Clean Labels

Acts 10:9-16

The next day, as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the housetop about the sixth hour to pray. And he became hungry and wanted something to eat, but while they were preparing it, he fell into a trance and saw the heavens opened and something like a great sheet descending, being let down by its four corners upon the earth. In it were all kinds of animals and reptiles and birds of the air. And there came a voice to him: “Rise, Peter; kill and eat.” But Peter said, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean.” And the voice came to him again a second time, "What God has made clean, do not call common.” This happened three times, and the thing was taken up at once to heaven.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part One)

“Get up, Peter!” says a voice, “Kill and eat!”

Peter is horrified. “Certainly not! I’ve never done that before and I’m not going to start now! It’s unclean!”

Then comes the response which echoes through the centuries, and still challenges all kinds of prejudice.

“What God has made clean, you must not call unclean” (160).

Aaron Orendorff

As trite as it might sound, the temptation to call something “unclean” is basically the religious equivalent of the social temptation to “label.” What makes labeling so comfortable—and similarly, what makes calling something unclean so comfortable—is that both eliminate the need for wisdom, sanity and judgment in the otherwise complex and rightly uncomfortable process of discernment. Once a thing is labeled, we know what it is. There are no ambiguities, no shades, no need to really think. But if God, through the gospel, has made all things clean, then nothing—in and of itself—is off limits. If God is in the business of redeeming creation, not eliminating or escaping it, then money and sex are no more the enemies of true spirituality than food is. What matters—what counts—isn’t how much we can avoid, but how much we can bring under the lordship of Jesus.