Acts 10:44-48 (but really, just read the whole chapter...)
It was just a retention pond. But we called it “the swamp.” My little brother would go over there and catch crayfish and turtles and frogs and bring them home in buckets to show our mom. One hot summer day, long before my brother’s catch and keep system, my sister, some neighborhood kids, and I rode our bikes the few city blocks to the end of the dead end street. We dumped our bikes on their sides, and raced forward toward the swampy wild. We were on an adventure.
I don’t remember the exact narrative that we had constructed. Were we knights in shining armor, coming to rescue the princess? Were we pioneers, discovering an untouched wilderness? Maybe we were wild horses, galloping along the sandy beach. I do remember, though, that I had just started to learn to read with some element of independence. I’d been learning letters and sounding out words for awhile, but now I was recognizing words more quickly, deciphering the more challenging ones a little more readily.
Well, we were traipsing through the boggy shoreline, mud seeping through our canvas Keds, when I came upon a strange sign. It was orange and black and nailed to a tree. I said, “Wait, guys, stop. Doesn’t that say, ‘No Trespassing’?” And my sister’s friend, being older and wiser, cocked her head to the side, laughed, and without skipping a beat said, “No silly. It says ‘No Treespinning.’ Duh. Come on. Let’s keep going.”
“Treespinning?” I wondered. What the heck was treespinning?
I guessed that if I didn’t know what it was, then I couldn’t exactly be arrested for doing it, right? But as we were vanquishing the evil queen or hunting down buffalo or feeling the salt spray against our shaggy manes, I looked up to my right, and at the top of the hill of a perfectly manicured, weedless and pristine lawn, was a tall, skinny old man. He was looking down at us, hands on his hips, ready, I’m sure, to shout “Git offa my lawn!” And then, in my little kid mind, he would call the police, and there the cops would be waiting for us when we returned to our bikes, handcuffs ready to take us to jail on four counts of criminal treespinning.
Although there were no cops, no sirens blaring, waiting to take us to the slammer that humid day, the memory of that tall old man, hands on his hips, glowering at us, was enough to keep me from ever going back to that magical place we called “the swamp” ever again.
To get to our passage today, we need a little background.
Cornelius is a walking, talking contradiction. He is an anomaly. An oxymoron. A Roman Centurion who owns slaves, owns property, and has power, and also gives alms to the poor, and prays constantly. He and his whole household. He is a “devout Gentile” who is the most Jewish non-Jew in all the land. He is constantly going where he’s not “supposed” to. And one day, as he is praying, he gets a vision. “Go, send a few of your men to Joppa. Find a man named Peter, whose real name is Simon, staying at some other Simon guy’s house.” (And try not to get the Simons confused – I can only imagine that there were a couple of Marys there, too.) So Cornelius does what he’s told. He sends his Gentile servants across boundary lines to the city of Joppa, to find a Jew, whom they will then bring back to Caesarea, a land full of Gentiles. Cornelius sends his men trespassing in search of Peter – to go where they are not allowed, where they are not welcome.
“Cornelius,” God says, “Send your servants to the dead end road, cut through the neighbor’s side yard, go to the swamp, and bring back what you find.” Use your imaginations, discover new things, expand your horizons.
“Cornelius,” the vision seems to say, “It’s time to go treespinning.”
Meanwhile, Peter is on a roof, praying, and he gets this crazy, radical vision of dramatic openness and radical inclusion. I mean, like, the knights who are supposed to save the princesses are riding the wild horses to join the pioneers in making friends with the buffalo -- that kind of crazy.
And as he’s having this vision, Cornelius’s guys show up, and Peter hears from the Spirit that they have been sent to him from God. These Gentiles. To a Jewish man’s house. Sent, not by tax collectors, or soldiers or the emperor himself, but rather instructed to cross dividing and boundaried lines by the Holy Spirit, God’s very self.
