What God Has Called Clean

I want to ask you a question this morning, and I want you to answer it in your own head, honestly. When you think about the word conversion, who comes to mind?

I’ll tell you who comes to most folks’ minds. The outsider. The prodigal. The person who was far off and got found. The drunk who got sober, the skeptic who got convinced, the stranger who walked in off the street and walked down the aisle. Conversion, in our imagination, is for them. It’s the movement of a far-off person toward God.

And I believe in that with all my heart. But this morning I want to show you a conversion story that runs the other direction. In Acts chapter 10, the person God goes after, the person God works on all night in a vision, the person who has to change his mind at the risk of everything he thought the Bible said, is Peter. The insider. The believer. The one with all the right doctrine. The most converted man in the story is the one who was already in the church.

I’ve been sitting with that story for weeks, because I think it might be the most important chapter in the New Testament for the question our whole culture is arguing about right now. Not because it mentions that question. It doesn’t. Because it shows us, step by step, what God does when his own faithful people are wrong about a category of other people. And church, if we’re honest, we have been wrong about a category of people. So let’s watch God handle Peter, and let’s ask whether he might be handling us the same way.

The man at the gate

First, meet Cornelius. Acts 10 introduces him as a centurion of the Italian cohort. That’s a Roman officer, the army of occupation, and Luke goes out of his way to tell us he was a good one. Devout. God-fearing. Gave generously to the poor. Prayed to God constantly. This man is a believer in everything but name and baptism. He prays, he gives, he fears God. By any fruit test you want to run, he’s bearing fruit.

And yet he’s unclean. Not because of anything he did. Because of who he is. He was born a Gentile, into the wrong family, on the wrong side of the line. Now I want to be careful here, because the precision matters. The law of Moses is clear about clean and unclean food and about ritual purity, but read Leviticus closely and it never exactly says Gentile people are unclean. A lot of that line was fence-law, the rules faithful teachers built around God’s law over the centuries, scaffolding so nobody would stumble near the real commandments. So when Peter says it’s unlawful to even visit a Gentile, he’s standing on God’s law and on a wall somebody built on top of it, and after a lifetime of keeping both he can’t always tell where one ends and the other begins. Peter didn’t draw the line out of thin air. God drew some of it, and the God-fearing teachers of his world drew the rest, and Peter kept all of it, faithfully, the way his mama taught him, the way every good Jewish man in Jerusalem kept it. It wasn’t prejudice, not exactly. It was obedience. That’s what makes this story so hard and so good. Peter isn’t a villain. Peter is a faithful man whose faithfulness has a fence in it.

And hold on to that detail, because it’s going to matter by the end. Part of what God has to tear down in Peter was never God’s in the first place. That is not an accident of the story. That is a warning to every generation of faithful people, including this one, about how much of what we’re sure is God’s fence turns out to be scaffolding we built ourselves.

So God has a situation. There’s a praying, giving, God-fearing man on one side of the fence, and a faithful apostle on the other side, and the fence is the problem. Watch what God does about it.

The sheet

Two visions, back to back, and they have to be read together. Cornelius is praying at three in the afternoon, and an angel tells him to send men to Joppa to find a man named Simon Peter. Meanwhile, the next day around noon, Peter is up on a rooftop praying, and he gets hungry, and while lunch is being fixed he falls into a trance. And he sees the sky open and something like a great sheet coming down, lowered by its four corners, and on the sheet are all the animals. All of them. The clean ones and the unclean ones side by side, the pigs and the vultures and the creeping things, everything Peter had spent a lifetime calling unclean, laid out on one cloth from the same sky.

And a voice says, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat.”

And Peter says no. Isn’t that something. The voice of the Lord says kill and eat and the apostle says, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean” (Acts 10:14). He quotes scripture at God. He’s not being rebellious. He’s being obedient to the very commandments God gave Moses. His no is the most religious no in the book. If a man is going to be wrong here, he’s going to be wrong on scriptural grounds.

And the voice comes back with the sentence that this whole sermon hangs on, and I want you to hear exactly how it’s worded. “What God has made clean, you must not call profane” (Acts 10:15). Some translations say common. What God has called clean, you must not call common.

Now catch the grammar of it, because where that voice lands is everything. The voice does not say, kill and eat because the rules have been repealed and nothing matters anymore. It does not say the animals changed. It says, look again at what I have made clean. The cleanness was God’s doing, already done, and the problem was Peter’s vocabulary. Peter had been calling something common that God had called clean. The command isn’t to Peter about the animals, not really. It’s about his speech. His labels. His category. Stop bearing false witness against what I have made.

And it happens three times. The sheet goes up, comes down, goes up, comes down. Three times, the same exchange, and then it’s gone. God had to say it three times because a faithful man does not update his theology on one hearing, and God knows that, and God is patient with it. There’s something almost tender about the three times. The Lord knows Peter’s not hardhearted, just certain, and certainty takes repetition.

