A Vision of Something New

Francesco Trevinsani, Peter Baptizing the Centurion Cornelius, 1709, oil on canvas, Pinacoteca Civica di Jesi, Ancona, Italy, public domain, click the image to link.

Sermon Series “Through the Bible,” № 61.

Then Peter began to speak to them: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” –Acts 10:34-35

Thirty years ago, I worked with a pastor-archaeologist who was the closest thing to “Indiana Jones” I have ever known.  Lew Hopfe was his name, and in the early 1970’s, he spent three years as a lead archaeologist on the dig at Caesarea Maritima, south of Haifa, on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. When we visited the site the spring before he died, Lew told the story about the day he saw something new.

Lew’s team was exploring a square plot of ground south of the old crusader fortress when they uncovered a domelike roof.  A doorway was located, and enough sand scooped away to provide access.  Then Lew made the first entry by crawling through the narrow opening.

When his eyes grew accustomed to the dim light of his headlamp, he realized that he was lying upon human bones.  Later, his team would determine that the building, in its final years, had been used as burial site.  As Lew rolled over to look up, he saw flecks of blue paint peeling off the underside of the dome.  It was then that he really got excited.

Lew’s team had found a “Mithraeum,” a temple of an ancient religion dedicated to the worship of Mithras, a minor Roman god.  It is still the only Mithraeum ever discovered in the Middle East. And Lew probably was the first person in more than a thousand years to look at its interior dome, which was originally painted in the colors of the nighttime sky. 

In the first century, the Mithraeum would have been a popular house of worship.  At that time, Caesarea was a seat of government and the Jewish capital.  Trade between Rome and Judea passed through its harbor.  Protection for a population of about 50,000 was provided by a garrison of Roman soldiers. 

Among these soldiers, Mithraism was a popular religion. They were drawn by its associations with power and strength. Mithras was a strong god, a warrior god, a god symbolized by a bull and its blood.

One of those soldiers was Cornelius, to whom we are introduced in today’s Bible reading.  Cornelius was among a handful of the high-ranking officers at Caesarea Maritima; he was a “centurion.”  A centurion was the leader of one-hundred.

Almost certainly Cornelius had visited the Mithraeum.  Luke tells us that he was “a devout man who feared God,” who “gave alms generously to the people and prayed constantly to God.”  What did Cornelius think as he watched the strange rituals?  As he looked up at that dome painted in nighttime blue and stars, I suspect that Cornelius felt a longing for something different.

I’ve entitled the sermon “A Vision of Something New,” but if you look at this section of scripture, you’ll find that there were several visions. A progressive series of visions take place. Scripture paints these mini-epiphanies, brushstroke after brushstroke, and layer upon layer, until finally they meld together into a new and fuller picture of truth. 

Peter’s resistance to the visions strikes me as perfectly natural.  Most of us reach a point in our adult lives when the way we filter information feels steady and secure. We know which religious practices are life-giving and which death-dealing, which moral practices are good and which are bad, which foods are healthy and which unhealthy. Even when new information comes from what we might otherwise consider a trustworthy source, it can be difficult for our minds to embrace, and our bodies to practice.

Peter’s attitude about the superior practices of one religion dividing its people from the inferior practices of another religion sounds familiar.  In German history, for example, it’s surprisingly common to find religion used as a weapon to divide people, when the real underlying reasons for division have more to do with political differences or economic interests. For about fifty years leading up to the domination of the Nazi party, leaders built a narrative in which, they argued, true “German-ness” was defined as anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, anti-Polish, even anti-Anglo-Saxon. In 1902, pastor and theologian Carl Werckshagen wrote, “Protestantism is the rock on which the culture of the German tribes, of the Germanic race, is built. Protestantism is the fundament of its political power, its moral virtures, of its dauntless, victorious science.”[1] Most of us can see how the direction of this argument is one in which some vague “Protestantism” lifts up one tribe and so-called “race” above all others. We can see that it’s religion made to serve political ends, to divide people into superior and inferior, rather than to bring them together in unity.

Of course, we have our own history with which to reckon, and this is where we have to calm ourselves, not feel personally offended, and honestly evaluate the past. Presbyterians all the way back to John Calvin looked down upon and persecuted Catholics, even when those same Presbyterians had been victimized by similar behavior.  Today’s observers of American Christianity see expressions of our own “tribalism.”

David Gushee, writing for the Religion News Service, described it this way, “Tribalism thrives on us vs. them thinking. Our tribe is better than your tribe. God is on the side of our tribe and against your tribe. This land has always belonged to our tribe. Other tribes are outsiders; perhaps we will tolerate them, but they do not belong here in the way that we do. We will muscle them aside and let them know who is in charge here. And if an obvious member of another tribe dares to come into one of our tribal gatherings we will let them know that they are not welcome.”[2]

World Communion Sunday is a church festival uniquely crafted to stand against tribalism. As a little descriptive paragraph in your bulletin says, it is a gift of Presbyterians to the larger Church. Those who called it into being in the 1930s were consciously trying to hold together a world in which tribalism was tearing things apart.

World Communion Sunday is a fitting day to be reminded of the visions recorded in Acts chapter ten, and how they stand in stark contrast to the old so-called “National Protestant Vision” in Germany, and similar expressions of tribalism we see and hear in American churches today.  Cornelius was a powerful member of a tribe dominant politically and culturally. But God told him there was grace and mercy in the message he would receive from a humble Jewish fisherman. Peter was concerned to preserve the purity of the Jewish culture he had inherited. But God told him grace and mercy were not exclusive rights of the Jews, but something God chose to share with others, too. Cornelius and Peter learned that God always is doing a new thing.

I often use a meditation guide called “Pray as you go.”  Saturday morning began with a reflection that seems especially fitting to follow up this text. First, ask God for the gift of clearer sight, to see God’s actions in these days (of your week) more fully, and so to thank God for them. Then, let the days that you’re looking back over, unfold unhurriedly before your mind’s eye. Does something catch your attention? Stay with it a moment What is it this week that you are most grateful for? What can you recognize as a gift from God to you? What new direction might God be opening for you?

May each one of us open our minds and calm our hearts just enough; for in each week, among people of faith, God offers a vision of something new.

NOTES

[1] C. Werkshagen, Der Protestantismus am Ende des IXI Jahrhundert in Wort und Bild, Berlin, 1902, translated and appearing in James Hawes’s The Shortest History of Germany: From Roman Frontier to the Heart of Europe―A Retelling for Our Times, New York: The Experiment Publishing, 2019.

[2] David Gushee, “Donald Trump and the travesty of Christian Tribalism,” Religion News Service, 20 Jan. 2016, https://religionnews.com/2016/01/20/donald-trump-travesty-christian-tribalism/ accessed 27 Sept. 2023.

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