The Dream That Tore Down the Fence

There was a fence.

You couldn't see it. But everyone knew it was there.

On one side stood God's people, the ones who knew his name. On the other side stood everyone else. The strangers. The far-away ones. The Romans, with their swords and their stone gods and their boots in the dust.

And the fence said one thing, over and over: this far, and no farther.

Now in a town by the sea lived a Roman soldier named Cornelius. He was a captain of a hundred men. He stood on the outside of that fence, the far side. And still, he had begun to love the God of Israel. He prayed. He gave to the poor. He reached for something he could not quite touch.

God saw that reaching, and God came near.

One afternoon an angel stood in Cornelius's room, bright as morning. "God has heard you," the angel said. "Send for a man named Peter."

Far away, on a flat rooftop, Peter was hungry and waiting for lunch. And then a strange thing happened, soft as sleep. The sky seemed to open. Down came a great sheet, held by its four corners, lowered slow. And it was full of animals. Crawling, fluttering, every kind. All the animals Peter had been taught never, ever to eat. The forbidden ones. The unclean ones.

"Get up, Peter," said a voice. "Take. Eat."

"Never," said Peter. "I have never once touched anything unclean."

And the voice said the thing that went all the way down into Peter's heart and made it go still.

"Do not call unclean what I have made clean."

Three times the sheet came down. Three times the voice spoke. And while Peter sat blinking on the rooftop, trying to understand, the men sent by Cornelius were already knocking at the gate below.

That sheet full of animals was really about the fence.

So Peter went. A man from the inside, walking through the door of a Roman house. And he looked around at all those waiting faces, the far-away faces, and said the thing he had only just learned: "Now I understand. God shows no one to the door. God keeps no favorites and locks no one out."

Then Peter told them about Jesus. How he loved. How he died. How he rose. And before Peter had even finished, the Holy Spirit came down on that whole roomful of outsiders, the very same Spirit and the very same gladness that had filled the friends of Jesus back in Jerusalem.

The fence was gone.

No one had knocked it down with hammers. It had simply come apart in the hands of a love that would not stay on one side. For Jesus had already opened his arms wide on the cross, wide enough to gather the near ones and the far ones, the soldier and the fisherman, you and the child who is sure she is too far away to belong.

God was making one family, and the first of that family stood right there in an ordinary house by the sea, a Roman soldier and a Galilean fisherman praising God side by side. One day every door in the world will stand open the way that one did, and there will be no outside left for anyone to stand on.