No Partiality
Sermon
Sermons On The Second Readings
Series II, Cycle A
You may be looking at the most fortunate person on the face of the earth. Let me explain. It seems that without even entering, I've won several lotteries based all over the world. I've supplied them with all my personal information -- social security number, bank accounts, all of that -- so, any day now, millions of pounds and rupees and doubloons will be flowing into my accounts. And if that's not enough, I have signed on to be the executor for a number of recently deceased international figures who need me to be a go-between for their large inheritances. It has something to do with international banking laws. And furthermore, any day I should be getting the information packets I've paid for about setting up my own internet businesses at home. With only a few hours per week at my laptop, I'll be earning six figures a year doing something -- I'm not exactly sure what.
If I was serious about all this, you would be thinking, "He's even dumber than I imagined" and "What a moron!" Maybe one or two of you would have had compassion: "That's a shame. Why didn't someone warn him about phishing and pharming and all the other ways disreputable people try to steal your identity?" Let me make it clear that I am in no way making light of the thousands of people who have their identities stolen, nor of the major brands and institutions (over 20,100 in May 2006 alone) that are victimized by "spoofed" emails that take consumers to counterfeit websites designed to trick them into divulging financial data thinking that they are actually updating their accounts. The Brittains are especially sensitive to identify theft since my wife, Eileen, had hers stolen before the term "identity theft" had even been coined. She was victimized the old-fashioned way when somebody stole her purse, altered her driver's license, opened numerous credit cards in her name, and went wild. The point is not to "blame the victim" and say that anyone whose identity has been stolen is to blame. But we do have to admit that some of these schemes should be pretty transparent.
There are some things about the message of scripture that should be just as crystal clear as how bogus the schemes I mentioned are. And yet, for a variety of reasons, many Christians often get them amazingly wrong. It is no more helpful, than in the cases I just described, to beat up on ourselves or others, in a theological version of blaming the victim, but we need to clearly see what is happening. One of these messages that somehow gets overlooked or distorted is the astounded remark of an obviously amazed Peter in today's reading: "I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him" (Acts 10:34-35).
To grasp the impact of this amazing sentence, we have to put it in context. Peter had preached on the day of Pentecost, leading to an astounding explosion in the size of the initial Christian community. While this was in some ways a "golden age" of communal sharing and daily prayer amongst believers and constant learning from the preaching of the disciples, by Acts 6 we learn that this growth brought with it some tensions between Hebrew and Hellenistic converts to Christianity. The latter would have been believers who came from the ranks of the so-called "God-fearing Gentiles," people who were not ethnically Jewish, but who had been attracted to the monotheistic faith of Israel. They were not attracted enough to actually convert to Judaism, which would have required keeping a kosher diet and undergoing circumcision, but very attracted nonetheless. There were so many "God-fearers" in ancient Palestine that in his grandiose expansion of the temple, Herod the Great had included a large "court of the Gentiles." Surrounded by 37-foot-tall Corinthian pillars and paved with marble, this expanse, unlike the inner temple area, was open to non-Jews (Gentiles) who conducted themselves reverently. So the conflict, which revolved around whether ethnically Hebrew Christians were getting preferential treatment over non-Hebrew converts, in some ways foreshadowed later conflicts within the Christian community over whether one needed to become a Jew prior to becoming a Christian. This latter conflict would result in the very first council of the Christian church, recorded in Acts 15. But that is getting way ahead of our story.
The solution to the tense situation created by the exploding community was to appoint seven deacons to assist the disciples. Acts 6 seems to indicate that the apostles would focus on the ministry of the word while the newly appointed deacons would focus on distributing the food. Not everyone had gotten the job description memo, however, because we immediately find Deacon Stephen stirring things up with his powerful preaching, so much so that he was dragged before the council where he delivered the longest sermon in the book of Acts. Not only was it a long sermon, it was a radically unwelcome one for most of its hearers, because its theme was the theme of misunderstanding.
Stephen began by focusing on the universally accepted foundation of Israel: God's promise to and covenant with Abraham. Then he reminded them of how the Hebrews ended up in Egypt (Acts 7:9-14). Everyone would have been nodding in agreement. But Stephen then shifted to commonly understood facts but commonly misunderstood purposes. Moses, he reminded them, was called to help his people but was rejected as a ruler and judge (Acts 7:23-28). Even after their amazing deliverance, the people of Israel rejected Moses as ruler and judge (Acts 7:39-43). Stephen recalled how they misunderstood God's purposes in Moses' leadership, the law, and the tabernacle.
