A sermon on Acts 11:1-18 and Revelation 21:1-6
Preached Sunday, May 18, 2025 at Saratoga Springs UMC
Video available here

Would you pray with me?

God of our hearts, thank you for being with us here today. Make your presence known among us. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

As I was preparing for the sermon this morning, I was delighted to find a new connection between my life as a planetarium educator and my life as a… religious person who’s really into the bible and theology, I guess. Did you know that the city in which Peter receives his vision in today’s scripture, the city translated as Joppa, known today as Jaffa, a part of Tel-Aviv, is, according to legend, the place where Perseus rescued Andromeda?

This might seem like a weird connection, but I’ve told that story hundreds of times. Andromeda, Perseus, Pegasus, Cassiopeia, Cepheus, Cetus, they’re all constellations up in the fall nighttime sky, and not only that, they’re the only constellations up in the fall nighttime sky. So for years, every time the leaves started to turn, I’d tell the story of vain Cassiopeia who chained her daughter to a rock to be eaten by a sea monster, and ended up in the northern sky, when her constellation is upside down for half the year and she’s hanging on to her throne for dear life.

And where does this story I’ve told over and over again takes place? Joppa! Joppa, like from the bible!

Now I know, I know. What place do Greek myths have in sermons, especially sermons these days? We are modern people and we don’t have much use for myths. And this is barely a myth! It’s a fairy tale, a little morality play about the dangers of vanity. But we don’t need Greek myths to teach those morals anymore. We’ve got so many other ways to tell stories that stick with us.

But myths, in a properly academic, theological sense, aren’t fairy tales or morality plays. It doesn’t mean “something fake.” Myths are something deeper. Myths shape or reinforce how we understand the world, how we make decisions, and how we live not just in our own lives, but in our societies. When we understand myths in this way, it becomes clear that we all believe in myths. The Myth of Manifest Destiny shaped the policies and actions of European colonizers and their descendants living on this continent. The Myth of Infinite Progress causes us to move fast and break things, using all available resources, trusting that we’ll never go back, only forward. The Myth of the Invisible Hand of the Market guides untold policies, affecting millions, if not billions of people around the world today. And we back up these myths with stories and examples from our own lives, so that the cycle continues.

Revelation has long inspired Christian myths, in ways both good and bad. I grew up as a semi-evangelical Christian in the early 00s, so of course I read the Left Behind books. If you don’t know what those are, God bless and keep you from them, but for those who do, you understand the myth that was being made in those books. Jesus is coming back any day now and there will be consequences. There will be a time of corruption and suffering and world domination by the anti-Christ. Only those who take scripture seriously and call on Jesus will be able to understand the events of those final, devastating days. Sarcasm aside, it is a mythic vision of destruction, violence, and desperation for everyone except those people who have prayed the sinner’s prayer and remained faithful to Jesus, no matter what.

And hear me right: this is a myth, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore it. Everyone believes in myths, including you. Sometimes we’re critical about the myths we believe, but mostly we’re not. And this myth, this concept of Revelation as the hidden key to all the world events shapes and reinforces how the people who believe it see the world, make decisions, and build societies. It is a myth that teaches distrust in governments and organizations, especially global cooperation. It is a myth that teaches interpretation of wars, rumors of wars, and disasters as signs that the rapture is at hand. And it is a myth that, as many of you may know, relies on certain events occurring in Israel. Versions of this myth have gone back decades, nearly a century, and they played a not-insignificant part in the formation of the modern-day state of Israel.

Myths shape how the people who believe it do everything.

Much like the myth that Peter builds in our passage from Acts today.

See, the early church in the days of the Book of Acts was having trouble accepting Gentiles into the full life of the church. Some said that they could join as long as they abided by all the Jewish customs of the time, including circumcision, others said that they could come as they are, as long as they “accepted the word of God,” using the words from Acts.

