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Yesterday, rhe Sunday School teacher in my new ward focused the lesson entirely on Acts 10 and Peter’s vision of the unclean beasts that led to preaching to and baptizing Gentiles. I won’t summarize the entire lesson, but it included an excellent conversation about what we see today as uncleanliness, how we interact with “sinners”, and how “worthiness” too often gets in the way of true Christian love.
I talked about how it is relatively easy to love someone who is repentant and humble (the Prodigal Son when he returned home) and how much harder it is to do so during their riotous living.
One woman shared that she was a truly “wild child” as a teenager – that some parents told their kids, sometimes in her presence, to stay away from her. She said she was on her way out of the Church until a Seminary teacher her senior year in high school told her she was needed and that she had excellent insights the other students needed to hear and understand. That teacher even asked her to take over and teach occasionally. That embrace of the Prodigal Daughter while she was living the riotous life was a powerful story.
I also was able to talk about how our view of “worthiness” for certain steps can get in the way of and distort our view of “worth” – that there is NOBODY who doesn’t deserve unconditional, active love simply by being a child of God and our spiritual sibling.
I truly believe there are more lessons like this occurring throughout the Church than we realize, since so many of the people who end up here do so at least partly because they don’t have these experiences.
There is a good post on this same part of acts on BCC Interesting that eating stuff that Peter was socialized to view as unclean is just standard fare now. Regardless – finding love, salvation, and redemption in Jesus seems to be much deeper than making certain lifestyle changes.
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