David and Solomon built God a permanent dwelling place. However, Stephen argued, Israel even misunderstood the purpose of the temple. Echoing the preaching of Micah and Jeremiah, he reminded them that many people had tended to put their faith in the temple instead of in the God honored by the temple. In words guaranteed to antagonize those in the council, he said,
But it was Solomon who built a house for him. Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made with human hands; as the prophet says, "Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. What kind of house will you build for me, says the Lord, or what is the place of my rest? Did not my hand make all these things?"
-- Acts 7:47-50
Fast-forwarding his message to the present, Stephen compared his audience to their ancestors: "stiff-necked" and "uncircumcised in hearts and ears." God had sent their ancestors the prophets, and their ancestors rejected and killed them. God had sent them the Righteous One [Jesus], whom they rejected and killed. Their ancestors did not understand God's purposes in Moses, and the prophets told them so -- they did not understand God's purposes in Jesus, and Stephen told them so. Stephen was stoned to death. Many scholars feel that Stephen's speech is the most important sermon in the book of Acts. It gives us an interpretive framework for what follows in the Christian, as well as the Jewish community: the tendency to misunderstand uncomfortable truth even when it should be absolutely clear.
Before long, Philip was commanded by an angel to go to a wilderness road where he encountered an Ethiopian eunuch who certainly looked like another "God-fearer" since he was reading from Isaiah 53 but could not understand the meaning. As far as the Jewish religious community was concerned, this man had two strikes against him: he was a foreigner, and from a long distance at that; and he had been sexually mutilated, so he could never be admitted to a Jewish religious assembly. Philip, of course, interpreted the scripture in light of Jesus and, as Stephen had done, gave a much broader and less encumbered interpretation, so that the Ethiopian was baptized. Then there is the story of Saul/Paul who learns on the Damascus Road that God's grace is not limited to punctilious Jews like himself, but is cosmic in its scope. At that point in the narrative, we are introduced to Cornelius, setting up this story.
Cornelius is introduced as not only another God-fearer, but a centurion as well. An angel appeared to him assuring him that his faith would be rewarded and instructing him to send for Peter who was in Joppa. The next day, as Peter was waiting for lunch to be prepared, he had his well-known vision of a wide variety of animals accompanied by a voice telling him to kill and eat them. Good old Peter, who you will recall corrected Jesus' prophecies of his suffering and death at Caesarea Philippi, now corrected the divine voice: "By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean." The voice said to him again, a second time, "What God has made clean, you must not call profane." This happened three times and Peter was still pondering it when the messengers from Cornelius arrived. Isn't it tempting to remind ourselves how Peter had denied Jesus three times and to take some cheap shot at him for not understanding such a clear message from God three times? But if I reflect on how many times I have fumbled clear words from the Lord, I realize I better quit while I'm ahead. The phenomenon of misunderstanding did not stop at the end of the Old Testament.
Upon his arrival at Cornelius' house, things seemed to click for Peter. Encountering a group of Gentiles in Cornelius' house he said, "You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean." Then, after hearing the story of Cornelius' vision, he proclaimed, "I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him" (Acts 10:34-35). But we know the rest of the story. We know that Peter, along with some of the other apostles, would have difficulty with this. It was one thing to proclaim God's incredible openness but another to eradicate all sins and errors and prejudices. In our relationship with God, some things change in an instant; others take a lifetime for the process of sanctification to do its work.
While thinking about this text, I received word of the death of one of my seminary professors and ordination sponsors, Dr. C. Everett Tilson, Professor of Hebrew, Old Testament, and Ethics at Vanderbilt University and the Methodist Theological School in Ohio. I have a photo of him with Martin Luther King Jr. The caption reads, "Pictured from left to right: Dr. Everett Tilson, Dr. C. T. Vivian, Alexander Looby (attorney), and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. This photo was taken on April 20, 1960, in Nashville, at a mass rally against racial discrimination held one or two days after Alexander Looby's house was bombed. Mr. Looby was the attorney for the students who had been arrested for holding sit-ins at segregated lunch counters."