While Peter is still standing on that roof trying to figure out what the vision meant, there’s a knock at the gate. Cornelius’s men. The Spirit says, go with them. And Peter goes.

What Peter learned

Now here’s the part I want you to see with your own eyes, because it’s easy to miss. When Peter gets to Caesarea and walks into a house full of Gentiles, he tells them what he learned, and he says it in a way that settles the question of what the sheet was about. “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” (Acts 10:28).

Anyone. Peter did the interpretation himself, and the interpretation is not about bacon. The sheet was never mainly about food. Peter says so, standing in the living room of the man the whole thing was about. God showed me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean. The animals on the sheet were the practice run. The people were the point.

And then Peter starts preaching, and before he can even finish the sermon, the Holy Spirit falls on the whole house. Acts 10:44. Peter hadn’t gotten to the invitation. The Spirit didn’t wait for the altar call. And the Jewish believers who came along with Peter are amazed, because the gift gets poured out on these people, the uncircumcised, the outside-the-line people, same Spirit, same gifts, same tongues and praise. And Peter says the practical thing: “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” (Acts 10:47). Can anyone withhold the water. The same kind of question the Ethiopian eunuch asked on the desert road, and the answer is the same one. Nobody can. Nobody dared. He ordered them baptized on the spot.

And here’s my favorite verse in the whole chapter, or maybe it’s in chapter 11 when Peter has to explain himself back in Jerusalem, and the believers there, the circumcised ones, are upset, because he went into a Gentile house, and Peter tells the whole story, the sheet and the three times and the knock at the gate and the Spirit falling, and he lands on this: “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” (Acts 11:17).

Who was I. That’s Peter, the rock, at his most honest. He doesn’t say, I studied it out and I concluded. He says, I watched God do it, and I got out of the way. When they heard that, they were silenced. And then they praised God, saying, “Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life” (Acts 11:18). Even to. You can hear the categories shifting right there in the sentence.

The direction of conversion

Now let me tell you why I believe this chapter is the word of the Lord for the question on the table, the one about gay Christians and the church.

Notice the direction everything runs. Cornelius doesn’t change first. He’s already praying and giving before the story starts. Peter is the one who changes. The faithful insider has to be converted from his categories before the outsider can be welcomed, and God himself does the converting, and it takes a trance and a sheet and three repetitions and a houseful of evidence before Peter gets there. And Peter gets there by watching, not by arguing. He sees the Spirit fall on people his upbringing told him were unclean, and his own eyes overrule his own doctrine.

And notice what the evidence is. Not a proof text. Fruit. A praying man, a giving man, a Spirit-filled household. The same fruit on the same tree. Peter’s argument before the Jerusalem council in Acts 15 is exactly that: “God made no distinction between them and us, but cleansed their hearts by faith” (Acts 15:9). No distinction. The fruit test was run, and the old categories lost.

Now somebody is going to raise a fair objection, and I’d rather raise it myself than have you carry it home. Peter’s food laws were ceremony, you’ll say, and the verses about same-sex behavior sit in a different part of the book, in the moral law, and you don’t get from one to the other just by waving a sheet. I hear that, and I’m not going to pretend the two kinds of command are the same kind of command. But watch what Peter himself says got overturned. When he walked into that house, he did not say, God showed me the food rules were pictures and now they’re repealed. He said, God showed me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean. Anyone. A category of people. And when the church in Jerusalem pushed back, the thing that settled it was not a new exegesis. It was evidence. God gave them the Spirit, same gift, no distinction, and Peter stood there and said, who am I to hinder what God is plainly doing? Even at the Jerusalem council, the fruit came first and the argument had to catch up. So the question this chapter puts to us is not whether the verses about sex are shaped like the verses about pork. The question is whether we have the right, or the stomach, to call unclean what the Spirit has already fallen on.

I want to say carefully what I believe this means. There are gay Christians in this town. Some of them are in this room. They are praying. They are giving. Some of them have been following Jesus longer and more faithfully than a lot of the straight folks in the pews around them, and they’ve done it while hearing themselves described from ten thousand pulpits as the problem with the culture. And I have watched the Holy Spirit fall on their lives. The love, the patience, the self-control, the endurance, the fruit that only the Spirit grows. Same Spirit. Same gifts. Same Lord.

And when I look at all that, I hear a sheet coming down out of a sky at noon, and a voice I have no right to argue with, saying the same thing it said to a hungry man on a rooftop: what God has called clean, you must not call common.

I know some of you want the six verses addressed, and they deserve more than a paragraph, and they’re going to get a whole sermon before long, because the ground rule is what the Bible says, all of it. But I’ll say this much now. Read in context, most of those verses concern lust, idolatry, or exploitation, and the ancient authors did not have our category in view, a person for whom this orientation is not a descent into lust but simply the way God made them from the womb. The word homosexual is younger than my grandmother and it never came from Paul’s pen. It didn’t appear in an English Bible until the middle of the last century, and serious scholars are still arguing over what Paul’s own Greek words covered there. What we do know from the whole sweep of scripture, Genesis to Revelation, is that God keeps converting the insiders’ categories. The Gentiles. The eunuchs. The Samaritans. The women. Sheet after sheet after sheet coming down. At what point does a person of the book start to notice the pattern?

