GOD IS A TROUBLEMAKER John M, Buchanan
Acts 11:4-18 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
January 28, 1979 Columbus, Ohio

I have never known anyone who wanted to be agitated, irritated, or changed,
by his/her religion, On occasion, when teaching a class or leading a discussion in
basic theology I have used the device of "word association" to get things going and
to stimulate people to identify what they believe, In Word Association when the
term "God" is brought into play people say - “father, powerful, love, comforter,
healer, creator," etc,, etc, but never, in my experience "Troubiemaker",

In his delightful and helpful little book, Your God Is Too Small, J.B,
Phillips wrote, "...some Sunday School children were once asked to write down ideas
as to what God was like, The answers, with few exceptions, began something like
this: "God is a very old gentleman living in Heaven,..!" (p.23).. Those answers are
probably not unlike the vague image most of us have of God,

Iam not, by the way, interested in exploring the visual, physical shape or
form which you identify with God, That, the theologians have been telling us for
centuries, is barking up the wrong tree, The name for it is “anthropomorphism" and
it meangy believing in a God who looks and acts like a human being, Our faith, and
the Judeo-Christian tradition is far more interested in what God does than what He
looks like, We are interested, primarily, in the acts of God, not His attributes,
But even here we are not inclined to perceive God as one who acts in a way which
might stir up trouble, Some time ago an Italian communist made a movie of the Gospel
according to St, Matthew, In spite of the fact that he portrayed Jesus as an al-
together grim and humorless revolutionary, the critics and scholars acclaimed the
movie as the most honest film portrayal of Biblical material ever made, But people
in this country didn't like it at all: and the reason was that Jcsus - and by infer-
ence, God - came off as troublemakers, agitators, disturbers of the peace,

My proposal this morning is to add "troublemaker" to whatever concepts, ideas
or images you use to think about God, My proposal is to look for Him in change as
well as stability, to see Him as one who agitates for change on a grand and a
personal scale,

That is the Word of God which I discover in the text this morning. In the
tenth and eleventh chapters of the Book of Acts a story is told, and then retold,
which the author - Luke - regards as one of the most significant events in the
history of the early church,

There are two characters in this story, The first is Cornelius, a Roman
military officer, a Centurian in the "Italian Cohort", a division historians have
determined was stationed in Syria about 69 A,D, Cornelius was what the Jews called
"a God-fearing gentile", That is, he was an admirer and an adherent of Judaism: he
prayed, contributed money to the Synagogue, But he was not a Jew, He had not under-
gone the elaborately prescribed ritual, including circumcision, which would have
made him a Jew, And even if he had, the most conservative of the orthodox would
have had trouble with him because, by birth and race, he was different - a gentile,

The second character in the story is Peter, disciple of Jesus, fisherman,
brave, impulsive; Peter was a Jew, Nowhere does the New Testament suggest that
Peter renounced his religion, In fact, it seems that Peter and people like him
regarded the way of Jesus as an expression of the ancient faith of their people, It
had not occurred to them, frankly, that someone could be, or would want to be, a
follower of Jesus without first being or becoming a Jew,

- 2 -,

The trouvle starts when Cornelius, the gentile, invited Peter, the Jew, to
come to his house in Caesarea, Good Jews had problems with the city of Caesarea
itself, It had been given to Herod by Augustus, was the capital of Palestine and
a thoroughly Roman/Pagan city, Like the rabid Ohio State supporters' opinion of
Ann Arbor, zealous Jews weren't so sure that the whole place wasn't profane and un-
clean, In any event, Peter couldn't accept Cornelius' invitation without violating
his own religion, According to Jewish law, the gentile Cornelius, was unclean, The
ceremonial and liturgical tradition drew a line right through the middle of life,
On one side were clean people and things; on the other side unclean people and things,
Religious people did not associate with unclean people, To enter the house of a
gentile was to become unclean oneself, To break bread with an unclean person was
particularly offensive. Jesus, himself, had been criticized for doing it.

