Participating in the Divine Economy
Like Peter, we often inherit frameworks—beliefs and assumptions passed down through family, tradition, or culture—that offer comfort and a sense of control. But God’s movements, the Divine Economy, does not operate on our terms or within our boundaries. It is expansive, surprising, and rooted in love that refuses to be contained. What happens when God’s grace flows beyond our fences?
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Transcript
From today’s reading from Acts: The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us.
Today’s text is a text of dreams and visions, an experience or reality I think we should discuss more in our lives. We see Peter describing a vision that shifts his entire worldview, of how God works in the world.
There is an unfurled sheet with images of animals covering it, and a voice instructs him to eat, prompting Peter to refuse out of his prior understanding of what is clean and unclean. Three times it does this.
With this vision, we think back to how things come in three’s for Peter. We remember how we denied knowing Jesus three times before the Crucifixion. Later, when Jesus met with Peter, he asked him three times “Do you love me, Peter? Feed my sheep.” The three questions allowed Peter the space to experience healing with his prior rejection.
Now we see the dream-vision with the sheet unfurling three times, giving Peter the space to absorb the lesson he is meant to learn. Then, three visitors come to invite Peter to join them. There is something he is meant to learn and see here, and the encounter gives him the space he needs to do it.
After the three visitors come, Peter says, “The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us.” If ever we needed a Bible verse printed on a t-shirt these days, this is it.
Peter had a certain worldview, a framework for understanding what faithfulness looked like, and Jewish identity was key. In this view, one first had to be Jewish and then they could experience an authentic relationship with Jesus.
With this dream-vision and the encounter with the strangers, Peter’s clear framework is upended. Somehow, gentiles are experiencing this relationship with Jesus. And the text ends with this wonderful line: “Then God has given to the gentiles the repentance that leads to life.”
The lesson in this both for Peter and us is key. God acts and moves in the world, and we respond to God’s movement. We catch up, as it were. That is the order. This may seem obvious, but we get this backwards all the time. We may think that we do, but we do not set the parameters on grace.
Our struggle is that we think we are in control in this regard. We have our own agenda, that probably we inherited, one that has emotional weight. Perhaps we received it from our grandparents or parents, and we don’t want to hurt their feelings by letting them think we see things differently, that we have grown. Our family systems become enmeshed and we are stuck in a loop of a certain way of thought. This is the way we think. This is the way we believe.
Then, we hold tightly to this worldview, and we have certain Bible verses that correspond to it. We have our key verses at our fingertips so we can defend ourselves when we feel our agendas or worldviews are threatened.
Then, we begin to think that we have everything figured out, that we have God in a box, as it were. We feel secure with the categories that we believe God operates in.
We see certain groups of people that fit into the categories we hold onto so tightly. Perhaps it is a belief that women can’t lead in church. Perhaps it is a belief of judgement around people who are gay, or people of color, other ethnicities, the poor, the homeless, people from another religious tradition, or immigrants.
In our categories, there is an ‘other’ that we see in our lives on whom the blame for our own pressure or discomfort often falls. Having such scapegoats is one of the oldest tricks in the books for so-called rulers who want to leverage anxiety to maintain their own hold on power. If we are convinced that someone else is to blame, then our own responsibility toward ourselves–or toward their greed and grasping–is reduced.
We feel we have everything in place, and our worldview is set. And, being humans, we like this feeling of security.
Then, of course, God surprises us. We look up one day and we see God moving and acting outside of the categories we have worked so long to maintain. Put another way, we work hard on maintaining our fences, and it is an uncomfortable feeling when we look up one day and see God dancing at a party on the other side of the fence.
How dare God!
God surprises us and our perspective on the world shifts. Our awareness expands–maybe suddenly–and we realize that the Divine Economy operates on different terms than ours–quite different.
In this moment of expansion, we are challenged to love more fully, to have our hearts opened to participate in God’s love for the world. As Peter and others said with their realization, “So, God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.” Even the Gentiles!
We are invited into a wider space of love that is meant to define us as followers of Jesus, as we hear from John’s Gospel today, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” This is how we participate in the Divine Economy. This is how God works, whether we like it or not. (And often we don’t like it).
So, what does this shift, this expansiveness, look like in our lives and practice. Is there a way that we can nurture this invitation to the Divine Economy within our practice of faith? There is a practice I have held to for a while now that approaches this dynamic in terms of ‘energy.’
I have noticed that frameworks or categories that are based on our small assumptions or rigid agendas always feel brittle.
I bet you know the feeling: in your heart, you have an encounter where someone says something or acts a certain way, and if you pay attention to the energy within your heart, you can feel a certain brittleness. There is a certain unwillingness even to discuss, a refusal even to be curious. It is fragile, there is something sharp about it. It has an edge to it.
If you pay attention in that moment to what you are feeling and what is going on within those who are holding that position, you will notice that the brittle, small-minded frameworks always need massive amounts of energy to shore them up, to prop them up, because at heart they are illusions. They require constant maintenance.
There is an awareness that, if there is not a constant energy applied to the position, the belief or position would collapse very quickly because it doesn’t have much substance to it at all. It has a reactivity, a sharpness, but not a lot of authentic substance. Spectacle is not substance. Merely being loud is not a marker of substance.
Think about our life right now: many of the economic, social, and political agendas or claims that we hear are based on shallow, egotistical frameworks that always need a certain energy to maintain them–and the energy that is needed manifests as anger and fear. Every time.
It is a tell-tale sign that we have encountered a shallow, egotistical framework when those propping up the claim or agenda always seem angry or fearful. There is a lack of joy, a lack of even smiling. Those seeking to prop up the shallow worldview can only tap into an angry energy that seeks to shore up the illusion they want others to believe in. This should be a warning sign that we have encounterd a shallow agenda. This should cause us to be very aware of what is happening in that moment, and we should do our inner work. Such a practice as this is deep, spiritual work.
Heart work like this is important because this is what it means to practice our faith. This is what St. Paul meant when he said “discern the spirits.” Such a practice moves it from being merely a head or intellectual exercise to one that we can feel in our hearts and bodies. We can grow spiritually when we realize that God’s grace flows freely and wants to transform our lives from the inside out.
God knows that, being humans, we are prone to constructing these frameworks that offer us a sense of certainty that we crave on that shallow level of ourselves. We want to feel in control. We want to maintain a sense of power, and we work so hard building our fences that will maintain our categories of life. This is clean, and this is unclean. This person is worthy, and that person is less worthy–or not noticed at all.
Yet suddenly we hear in our own lives, “So, God has given even to the gentiles…or this person…or that person…the repentance that leads to life.” So God’s Spirit lives in the life of someone I consider unworthy. So my worldview must expand to meet the way God moves in the world around me.
To close, the words in this poem are meant not only for ourselves, but for all human beings who are bearers of God’s Light:
A flash of the divine
But in that one moment,
the one when sunlight poured
through the green beech leaves,
kissing the skin on my arms,
and I heard your voice
as clear as the day:You are a flash of the divine,
a moment of my love made flesh,
my own dream embodied
and daring to walk on the earth
with hands wide open
to catch the falling rain.