2022.05.15 | Expanding Our Comfort Zones
“Expanding Our Comfort Zones”
Rev. Dr. Arlene K. Nehring
Eden United Church of Christ
Hayward, California
Fifth Sunday after Easter
May 15, 2022
Acts 11:1-18 | Hechos 11:1-18
Nearly 30 years ago, when I was a freshly-minted pastor, the congregation I served in Boston asked me to lead our college group on a month-long mission education trip to the Philippines. The assignment came as a bit of surprise to me, as I had only been on the staff about four months when I was asked to lead the trip, and I was not the pastor who was assigned to this group. Never mind the fact that I was only 25 and barely old enough to get myself to obscure islands in the Philippines safely, let alone taking 12 college students with me and keeping them in line.
Fortunately for all involved, my passport was current at the time, the students who registered to go were mature and responsible and supervised themselves. We received some great coaching from the ecumenical organization with whom we partnered, and a native Filipino who was a member of the congregation.
One thing I quickly came to appreciate about the students who went on the trip was that they were determined to be good guests. They abhorred the “do-gooder” mentality that belittled people who were less prosperous than them, and they loathed the thought of showing up as “ugly Americans” in another country. Each of the students fully understood that he or she had more to learn from the mission trip than the people we were ostensibly going to “help.”
Even though the students’ manners were commendable, we all struggled to cope with and adapt to what to us was a foreign culture. Almost everything in the small villages where we spent most of our time was different from anywhere that any of us had ever lived or visited. The language, food, living conditions, behavior, social customs, dress, and the weather were vastly different from what we had experienced.
One of the ways that we coped with these differences and the challenges they presented for us was to give ourselves permission, periodically, to notice and name the differences in a polite, but clear way, and to acknowledge that it’s hard to be in unfamiliar situations.
During most of the month we were in the Philippines, the students and I lived in accommodations that were much like the accommodations at Camp Cazadero, where we send our kids to church camp every summer, except there was no running water or flush toilets, and we never once ate a meal that was like anything we’d eaten before.
All of our meals were eaten in the dining area of our cabin. The 13 of us sat around a large table, and were served food that had been cooked over an open fire and looked like some type of soup. What was in the broth varied from meal to meal. Just after I raised my head from asking God’s blessing on our first meal together, one of the students looked and asked me, “What is it?”
I said, “I have no idea. Shut up and eat it.” The students all replied, “OK, Mom.” And they did. And, that’s pretty much how every meal after that went until we flew back to the States at the end of the month.
II
If you’ve ever been to a place that’s vastly different from the place where you grew up, or where you have even been invited to dinner, you can probably relate to the sense of courage and adventure required of me and my students and the humorous way they tried to cope with the barrage of new and different experiences. Perhaps you can also appreciate the sense of awkwardness and the “cultural field trip” the Apostle Peter was on in Acts, Chapter 11, that we read today.
Imagine being Peter. Imagine being a good Jew who kept kosher, and who heretofore thought Jesus came strictly for the Jews. Imagine seeing a vision from God of all types of non-kosher foods streaming down from heaven, which you had been taught not to eat, and then hearing a voice from God essentially telling you three times, “Shut up and eat it, and, oh, by the way, take Christ’s message to the Gentiles, and eat with them too.”
It’s probably difficult for us to fully imagine how shocking this experience was for Peter and the other apostles, because we have come to take for granted that Christianity is a worldwide religion open to all people; prior to Peter’s experience — prior to this experience which scholars call “Peter’s conversion” — Christianity wasn’t yet a fully formed religion; it was simply a Jewish sect.
If Peter had not opened his heart and mind to the Spirit’s movement calling him to forgo kosher practices and to share Christ’s message with Gentiles and Jews alike, Christianity would have died as an obscure Jewish sect by the end of the first century, and we would not be here in this Sanctuary holding a Christian worship service today.
III
Numerous lessons can be learned from Peter’s conversion experience. Perhaps the most relevant lesson for our congregation at this place and time is to notice how God has a habit of pushing His people out of their cultural comfort zones. In particular, it’s a guarantee that God is making Her biggest moves when she is making her people go to strange places and make friends — not just with complete strangers whose language we may not speak — and eat their weird food.
Think about what I’m saying for a moment. This story about Peter’s vision of the weird food and the unlikely invitation from the Gentile in Caesarea to eat, sleep, and preach in his household was not the first time God pushed someone out of his cultural comfort zone.
The entire story of Exodus, which is the basis of the Jewish season of Passover, is about God pushing the Hebrew people out of their cultural comfort zone of Egypt, directing them eat weird food in the desert and meet new people throughout a 40-year journey to the Promised Land.
If the Hebrew people had not heeded God’s call to take their unleavened bread and flee from Egypt, the Hebrew people might still be slaves in Egypt—that is, if they had not already died in Egypt centuries earlier.
IV
In a similar manner, any congregation that sits in a multicultural environment like Alameda County, and refuses to move out of its cultural comfort zone and become a bi-cultural or multicultural congregation in the 21st Century, will die a well-deserved death. Why?
Because the New Testament is very clear about the fact that Christ came for one and for all, not just for me and mine. Christianity is not just about what happens on Sunday mornings, it’s also about working cooperatively to fulfill God’s vision of equity and justice for all.
