laws. If my experience with the octopus in Australia was world-changing, it’s hard to even find the words to describe the shocking, transformative impact of this vision on Peter’s sense of his identity as a person, as a Jew, as a follower of Jesus. This vision was taking a sledgehammer to some of the very pillars of what he understood about what God wanted from God’s people and how God’s people were defined and recognized.
As his head is spinning from the implications of this vision, Cornelius’ servants arrive, and the Holy Spirit speaks directly to Peter and tells him to receive them. They explain why they are there, and perhaps starting to put the pieces together between his vision and their arrival, he agrees to go with them. When he arrives at the home of Cornelius, Peter appears to have digested at least the essence of what God is up do in this seminal moment, explaining that he came because God had shown him that nothing and nobody should be considered profane or unclean, despite his understanding of Judaism limiting his connection with outsiders, and especially prominent officers in the army of the empire occupying his people’s land.
Cornelius explains that God told him to listen to what Peter had to say, and before Peter even concludes his sermon, the Holy Spirit falls upon the Gentiles who are listening, and the Jewish Christians there are “astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles.” And at that point, Peter asks the rhetorical question, “can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” And in answer to his own rhetorical question, Peter orders them to be baptized.
At least, it was supposed to be a rhetorical question. The truth is it takes the church five more chapters of the book of Acts, which covers a time period that probably stretches years (many scholars would say a decade) between when Peter made this declaration and the church convened a council in Jerusalem to decide once and for all whether Gentiles could truly be considered followers of Christ, without also following the commandments of the Jewish Law.
Almost every letter of Paul in the New Testament had at least a section if not the main point focused on telling Gentiles that they should not listen to apostles that followed him telling them that God’s grace wasn’t enough for Gentiles, they also needed to be circumcised and follow the Jewish dietary laws. And even when the Jerusalem Council was convened, they still could only agree that Gentiles didn’t need to be circumcised, but only had to follow some of the “essential” Jewish dietary laws.
So this is simultaneously a comfort and a warning for the Christian Church today, which still struggles, two thousand years later, not to burden people with requirements for full access to God beyond God’s grace in Jesus Christ. It’s a comfort because it was so hard for the early church to accept that truth that God had to literally grab people by the Spirit, throw them together, and tell the Christians what to say or how to respond, in order to make clear that truly, nothing and nobody is unclean in God’s eyes.
Even they struggled for years to accept that truth, despite the powerful movement of the Spirit showing and telling them this over and over and over again. So of course we still struggle with it. And yet it is also a clear warning that anytime we create obstacles, or barriers, or boundaries between people and God based on their ethnic or racial identity, their religious background, their language, their gender or sexuality, God not only kicks those obstacles down and rubs the lines of those boundaries out in the dirt, but God calls us all the more to do the same.
In God’s eyes, it does not matter who we are in order to receive God’s full love and mercy and grace and peace; it only matters whose we are, and whose we are is God’s. And that, then, becomes who we are: the beloved children of God. And nothing in heaven or earth can or will ever change that. Now yes, some people make it easier to believe that about than others; some people can make it pretty hard for us. And sometimes it can harder still to believe it for ourselves. But none of that makes it any less true.
And so our calling is now, is always, to believe in that truth, for ourselves and others, and to act as though we believe it. Because if and when we do, nobody, nobody, will be able to withhold not simply the waters of baptism, but the transforming power and presence of the Holy Spirit to remake our lives and our world into embodiments of God’s love in themselves.