Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God. So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, saying, "Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?" Then Peter began to explain it to them, step by step, saying, "I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners; and it came close to me. As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. I also heard a voice saying to me, `Get up, Peter; kill and eat.' But I replied, `By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.' But a second time the voice answered from heaven, `What God has made clean, you must not call profane.' This happened three times; then everything was pulled up again to heaven. At that very moment three men, sent to me from Caesarea, arrived at the house where we were. The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us. These six brothers also accompanied me, and we entered the man's house. He told us how he had seen the angel standing in his house and saying, `Send to Joppa and bring Simon, who is called Peter; he will give you a message by which you and your entire household will be saved.' And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning. And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, `John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.' If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?" When they heard this, they were silenced. And they praised God, saying, "Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life."

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The neighborhood in which I live is one of those rare places today: a real walking neighborhood. By that, I mean that I can walk not only to other houses, but also to grocery stores and a dentist and the post office and restaurants and even a bookstore. It is a neighborhood that was begun almost a century ago, when many people did indeed walk every day as they went about their lives.

Being in such a neighborhood means that we have a number of alleys. There is the front of the store and the back of the store where the alley is, and front and back bear little resemblance to one another, sometimes even to the point of having no sign on the back door whatsoever. You simply have to know, for example, where to make deliveries.

For us walkers, it presents some opportunities to see the world in new ways. Take restaurants, for example. Every time a restaurant opens we can tell that someone has spent some serious money on interior design. The lighting is carefully thought out, the wall colors hopefully chosen to make the patrons look good, even the shape of the plates these days chosen with a certain purpose in mind. It is all of a piece, all designed to look…well…perfect. And the food comes out looking enticing and perfect as well.

But go walk around to the back of the restaurant in the alley. There you get a glimpse into the heart of the operation. If the door is open, and it often is because the heat is so intense in the kitchen, you can see a cacophony of kettles and mixers and bags of produce and sweating immigrant employees and often a busboy standing outside taking a cigarette break in an age in which smoking in restaurants is looked on in horror. And let’s be honest. Don’t look to closely or you will see a roach or two inside the kitchen storage area and perhaps a rat outside the door, looking for food. That is simply the way the restaurant business is. When you can see the heart of the operation, it is different from the carefully scripted activity that is going on in the front room where reputations are at stake.

But the meal that satisfies our hunger comes from the real world of steaming cauldrons and sweating employees, which is what commercial kitchens look like.  If we want to be fed, there has to be an honest to God kitchen.

Remember that truth as you re-read this lesson from Acts that we heard today. In the cosmology of Peter’s day, heaven is still the place beyond the vault of the sky. God, that which is holiest, dwells there in a way much grander and holier than his dwelling place in Jerusalem in the Temple. In his vision, Peter gets a glimpse of heaven in the form of a sheet filled with animals coming down from the sky, sort of like a laid-in ceiling tile being removed and someone letting you see what is above the tiles. And lo and behold, what he sees is more kitchen than front room. To take the image at its face value, heaven is filled with both unclean and clean animals.

It is a shocker. It is for him, and it is for us as well. We in the church are usually so very focused on the front room where we want everything to look just right. It is what we imagine heaven to be. But a bit of heaven is lowered so that Peter—and by implication, we—might see what it really looks like beyond the dome of the sky. It is not the pristine place that we might have imagined. The glimpse is of the clean and the unclean mashed up together.

Today’s reading from Acts is there to confront us insiders as much as anything else, to remind us that the kingdom of God is not as pure and pristine as we would sometimes want it to be. It is filled with the totality of creation, and God is letting us see what it is really like, a glimpse of the kingdom let down for us to see, so to speak. And God does so again and again until we hopefully understand the message. It is why the church continues to wrestle with issues in every generation. God keeps lowering the sheet and says, “Look at what is coming from the very heart of where I dwell. Aren’t you going to share in the meal that I am providing?”

In the end, we can choose to be fed by such a kingdom or to refuse and starve. Peter chooses to be fed and not to “make distinctions between them and us.” It changed the church in Jerusalem and thereby opened membership to people previously thought outside the reach of God’s covenant. This very same message ought to be changing the church today, and it is behind our baptismal covenant’s call for us to respect the dignity of every human being. There is no distinction between “them” and “us.” Great sustenance can come from that very real and varied kitchen, that very ordinary heaven that is filled with what we have too often been taught to avoid.

I know that it sort of like preaching to the choir to come to St. Paul’s and talk about the Christian imperative to see beyond them and us. You have a reputation for doing exactly that. But there is something more going on in this story from Acts. This vision of Peter is told almost word for word two times in the book. That is a lot of real estate, as they say. The writer of Acts is therefore trying to tell us something more, and I think it is that the church is to tell the story again and again and again of what the kingdom of God actually looks like, that the kingdom looks more like an alley entrance than front door.  Our charge is to tell the story of the tired busboy and the sweating immigrant and the exasperated cook. That charge is extremely important in this age in which we live when, for example, the huge fight is over who comes in our country or our state or our communities through the back door rather than the front door. We are called to proclaim again and again what is in that sheet let down from heaven. That is the message that will eventually feed the hungry, and if there is anything that we have experience in, it is in turning the least of ingredients into a feast. After all, we have done it with bread and wine for going on two thousand years.

Sometime take a walking trip through an alley. See what glimpses of the kingdom you will see there. Then tell others what you have seen and how you have heard the voice of God. It has the power to shake the church—and turn this known world upside down. Amen.