Sermon: "Crossing Barriers"

Sixth in the "Beyond These Walls" series.
Delivered May 28, 2006 by Rev. George Antonakos.
Other sermons in this series - 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7

Theme: God helped Peter to knock down some "racial walls" in his life; from his story we are helped to examine how some walls might come down in our own lives in order to effectively share our faith across barriers today.

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Let's start today with a word association, okay? If I say the term "the Berlin Wall" what is the first word or couple of words that come in to your mind? Anyone? Freedom. Is that it? That's alright. That's good. That reminds me, I failed to say Happy Memorial Day Weekend and especially if you are a veteran, thank you for all that you have done to provide freedom. You know some of us who are here today remember a time before the Berlin Wall was even a reality. That kind of dates us and some of us who are here today remember when it was erected in haste in the early 60s of an expression of competing ideologies.

Following high school I was privileged to visit Europe with 24 other classmates and one of the stops was Berlin and we were allowed actually on a bus to go through checkpoint Charlie, which was one of the 16 I think places where you could travel from West Berlin to East Berlin and being only 17 and being kind of a goofy kid I remember the soldiers coming on to the bus after we came back from East Berlin in to West Berlin and the stern looks on their face. I challenged a couple of my classmates to make faces at them and to smile at them you know, but nobody took me up on it. Pictures were forbidden; you could not take pictures, but I thought being kind of like James Bond Junior I would put my camera on the back of the chair you know and just kind of like click the picture, right? I mean if you saw the picture you would think I dropped my camera, but I felt that I was one up on the communists, okay? That I had something in hand in my photo album of this time.

Now of course some here today are so young that you have no word association with the term the Berlin Wall, but if you were born by the early 80s even, you may have somewhat of a recollection or a vivid recollection of a fateful night in November of 1989 when the Wall's deconstruction began. Now I want us to take a look at that moment in a video from Steven Covey and Associates. I have used this with permission. I wish you could see the whole 60 minutes. Obviously we don't have the time to show the whole 60 minutes, but I am going to show you a segment of that fateful night when those walls started to come down. What I wish you could see in the first part of the video was the tremendous anguish and misery that was created by the construction of this wall. There is one scene that you won't see, a particularly poignant scene of a woman whose apartment building was right by the wall trying to get out from a second story window and people from the eastern guards were trying to pull her up in to the window while others were trying to pull her down on to a safety net. She was like a human tug of war rope. So take a look at this. It's about three minutes. Take a look at this moment in history.

Movie clip:

"The people always thought that cannot be it; that cannot be the end of it. There must be a day where they work something out."

"In November of '89 when the wall opened up for the first time the euphoria in Berlin was unbelievable. People would come across and they would just hug each other. West Berliners bought fruit, exotic fruits with their own money and as the cars went by they would just hand out bananas to little children. Many of them had never seen or eaten bananas before. It was just fantastic."

"On the evening when the wall opened they should it all on television as it happened. We sat in front of the TV and cried. The emotions were just overflowing."

"For someone that experienced when the Wall was built and suffered because of it for 40 years, it was an indescribable experience. It simply cannot be described. Euphoria is not the right word for it."

"The night of November in 1989 was an historic day even for my own family. Everybody was excited of course. We were looking at the TV and my two sons they went that very night to see their father who was living in West Berlin and whom they hadn't been able to see for quite a long time."

"The 12 crossings up until now have been so frightening for me. You never know what to expect and they really had me over the coals several times and now to come back; this is my 13th trip, so lucky 13 to come back and walk freely back and forth. It's almost like the wall was never here."

"When the wall came down, I realized that what my parents had always told me that these folks are actually human beings that don't mean to kill other people. They were ordered to do that and as a child I was always really frightened by them, carrying their guns and looking at me through their binoculars. When I saw them lift people over the wall, hugging each other, that was affirmed in my mind that these were just as human as I ever was."

