19th Day of Easter, Thursday April 30: Acts 11:1-18

It’s one thing to come to a new understanding with another person or community, out in the week and the world. It’s another to bring it back home to the family or the church that have not shared the experience. When have you had that experience of making new friends and new sense, or adopting a new way of living differently – only to have to explain it back at home?

So the church in Judea, centred in Jerusalem, get wind of Peter befriending Gentiles. Rumour has it that Peter is eating non-kosher food with non-circumcised people, and not making them change to be like him. Again, this story stands in context of an orthodox observant community learning how to make alliances with heterodox differently observant folks, not just as a strategy to change them, but accepting them. In our context the risk is of anti-Semitic or rigidly progressive reading of this text as if Jews were less developed or smart, and lacked enlightenment – or worse, that they do today!

Peter recites the story we read yesterday. Sometimes we have to tell stories, and not speak in categorical terms. Through our church’s struggles to welcome gay and lesbian members and leaders, story telling was always more effective than legislative edicts. Can you tell a story, as you remembered in the first paragraph today, of when you expanded your horizon and perspective, and then came home to tell the story? How did that go for you?