A pig's liver kept a man's body running for five days

Acts 10:15A voice came to him again the second time, "What God has cleansed, you must not call unclean."

On May 29, doctors in Nanning, China did something that had never been done before. They put two pig kidneys and a whole pig liver into the same human body. The recipient was a 53-year-old man whose brain had already died. His family gave permission. The pig had been genetically edited in six places. Within nineteen hours, the liver was making bile. The kidneys were filtering waste. The whole arrangement held for nearly five days.

Roughly 100,000 people sit on the U.S. transplant waiting list. About a dozen die every day.

Peter, on a rooftop in Joppa, was hungry and saw a vision. A sheet came down full of every animal a Jewish fisherman had been raised to refuse. Pigs especially. A voice told him to eat. He said no. The voice answered: what God has cleansed, you must not call common. It went on like that three times.

The vision was not really about lunch. It sent Peter down the stairs and into the house of a Roman centurion, where the same question of clean and unclean had to be asked about a human being instead of a meal.

Two thousand years later, a pig's liver runs inside a human chest for five days. The line on the rooftop sounded strange to Peter. It sounds strange to us. It also keeps turning out to be where the doors open.