Many of you probably heard the comment that that night in '89 was really the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. I take the time to share all of this in order to usher us in to this sermon about crossing barriers, because in each and every one of our hearts today there are barriers or walls that really do need to come down. These walls go by many names: perceptions, prejudices, paradigms, worldviews, but their underpinnings are based on our beliefs, our assumptions and our values. Our values are the worth that we attach to people and things. And as Hamlet said, "There's the rub," because our behavior will rarely change if our attitudes and our beliefs and our assumptions don't change. Just ask anyone here that has had a major medical diagnosis or a major surgery about their behaviors before and after that event and you will see that it's not until assumptions and beliefs and perspectives change that behavior changes. Some seated here today weren't always crazy about being in church, right? But one day what you believed changed and some interior walls came tumbling down and you realized that your relationship with God was more valuable than anything else and then you made Sunday worship a priority because then Sunday worship that deepened your relationship with God became more important than reading the Sunday newspaper. Behavior will not change until beliefs change.

The same is true for a congregation. Congregations will rarely break out of a status quo on anything until there is a change in beliefs and values. Now for all of this spiritual depth and experience the Apostle Peter had some beliefs and values and assumptions about his spiritual life and worldview that needed to come down. Actually it was God who helped Peter knock down some of the interior walls in his life and in looking at his story about how God helped him to knock down some walls in his life, we will be helped to examine how some walls might be able to come down in our own lives. And this is necessary if we are going to grow in faith, let alone effectively share our faith across barriers and with others.

Now the story begins in Acts, Chapter 10 and in the beginning of Acts, Chapter 10 it sets in motion a paradigm shifting encounter between Peter and a Roman captain named Cornelius. In the early part of Chapter 10, God had directed this Roman captain Cornelius to send for Peter and have Peter come to his home up the coast so that he could hear the life changing message of Jesus Christ and this meeting would change both men significantly, but Peter had some work to do in order for this meeting to really take place. Now our text today starts in 23. We are not going to look at that just yet. Its hard to preach from Acts 10 without understanding the first half of the Chapter so I want to remind you of what's in there and I would just invite you to open to Chapter 10 on page 778 in the pew Bible and let's just pray and ask God to guide us.

Lord, we do ask for your grace as we look at the scriptures, as we read the scriptures, as we listen for your spirit. Open up our minds and more importantly our hearts so that walls might come down for us and we might be faithful in our following you. We ask it in Christ's name. Amen.

Okay, now if you think about all that Peter had been through from the beginning of Acts all the way up to this point at the end of Acts, Chapter 9, all the events, all the excitement and all the confrontations and Pentecost and everything, by this point in Acts, Chapter 10 he was due some vacation time and that's exactly what he did. If you look at the beginning of Acts 10 you will see, or actually the end of Chapter 9, Verse 43 says, "Peter stayed in Joppa for some time with a tanner named Simon." And if you look at 10:6 it says, "He is staying with Simon the tanner whose house is by the sea." So he is staying for some time by the sea, right? Now I am not sure if he was sunning on Simon's roof, maybe he was, but I am sure he went up and spent a lot of time on that roof looking out at the beauty over the Mediterranean reflecting on everything that God had done up to that point. But he still did not know the half of it.

One day at noon as lunch was being prepared, the aroma was wafting up to the rooftop where he was and he went in to a trance-like state and he saw from heaven a vision of animals clean and unclean coming down from something that looked like a sheet. I mean it was a vision designed to disgust a good Jewish man, reptiles and everything, okay? But from our vantage point, it wasn't just a sheet coming from heaven; this was one of Peter's assumptions coming down in to his mind's eye. The Lord commanded him, "Get up Peter. Kill and eat." At that point, Peter said something that was so uncharacteristic of his personality, Not! He goes, "No way. Surely not. Lord, I have never eaten anything unclean or impure." The voice said, "Don't call unclean what God calls clean." Listen carefully. That exchange happened two more times. Three times it comes down, three times Peter says, "No way." Alright?

This is one of Peter's favorite phrases in all of his life, the Greek emphatic of Peter's answer was, "No, not at all, no I will not." I can think of three other times in Peter's life when he got like this. When Jesus spoke of his own suffering, Peter said, "God forbid Lord, this shall never happen to you." The second time, when Jesus started to wash Peter's feet, "No, you shall never wash my feet." The third time, when Jesus predicted that his disciples would scatter and Peter said, "Not me." Jesus said to him three times, "You will disown me." Peter said, "Even if I have to die, I will never disown you." And the vision of the sheet happened three times. Hmmm. I can see Jesus up in heaven going "Ay Ay Ay."

