God's Kind of People--January 16, 2026

God's Kind of People--January 16, 2026

Peter began to speak to [Cornelius and his household]: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every people anyone who fears him and practices righteousness is acceptable to him...." (Acts 10:34-35)

There's never a time when God says, "Those aren't our kind of people." There is no point where God says, "Get out of here and go back to where you came from." There will never be a person of whom God says, "We don't welcome your kind around here." And once we realize that, we are changed forever.

That was certainly Simon Peter's story, which we get here in this snippet from the book of Acts, and which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday.  This is the moment when Peter finally "gets it," when it finally dawns on him that God is doing something new in the community of Jesus' followers that includes people from every background, every nation, every language, and every culture. And this is the moment when the old hardened racial and cultural prejudices he didn't even realize he was still carrying finally crack and begin to fall away for him.  

How did he get there? Well, the short version is that God had sent him to go to the house of a Roman centurion named Cornelius and to tell him about Jesus. Cornelius, obviously, was a gentile (non-Jewish), and as a solider in the army of the occupying empire, it would have been easy (and not incorrect) to see him as an "enemy." He was from the "Italian cohort" of soldiers, which strongly implies he was from far away back in Europe, rather than a local Judean native who somehow enlisted in the Roman army.  He would have grown up worshiping the gods of the Roman pantheon, speaking Latin, and immersed in the cultural practices of the Empire.  There were LOTS of ways it would have been obvious that Cornelius and his family were "not our kind of people" from Peter's perspective.  And so when God finally persuades Peter to go (and teaches him along the way that "you don't get to call UNCLEAN what God has called CLEAN"), and Cornelius hears the message about Jesus, he and his whole family want to be baptized on the spot. They come to faith in Jesus, they receive the Holy Spirit, and they commit to following the way of Jesus, too!

And that's when it dawns on Peter: this is what God had in mind all along!  This was in fact God's doing, and God had let Peter to bring the message in the first place to Cornelius and his family--even when Peter felt like he was being dragged kicking and screaming to Cornelius' house at first! Peter realizes that God intends to draw all people, from everywhere, including every background, language, ethnicity, culture, and place, into the community of Jesus.  That had seemed scandalous to him earlier in his faith journey; Peter had grown up assuming that pretty much God only cared about his group--people from the ethnic group descended from the tribes of ancient Israel.  For certain, a young Peter would have believed that God cared about his group FIRST, at least, and that only after his own group's interests were covered would God give any care for other people.   But now, Peter realizes that God doesn't show partiality to any group of people or love one nationality more than another. There is no language God requires we speak, no country on the map which is exceptional in God's eyes, and no barrier keeping out "the wrong kind of people" from following Jesus and belonging in God's Reign. Peter realized that when Cornelius came to faith, and apparently we keep needing to re-learn it twenty centuries later.  All of us, it turns out, are "God's kind of people."

As we keep exploring this season what it means to be called by Christ, it's worth remembering that we are called alongside a LOT of other people, and all of us are different.  For me to recognize that you are also called by Christ doesn't take anything away from me or lessen my calling.  And the fact that God has called people from halfway around the world, whose language I do not speak, whose culture is different from my own, and whose stories are divergent from my experience, doesn't threaten my identity as someone called by God, either. Sometimes we who have been around the church for a while start to think of ourselves as Peter, as though we are experts who have been self-deputized to decide who is "in" and who is "out" on God's behalf.  But we are very much Cornelius, too--that is, we are people who were outsiders and strangers, who have been welcomed in by God, despite our many kinds of difference. And if God has drawn us into the love of Christ, regardless of where we have come from or what our story is, then God surely reserves the right to draw in anybody and everybody else, too, no matter where they are from or who they are.

That realization changed Peter. It will change us, too.

Lord God, help us to welcome all whom you are calling to yourself, and help us to rejoice that your welcome includes us, too. Enable us to see that we are all your kind of people.