June 21: Universal God

The voice said to Peter again, a second time, "What God has made clean, you must not call profane." (Act 10:15)

For whatever reason of human nature we just love categories. You could make the case that this tendency is exacerbated by Western individualism and Enlightenment thinking - well you would make that case in some circles anyway! But it seems to me on some level it’s just a part of how we engage life as humans… we try to make categories that help make sense of the world.

Peter’s vision that prompts this verse challenges his categories of clean and unclean food. His vision challenges it by way of also challenging the categories of Jew and gentile in advance of Peter’s call to visit Cornelius, a non-Jew.

Ultimately however the comment the voice tells Peter has far larger ramifications than simply household codes or who fits in the categories of acceptable visitors and hosts.

“What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

It invites the question – what has God made clean? And that invites to my mind all sorts of next level questions:

If God is the creator of the universe is not all the world made clean by God? Does it then make sense to divide the world into secular and sacred – as if some of the world is less God-created than other parts… or people? What does it mean that God made it clean… and why do we tend to only think its clean if it looks and feels the way we like things to look and feel? What does it mean to walk in a world in which we do not get to label things as profane? And then at some point as all these questions role over me I get to one that is particularly challenging to me right now – in a world in which God has made creation clean what does it say to us that we have a way of making the world dirty?

Let me back up and give a moment of context from which I am writing this at the moment. Two particular things stand out in my mind:

The first is that I’m up in Atlanta for a class for my Doctor of Ministry. The class is: Ethicist as Social and Cultural Critic. Today we were talking about a continuum of moral agency in which we always start at complicity, but hope to move towards accountability and then responsibility.

The second thing that stands out in my mind was from the Sunday school class Tom and I are hosting over the summer in which we are engaging the questions that people have as our topic (in other words there is no pre-arranged topic.. we just open up for questions on whatever). A question was raised about the image of the Gulf of Mexico on fire and if this was an apocalyptic sign.

It was a wonderful question. It is not – I believe – a sign to tell us we are on some Revelation-esque timeline to the end of the world. However, I do believe it is capable of being a revelatory sign (apocalypse means to unveil… to reveal). It serves – or should – as a wake up call that there is a fundamental problem with how we are living in the world. As oil rushes into the ocean poisoning countless aspects of God’s “made-clean” creation the ramifications will take a long time to figure out. But one thing is clear to me: I’m complicit in this.

My way of being in this world pollutes the world – makes is unclean, breaks it down, leaves it less capable of nurturing life. I have no good answers to how to change that, it isn’t an easy conflict. But I have a growing awareness that simply admitting my complicity and not trying to change it will no longer work.

If we separate the world into categories than we set ourselves off from other people and things. We aren’t as challenged (or sometimes concerned at all) by how our actions effect them as they aren’t “us”. It doesn’t matter if my way hurts the profane – because it is… well, profane.

But what if the category doesn’t make sense or is artificial… or even if it’s a legitimate category but doesn’t mean that it’s profane at all - simply a different kind of clean. Now I have moral… and God given responsibility to it, we are connected and inter-related and accountable to one another, and I hear the voice again – “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

What are you naming profane… and on what – and whose – authority?

Are you nurturing awareness of our fundamental relatedness – and responsibility - to all of God’s creation?

Where are you stuck and unable to move from complicity to accountability?

Universal God,
We have a tendency to separate ourselves by that which differentiates us from others. Let us hear again your voice telling us that you have made the world and all that is in it. Help us to live our life in light of our shared common heritage with the entire created universe. Amen.