When I was in high school, we had a school assembly featuring Commodore Grace Hopper, who at the time was the highest-ranking woman in the United States Navy. 

She was also the second-oldest person still on active duty.

Admiral Rickover, she explained, was sixth months older. 

There’s a lot I still remember about that talk.

What I want to mention today is a piece of advice she gave us right near the end of it. 

In one of her final stories for us, she offered this moral: “Sometimes, it’s easier to apologize after the fact than it is to ask permission.”

I love that. 

I love it, even though I, myself, am more of a “permission” person and always have been.

But we all know it’s true. 

Seeking permission can get you into weird territory pretty quickly, where the lines blur between care and fear, foresight and hindsight, possibility and probability, bridges and walls. 

I suspect Peter knew it, too.

In any case, he had plenty of time to think about it on the ride back home from Joppa.

The black Town Car pulled up to the centurion’s house, and the driver knocked on the door with a note from the main office. 

“We need to see you, Peter. Now.”

And off he went. 

Because you didn’t just go spend the weekend at a centurion’s house. 

You didn’t break bread at the table together—heck, you didn’t even modestly excuse yourself and work off a plate while standing in the kitchen.

When it came to eating faithfully, the guidelines they all knew weren’t just about the ingredients.  They had counsel about the pots, pans, and plates, too. 

And for sure, you didn’t start talking about Jesus. 

You had no idea who these people were.

But this is what Peter had gone and done. 

Had he thought about sending an email or a text before he went?

If he had, it was just as well that he didn’t. 

They would never have gone for it. 

That said, it’s important to note that, while Peter had failed? neglected? refused? to ask permission, he also doesn’t come before the apostles to apologize. 

Not exactly.

In fact, he comes to preach. 

He comes to tell them about this newest thing that God has done. 

“Who was I, that I could hinder God?” he asks. (v. 17)

And it’s this question that I want to pause over for a bit.

“Who was I, that I could hinder God?”

“Whose permission was I supposed to get?” might be another way to ask it.    

Or “Where am I supposed to send my apology and for what?”

Because the fact is, God has broken him open yet again, and he needs to tell them about it.[1]

He had already seen so much—miracles and healings and appearances behind locked doors and next to a bonfire on the seashore and even Jesus finally ascending into the heavens. 

He’d been there for so much.  They all had. 

In a way, you could see how those experiences might turn anyone into a bit of a hard nut to crack. 

And it’s true that their faith has gotten tougher in a good way, like bare feet do in the summertime, or like a broken bone grows back stronger at the break than it was before. 

But the thing about Jesus was his ability to break you open, not once, but time after time…in face after face, and encounter after encounter. 

Maybe at a certain point, after enough time…enough faces…enough encounters, you’d seen what you needed to see in order to believe. 

You could look up in the sky and think of Jesus up there, sitting on his throne now, looking back down.  [MG: look up with a tentative wave.]

Not Peter. 

For Peter, the real sign that Jesus is alive is that he keeps on breaking people open, and to see it…to be part of it… keeps on breaking Peter open all over again. 

So then, there’s his question: “Who is he, that he could hinder God?”

In his time with Jesus, Peter saw so many broken hearts transformed into hearts broken open.

What he sees now is the Holy Spirit doing that same work of opening, but now it’s not just among the sick and sad or people with not much to lose…people waiting on being saved. 

Now God is breaking open people from different families, different faiths, different nations, different stories – people with no ties to chosenness, at least as any of the apostles had been raised to understand it. 

It’s hard to overstate how important this is. 

Another theologian, James Alison, uses a different metaphor, suggesting that faith is “what enables you to be stretched beyond the familiarity of things.”[2]

Feelings, he suggests, even religious ones, can have the capacity to distract us, for they assure us that what we’re experiencing is not all that different, not really all that challenging after all…not likely to break us. 

But in faith, the God we encounter in the utterly unfamiliar “nudges you into daring to be something rather more than you thought you were.”

This is what is happening to Peter. 

In being broken open, he is nudged into a new sort of daring.

This is especially important for us to remember now.

We also contend with the “cult of the familiar” in our own ways and may feel the steady pull of lives that neither ask permission or demand much apology. 

So many expressions of Christian conviction try to keep us coloring within the lines.

But that’s not how it works when you get broken open or “stretched beyond the familiarity of things.”

You find yourself haunted by an image from a news story about something happening far away. 

You sit with a child who’s made a mistake of some kind and is sinking under the terrible weight of their own shame and embarrassment.

You receive overwhelming gratitude for something not so hard for you to offer and realize how easily you might have done so much earlier. 

Or you learn to love someone else with that kind of love where hearts break and heal and break again and heal again, not out of drama but out of commitment in the face of life, and you wonder how the world might be if everyone got to be loved like that.

This is what it is to be broken open.

And just as surely as Jesus told us to look for him in the breaking of bread, He is to be found alive and at work wherever our lives are broken open. 

Don’t wait for permission to follow him there. 

Don’t apologize for what you learn there.

Dare to be something rather more than you thought you were. 

In a time of walls, may it build a bridge. 

Amen. 

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[1] “Broken open” is a phrase also from Jennings’ commentary on Acts. 

[2] James Alison, Jesus The Forgiving Victim: Listening for the Unheard Voice, 220.