Do you start to detect something here about the way that God helps us with our interior walls, so that our relationships can change? The stuff that causes strong negative reactivity inside of our guts may be the very thing that God wants to help you with to see it differently and to bring about change in you and in me. The stuff that repeatedly hooks us is what God wants to unhook. A reactivity betrays a rigid paradigm, a way of seeing things. So it's not that we can't solve our problems, it's that we can't see our problems. So even if I were to ask you this morning, what is your "sheet lowered from heaven" attention-getter, you might not be able to answer me. You might be able to and you might not be able to. Listen to this quote from psychiatrist R.D.Lang, he said this; listen carefully because this is really tricky. If you don't listen carefully you will miss this. Even if you listen carefully you might miss this, okay? "The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice and because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little that we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds." I am not going to read it again, but think about it.

So Peter is not the only one with a no-never attitude is he? I will never work for a woman. I will never be friends with a person of a different race. I will never forgive that person. I will never be able to get along with someone like that. I will never say "I am sorry" to them. Living in no-never land means we usually presume too much and believe too little. By contrast, maturity is seen in our lives when we are able to step back from ourselves and begin to question things from another angle.

If you look in Chapter 10 at Verse 17 it says that Peter was wondering about the meaning of this vision; what that really means is that he was inwardly perplexed. He was starting to doubt his current paradigm and while he was in that mode of starting to doubt his current paradigm, the Spirit spoke to him. You see when we are most able to hear the Spirit's voice? When God helps us become more expansive within and consider that we might just have blinders on, and we become more open to the fact that we might be wrong about our view. The Spirit's message is that Peter is to go downstairs and to meet three men who are looking for him and to go with them without hesitation. That's one of the translations in the NIV that really misses it. He says that what it really says is, "Get up and go with them without making distinctions." Get up and go with them without judging what you have judged before. What was once an image about food becomes a metaphor about people and the point is made even further when God says to him, "Now you go because I have sent them." And so you start to see another way that God starts to break us down. Not only does he break us down from within, he breaks us down by sending people in to our lives, to help us to rearrange our viewpoints.

Now with that introduction, let me ask you to look at Acts, Chapter 10 beginning in Verse 23 because Peter has now listened to the messengers from Cornelius and he has invited them in to his house to be his guests and we will pick it up with Peter at Corneluis' house.

"The next day Peter started out with them, and some of the brothers from Joppa went along. The following day he arrived in Caesarea. Cornelius was expecting them and had called together his relatives and close friends. As Peter entered the house, Cornelius met him and fell at his feet in reverence. But Peter made him get up. "Stand up," he said, "I am only a man myself."

Talking with him, Peter went inside and found a large gathering of people. He said to them: "You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with a Gentile or visit him. But God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean. So when I was sent for, I came without raising any objection. May I ask why you sent for me?"

Cornelius goes on to explain why he sent for him. We can see by Peter's actions entering a Gentile's home and by his words: "God has shown me" and by how he starts his sermon in just a moment that he was learning what God was trying to teach him. He was getting it. You see, Peter not only preached the message, the change that God worked in him was part of the message. The medium was part of the message. The barrier between Jew and Gentile was starting to cave in; a barrier that they figured could never happen. God is not a respecter of persons he goes on to say. God does not judge by externals. Everyone who believes in Jesus Christ regardless of race, regardless of class, regardless of appearance, regardless of worldly conditions receive forgiveness through Jesus' name. It's so very difficult, maybe impossible for people to change certain paradigms when they have been built up over time, when we heard about it in our houses, when we were modeled it in our homes. The second part of the movie about the Berlin Wall truly shows how deeply ingrained some barriers are. Look at the second part of this video after the wall has come down, after the euphoria has settled in. Listen to the comments of the people that went through it.

Movie clip:

"If you look at the Wall in retrospect it did cause a barrier within people because it was unnatural. It made a barrier between people. It prevented them from communicating with each other and exchanging feelings. When the Wall first fell, we believed at the beginning in our happiness, that now everything was all right. We are one. We are free and suddenly we discovered that these barriers that we have built up over the past 40 years cannot be broken away in a short time."