In preparing for today’s sermon, I was reminded of another story my oldest childhood friend told me her pastor had shared with her. To fully appreciate the story you need to know my friend Ilon and her family are life-long members of Missouri Synod Lutheran congregations in Northwest Iowa. (The Missouri Synod Lutherans are such separatists that they won’t even celebrate communion with other Lutherans, let alone other Christians.)
The story Ilon’s pastor told goes like this: a man dies and goes to heaven, and is met at the pearly gates by St. Peter, who offers him a tour of his new home. In this story, heaven looks remarkably like the 19th-Century school building where I attended junior high and high school. The building had 11-foot high ceilings, large classrooms, and long hallways.
St. Peter led the novitiate down the hallway of heaven, stopping at one room after the other. At the first room, St. Peter swung open the door, and explained, “In here, we have the Roman Catholics.” The newcomer took a peek in and saw a beautiful cathedral, with a full mass being celebrated.
After a few moments, Peter closed the door, and led the novitiate on to the next room, where the two could hear loud preaching, foot-stomping, hand-clapping and gospel music coming from the room. When St. Peter opened the door, the novitiate looked in. He could see a central pulpit, with the preacher standing behind wearing a polyester suit and carrying a floppy Bible with gold tipped pages. “Those are the Baptists,” explained St. Peter.
The next stop on the tour sounded like a workroom at a big company where a lot of people were talking and the copy machine kept running. The two stopped and listened for a while, but the conversation never seemed to end. “Who’s in there?” asked the novitiate. “Oh, those are the Congregationalists,” said St. Peter. “They have a lot of stuff to process.”
As the initial tour of heaven was about to end, St. Peter stopped, turned to the new recruit, and said, “Now, you have to be very, very quiet when we walk past the next room. We’re not even going to open the door.” “Why?” asked the new guy. “Well,” said St. Peter, “because this is where the Missouri Synod Lutherans meet, and they think they’re the only ones up here!”
The point of this story of course is that it is easy for any religious community to think that it is the one true Church, the only group who’s going to heaven, and/or the people with whom God is most concerned. But my friend’s story, and more importantly Peter’s conversion, offers a healthy correction to that illusion.
V
Many of us are associated with Eden Church because we have rejected the “small heaven” views that other traditions have eagerly embraced and propagated, or because we were raised in those exclusivist kinds of traditions, and have run screaming from them.
So if we posit a vision of heaven that reflects the people for whom Christ came, which is everyone in the world, then our churches, with their different activities and programs, need to look and sound like the whole world and not some college fraternity that only offers membership to people from a very narrow demographic.
To be sure, it will always be easier and tempting to cultivate a mono-culture in all of our social relationships. That way we would never have to eat unfamiliar food, hear unfamiliar languages, or learn unfamiliar customs. According to the New Testament, including numerous teachings of Jesus in the gospels, like John 3:16 and 17, and the Acts of the Apostles, it’s not faithful to cultivate a mono-culture, because God sent Jesus into the world for the whole world—not just for the people who look, talk, and eat like us.
Another way Jesus modeled being faithful was in tending to people in a variety of ways, places, and aspects of their lives. While we may often think of church as just what happens on Sunday mornings, another way we can be faithful is to imagine Eden Church as what happens throughout the week, both in this building and in other places where we are engaged in working to bring God’s Beloved Community into reality.
Given this truth, we can be sure we are doing God’s work, like Peter did, and being the church of Jesus Christ, like the apostles were, whenever and wherever we are being pushed out of our respective cultural comfort zones to help fulfill God’s vision of equality and justice for all.
The good news is that as we practice together moving beyond our comfortable zones, familiar relationships, and behaviors, we can support each other just like the college students I took to the Philippines. We can learn to poke a little fun at ourselves, and make the world a better place through partnerships with people who are very different from us, but who are also working toward Jesus’ vision of equity and justice for all.
At the end of the trip to the Philippines, two brand new schools, and two health care clinics were standing in two remote villages where there had never been schools or clinics before, and the people in the village had access to education and healthcare services that hadn’t ever been available to them. We built these buildings together, even though we didn’t speak the same verbal language, and even though we never learned the names of the food we were eating or how to prepare it.
Despite our significant cultural differences, the students and the villagers learned we could focus on common goals. By our church donating construction materials, students, teachers, and carpenters donating their time, hosts offering hospitality and providing the land, and the Filipino government funding the medical staff, we learned the value of taking a strengths approach to problem solving, and developed deep respect and care for each other.
IMHO, we are fortunate in the Bay Area to have many opportunities to experience the culture of peoples whose lives are very different from ours, and that may even have surprising intersections. The questions remain: do we embrace these opportunities? or do we just look at them like petulant children and refuse to try a taste or posit that another way of life could be as good as our own?
I suggest that daring to expand our comfort zones is one of the ways that we can do God’s work in the world. In fact, being stretched and challenged may be evidence that the Holy Spirit is working on us, trying to teach us more social graces and preparing us for heaven where surely there will be an international buffet and some dinner guests who we weren’t quite expecting to see. Amen.