The inventor of the umbrella was stigmatized for interrupting the designs of Providence, for when showers fell it was evident God intended man should get wet.

That’s the line printed in The Dallas Morning News November 22 column of one Pauline Periwinkle in the year 1897. Periwinkle was the pen name of The News’ Women and Children’s editor. She was also a social activist who used her pen and her passion to mobilize women for good causes.

While popular with some, she was an irritant to others. For instance, she crusaded for so-called “pure food” laws in Texas around the turn of the last century. There were no laws back then that saw to it that blowing dust didn’t contaminate food, and nothing and no one monitored dairy herds for diseases in milk. While people rose up in arms over the boll weevil destroying only 10 percent of the cotton crop, no one was fighting against impure food that was causing the death of—get this—one-third of the babies in the country. Of course, when she took up the fight, local grocers complained that they would lose money if they couldn’t sell the goods already on their shelves—whether adulterated or not. Does that sound familiar? Periwinkle consoled herself and others, she said, with the knowledge that people have opposed everything new from time immemorial. And then she cited the matter of the umbrella and divine providence.[1]

St. Peter also had a vision that had to do with impure food. And it, too, led to opposition by those who thought that to change anything would be tantamount to opposing God. But it was God whom Peter was also most concerned about opposing. And it is God whom we should most be concerned about opposing.

We pick up the story in Acts 11. By this time, Luke has led us from Jesus’ ascension after the resurrection to the descension of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. We’ll be looking more closely at these events in a couple of weeks as we take a step back. But for now, the important thing is to see what Luke is trying to tell us about the early church and what God was doing in it after the resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus changed everything. It showed that any and every barrier that had hindered people from knowing God and being acceptable to God had been finally broken down by God and had to be seen by God’s people as broken down. Peter had preached this at Pentecost when he declared that God’s Spirit had been poured out on ALL FLESH and that God was no longer going to tolerate distinctions among people on the basis of age or gender or ethnic origin. It doesn’t matter if you are young or old; God’s Spirit can give you dreams and visions. It doesn’t matter if you are male or female; God’s Spirit can give you a voice to raise. It doesn’t matter if you are Jew or Gentile; God’s Spirit can give you a mission to the world.

But breaking down those barriers in people’s hearts would be harder than you would think. And the story Luke tells in the Book of Acts is the progressive unfolding, step by step, of how the church had to come to grips with this new understanding of God so that it didn’t hinder God’s work in the world.

Peter is the supposed head of the church, but when he went up to Jerusalem, the other apostles and some believers there criticized him for eating with Gentiles. Now this I find shocking, just shocking, I tell you. The acknowledged leader of the early church, whom Jesus himself had put so much stock in, would be criticized by church people? Glad we’ve gotten over that? But what’s more, look what they criticize him for: apparently word has reached Jerusalem ahead of him that Peter has eaten with the wrong people. It’s an outrage, I tell you.

Now let me make a little detour here, in all seriousness, and say that this little scene of Peter and the church is more faithful than unfaithful. Much as I would like you to roll over and do whatever I want because I’m the pastor, you aren’t trained housedogs and I your master. We’re all just people, and, in fact, in the church the pastor wears the collar, so to speak. You’ll notice that Peter had to wrestle himself with this whole matter of whether he should be cavorting with unclean Gentiles. And that’s generally how things move ahead in the church: by losing sleep over whatever it is, by breakthrough visions God gives that have to be tested and challenged by the people until we all get it—or at least until most of us get it. When the pastor runs too far ahead of the people, or the people drag their heels too long or too much, God is hindered. But when they talk to each other, pray with each other, and make God’s will the issue, things can happen that change the church for good and for good.

So let’s go back to the story and see how it played out. Peter is in the coastal town of Joppa, which today is called Jaffa and is part of modern-day Tel Aviv. He has just raised a young girl from the dead—Tabitha was her Hebrew name, Dorcas in the Greek. Now he’s staying at the home of one Simon the tanner. Already we have a problem, Houston. As a tanner, Simon is clearly a Gentile. He’s got to handle the carcasses of dead animals. Which isn’t kosher, don’t you know?! But what’s he doing there, then?