"This period of euphoria was very short and after that we here in East Berlin started to discover that people in West Berlin do think different and we too think different and people over there they just think in terms of money; how to make money, how to buy a big car, how to make that career."

"This is something we have to ask ourselves, is our freedom only materialistic freedom, the freedom to buy whatever we want or is it something more?"

"Now that the wall is down there really is another wall within the people starting to go up. There is a very big difference between East Berliners and West Berliners. You can feel it and you can sense it. When you talk to them, oh he's from East Berlin and I think its really a little bit like in the south and the north in America. We still have a few repercussions from the Civil War and I have a feeling that this will remain for many many years to come."

"One could be under the impression that now an era of greatest bliss and joy would begin. This was not the case, but reality caught up with us quickly. Just as the wall fell, the trench between the west and the east deepened. Now the trench is deeper than the wall was high."

"I dislike actually to call it unification. To me it's a really kind of occupation you see. I was one to be against the unification. I don't like this great Germany we have now. You know, there are many people like me. I feel I am sort of a stay put person."

"The vision that brought the wall down really needs to continue in order to overcome the last chasms that are still between the two Germany's. There are people at work that are trying to overcome that chasm or that other secondary wall; the spiritual wall maybe so to speak. Only if people are at work in that respect can Germany really be reunited."

Physical walls are one thing. Walls or barriers of the heart are quite another. Racial integration was forced 40+ years ago, but it still needs to happen in here. How can these types of change happen? Through the message that Peter preached in Cornelius' house. Listen to this message again as though you were hearing it for the first time, because only an encounter with God in Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit can penetrate the toughest walls of the heart. Listen from Acts, Chapter 10 when Cornelius says, we sent for you. You are here. We are in the presence of God. Tell us, tell us the message.

"Then Peter began to speak: "I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right. You know the message God sent to the people of Israel, telling the good news of peace through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all. You know what has happened throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John preached- how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and how he went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil, because God was with him.

We are witnesses of everything he did in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They killed him by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him from the dead on the third day and caused him to be seen. He was not seen by all the people, but by witnesses whom God had already chosen-by us who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one whom God appointed as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.

While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit came on all who heard the message. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles. For they heard them speaking in tongues and praising God.

Then Peter said, "Can anyone keep these people from being baptized with water? They have received the Holy Spirit just as we have." So he ordered that they be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Then they asked Peter to stay with them for a few days."

I wonder what was on the menu and I wonder how Peter did in those few days as he ate with those folks? God's power can create relational miracles.

Once the American Red Cross was gathering supplies, medicine, clothing and food in the life of the suffering of Africa. Inside one of the boxes that showed up at the collecting depot was a letter. It said, we have recently been converted and because of how Christ has changed our life, we want to try to help. We won't ever need these again. Can you use them for something? Inside the box were several Ku Klux Klan sheets. The sheets were cut in to strips and eventually used to bandage the wounds of African people. From symbols of hatred to bandages of love because of a new creation that God works in the human heart. Friends, listen to me. The gospel is the only thing that matters. The gospel of Jesus that we get to share is the only thing that can break down the kind of walls that need breaking down. Don't miss the part where the angel comes to Cornelius and says to Cornelius, "Send for Peter, he's got a message for you." If we weren't important why wouldn't God just let the angel tell him? Because angels haven't experienced the redemption that there is in Jesus. Only those who have been changed from within by the power of the Holy Spirit have the privilege of sharing that with other broken human beings. I want you to ask God to knock down any walls that might be keeping you from being the messenger you were created to be in Jesus Christ.

Let's pray. Lord, we ask that you would help us in these moments. We pray that you would grant to us your grace and as we sing this song, as we sing about what Andy said earlier how you have loved us before we ever loved you, how you knocked down walls toward us as we contemplate that you were cursed by being hung on a tree, a curse to both Jews and Gentiles an affront, an offense, that you have changed the paradigm of the world and as we worship the crucified Jesus our paradigm must change. The way we see the world must change because you have embraced it. Help us to humble ourselves in your holy name. Amen.

© 2006, Rev. George Antonakos
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org