Reading: Acts 11:1-18

When I was nine or ten years old, long before I became a vegetarian, I declared to my family and anyone else who would listen my one defining dietary restriction: I would not eat crustaceans. I would try any vegetable once, any starch or meat or even fungi. I didn’t mind fish, which was our primary protein source when we lived in Micronesia, out in the western Pacific—in fact, I even actually kind of liked eating fish eyes, as long as they were well done. But I would not eat crustaceans—not lobster, not crab, not shrimp. It turns out I don’t like mollusks, either—meaning no clams or oysters or scallops—but I don’t think I knew the difference then. Anything that lived underwater and looked like a bug or a snail or might produce a pearl was not coming anywhere near my dinner plate.

You might think that at my current “mature” stage in life I must have outgrown this peculiar dislike, but I have not. Even though I have lived in Hawaii, Seattle, Scotland, and other places renowned for their seafood, I never, ever developed a taste for crustaceans or mollusks. For the most part, this has not been a great source of hardship in my life. Occasionally at a dinner party or other social event I’ve tried to nibble on shrimp cocktail or sip a bit of lobster bisque to be polite, but my response is still visceral, irrational dislike. In a word: “Ew!” You might be thinking, “What’s the matter with her? She’s crazy! There’s nothing better than surf ‘n turf!” Sometimes people I’m with are a little embarrassed by what they see as a sign of my unsophisticated palate. I’ve decided to see this as part of my “muchness,” to steal a word from Lewis Carroll. It’s just the way I am, one of the myriad things that makes me me.

I bring all of this up because whenever I read the story in Acts about Peter’s vision of a large sheet being lowered down from heaven, filled with foods that Peter knows he is not supposed to eat—well, in my mind, that sheet is always a red-checked table cloth teeming with crustaceans. I know this is not remotely accurate. Given Peter’s life experience, the sheet he saw was probably something more like a sail or a tent canvas than a tablecloth. And the text is very clear that the sheet in fact contained “four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air.” But my imagination goes straight to crustaceans flying down from heaven, which at least has the virtue of helping me truly empathize with the distress Peter must have felt at being told repeatedly to get up, kill, and eat. Even a voice from heaven would not be enough to get me to tuck in to a big pile of lobsters or even the impossibly-named jumbo shrimp!

Now, it’s your turn to use your imagination. I don’t want to upset anyone on a Sunday morning by asking you to think about what foods you would least like to eat. Instead, I’d like us to get to the deeper meaning of this vision. After all, God was not really talking to Peter about food—he was talking to Peter about boundaries, and not the healthy kind of boundaries, but about the distinctions that people make up to decide who is in and who is out, who is worthy of saving and who is marginal, who has ultimate value and who can be left behind or, worse yet, discarded. After all, who are we to call something worthless or profane, when God has declared it all very good? You just have to glance at Psalm 148 and all that infinite variety of creation—including, you’ll notice, sea monsters and all deeps—to realize that God’s love is infinitely wider and more encompassing than our own.

At yet another level, this vision is about identity, so maybe we could use that as prompt for an imaginative entry into this story. What is something so central to your identity that you would hate to give it up, even if instructed to do so by God? And what image would symbolize that identity in a vision? I have to tell you that when I sat with this question myself for a few minutes this week, I got pretty uncomfortable. Most of the things that are integral to our identities are good things. I’m a priest, a wife, a mother, a dog lover, and so on. I tend to think that God wants me to be those things, in some way, or at least that they are such good and joyful expressions of the person God created me to be that they give God pleasure and honor.

The problem comes when we set up protective barriers around these identities, or when we begin make value judgments or moral distinctions about those who don’t share the same identifying characteristics. We know how easily this happens with politics, but it isn’t just labels like conservative or progressive that divide us. For instance, I adore my children and love being a mother. That does not give me the right to think that women who aren’t mothers are in any way “less than.” It is so easy to divide up the world into categories and to set them in competition—dog people vs cat people, vegetarians vs omnivores, country people vs city people, and on and on. When we hold on to these categories to the point where they are central to our identity, they can become hardened, set in stone, and create barriers to our relationships with others instead of helping us build bridges. This can even become toxic to the point of hatred, such as identifying as a white nationalist or other hate-based descriptor.

For Peter in today’s story, the stakes are very high. Following the dietary customs he had been taught was not a trivial thing—it was part of being in right relationship with God, so that vision symbolized his identity as a Jew. Yet now he finds that primary aspect of his identity in conflict with something else that has become central to who he is: being a follower of Jesus. Jesus had told him to feed his sheep, tend to his flock, and go out and spread the good news to everyone, to all the ends of the earth. He is now having to face that following Jesus might mean being in community with people he does not consider to have quite the same relationship with God that he has. His beloved community wants him to stop eating with these unclean people, and they have centuries of tradition on their side. But wait, aren’t these the same people that Jesus told him to care for and to feed? And so he goes, around and around, struggling to be true to both sides of himself and not sure of how to make it all make sense.

Internal conflicts about identity are the hardest kind. They can throw our certainties into confusion and cause us to doubt not only what we believe but even who we are. If we’re not willing to lean into that uncomfortable confusion and doubt, we’re likely to project it outward. That’s when we start turning those distinctions into dividing lines, putting up barriers instead of building bridges.

The antidote to all this? Well, to start with, how about we get comfortable with messiness! Let’s remember that human beings are complicated and most of the categories we use to define ourselves and others only have limited usefulness in real life. Each of us is complex and singular and beloved and full of much more “muchness” than any of our labels can capture. Getting comfortable with all that mess and muchness can stop us from being inappropriately critical of ourselves and of everyone else. It can also help to remember that we are not gatekeepers for God. We are not here to decide who is in or who is out. ‎As Thomas Merton so beautifully put it: “Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy.” Thomas Merton also said that a tree gives glory to God by being a tree. We give glory to God by being who we are, with all our muchness and mess. If we concentrate on that, on being the best selves we can be, and feeling grateful for the glorious, messy diversity of the world, we will not not only hinder God, we might just expand and build up God’s beloved community, right here on earth. Amen.