Devotionals by Dr. M. Craig Barnes
The voice said to him again, a second time, "What God has made clean, you must not call profane." --
The voice from heaven breaks into the biblical narrative so infrequently that we really have to pay attention when it does. When Peter called some of God's creation unclean, heaven became so offended it had to say something. Nothing will offend heaven quite like humans becoming more religious than God.
Peter had been taught by his religion to catagorize creation between the clean and the unclean. That's the nature of religion. It systematizes, orders, and makes sense of our lives from the limited knowledge we have of God. It certainly isn't a bad thing, but it has its limits. The greatest limit is that religion simply can't contain God. In other words, sometimes we get it wrong. Anytime the religious start to tell God that something or someone he has created is not holy enough, well, that's one of the times we get it wrong.
This doesn't mean that human creatures can't make some really bad choices that distort the image of God in our lives. But the traces of God always remain on his creatures. Where there is even his trace, there is also his holiness. That holiness has the power to change us until we are again, "what God made clean."
So the call of religion has less to do with figuring out who is unclean, as if that would leave anyone out, and more to do with helping people find the trace of transforming holiness that remains in their lives.
-- Craig Barnes