The cost, told honestly

Now I have to be fair to the other side of this, because I’ve been on it, and some of you are on it, and you’re not bad people. You’re Peter. You have verses, and the verses are really there, and your no comes out of obedience, not hate. I know that. Most of the people who hold the traditional view love God and are trying to be faithful to the book. We do not get to call them bigots. That word does more damage in five seconds than a hundred bad sermons, and the Lord we follow died for the people who were wrong about him, so we can manage some patience with the people who are wrong about this.

And let me honor one path in particular before I tell you what I’ve seen. The traditional view says the fruit test is passed in celibacy, in the gay believer who gives the whole of his or her love to God and lives alone for conscience’ sake. I have met those saints, and saints is the right word, and I will not build this sermon on their backs. The disagreement between us is not about whether they are faithful. It is about whether the whole church gets to demand that path of everybody, forever, as the price of a seat, when the sheet says nobody is common.

But I want to tell you what I’ve seen on the other side of that faithful no. I’ve seen the kids. Thirty years of ministry, and I have buried too many of them. Young people who grew up in churches like this one, who loved Jesus with everything in them, who prayed and sang and witnessed to their friends, and who figured out somewhere around fourteen or fifteen that they were the category the sermons were about. And they heard what the sermons said. Some of them went home and prayed the gay away until their knees bled, as the saying goes, and God, for reasons we argue about, did not take it away, because there was nothing to take. And some of them concluded that the door of the house of God had a sign on it with their name on the exclusion list, and they walked, and some of them walked so far they never came back, and a few of them didn’t walk anywhere at all. They’re in the ground.

Now hear me say this carefully, because the line matters. The traditional teaching itself, held by people of good will, condemns that cruelty. Those kids didn’t leave because of what the doctrine says on paper. They left because of how it got practiced, the contempt, the slurs, the prayers that sounded like curses. That is on the people who let it happen in God’s houses, not on the grandma in the back row who loves her Bible and never hurt a soul. Grieve the one, and refuse the other.

And if you’re the mama or the daddy sitting under one of those losses, I’m not talking over your head this morning. I’m talking to you. And if you’re the young person in this room hearing yourself described and wondering whether there’s a seat for you in this house, stay. Stay and hear the rest.

A tree is known by its fruit. I don’t say that lightly and I don’t say it as a debater’s trick. Jesus said it, and he meant it as the test for teaching. So we run the test, knowing all the while that experience can deceive, that Peter could have talked himself out of what he saw on that rooftop, and that’s why the voice on the sheet mattered, and why the book still sits in judgment over our experience and not the other way around. I have spent my life around both orchards and I’m telling you what I’ve seen with these eyes: one teaching has borne a harvest of desertion and despair, and the other has borne saints. Faithful, prayerful, generous, durable saints. And whoever is hindering whom, somebody needs to ask Peter’s question before it’s too late to ask it kindly: who was I that I could hinder God?

The knock at the gate

Here’s how I’d sum it up. Somewhere in this story, there is a Cornelius, and there is a Peter, and you get to decide which one you are this morning, and here’s the strange part: some of you have been Cornelius your whole life. God-fearing, praying, faithful, standing outside a fence somebody else drew, and this morning I want you to hear it from this pulpit, in this house, in the name of Jesus: the fence is not the gospel. The gospel is the sheet coming down and the voice saying, I have made them clean, and the water, and nobody being able to withhold it.

And some of you are Peter. Good, faithful, verse-quoting Peter. I’m not mad at you. I was you. God is patient, he does the sheet three times, and he’s probably been lowering it on you for years in ways you didn’t name. The gay kid from your youth group who’s still serving the Lord somewhere. The couple in your family whose marriage has outlasted half the straight ones in the phone tree. The Spirit you’ve seen with your own eyes on people your categories said shouldn’t have it. That’s the sheet. That’s the knock at the gate. And the question the story leaves you with is the one Peter had to answer with his feet: when the people God has called show up at your fence, will you go with them?

And let me say what this means for Monday, because a conviction without a next step is just a mood. In this church, the table is open to every baptized believer, and so is membership, and so is serving, and that is not going to change this morning, because the Spirit has not given me one verse to take it back with. If anybody has been sitting in the back row waiting for the sign to change, this is the sign. Come and see me. There is water.

The church’s whole history is the story of sheets coming down. Every generation, God finds a faithful insider who’s wrong about a category of people, and he doesn’t stone them, he shows them. Peter got a sheet. We got the fruit of a hundred years of watching. And the voice hasn’t changed: what God has called clean, you must not call common.

Can anyone withhold the water?

Nobody dared then. Lord have mercy, let’s not dare now.

Amen.