Acts 11:1-18; John 13:34-35
Who do you identify with? Who are the people you feel you belong with? For most of us it starts with family. That may be a big group of extended family, aunts and uncles and cousins, or just the people we live with. It may be our neighbours – the people of our village. It may be the people we socialise with – people from church or from the pub or from our interests. It doesn’t need to be people we meet in person, it could be our Facebook groups or the people who read the same paper or vote the same way. Human beings are tribal – we need to belong. If someone asks you where are you from, do you say you come from Shropshire, or England, or the UK? It’s one of the things that we talk about when we meet someone for the first time, just a normal way of establishing contact, making connections.
For a Jewish person of Jesus’ time, identify was very clearly defined by holiness laws. These were derived from the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, and dictated every detail of daily life. They determined how people related to each other and how they should behave towards those who were not Jewish. The purpose of the laws was to shape lives that were holy, lived to the glory of God so that the whole world might be drawn to him. But in practice they had become a way of tightly defining who was acceptable and welcome, and who was unclean,and therefore outside of God’s love.
Jesus came offering a radically different vision of God’s love. He broke the purity rules again and again – he touched the sick, he healed on the Sabbath, he ate with sinners, he talked to women, he wasn’t frightened of blood or the dead! In today’s gospel reading he gives us a new commandment, that we love one another. We are to be known as his followers, not by the strict laws that we keep, but by the love that we share.
This gave the early church an enormous challenge – how were they supposed to respond to gentiles, those who were not inheritors of God’s promise to Abraham? And here, Jesus had not given them specific instructions – they had to work it out for themselves, guided by the work of the Holy Spirit. It might seem obvious to us, centuries later! But Peter’s vision was as radical for the early church as Jesus’ taboo busting had been. As he saw this sheet being lowered from the sky, he would have been filled with instinctive revulsion. Maybe our equivalent would be being invited to eat dogs, or insects. He would have felt sick at the very thought. It’s not a cosy sort of vision! Peter would have been deeply upset – the Spirit is inviting him to contemplate the unacceptable, something that would have made him unclean, outside of God’s love himself!
Because God is wise to our human nature, this vision in all its horror is immediately followed by a practical demonstration of its application. A man from Caesarea, not a Jew, Knocks at the door and says he has been sent from God with a request that Peter comes to his house. Even entering a gentile’s house was considered unclean – but Peter does not fail at the first hurdle and he goes. Imagine how he felt when he experienced the Holy Spirit fall on that household just as it had on the day of Pentecost – tongues of flame, a great wind, and an eruption of praise of God in new languages, the whole works! I wonder if for a moment he thought ‘this isn’t fair! We are Jesus’ special followers! How come these outsiders are being treated to the same Holy Spirit, when they have only just heard about Jesus?’ But he is moved by that same Spirit to welcome them, to live out the message of his vision, and to see that God is redefining the mission of the church.
Just as well, otherwise we would not have heard the good news! But that challenge, to see who God is welcoming, is alive for us today. We too need to go beyond our comfortable identity and see God at work in people we have written off. It is not just something that only affected the early church – in our ever more divisive world we need to follow Jesus’ radical example and make his love visible over all the barriers we have erected.
There are so many ways in which our world is polarising, and separating into groups with diametrically opposed views. Following Jesus doesn’t mean that we are obliged to join one camp over another – church attendance doesn’t determine our political allegiance. It’s more fundamental than that. Following Jesus means that we love one another! We don’t label anyone unclean, other, unacceptable whatever their creed or opinions or lifestyle. This is seriously uncomfortable!
Perhaps it’s most obvious if we think of some of the big players in today’s world. People we love to hate – Putin, or Trump, whoever you are horrified by. We see them as cardboard cut-outs, not as God sees them. We don’t want to acknowledge that there is a real person inside there, wielding all that power but still needing to know love and forgiveness. We generalise that hatred to their followers – we fail to see the humanity in people whose views are alien to ours. We don’t have to accept their views, but we do need to go on seeing them as children of God, however much we want to reject them.
It’s nothing to do with being liberal or conservative. Loving each other doesn’t mean that anything goes, or abandoning rules which keep us safe, or trying to order society in any particular shape. It means listening to each other, valuing each other, rejecting labels and definitions of identity that demonize other people. I was deeply saddened by Sir Kier Starmer’swords when he said ‘we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.’ Irrespective of our views on immigration, we cannot label our neighbours as strangers – we personally have to do something about it. In Hebrews it tells us “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.”
Increasingly, as our world fractures along party lines, we are being challenged to live out Jesus’ radical example – not to be woke, but to be loving. To reject the idea that anyone is less than human, outside of God’s love, whether they are a politician or a bum on the street. To go beyond our own tribe, the people we are comfortable with, and reach out to those we disagree with, or disapprove of. Even if that reaching out is as simple as smiling at the Big Issue seller, or thinking of a person we disagree with as someone with a family or ordinary health issues, a real person.
Can I invite you now to hold in your imagination someone you have recently argued with? Someone whose views you really don’t share? Ask God to show you how he loves that person, irrespective of their views. Now think of a person whose lifestyle makes you uncomfortable, and again ask God to show you what he is doing in their life. If there is anything practical that God is inviting you to do, commit now to following through. We rejoice that there is no one God has abandoned, no one who is outside of his love – and that of course includes each one of us! Amen
Revd Emma Phillips