How Inclusive is God?

Acts 10-11

When God gives a vision, everyone gets uncomfortable.
This Sunday’s text is the account of the conversion of Cornelius.  It is such a significant event that it takes up a large portion of the book.  The central person is Peter and how he has to come to terms with God’s vision. 
Peter has been taught the Bible (especially the Torah).  Peter has learned that a good portion of God’s Word, the Torah, talks about being clean or unclean before God.  He knows he has been redeemed by Jesus Christ, he has met the Resurrected Christ, but God gives him a vision that reinterprets all that he has understood about the Bible and the Resurrected Christ.  The radical revelation that causes everything to change for Peter is “I truly understand that God shows no partiality.”
God sends visions to God’s people, especially through God’s prophets.  Then the prophetic word does not change reality but helps us to see God’s reality in a clearer focus.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a prophet.  He took the words that Americans knew as true, “All men (sic) are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights…”  Since he spoke that prophetic vision, we Americans realized those words in a way that confronted our comfort zone and brought us to a place of decision.
This Sunday let us consider the vision that God sent through Peter, how its making us uncomfortable today.