Sermons
6th May 2007 - Easter 5
I was talking a little about the advantages of being a priest last week. One thing I forgot to mention was that priests get invited to posh events from time to time. Last week I was at a very posh hotel for canapés and drinks. As the clergy arrived we were led into a huge room, one portion of which was cordoned off for us with a large notice saying ‘private’. As we all started doing what clergy do when they get together (which is to gossip), the rest of the room suddenly started to fill up with young people who were there on a separate event. At this point several waiters rushed over and erected a sort of barrier made from those big ropes that you get in art galleries to stop you getting too near the pictures. The young people, already rather amused to see such an odd collection of people in clerical dress, thought this was very funny indeed and we really began to feel rather like exhibits separated off from the public. When asked what they were doing building the barricade, one of the waiters said, ‘we thought you wouldn’t want to mix with them…they’re estate agents’.
I am happy to say that we managed to take the barriers down both physically and socially and a good time was had by all, each group learning a good deal from the other. You can imagine, perhaps, the estate agents going home pondering on the conversations they had had, and the clergy returning to their vicarages pondering the huge salaries that they would never earn.
We hear a lot in the gospels about the separation of religious things from mundane things, you might almost say the Hebrew religion had specialised in this sort of separation, but in today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles we hear of dispute amongst the very early church with Peter being asked why he has been sharing table fellowship with the Gentiles ‘why did you go to the uncircumcised and eat with them?’, the same attitude as the waiter, ‘we didn’t think you would want to mix with them’.
Religion seems to be something ever in danger of fossilising, of turning from grace into law, from gospel into legislation. And law is attractive, particularly moral law, particularly for busy people. A church that can offer bite-size chunks of moral stricture is almost the model of a modern service industry, the customer turns up and receives a very specific and self-contained set of rules about life delivered with no less than divine authority from the law books written by God, namely the Bible. And these bite-size chunks of law have an ethos of uniformity; this is a product which can be exported and replicated. It is attractive in the same way as MacDonald’s obviously is, it is the same everywhere, it is fast and requires little effort on the part of the consumer, and it is both highly addictive and ultimately unsatisfying.
When religion is driven by the need to formulate moral law, these bite-size moral laws also nearly always create a sense of separateness in the adherent, a sense that they have been drawn into something from which others are excluded and this sense is also backed up with divine sanction and labelled ‘holiness’. Peter’s vision of the great sheet being lowered to him containing not just holy food but every sort of thing you can imagine eating, gives us a very different approach to religion, an approach that suggests God is desirous of inclusion not separation, and desirous of his truth being understood as mediated through grace, not through law.
The Jewish Christians in Jerusalem ask Peter how he could have sat down with Gentiles to eat and Peter explains that his vision has inspired him to cross the line of religious and legal demarcation because God’s love is not going to be restricted by such imaginary lines.
And we should remember that the Jewish Christians in this story ask a real question, they are not being simply mischievous. For a Jew to eat without ritual cleansing or attendance to dietary rules, meant loss of religious identity, loss of holiness, loss of separateness. The question they pose Peter is, how could meals be shared and yet still holy? Peter’s vision gives the answer ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane’. There are all sorts in the sheet lowered down to Peter, not just a selection of holy foods.
And are these stories of the early church simply of historical interest, a record of the dramatic time of change that the incarnation brought in its wake? They are also, I would suggest, powerful cautionary tales. And their warning should be particularly heeded by religious people of any time. They are a warning that religion is hedged about with great perils, particularly the danger of imagining that the answers to religious and moral questions have become miraculously available and fixed, and available in particular to a chosen band amongst the faithful. The warning is that the sort of religious questioning characterised by openness to God, by humility in the face of the awesome questions that religion raises, can quickly die out in the face of imagined certainty. And it is this certainty which is to be most guarded against, not because we are unable to delineate our faith, quite the contrary, but because if religion does not remain open to new influences, to change, to questioning, to doubt, it is in danger of missing the main event. Peter crossed the line in the power of the Spirit and showed that God does not make a distinction between people in the way people themselves so often do. The clergy in the hotel that night had to do the same, it was assumed that we would want to be separate, assumed that the religious and the mundane were somehow incompatible.
So we should pray that against the backdrop of the great truths of the Christian religion, that the actions of the church never become those of separation and segregation, of dividing one set of people from another, of saying one set of people should have a share with us at the table but not another set. For whom would we exclude?
We should pray for religious leadership that is open to God’s continuing actions in history, and when we come across religious leaders, be they bishops or priests or lay people, who tell us they’ve got it all sewn up, who know exactly how God wants us to make our moral arrangements, who know exactly how to interpret the Bible, who dish out bite-size chunks of moral exhortation that exclude whole groups of people on account of their gender, or their sexuality, or their intelligence, or their acceptability as guests at the table, when we come upon this sort of religious leadership then we should be on our guard. One of the greatest calls on us as Christians is the dismantling of barriers. So as you ponder St Peter crossing the line, it might be worth examining which barriers you have in place in your own life, where are the lines you fear to cross? Where do you acquiesce in the construction of separateness? We all have these barriers, they are often quite subtly constructed and difficult to spot, but when you do find them, bring them down, allow God to show you what is holy what is clean, I suspect he often has quite different ideas about that to us.