It seems Peter’s feet run ahead of his head. He may have more of Christ in his feet than in his head. He’s already where Christ wants him to be, but he doesn’t want to think about it. It would be a few centuries—like nineteen—before we would sing Wherever he leads I’ll go, but that’s the way it works: sometimes Christ leads us to people and places that if we stopped to think about it, we would have all sorts of objections. But if we obey first, reason follows.

And how often has this been true in the church? There was a day when we just needed some leader to stand up and put his feet faith before his head faith on whether blacks could be in the church, whether divorced people could serve as leaders, or whether women could preach. My goodness, the controversies over all that. Unclean. We had biblical theologies that made it clear as mud that blacks were inferior because of the curse of Ham, that divorce was a state of perpetual sin, and that women were subservient to men by nature because Eve was first deceived in the Garden and then led poor empty-headed Adam to sin. But somehow, we knew in our feet that that was wrong. Somehow we put ourselves into relationship with these folk before we got our theology together on it, and what happened is that God made it clear to us after the fact that they were acceptable after all.

Well, Peter tells the church in Jerusalem that God gave him this vision of the sheet coming down from heaven—coming down, note. In other words, these unclean animals were already acceptable to God. Of course, it wasn’t unclean animals at issue; it was unclean people— Gentiles who ate unclean animals.

Peter resists the message right away. God tells Peter in the vision to get up and kill the unclean animals and eat them. Peter replies as if it’s a trick God is playing on him: By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth. No, but he doesn’t say anything about having his feet in the door of the unclean, does he? Anyway, a voice from heaven answers: What God has made clean, you must not call profane.

Peter is more orthodox than God! Go figure. And what happens to the church when it’s more orthodox than God? I’ll tell you what happens: it gets more concerned with having a pure congregation of “people like us” than a real congregation of people God has called together. And that will logically turn into a “people like me” approach in which we don’t need to check papers for illegals among us; we can tell. This makes an effective strategic plan for a church “ensmallment” campaign.

Notice that the voice from heaven says that God has made clean what was considered unclean. It’s not that the Gentiles or any of us is clean in ourselves; it’s that God makes us clean, declares us so. This is how we are all of us saved—not by getting ourselves clean enough that God accepts us, but by God accepting us by declaring us clean. And then if we turn around as insiders and go back to the clean-unclean game by not associating with anyone unclean, we’ve learned nothing and we’re back to hindering God.

In one of her most memorable short stories, called “Revelation,” Flannery O’Connor draws a portrait of a certain Mrs. Turpin. She’s a Southern white woman, a Christian in the worst sense of the word. Mrs. Turpin finds herself in the waiting room of a doctor’s office where she engages in conversation with those lesser souls she is grateful not to be. Mrs. Turpin could speak to you in a way that is pleasant but catty. At one point, she talks about one of her favorite pastimes, which is ranking the classes of people and deciding what she would want to be if God had made her something else. She has it all figured out. On the bottom were the colored people. Then next to them—not above them, mind you, but just away from them—were the white trash. Above them were the homeowners, and above them the home-and-land owners, to which she and her husband, Claud, belonged. Above them were the people with a lot of money and much bigger houses and a lot more land. But here the complexity of things set in, because you had some people who fit there but were really common, and some with good blood who had lost their money and had to rent, and some colored folk who owned their homes, and, well, you get the idea. Anyway, Mrs. Turpin was just grateful for who she was, including the fact that she had such a good disposition. Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is! she liked to say. But then all of a sudden a crazy young girl in the waiting room throws a book at her—is it the Bible? She hits her in the head and calls her a wart hog from hell. Now you can’t tell Mrs. Turpin that she’s anything worse than that. But it starts to work on her, what that girl said. And at the end of the story, Mrs. Turpin is standing at the railing overlooking a hog pen when she sees a vision. It’s a revelation of all the classes of people going up into heaven, and what’s interesting is that the order they go in is the reverse order of how she’s got things ordered. The white trash go first, clean for the first time in their lives. Then the colored folk go, followed by that class of people to which she and Claud belong. And just when she sees her kind being their usual dignified and respectable selves, O’Connor says this: Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.[2]

God is no respecter of persons—even, it seems, if we try to divide ourselves on the basis of our holiness. And thank God for that, because that means we all get to come to God’s table and eat our fill. All of us are the same in the eyes of God, made clean by the blood of Jesus Christ.

When you look around at who else is eating with you this morning, give thanks that Jesus has made everything the way it is and that you are included. Then don’t hinder God by trying to exclude anyone else.