In Cracow, a rabbi dreamt three times that an angel told him to go to Livovna. ‘In front of the palace there, near a bridge,’ the angel said, ‘you will learn where a treasure is hidden.’ The rabbi went to Livovna. When he arrived at the palace, he found a sentinel near the bridge, so he told him the dream. The sentinel replied: ‘I, too, had a dream. The angel told me to go to a rabbi’s house in Cracow, where a treasure is buried in front of the fireplace.’ Hearing this, the rabbi returned home and dug in front of the fireplace. There he found the treasure. All revelation will show that God is to be found nowhere else but within.

This traditional Jewish tale illuminates something significant about our understanding of God.  The question is, how does God speak to us?  Following from that question we may find ourselves asking another: How do we know it’s God speaking to us, especially if it goes against our previous understanding of God’s will for our world and our lives?  These questions arise naturally today out of all our texts, but most particularly beginning with Peter in the lesson from Acts 11.

The Christian community immediately after the resurrection of Jesus was overwhelmingly Jewish, steeped in ritual and traditions carried down from their deepest ancestors in faith. When, as the book of Acts records, more and more non-Jewish people began to be converted to Christ, there was great rejoicing, but also many complications. How were the Jewish Christians to mix with the Greek and Roman Christians of non-Jewish birth?

Jewish Christians could follow certain practices to maintain separation from those who did not observe the dietary laws. But the issue could not be kept so neatly packaged when it came to the leaders. Peter was committed to the ministry to which God had called him, and made himself available to all Christians who required his presence, Jewish or not. Yet the law said that those associating with unclean people would become unclean too. If Peter went from an unclean community to a ritually clean one, he would transfer the impurity. This controversy forms the basis of the conversation in Acts 11 today.

God had given Peter a fantastic vision featuring unclean animals and a command to ‘kill and eat’.  He initially refused even though he knew that the voice was of divine origin – as the dialog indicated when Peter said, ‘by no means Lord”. As the story was told and retold later among the Jewish Christians, they could therefore refute anyone who tried to say that Peter had neglected or abandoned the law.

The story is a study in the community’s wrestling with how God speaks to us. Christianity itself was a “new thing”.  Jesus often presented old teachings in new circumstances, encouraging his followers to attend to the ways of God, always keeping his teaching within the themes, laws, and traditions of the old community. We see this in the gospel where the “new commandment” to love one another was already well known from prophetic writings.

What’s new is the part that goes, “As I have loved you.” Judas had just departed to betray Jesus. Peter was just about to deny Jesus. And Jesus loved them.

The Christian community was born of change. And yet, only a short time after the ascension of Jesus, the community began to want to keep everything exactly the same. Much like grieving parents who lose a child and make the child’s room into an untouchable shrine. This emotion is understandable.

By keeping things the same, we try to protect ourselves, our loved ones, and the world. But it is a great human error to believe that there is any kind of refuge in keeping things exactly the same. In doing so we both fail to trust God, and also try to block God’s intention to continue “making all things new” as John so eloquently wrote in the book of Revelation.

So, we can’t keep things the same.  But how are we to keep from being at the mercy of anyone who comes along with a new idea and says it’s direct from the mouth of God? The answer is laid out by Peter. God speaks through time-honored and familiar symbols, even when doing a new thing, and God speaks always through the Word – which we understand as the living, present Christ.

As with the story of the rabbi, dreams and visions are a familiar means by which God communicates with us. Jacob had a wild dream of wrestling with a stranger, waking with a hip forever out of joint and a new vision of how to be a less-than perfect leader. By the dream of a stranger, Gideon was informed that God was ready at last to give him victory over the Midianites. Joseph’s dream made his brothers sell him into slavery, but by dreams and visions in Egypt he became a trusted advisor of the Pharoah, ending up with the means to shelter and provide for his family in Egypt after they left drought and starvation in Canaan.

Peter’s vision was replete with familiar and powerful symbols. It featured the number three – a perfect number in Jewish symbolism. The vision was repeated three times. Then there appeared three men, who may well have been angels – messengers of God – who accompanied Peter along with the Holy Spirit to the house of the unclean man who himself had had an angelic vision. The Holy Spirit then fell on all present at the home, including all who were unclean.

Yet this wealth of symbols was not sufficiently convincing. There was still some resistance, because we are told that “peace” came only when Peter delivered the final irrefutable piece of evidence, recalling Jesus’ teaching that believers would receive the Holy Spirit.

Since the unclean ones clearly received the Holy Spirit that day, they were considered acceptable to God. Since Jesus is the Word of God, and since Peter had personally known him, the dissenters were at peace. The Word of God spoke that day to the early Christians reminding them from beyond the grave, the cross, the resurrection and the ascension, of their essential humanity, and shared community.

What’s at stake here is the essence of Easter itself. New life is all about change. Do not be fearful, but be faithful. Those who discern God’s renewing activity among us look and listen for the Holy Spirit (whose work is public, and revealed to many) and embrace the living Word who is Christ our Lord.