Acts 10:34-43

Like most people who grew up in northwest Louisiana in the mid twentieth century, I absorbed a lot of racial prejudice from my culture. I didn’t realize it at the time, of course, for prejudice of all kinds is usually unconscious and unintended. In time God let me see my racial prejudice and delivered me from it. Then I had to overcome my prejudice against those who were still racist!

Pride is such a subtle sin, isn’t it?

It’s not a long journey from Joppa to Caesarea by the Sea. It’s only about thirty-two miles up the coast of Samaria — little more than a day’s journey in the first century world of Simon Peter. But for Peter it was a life-transforming pilgrimage. It was a pilgrimage from prejudice.

I. Peter’s pilgrimage began in prayer (10:1-9).

It is interesting that prayer figured prominently on both ends of this journey. Cornelius “and all his family were devout and God-fearing . . . and prayed to God regularly.” At the hour of mid-afternoon prayers, God spoke to him in a vision about Peter. At the same time God was preparing Peter for his pilgrimage.

Already Peter had accepted the hospitality of Simon the Tanner in Joppa. A tanner deals with dead animals all the time. That makes him ceremonially unclean. Not only that, but this coastal town was in the territory of the much maligned half-Jews, the Samaritans. Still, Peter was a very Kosher Hebrew and very faithful in his prayers.

As the servants of Cornelius approached Joppa, Peter was on the flat rooftop patio in prayer. In spite of some baby steps Peter had already made, we may be sure he was not praying about his racial pride and prejudice. Such a prayer is all but impossible, for the person who can see his prejudice has already made the first step away from that blindness. Peter was in prayer, and that’s a wonderful place to meet God and come to know His heart – and your own!

II. A Second Step in Peter’s Pilgrimage was a Move from Prayer to Perplexity (vs 10-17).

During his prayer he fell into a trance. He saw heaven opened and something like a great sheet or sail being lowered to him from heaven. All kinds of animals were gathered in it, and a voice from heaven said, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat” (vs. 13). Even though he was hungry waiting for the call to the noonday meal, he could not imagine obeying the heavenly voice. Why not? Well he was a Kosher Jew and all these animals were on the list of forbidden foods. He had never eaten any of them and reminded God of that.

But the vision and the voice confirmed to him in a three-fold repetition, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean” (vs. 15). The men sent by Cornelius arrived at the gate “while Peter was wondering about the meaning of the vision” (vs. 17). The verb here means to be greatly perplexed as several English translations show. A time of perplexity is often a very teachable moment.