Dr. Tilson, who frequently shared the platform with King, had written a book in 1957, titled Segregation and the Bible (which I am happy to report is still available from Amazon.com), that demolished many of the arguments then in use to justify government mandated separation of the races. It was widely used and highly regarded. That is the good news and one fitting tribute to Dr. Tilson. The bad news is that he had to write it in 1957! After all, John Wesley had been an active opponent of the slave trade; indeed his very last letter was an encouragement to William Wilberforce to continue the anti-slavery fight. The really bad news is that not everyone agreed. Well into the '60s, Jerry Falwell opposed Martin Luther King and other anti-segregation clergy by misrepresenting the Old Testament "Curse of Ham" as teaching that it was God's will that blacks be subservient to whites. Twenty years later, in 1985, Falwell backed the newly elected (and final) apartheid regime of P. W. Botha in South Africa because it claimed to be a theocracy. He even labeled then Archbishop Desmond Tutu "a phony" for speaking against apartheid. He sort of apologized after donations to his ministry deceased by one-half million dollars a week and President Reagan imposed an embargo on South African gold coins.
The catastrophically bad news is that there are many contemporary Christians who agree with Falwell's 1985 position even if they won't say it out loud. Why else would the "race card" be so consistently played in both political and church circles today?
How can this be? I want to suggest that one of the reasons is that we find ourselves playing the same kind of misunderstanding game we find Stephen deriding in his sermon, Phillip disarming in his encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch, and Peter grappling with when he responds, "By no means, Lord...." We have far too often simply not heard the dramatic word that God has clearly spoken in Jesus Christ. If you look at today's text, you cannot help but see that it is a God-centered text: According to Peter, it is a message sent by God the Father preached by God the Son; a message of how God anointed Jesus with the Holy Spirit (all three persons of the Trinity!), how God raised Jesus, and how God chose the witnesses to Jesus, among whom Peter finds himself. Compare that to the gospel we so often hear: a gospel of what Jesus means to me, and what God can do for me rather than what God has done and is doing in the world through Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.
The relationship of the human and the divine in Jesus Christ was one of the really hot topics in the first few centuries of the Christian church's life. But it is a mistake to think that it was settled once for all at Nicaea or Constantinople or Chalcedon. A few years ago (2003), Stephen Prothero, the chair of the religion department at Boston University, wrote an important book, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon. It is an important book and the title gives away one of its main themes: A national icon does not have to be God; something or someone can be very important without being divine. As one reviewer put it, it "documents how the Son of God became the nation's most ubiquitous and flexible celebrity." The obvious question is, "What do these celebrity versions of Jesus have to do with the Son of God in Peter's sermon?"
Prothero spells out a variety of these Jesuses. There is the "enlightened sage" Jesus of Thomas Jefferson's version of the New Testament (compiled late in life, 1819 or 1820) seeing Jesus as a great teacher, but nothing more. There is the "sweet savior" Jesus, so loving and so caring and so feminine that by the end of the nineteenth-century, women were being used as models for portraits of Jesus. Counteracting this was the manly Jesus who not only cleanses the temple (in the gospels) but beats up on his opponents (not in the gospels) like Billy Sunday and advocates of twentieth-century "muscular Christianity." There is the totally acculturated Jesus who looks just like us (whoever "us" is) and would surely feel about everything and respond to all today's needs just like we do. And isn't this right where Peter was when he presumed to say to the divine voice, "By no means, Lord ..."? In Prothero's phrase, we have become too much "Jesus-centric" and too little "Christo-centric." Jesus, after all, was the man, and we are comfortable adapting and refashioning our idea of the man to fit our own humanity. "Christ" is the title, "Messiah" and that is who Peter proclaims.
It is worth remembering that Peter had been with Jesus during his earthly ministry. He had seen him eat with sinners, interact with the Samaritan woman, and heal the lepers. He had heard the parables about the lost sheep and the lost son. And yet, it seems, he was too close to the human Jesus to have things really clear. It took some time for him to realize, "I truly understand that God shows no partiality...."
Kathryn Henderson, a Houghton College student on a summer internship, had some really radical thoughts about homeless people in Chicago:
I've been wondering what it would be like if it was just a cultural norm for people in the city to make efforts to care for the homeless who begged on the street that they traveled on most. Like: I spend the most time walking on one stretch of Monroe Street. I and other people could give sandwiches and money and jackets to the people on Monroe, knowing that elsewhere, other people were doing the same kind of thing. Of course there's always the slippery slope: people might get to like this life, they might find it so secure and wonderful that they wouldn't want to try and get things back together. Somehow, though, it seems people get that way anyway, and perhaps the act of extending kindness might change things, in them and us.