Please understand that I do not mean to be disparaging, Survival in the
ancient world depended on defining what was clean and unclean, healthy and unhealthy,
Certain foods, for instance, always scemed to make people sick, People who ate them
died. When ancient tribal leaders deduced that - they called the food unclean, and
made it a matter of morality to abstain from it, Likewise they deduced that people
who had contact with other people who had sores on their bodies were likely to get
sores on their own bodies, And beneath it all, they knew that the way to avoid
simply being swallowed up by other nations through intermarriage and cultural
synthesis, was to keep to themselves, to be rigidly exclusive, There was no othex
way to survive, I'm not disparacing that, One of the reasons why there are lots
of Jewish people in the world today and no Babylonians is that Jewish taboos were
more accurate and more strictly enforced than Babylonian Taboos,

In any event Peter had a problem when the gentile Centurian invited him over
for dinner, In the meantime he must have been fretting about it, Cornelius, after
all, was a nice man; a generous and pious and respectable man. Somehow it didn't
seem right to Peter that his religion should exclude him so completely. Peter had
a dream,.,nightmare is more like it, He saw a large bed sheet, full of all kinds
of animals, birds and fish. A voice told him to kill and eat, which he refused to
do on the basis of the dietary taboos of his religion, Those animals, birds and
fish, were not kosher, Then the voice said, "What God has cleansed, you must not
call unclean," Somebody is stirring up trouble here and it isn't Peter, or Cor-
nelius, for that matter,

Well, Peter went to see Cornelius, found him receptive to the Gospel, and
of all things baptized him in the name of Jesus Christ; that is, made a gentile a
Christian, bypassing entirely the whole matter of becoming a Jew first,

When the leaders back at headquarters in Jerusalem heard what Peter had
pulled in Caesarca they were very upset, He was severely criticised as a trouble-
maker, agitator - a loose and irresponsible handler of sacred tradition,

Chapter cleven in the Book of Acts is Peter's retelling of what had happened
and his defense of his behavior before a Church Council in Jerusalem, For the
moment he carried the day, The assembly was persuaded that a gentile could be a
Christian without becoming a Jew first, But the issue would emerse again and again
in the early life of the church, In other forms the issue emerses in every genera-
tion, There is something about religion that seems to become inherently exclusive,
narrow, provincial, and there is something about God, the Bible suzzests, which
keeps stirring up trouble every time it happens,

-~3-

Historically, the importance of the story is obvious, Cornelius was the
first gentile Christian, But more important for us today, the story suggests that
true religion is always universal, as wide as the world: that all people are
brothers and sisters - and that God can be expected to agitate for both of those
points,

Sadly, it has taken some agitating. One of the most powerful motifs in
human experience is exclusivism and tribalism, Human society has been organized
from the very beginning on the basis of family, kin, clan ~ and then the extension
of that elementary social structure, tribe or village, and finally, race and nation,
The unit, beginning with the family or tribe, was the organizing principle of life:
it is what gave che individual a sense of identity = and still does, Now, without
becoming overly sociological, we need simply to see that within that powerful motif
religion has alivays played an important roie,

in the ancient world gach tribe or nation had its own deity, When a nation
or tribe was divcated, it wss assumed that what really had happened was that two
gods had tangied, One won 22d one Lost, The Hebrew idea that there was one God for
everybody - wWir.ers and Losers - was extremely strange and revolutionary. So
revolutionary in fact that people really didn't believe it even when they said they
did,

Historians have suggested that when Constantine declared that Christianity
was the official religion of the Roman Empire he was motivated not so much by piety,
as by his political sensitivity to the tribal need for a common religion, his
empire was coming apart at the seams and he hoped Christianity misht be the cement
to hold it tegether a little Loncer,

Abraham Lincoln noted, wryly but sadly, chat both sides in the Civil War
prayed to the same God, invoked His blessing, and claimed His support for their
cause, The belt buckles of German soldiers in the First World War were ins¢ribed
with the words, "Gott Mit Uns'! - God with us, There were Christian chaplains on
both sides and the Nazis worked hard at piving the German people a common folk
teligion which would enhance their pride in race, blood, fatherland.

The Germans weren't the only ones who tried to use religion in this way,
Senator Albert Beveridge raturned from a tour of the Philippine Islands and
addressed his colleagues in January of 1900 on the subject of the war the United
States Army was then waging against the Filipino independence movement, Listen to
his words,,,

"God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic
peoples for a thousand years for nething but vain and idle
self-contemplation and self-admiration, No, He made us
master organizers of the world to establish a system where
chaos reigned, He has given us the spirit or progress to
overwhelm the farces Gf reaction throughout the earth, He
made us adept in sovernment that we may administer covernment
among savage and servile peoples. Were it not for such a
force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and
night, And of all our race He has marked the American people
as His chosen nation to finally lead in the redemption of the
world," (Ihe Broken Covenant, Robert Bellah, p,37~-8).

