Acts 11:1-10; Revelation 21: 1-5

The Aha Moment

Dear friends,

The movie “Summer of 42” that came out in 1971 is about three boys coming of age during a summer in Work War Two and a young woman whose husband goes off to war.  One of the last lines of the flim is:” life is made up of small comings and goings and for everything we take with us, there is something we leave behind.”  This last part couid be said of Peter. Peter is gaining a new knowledge, about what is profane or acceptable, about what is pure and what is dirty.  Peter leaves behind the old Hebrew thinking about food as a new Christians community.  In other parts of Acts Peter also has to deal with accepting non-Jews to this community and he wasn’t at all excited about that. So Peter has to leave something behind. His old way of seeing things is gone forever now that he has had his vision. You cannot go back to the old ways. But he takes something with him, a new understanding of the Church that’s supposed to be built on him as the rock. He comes up with a while new way of seeing that’s freer and more inclusive. It’s an aha moment.

                Friends, life is made up of small comings and goings. We tend to focus on the big ones, but most of them are small. Little milestones, little markers. They are the moments where we decide to see things an old way or see things a new way.  Little aha moments.  But when you add them up, they become new moments.  The church has them too.  Rola has been asked to be part of a group called Vital Congregations. It is a national group that partners with Presbyteries to help churches think about markers of their health. She will be talking to you about it I am sure. They focus on the four b’s in churches. One of those b’s is “BUT we have never done it like that before.  This is when churches are like the old Peter, not ready to have an aha moment.  But small moments can become big moments.  The text in Acts shows us a big moment, but we can be sure that Peter has been thinking about this issue, wondering whether the old rules still apply to this brand new community of followers of Jesus.  We think of the big decision of the Presbyterian Church to fully include Gay and Lesbians in the life of the church, but is a compilation of a series of small moments.  We still have ways to go, but we are ahead of many other denominations.

                My sister has become a real Texan, espousing most of Texas values since she first went there when she was twenty.  I was a little surprised when she told me that the movie Crazy Rich Asians is one of her favorites. I’m not sure I get it, but she likes the character of the rich mother who says: ”we know how to build things that last.” Very Peter of her, before he saw the light.  The Rachel Chu character is the one creates the Aha moment however, the professor of Game Theory in New York that she is. Rachel invites her not-to-be mother in law to a. Mahjong club in Singapore where they talk. MahJong, she explains is a game of strategy and cooperation.  Rachel uses the game to explain why she turned down the son’s proposal. Because someone’s was going to lose, someone was going to leave something behind and not gain anything. The game becomes an aha mother for the mother who herself has never measured up. The small coming and going of the Mah Jong club becomes a big one.

                Friends, I have an agreement with Rola and Veronica that on the days I am here I lock the back gate.  Most of the time it is dark when I leave and I first have to make the letters in the lock line up to undo it first. Sometimes this takes an annoyingly long time. I have to go back and get my glasses and use the flashlight on my phone and sometimes and then at times I have wondered why I don’ t recognize any of the letters. This is when I realize the lock is upside down and so are the letters. Invariably all four letter will click into place and lock opens. I think our aha moments can be like that: things line up.  The letters suddenly form a word that makes sense to us.

                Friends, the words of the old scriptures didn’t line up with the old arrangement for Peter. It didn’t make sense anymore.  Things didn’t line up.  There was an aha moment.  You as a congregation will have lots of small comings and goings in the years to go. There may a few aha moments, but probably only because they were a long time in the making.  Time marches on.  Things don’t stay the same. They never have.

There are these moments that we realize we need to leave something behind, when what we considered profane is now part of the holy, when the world of the text once again lines up with the world as we know it.  May God helps us see. Amen.