Where would she get such an idea? If I had time I'd give it some thought. But I need to get back to managing my internet fortune. Amen.
If I was serious about all this, you would be thinking, "He's even dumber than I imagined" and "What a moron!" Maybe one or two of you would have had compassion: "That's a shame. Why didn't someone warn him about phishing and pharming and all the other ways disreputable people try to steal your identity?" Let me make it clear that I am in no way making light of the thousands of people who have their identities stolen, nor of the major brands and institutions (over 20,100 in May 2006 alone) that are victimized by "spoofed" emails that take consumers to counterfeit websites designed to trick them into divulging financial data thinking that they are actually updating their accounts. The Brittains are especially sensitive to identify theft since my wife, Eileen, had hers stolen before the term "identity theft" had even been coined. She was victimized the old-fashioned way when somebody stole her purse, altered her driver's license, opened numerous credit cards in her name, and went wild. The point is not to "blame the victim" and say that anyone whose identity has been stolen is to blame. But we do have to admit that some of these schemes should be pretty transparent.
There are some things about the message of scripture that should be just as crystal clear as how bogus the schemes I mentioned are. And yet, for a variety of reasons, many Christians often get them amazingly wrong. It is no more helpful, than in the cases I just described, to beat up on ourselves or others, in a theological version of blaming the victim, but we need to clearly see what is happening. One of these messages that somehow gets overlooked or distorted is the astounded remark of an obviously amazed Peter in today's reading: "I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him" (Acts 10:34-35).
To grasp the impact of this amazing sentence, we have to put it in context. Peter had preached on the day of Pentecost, leading to an astounding explosion in the size of the initial Christian community. While this was in some ways a "golden age" of communal sharing and daily prayer amongst believers and constant learning from the preaching of the disciples, by Acts 6 we learn that this growth brought with it some tensions between Hebrew and Hellenistic converts to Christianity. The latter would have been believers who came from the ranks of the so-called "God-fearing Gentiles," people who were not ethnically Jewish, but who had been attracted to the monotheistic faith of Israel. They were not attracted enough to actually convert to Judaism, which would have required keeping a kosher diet and undergoing circumcision, but very attracted nonetheless. There were so many "God-fearers" in ancient Palestine that in his grandiose expansion of the temple, Herod the Great had included a large "court of the Gentiles." Surrounded by 37-foot-tall Corinthian pillars and paved with marble, this expanse, unlike the inner temple area, was open to non-Jews (Gentiles) who conducted themselves reverently. So the conflict, which revolved around whether ethnically Hebrew Christians were getting preferential treatment over non-Hebrew converts, in some ways foreshadowed later conflicts within the Christian community over whether one needed to become a Jew prior to becoming a Christian. This latter conflict would result in the very first council of the Christian church, recorded in Acts 15. But that is getting way ahead of our story.
The solution to the tense situation created by the exploding community was to appoint seven deacons to assist the disciples. Acts 6 seems to indicate that the apostles would focus on the ministry of the word while the newly appointed deacons would focus on distributing the food. Not everyone had gotten the job description memo, however, because we immediately find Deacon Stephen stirring things up with his powerful preaching, so much so that he was dragged before the council where he delivered the longest sermon in the book of Acts. Not only was it a long sermon, it was a radically unwelcome one for most of its hearers, because its theme was the theme of misunderstanding.
Stephen began by focusing on the universally accepted foundation of Israel: God's promise to and covenant with Abraham. Then he reminded them of how the Hebrews ended up in Egypt (Acts 7:9-14). Everyone would have been nodding in agreement. But Stephen then shifted to commonly understood facts but commonly misunderstood purposes. Moses, he reminded them, was called to help his people but was rejected as a ruler and judge (Acts 7:23-28). Even after their amazing deliverance, the people of Israel rejected Moses as ruler and judge (Acts 7:39-43). Stephen recalled how they misunderstood God's purposes in Moses' leadership, the law, and the tabernacle.