And Peter is more in the first camp, the circumcision camp, until he has this vision at Joppa, in which he learns that “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” And this is life-changing for Peter. This is show-stopping stuff. This is a myth being built, and it’s happening in Joppa. Peter goes from this vision, from his meetings with folks in Joppa, to Jerusalem, to argue the opposite of what he believed when he left there. He no longer believes the same myth. Physical circumcision is no longer what proves a man is righteous before God. Peter can’t shape his life and his decisions and his policies by that myth anymore. He believes something new.

Remember, just because something is a myth, doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Now, one thing I love about the bible is that doesn’t give you extra information. It’s got a lot to say and not enough time to say it. So when the bible tells you something happens in Joppa, you should pay attention to Joppa.

Joppa, now called Jaffa, is an important sea port, just northwest of Jerusalem, on the Mediterranean coast. It’s changed hands many times over the years, being conquered by Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, Crusaders, the Ottomans, Napoleon (temporarily), and the British, before becoming a part of the modern state of Israel when it was annexed into Tel-Aviv as a part of the 1948 war. Like all ports, it’s a place where not only goods but culture can be exchanged, and today, as in the past, it has a population from different religious and ethnic backgrounds.

Biblically, Joppa is the northernmost Philistine city, the Philistines being, of course, the famous enemies of David. David must conquer it, because Solomon receives the cedars of Lebanon for his Temple via Joppa. Joppa is where Jonah boarded a boat for Tarshish instead of Ninevah. Joppa is where Peter raised a widow back to life. And Joppa is where he receives his vision. Joppa is a port. Joppa is a doorway. Joppa is a gateway. No wonder God opens a new door to Peter in Joppa.

But here is the turning point of the sermon today, here’s where we see the danger of uncritically believing in myths: Joppa is not a mythical place.

Whatever myths we believe, and remember, we all do, we must always remember facts like these. Jaffa is a real place. Real people live there. It can be a setting for your myth, but it is not the subject of it.

In the late Ottoman period, the late 1800s to early 1900s, there was a large investment in citrus growth in Jaffa. It became a place that migrant workers from all over the region came to, in order to work and produce what would soon be a world-famous product: the Jaffa orange. For those who have been to UK, Jaffa cakes are named after Jaffa oranges. In fact, the oranges were so successful that by 1940, they had hired a city planner. Recognizing Jaffa as not only an important place of industry but also of culture (most of the Palestinian newspapers at the time were printed in Jaffa), the planner laid out a vision of new housing, transportation, parks, and improvements to the waterfront. But then came the souring of the British mandate, on the heels of the Arab revolt, and 1948 war, the displacement of more than 50,000 people, the annexation, and the renaming of the streets. The idea of what Jaffa could be, the myth of a Palestine built and cultivated by Palestinians, changed, in no small part because of the myth of Revelation that requires a final battle at Meggido, an event called Armageddon, north and east of Jaffa.

But this is not the myth that we have to believe. This is not the future that we have to accept. In fact, this is not even the future or the myth that the book of Revelation itself seems to want us to accept. The crowning vision of Revelation, the vision that the whole book is working toward, comes in the chapter we read this morning, where there is a new heaven and a new earth, because this world will pass away. And in that new heaven and new earth, there will not be war. There will not be death. No more mourning and crying and pain, all tears wiped away, all things made new.

This can be the myth we believe.

This can be the myth that shapes us, that reinforces how we understand the world. This can be the myth that informs how we make decisions and how we live not just in our own lives, but in our societies, in the world we build, however temporary it may be. This book, this vision, this revelation doesn’t have to lead us to violence and war, displacement and famine, the dehumanization of others who are not like us. We can choose to believe in the myth that one day, all peoples will inherit a world without pain and suffering. And when we believe that, when we shape our lives around that, when we make that the truth that guides our actions, we will not only work for peace and justice and abundant life for all, we will stand against those make war and injustice and death and we will tell them, “No more!”

I believe that we can do that.

I do.

The bible told me so.

Amen.