When Religion Doesn’t Fit
What Peter’s strange rooftop vision teaches us about growing beyond the boxes we build.
Lent is a season of disruption.
A season where the assumptions we live by are gently, and sometimes painfully, challenged. We enter these forty days expecting reflection, repentance, and renewal… yet often what we encounter is something far less comfortable.
We encounter a God who refuses to stay inside the boxes we have built.
Today’s reflection explores one of the most disorienting moments in the early Church, Peter’s rooftop vision, and what happens when faith outgrows the framework that once held it.
There’s a story in the Bible about a man named Peter who falls into a trance. Like you do.
But it isn’t your ordinary household trance. In this one, Peter sees heaven open and a sheet lowered to the earth. On it are all kinds of animals; the writer is careful to mention the four-footed kind, along with reptiles and birds.
It’s a vivid, strange and almost reads like a feature film opening.
Then he hears a voice.
“Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.”
Peter protests, of course, he’s that kind of guy.
“I’ve never eaten anything impure!”
In today’s terms, you can almost hear him say, “I’ve been good, don’t even tempt me”
The voice responds,
“Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”
This happens three times. Then the sheet is whisked away, and Peter is left blinking into the bright Mediterranean light, trying to make sense of what just happened.
(Nerdy fun fact: the Greek word for “trance” here is ekstasis — the root of our English word ecstasy.)
