As with Peter in today's first reading, Acts 11: 1-18, God frequently challenges us to rethink issues, to move beyond boundaries to which we might be clinging that actually are not what God desires of us. In Peter's case it was, for one, refusing to eat certain meats that the law pronounced as clean. God said to Peter in prayer: "What God has made clean, you are not to call profane." Secondly, there was a law not to enter the house of the uncircumcised, which Peter had done when "three men appeared at the house where [he] was...The Spirit told [Peter] to accompany them without discriminating." As Peter was speaking to these men, "the Holy Spirit fell upon them 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 he gave to us when we came to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to be able to hinder God [by refusing to go into their house because they were uncircumcised]?
We might ask ourselves two questions: 1) Are we clinging to laws that may actually be hindering us from doing what God desires of us and 2) Do we avoid going into other peoples' houses or speaking to other people because they are different from us or have beliefs that differ from ours?
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