David and Solomon built God a permanent dwelling place. However, Stephen argued, Israel even misunderstood the purpose of the temple. Echoing the preaching of Micah and Jeremiah, he reminded them that many people had tended to put their faith in the temple instead of in the God honored by the temple. In words guaranteed to antagonize those in the council, he said,
But it was Solomon who built a house for him. Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made with human hands; as the prophet says, "Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. What kind of house will you build for me, says the Lord, or what is the place of my rest? Did not my hand make all these things?"
-- Acts 7:47-50
Fast-forwarding his message to the present, Stephen compared his audience to their ancestors: "stiff-necked" and "uncircumcised in hearts and ears." God had sent their ancestors the prophets, and their ancestors rejected and killed them. God had sent them the Righteous One [Jesus], whom they rejected and killed. Their ancestors did not understand God's purposes in Moses, and the prophets told them so -- they did not understand God's purposes in Jesus, and Stephen told them so. Stephen was stoned to death. Many scholars feel that Stephen's speech is the most important sermon in the book of Acts. It gives us an interpretive framework for what follows in the Christian, as well as the Jewish community: the tendency to misunderstand uncomfortable truth even when it should be absolutely clear.
Before long, Philip was commanded by an angel to go to a wilderness road where he encountered an Ethiopian eunuch who certainly looked like another "God-fearer" since he was reading from Isaiah 53 but could not understand the meaning. As far as the Jewish religious community was concerned, this man had two strikes against him: he was a foreigner, and from a long distance at that; and he had been sexually mutilated, so he could never be admitted to a Jewish religious assembly. Philip, of course, interpreted the scripture in light of Jesus and, as Stephen had done, gave a much broader and less encumbered interpretation, so that the Ethiopian was baptized. Then there is the story of Saul/Paul who learns on the Damascus Road that God's grace is not limited to punctilious Jews like himself, but is cosmic in its scope. At that point in the narrative, we are introduced to Cornelius, setting up this story.
Cornelius is introduced as not only another God-fearer, but a centurion as well. An angel appeared to him assuring him that his faith would be rewarded and instructing him to send for Peter who was in Joppa. The next day, as Peter was waiting for lunch to be prepared, he had his well-known vision of a wide variety of animals accompanied by a voice telling him to kill and eat them. Good old Peter, who you will recall corrected Jesus' prophecies of his suffering and death at Caesarea Philippi, now corrected the divine voice: "By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean." The voice said to him again, a second time, "What God has made clean, you must not call profane." This happened three times and Peter was still pondering it when the messengers from Cornelius arrived. Isn't it tempting to remind ourselves how Peter had denied Jesus three times and to take some cheap shot at him for not understanding such a clear message from God three times? But if I reflect on how many times I have fumbled clear words from the Lord, I realize I better quit while I'm ahead. The phenomenon of misunderstanding did not stop at the end of the Old Testament.
Upon his arrival at Cornelius' house, things seemed to click for Peter. Encountering a group of Gentiles in Cornelius' house he said, "You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean." Then, after hearing the story of Cornelius' vision, he proclaimed, "I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him" (Acts 10:34-35). But we know the rest of the story. We know that Peter, along with some of the other apostles, would have difficulty with this. It was one thing to proclaim God's incredible openness but another to eradicate all sins and errors and prejudices. In our relationship with God, some things change in an instant; others take a lifetime for the process of sanctification to do its work.
While thinking about this text, I received word of the death of one of my seminary professors and ordination sponsors, Dr. C. Everett Tilson, Professor of Hebrew, Old Testament, and Ethics at Vanderbilt University and the Methodist Theological School in Ohio. I have a photo of him with Martin Luther King Jr. The caption reads, "Pictured from left to right: Dr. Everett Tilson, Dr. C. T. Vivian, Alexander Looby (attorney), and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. This photo was taken on April 20, 1960, in Nashville, at a mass rally against racial discrimination held one or two days after Alexander Looby's house was bombed. Mr. Looby was the attorney for the students who had been arrested for holding sit-ins at segregated lunch counters."