This is hard for us to imagine, but this is sitting at the front of the bus, protesting at the diner counter, crossing the battlelines to put a flower in the rifle kind of stuff. This is open borders, open drinking fountains, political aisle crossing stuff. The Gentiles invite the Jews to come with them to Cornelius’s house so that they can hear their story. And the Jews respond by inviting the Gentiles to cross the threshold, to enter their home, to sit, eat, and stay with them.
This is the equivalent of Muslims and Jews worshipping together. This is the same as de-segregating the schools. This is a crossing of boundaries, this is a tearing down of walls, this is God transgressing all the human rules of exclusion and division and segregation.
This is wild, radical, trespassing. Or, perhaps, rather, treespinning.
And then they go further. Peter joins these Gentiles on a journey to Cornelius’s house. It takes two days. Two days of time together, eating, talking, walking the same road, drinking from the same canteen, sharing their Cornnuts, passing through the same gates into Caesarea. And when Peter gets there, Cornelius, who has been waiting for him, kneels before him, and begins to worship. And Peter essentially says, “Knock it off. I am only mortal, just like you.”
He says, “You know the rules, none of this is allowed! You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or visit a Gentile, but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.”
Those divisions have dissolved. This is a crazy act of trespassing that they're all committing here. And so, Peter goes on to tell the impossible transgressing, trespassing, treespinning story of God come to earth to teach us that there is no trespassing, there is no division between the holy and the unholy, the clean or the unclean. Through the incarnation of Jesus Christ, all that is gone. There is no trespassing. There’s only treespinning.
Theologian and biblical scholar Willie James Jennings says that this is God’s divine transgression, that “God has pushed [Peter] over the line that separated Jewish bodies from Gentile bodies, holy bodies from unholy ones, and pressed Peter to change his speech acts by never again calling anyone holy or unclean.” Peter is learning to treespin.
And finally, as we get to our reading today, we see the result of this treespinning. Absolute, total, radical inclusion. And the circumcised believers are shocked. It isn’t even Peter who witnesses to the Gentiles, but the reverse. The Gentiles begin to teach Peter about who God is.
Peter stops talking. And the Gentiles start praising. Things are turned topsy turvy in a radical act of spiritual vertigo.
And then Peter takes the next step to radical inclusion. He takes a sledgehammer to the walls dividing east from west, north from south, wealthy from poor, Jew from Palestinian, Ukrainian from Russian, migrant from citizen, protesting college student from college administration. Like the Ethiopian eunuch, he asks, what’s to keep these people from being baptized? He says, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?”
Peter is treespinning.
He asks, rhetorically, who owns baptism? Who gets to say who is in and who is out? Who hangs these No Trespassing signs on God’s trees? Who owns the water? Who owns the faith?
No one. No one can withhold or own or say anything anymore. Only God, the owner of the swamp and the trees and the stories and perfectly manicured lawn, can withhold any of it. And God doesn’t. God says that we – all of us – belong to God. God says that we – all of us – belong here.
God isn’t the old man with his hands on his hips, staring at us with a threatening glare.
All these lines and divisions are fabrications that we have put up against each other. God, instead, invites us treespinning. Jesus is God’s transgressing, Jesus is God’s trespassing, Jesus is God’s treespinning. And Jesus calls us to follow him into the swamp, to vanquish the evil queen, to explore the uncharted land, to gallop through the waves with the Holy Spirit wind whipping through our manes.
This is a God who steps into our lives, the One who reaches for us, who crosses the picket lines and climbs the border walls and destroys militarized zones and flies through enemy airspace to get to us.
We like to say that entering in to someone else’s space is trespassing, but for God, when God does it, it’s treespinning.
We are invited to treespin with God. To go where we “shouldn’t.” To have hard conversations, to invite others into our space, to be invited into their space, to ask uncomfortable questions and feed undeserving people. We are invited to follow where God leads. To see the face of God in the places and the people we think God has no business being. Even in the face of that grumpy old man as we went treespinning that warm summer afternoon.
Let’s go treespinning. God knows what adventures await.
Thanks be to God.
