Acts 11:17
If then God gave them the same gift he gave to us when we came to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to be able to hinder God?
There is a great villain line from one of my favorite movies of all time The Incredibles. Syndrome, the villain, lays out his plan for world domination to our hero, Mr. Incredible. Then he drops this line like a microphone…"I'll sell my inventions so that everyone can be superheroes. Everyone can be super! And when everyone's super [laughs maniacally] no one will be." The superheros had something that Syndrome wanted but didn't have. So he set out to make the superheroes powers irrelevant.
In today's readings we find the Jews jealous that Peter is sharing Christ with the gentiles. They thought they had a superpower, the grace of God, and they were right. But they were afraid that if everyone had what made them special they wouldn't be special anymore. Fortunately for us that is not the way that God's grace works. There is more than enough grace for everyone and it's up to us to share that grace. I think sometimes we get trapped in the same misconception the Jews had. We think that God's grace is good enough for the "church" but not good enough for the convict, or the homeless, or our enemy. Our challenge today is to share the superpower of God's grace with everyone we meet.