Dr. Tilson, who frequently shared the platform with King, had written a book in 1957, titled Segregation and the Bible (which I am happy to report is still available from Amazon.com), that demolished many of the arguments then in use to justify government mandated separation of the races. It was widely used and highly regarded. That is the good news and one fitting tribute to Dr. Tilson. The bad news is that he had to write it in 1957! After all, John Wesley had been an active opponent of the slave trade; indeed his very last letter was an encouragement to William Wilberforce to continue the anti-slavery fight. The really bad news is that not everyone agreed. Well into the '60s, Jerry Falwell opposed Martin Luther King and other anti-segregation clergy by misrepresenting the Old Testament "Curse of Ham" as teaching that it was God's will that blacks be subservient to whites. Twenty years later, in 1985, Falwell backed the newly elected (and final) apartheid regime of P. W. Botha in South Africa because it claimed to be a theocracy. He even labeled then Archbishop Desmond Tutu "a phony" for speaking against apartheid. He sort of apologized after donations to his ministry deceased by one-half million dollars a week and President Reagan imposed an embargo on South African gold coins.
The catastrophically bad news is that there are many contemporary Christians who agree with Falwell's 1985 position even if they won't say it out loud. Why else would the "race card" be so consistently played in both political and church circles today?
How can this be? I want to suggest that one of the reasons is that we find ourselves playing the same kind of misunderstanding game we find Stephen deriding in his sermon, Phillip disarming in his encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch, and Peter grappling with when he responds, "By no means, Lord...." We have far too often simply not heard the dramatic word that God has clearly spoken in Jesus Christ. If you look at today's text, you cannot help but see that it is a God-centered text: According to Peter, it is a message sent by God the Father preached by God the Son; a message of how God anointed Jesus with the Holy Spirit (all three persons of the Trinity!), how God raised Jesus, and how God chose the witnesses to Jesus, among whom Peter finds himself. Compare that to the gospel we so often hear: a gospel of what Jesus means to me, and what God can do for me rather than what God has done and is doing in the world through Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.
The relationship of the human and the divine in Jesus Christ was one of the really hot topics in the first few centuries of the Christian church's life. But it is a mistake to think that it was settled once for all at Nicaea or Constantinople or Chalcedon. A few years ago (2003), Stephen Prothero, the chair of the religion department at Boston University, wrote an important book, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon. It is an important book and the title gives away one of its main themes: A national icon does not have to be God; something or someone can be very important without being divine. As one reviewer put it, it "documents how the Son of God became the nation's most ubiquitous and flexible celebrity." The obvious question is, "What do these celebrity versions of Jesus have to do with the Son of God in Peter's sermon?"
Prothero spells out a variety of these Jesuses. There is the "enlightened sage" Jesus of Thomas Jefferson's version of the New Testament (compiled late in life, 1819 or 1820) seeing Jesus as a great teacher, but nothing more. There is the "sweet savior" Jesus, so loving and so caring and so feminine that by the end of the nineteenth-century, women were being used as models for portraits of Jesus. Counteracting this was the manly Jesus who not only cleanses the temple (in the gospels) but beats up on his opponents (not in the gospels) like Billy Sunday and advocates of twentieth-century "muscular Christianity." There is the totally acculturated Jesus who looks just like us (whoever "us" is) and would surely feel about everything and respond to all today's needs just like we do. And isn't this right where Peter was when he presumed to say to the divine voice, "By no means, Lord ..."? In Prothero's phrase, we have become too much "Jesus-centric" and too little "Christo-centric." Jesus, after all, was the man, and we are comfortable adapting and refashioning our idea of the man to fit our own humanity. "Christ" is the title, "Messiah" and that is who Peter proclaims.
It is worth remembering that Peter had been with Jesus during his earthly ministry. He had seen him eat with sinners, interact with the Samaritan woman, and heal the lepers. He had heard the parables about the lost sheep and the lost son. And yet, it seems, he was too close to the human Jesus to have things really clear. It took some time for him to realize, "I truly understand that God shows no partiality...."
Kathryn Henderson, a Houghton College student on a summer internship, had some really radical thoughts about homeless people in Chicago:
I've been wondering what it would be like if it was just a cultural norm for people in the city to make efforts to care for the homeless who begged on the street that they traveled on most. Like: I spend the most time walking on one stretch of Monroe Street. I and other people could give sandwiches and money and jackets to the people on Monroe, knowing that elsewhere, other people were doing the same kind of thing. Of course there's always the slippery slope: people might get to like this life, they might find it so secure and wonderful that they wouldn't want to try and get things back together. Somehow, though, it seems people get that way anyway, and perhaps the act of extending kindness might change things, in them and us.
Where would she get such an idea? If I had time I'd give it some thought. But I need to get back to managing my internet fortune. Amen.