~ qe

Religion has always becn a part of the worst kind of bigotry and the most
destructive nationalism, In fact, religion can beewme its own tribe, Religion at
its very worst is evc/usive, narrow, confithig: sf “ts mmny worst religion supports
and sometimes cxeviis va:riers between pesgle, ceategorzes of clean-unclean, rightcous-.
sinners, saved--diuoed,

J.B,Phillips wrote, "The Churches appear to be saying, 'If you will jump
through our particular hoop or sitn on our carticular doteed line chen we will
introduce you to God, But if not there is no God for youl," Religion, that is to
say, can be our tribe,

The text, the story of Pater and Cornelius, reveals rolisious provincialism
for what it is; namely, sin, in pious attire, It suggests that egotism can be in-
stitutionalized in a fanatic patriotism or a zealous religiosity: that there is
power and primal appeal to both: who, after all, doesn't want to feel that he is the
best: that his race, religion and nationality make him superior: that the Gospel of
Jesus Christ, however, moves in a different direction altogether. It points to a
God who wants people to learn how to cet along, a religion which helps people live
together, not intensify their divisions, The text suggests to me that one of the
acid tests of religion is just this - does it bring you closer to your fellow human
beings, or dees it drive you apart? Is it reconciling - or is it divisive? If it
is exclusive - to the degree that it is a barrier between people, I can't for the
Life of me understand how it can be called Christian.

The text suggests that in God's sight people are equal, That's hardly news,
and yet it is not a lesson the human family has learned easily, There simply is no
room in Christianity, or the Church of Jesus Christ, for racism of any form, ‘The
text suggests that the agitation for equal apportunity, equal justice comes ultimate-
ly not from one pressure group or another, but from God himself, He is the one
behind the whole movement. The aprocryphal story is told of the day Supreme Court
Justice Charles Evans Hughes walked down the aisle of a large Washington éhurch to
confess his faith and become a member, He was met in the front by two other men -
who also wished to join: men of different races and vastly different stations in life,
The minister was said to have surveyed the scene and exclaimed, "Isn't it amazing
how level the ground is at the foot of the cross,"

There is a sense in Which no one could be around this church for very lons
without learning and experiencing what I have been talleing about, Indeed, there
is a sense in which you are here because the subject of this text is somewhat of
a priority for you, We need, all of us, an occasional reminder of universality of
our religion - and the equality it demands for all of God's children, But in the
final analysis, I have concluded that the word here is intensely personal, with
profound implications for inter-personal relationships,

Each of us knows what it means to shut someone out, or to be shut out by
someone else, Each of us knows the pain of being put down - and the temptation
to put others down, We know something about the game called "mine is better than
yours" and how that game, played so relentlessly, makes human contact, human
communication, human reconciliation impossible. We know how that same can be
cruelly exclusive because we've been both its victims and its players. And we imow

~5-

also, how it can creep into the most intimate and closest of relationships, so
that a once loving and supportive and life-giving marriage, for instance, becomes
a battlefield on which two égos are locked in mortal combat. We lnow, in our
professions, how casy it is simply to shut out our colleagues, to be immune to
their ideas, their skills, their needs as persons, We know a little bit about the
barriers that keep growing up between us,

The text suggests that the love of God in Jesus Christ breaks those
barriers down: that God wants us to be open and in love with the people He has
given us, It suggests that religion is for that purpose - and, finally, that we
can expect God to be the troublemaker, the agitator,

The text suggests that He brought Peter and Cornelius together for the
purpose of opening something up, changing something, making something bigger and
better, I belicve He does the same thing in my life and yours, He stirs up
trouble: He forces the issues: He makes us uncomfortable with the status quo: He
pushes us - to change and grow and become. He wants us to Live a full life: He
wants us to become everything we are capable of becoming: He wants us to discover
the goodness and beauty of life lived in love with others, And He wants that
enough for us - Eo push, agitate, stir up trouble to get it, You can count on it,

Amen,

Father, give us the courage to be mere than we are, Open us to your love -
stimulate us to what needs changing in our Lives! and teach us again that You love
ug - and all your children in Jesus Christ our Lord,

Anen,