The book of Acts chronicles the experience of the early church as it struggled to understand the nature of a post-Easter world. Christ has been resurrected, and the world can no longer be the same. The old rules about insiders and outsiders no longer pertain. God’s welcome knows no bounds.

Rules for Church Membership

Last week I discussed the story of Philip baptizing the Ethiopian eunuch. In that text, the Holy Spirit calls Philip to baptize a person who would have been excluded from the Temple because of his non-normative gender expression (see Deuteronomy 23:1). Yet God instructs Philip to welcome the eunuch, to instruct him, and ultimately to baptize him into the family of God.

The story of Peter and Cornelius in Acts 10 goes even further. It describes God’s explicit willingness to disregard the laws of establishment religion in order to welcome everyone who believes.

The story begins with Cornelius, a Roman centurion from Italy, stationed in Caesarea, the regional Roman capital. You can’t get much more Gentile than Cornelius, a Roman’s Roman to the core. This meant that Cornelius couldn’t become a member of the church, despite being a reverent man who prays and uses his money to help the community.

That’s because, according to the book of Acts, the earliest church had strict rules about who could and couldn’t be baptized into the Christian fellowship. In order to be baptized, they believed, a person needed to obey Jewish purity laws, eating only kosher foods and (for males) being circumcised. Someone like Cornelius, a Gentile who didn’t follow the Jewish law, couldn’t be Christian, according to the rules of the early church.

No Person Unclean

In the story of Peter and Cornelius, we once again find the Holy Spirit breaking all the rules, defying the church’s notions about who can and can’t be a Christian. As the story opens, the Holy Spirit appears to Cornelius and tells him to send for Peter, who is living in Joppa at the time.

As Cornelius’s men are traveling from Caesarea to Joppa, Peter is on the roof of his house praying. As he prays, he has a vision of a giant sheet descending from heaven, filled with all kinds of un-kosher food. As the basket descends, a voice speaks to Peter saying, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat” (10:13)

Peter objects that he couldn’t possibly kill and eat the things in the sheet, since they are not kosher and he is a good Jew. This happens three times. The sheet descends, a voice tells Peter to kill and eat, and Peter objects that he can’t eat things that are unclean.

Each time, the voice replies to Peter: “What God has made clean, you must not call unclean” (10:16).

Just then, Cornelius’s men arrive from Caesarea, and the Holy Spirit instructs Peter to go with them. When they arrive back in Caesarea the next day, Peter meets with Cornelius. As Cornelius and his family gather, Peter makes the connection between the vision of the sheet and his visit now with Cornelius. He says,

You yourselves know that is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean. (Acts 10:28)

Peter then goes on to baptize Cornelius and his family into the family of God.

The Holy Spirit Out of Bounds

As with last week’s story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, this passage is remarkable in that Holy Spirit disregards the scriptural rules about membership in God’s family in order to embrace those who have previously been excluded. The Torah is clear about obedience to purity laws as a prerequisite for being Jewish—and by extension, for being Christian. Peter and the others have understood God’s welcome to restricted by Torah commandments.

But the Holy Spirit believes otherwise.

The way Peter describes it is that “God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean” (10:28). Quite literally, the Greek says, “I should not call a human being unclean or impure” (my translation).

Just linger over that statement for a moment. Peter recognizes the inherent value of human beings. God has instructed him never to use religious categories of purity and impurity to separate people into categories of desirable and undesirable or welcome and unwelcome.

We should never call a human being unclean. We should never call a human being unwelcome. We should never call a human being unworthy (or even less worthy) of God’s love.

This would seem to be true even if there are scriptures that declare certain people unwelcome in God’s family due to their ethnicity, nationality, gender expression, sexual preference, or a whole host of other identity markers that we to exclude others from the community of faith. If the Holy Spirit can contravene kosher law and the law of circumcision, then the Holy Spirit cannot be bound by laws or customs of our choosing, scriptural though they may be. We cannot contain or control the love of God, freely given through the power of the Holy Spirit.

You can this made the early Christians nervous. They were afraid of losing control. If the Holy Spirit can work outside the bounds of church authority, then what power does church authority actually have?

Indeed, in Acts 11, Peter will receive an outright reprimand from the church in Jerusalem for welcoming Gentiles. Yet, for now, Peter simply acknowledges that he cannot in good faith withhold baptism from people “who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have” (10:47).

Evidence of the Spirit

In Peter’s view, the role of the church is not to control the Holy Spirit but rather to discern the movement of the Holy Spirit, who moves in unexpected ways. In order to do that, we must simply look for evidence of the Spirit to see where and among whom God is at work.

While this passage lists evidence of the Spirit as “speaking in tongues and extolling God,” we might also look to Paul’s words in Galatians to understand the movement of the Spirit. Paul says, “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Gal 5:23).

Where we see these things, we see the Holy Spirit at work. Where these things are absent, the Holy Spirit, too, is absent. It’s my suspicion that there are many churches where the Holy Spirit is not, in fact, at work. By the same token, the Holy Spirit is clearly at work among many whom the church has declared unclean.

If we want to catch up with God’s work in the world, we cannot declare any human being unclean, impure, or undesirable. Rather, we look for love and joy, peace and patience, kindness and generosity. That is where God is at work. We look for faithfulness and gentleness and self-control. That is the result of the Holy Spirit.

Where we see evidence of the Holy Spirit, there God is at work. No one is unclean.