Acts 10:27-28
27 Talking with him, Peter went inside and found a large gathering of people. 28 He said to them: “You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with a Gentile or visit him. But God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean.”

In this passage, Peter is addressing the large group of people that have gathered at the house of a man named Cornelius, who is “God-fearing” yet not Jewish–in other words, a Gentile. In this time period, Gentiles and Jews just didn’t mix, for cultural and traditional reasons such as the one Peter mentions here. In fact, many Jews of the day considered Gentiles just as heathen as complete nonbelievers. So it was no wonder, when Cornelius sent for Peter to come, that people came to see what would happen–it was quite a spectacle indeed.

But Peter by this time is not a Jew any longer himself, but a Christian–a follower of Christ, who has died and risen again. And he’s experienced so much, not only walking with Jesus but preaching Jesus’ message; he knows now that Jesus is the Savior of all, not just the Jews. In short, he knows that the cultural and traditional divide between Jews and Gentiles is merely human law, and not God’s. Tradition dictates that Peter can only visit, help, and witness to certain folk; Jesus showed him that everyone could be visited, helped, and witnessed to.

This passage is a teaching moment for the whole crowd–no longer is religion just for a few privileged people, but for anyone who believes. This inclusiveness and accessibility by all was what set Christianity apart from Judaism and other established religions right from the start. Yet even today, the modern Christian church struggles with accepting quite all of the curious and the faithful. Certain people are deemed “not good enough to go to OUR church,” and so they are never witnessed to. Or, sometimes believers are discouraged from coming back to a church because they get the message “you’re not OUR kind of people.”

These are messages we must eradicate from our minds if we are to serve God purely. God made clear that as long as a person believes in Him and accepts Jesus’ sacrifice, they are saved; who then are we to judge them “unfit” to attend our churches, or “not good enough” to visit us or for us to visit them? We humans divide ourselves up like this all the time, often for reasons of “tradition,” but tradition doesn’t always come from God. Dividing humanity up along the lines of socioeconomic status, political parties, races and ethnicities, cultures, genders, etc. does nothing except to splinter the church apart, and keep us from witnessing to and prayerfully serving anyone whom God has put in our path.

So, this is our challenge as Christians, then: to aid and witness to anyone who needs God and needs our help, no matter if they are unwashed, no matter if they are poor or of a different race, no matter if we know their past legal history, etc. As Peter says here, “God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean;” that goes for us, too.