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Food and Fellowship
Date: 6th May 2007
Preacher: The Revd Canon Jonathan Draper
Most of this past week was spent in sunshine in the Derbyshire countryside at the Hayes Conference Centre attending the Diocesan clergy conference. The Dean and Canon Fletcher also attended while Glyn was left holding the fort here. For some very grievous sin in my youth it fell to me to organise the event. We had three fantastic speakers who in very different ways helped us to think about and be challenged by our faith. My hope is that everyone went home a little better equipped for their ministries and perhaps even a little bit encouraged in them.
But clergy, as you may imagine, are a funny bunch when they get together. There is that old saying that clergy are like manure – best spread thinly on the ground. So even when the music at the conference was dreadful they managed to sing too slowly, and then to say the prayers too loudly as if they were each leading the service. The staff of the conference centre were also impressed by how well they made use of the resources of the bar. Still I hope someone got pictures of His Grace the Archbishop of York dancing with the Prioress of the OHP at the party on the last night. I think Sister Linda may have been spotted dancing too.
The theme of the conference was ‘A Feast for all Nations’ and our speakers addressed the way in which the good news of God’s love is not just for the select few, but is for everyone; not just for those inside the household of faith or within the traditions of western theology and spirituality, but even, perhaps especially, for those outside them. And without stretching things very much, this is the theme of our reading from the Acts of the Apostles too, which I think is among the most important passages in the NT, and I’d like to spend some time this morning exploring it with you.
The story told in the reading doesn’t begin well. Peter has been out and about preaching the good news and has clearly encountered Gentiles – non-Jews – who have heard and responded to the Gospel and accepted it; indeed he has had the troubling experience of seeing for himself first hand the Spirit of God coming upon these Gentiles and their ecstatic response and their baptism into faith. When Peter gets back to headquarters in Jerusalem, the central authorities of the church are clearly and greatly disturbed: ‘you have been visiting men who are uncircumcised and sitting at table with them’. This is no minor matter, but something that touched the intellectual, spiritual and emotional heart of their faith as Jews and as Christians. As Jews the mark of their separation from the world, and of being set apart as the
people of God, was circumcision. As Christians they followed a Jewish Lord who was seen by them as being the Jewish Messiah, the anointed one, the one sent from God to restore the fortunes of Israel and to sit on the throne of David for ever, the Pascal Lamb who takes away the sin of the world in the final Passover of God. To sit at table with those outside the household of God was to deny all of that; it was to make oneself unclean, no longer a part of the spiritual life of the community, no longer acceptable to God, no longer a part of God’s people. To visit these Gentiles was bad enough; to sit at table with them was appalling. Within months of the day of Pentecost, when the Spirit of God had descended on the disciples with a shattering power as the beginning of the new creation, the church born out of that experience was in the deepest kind of fundamental crisis; a crisis which touched the very heart of the Christian vision; a crisis which led to mounting acrimony and bitter and violent verbal exchanges between the two towering figures of the early church, Peter and Paul; a crisis which threatened to kill the infant church at birth. This was a crisis which ultimately led to you and me being a part of this growing church, and which gave birth to synodical processes. This was no spat, and had the British newspapers been around at the time, they would have spoken of bitter division, of schism and the end of the church, of the undermining of Peter’s authority and of crisis meetings in Jerusalem to bring the warring parties together. This was a big deal.
Peter is clearly summoned by the apostles in Jerusalem to explain himself, and he does so in the simplest and most compelling way he could, by telling the story of a dream he had. Had they summoned St Paul, who wasn’t quite on the scene yet, he would, no doubt, have given a full, exhaustive and profound theological explanation for what was going on. Thank God it was Peter they called and who, like Jesus, chose to tell a story to help them understand.
The story he tells is of a dream and what happened when the dream was done. He starts by telling them that he was at prayer in the City of Joppa, which today is encompassed within the modern city of Tel Aviv. This is the port to which Jonah returns after preaching to another group of Gentiles and through which the cedars for Solomon’s temple were brought from Lebanon; it is the place where Peter had already raised Tabitha from the dead. Here, having already done much to spread the gospel, Peter is at prayer; and I suspect he is praying about what to do about these Gentiles who seem to be following Jesus without first following the law of Moses. His prayer is answered in a vision, and the vision is about food.
Now for those of you who think that the OT law is composed mostly of dire warnings about the sinfulness of homosexuality, I hate to disappoint you, but a great deal more of it is simply about food: about what to eat and what not to eat; what not to eat with what; and what foods are absolutely unclean and not to be touched at all. For those of you from this part of the world and who enjoy a bit of black pudding, be warned: if you want to take the OT seriously, you must stop eating it for it is expressly and routinely forbidden.
But this is the tradition out of which the vision comes. Three times a sheet full of animals is lowered towards Peter with the command to kill and eat; three times Peter refuses saying that he has been scrupulous in obeying the laws about food and has never eaten anything which is unclean. The voice, which he recognises as the voice of God, then says to him, ‘It is not for you to call profane what God counts clean’. This must have been very confusing for Peter since as far as he knew, it was God who had declared these animals unclean in the first place. It was there in the law, the law delivered to Moses by God, the law by which God’s people had lived, and for which they’d suffered, for hundreds of years. And yet here it was that God was over-turning the lot, sweeping it aside with a new reality that the love of God in Christ for the world was for everyone, whoever they were, whatever their background. This is a profound moment for the Christian faith, from which there can be no turning back. God’s love is not bound, and what God loves is not unclean, and can be the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. No sooner has Peter had the vision, than he is confronted by a group of Gentiles and commanded by the Spirit to go with them. He speaks to them of the Gospel and almost immediately they are filled with the Holy Spirit, and Peter baptises them. You can almost hear the confusion and awe in his voice as he explains to the assembled leaders in Jerusalem, ‘God gave them no less a gift than he gave us when we came to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. How could I stand in God’s way?’ And you can hear a pin drop when Peter stops speaking until the light dawns for them and they begin to praise God as they realise the import of this: ‘God has granted life-giving repentance to the Gentiles also’.
In our gospel reading, we have a part of the prayer Jesus makes just before he is betrayed and arrested. In it he prays for those who would follow him that they might show in their life together the kind of unity which draws other people to God, a unity founded on love, the kind of love that God has had for him. This, I believe, is meant to be a love which transcends and transforms everything, a love which is not bound, a love which finds expression where ever the Spirit of God is welcomed, wherever the Spirit of God is at work. And like Peter we will find that God is at work in unlikely and alarming places and people, and not just in those who think and act and believe like we do. ‘Those who are not against you are for you’, Jesus said to his disciples: not those who agree with you or support you or think you are the ‘bees knees’, but even those who simply don’t stand in your way are on the side of the angels. Why should we imagine that we have the love of God under control or that we know even anything more than the outer edges of the love of God? Who do we think we are that we can stand in the way of God? The gifts of God’s love in the world are distributed with an alarming and spectacular generosity; our job is to praise God that he has given his gifts so widely and so well.
The crisis in the church brought on by the mission to the gentiles didn’t resolve itself all that quickly or smoothly, and there was at least a generation or two of continuing turmoil in the church over it and what table-fellowship means. Indeed, we are still wrangling over what table-fellowship means even if the presenting issues are different. But the resolution now is going to be the same as it was then: to recognise the fruits borne by those in whom the Spirit of God is at work and to rejoice. Anything less is simply to stand in God’s way.
Amen.