The One About a Three Legged Pig

Biblical Text: Acts 11:1-18; (Revelation 21:1-7)

The text of the sermon is largely Peter’s vision of the heavenly tablecloth descending which ended up at Gentile Pentecost. It’s a story about ceremonial laws – clean and unclean – and how they play no role in the Kingod of God. Now most of us probably don’t think we have ceremonial laws which is crazy. Because we are constantly making clean and unclean distinctions. And constantly making new ones. They are much easier to render judgement upon. What this sermon does is two things. It attempts to teach some distinctions in the law: moral, civil and ceremonial. And then it proclaims like Jesus to Peter, “what God has made clean, do not call common.” For God made all things good. And Christ is remaking all things. Our clean and unclean distinctions, our ceremonial laws, better not get in the way of the Work of God.

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Spirit Led Change: Vision, Experience and the Word

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Biblical Text: Text: Acts 11:1-18, John 16:12-15

Change in the church is always a contentious issue. But even Jesus assumed that it would happen. And the book of Acts gives an example of a significant change. What these biblical texts give us is a Spirit Led pattern. This sermon takes Jesus’ words as the basis and Acts as the enaction of those words. Peter’s “ordered argument” is meaningful. It is not that revelation or vision and experience are meaningless. They are quite meaningful and Peter includes both as part of his argument. But his real argument is “remembering the Word of God.” This sermon looks at Peter’s Spirit led example and encourages us to examine our own changing in the same light.

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That It Would Come to Us Also

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Biblical Text: Acts 11:1-18

Technically next Sunday is Rogate (if you listen to the sermon you’ll find out), but the calendar got a little scrambled and the texts this week fit the old liturgical practice better. The selected text is sometimes called Gentile Pentecost, but what I’ve portrayed it as here is how the living and active Word – Jesus Christ – precedes us and calls us to be an active part of the Kingdom.

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