Fifth Sunday of Easter, 24 April 2016
Queen Camel Together at Ten, West Camel Methodist Church
Would you go on a picnic with Peter? Look at the food he he laid out on his picnic blanket: four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air..... Would you eat any of those?
Now you probably know that Peter's people the Jews had very strict food laws, then, as they still do now. But you know, it's not just the Jewish people who have strict food laws, it's us too. It's not just the Jewish people who have very clear ideas about what food is clean and what food is unclean, what food is 'ours' and what food is 'foreign muck' which we wouldn't touch even if our life depended on it because we'd feel contaminated by it. Think of the foods which some other people eat, but you would definitely not eat: frog's legs, monkey's brains, tripe perhaps - and consider the reason why you'd not eat them.
The reason why we’d not eat these funny foods is that we are all guided by food 'laws' - unwritten laws, mostly, instinctive, intuitive but very firm ideas about what is clean and what is profane. Laws which can change as society changes, over time, but strong influences on us all the time.
Our modern-day obsession with purity, with cleanliness, tied in with health and safety, is just as strict and restrictive as the cleanliness obsessions of Peter's day. In the UK each year we throw away 8.3 million tonnes of household food, most of which could have been eaten [2]. Sell by dates have a lot to do with this. We consider something unclean now, and feel unable to eat it, if it's past its sell by or use by date. Even though it is actually still perfectly edible.
If Peter was around today and his picnic menu included some bread and butter and some ham which were each just over their use-by date, and some very strong smelling cheese well past its sell-by date, would you eat a sandwich with him?
Some of us would, but others might turn up our noses, say politely, 'no thanks', go home and gossip or make jokes about Peter's horrible picnic food. Even gossip or make jokes about the people who had said yes and eaten with him.
Some time ago I worked in a hostel for homeless people and we fed these folks on sandwiches which were each day donated from a large supermarket... sandwiches which had just passed their sell-by date. Interesting to think about the values of that supermarket: they wouldn't let their customers eat that food (to them, it would be unclean), but they would pass it on to homeless people (who perhaps the supermarket thought were unclean anyway, so it didn't matter that they ate it).
What you eat is sometimes used as a form of insult towards you. For example some people call Asian people 'Bug-Eaters' as many Asians eat bugs such as locusts and grasshoppers. Germans call Italians 'cat eaters'. If you’re from Wigan you’re a ‘pie-eater’. (‘What do you call a balanced diet in Wigan? A pie in both hands’). And so on. [3] All of this might help us to understand the struggle that Peter was having in his head and in his heart about whether or not he should be eating Gentile food.
Remember that in the early years, Christianity was a Jewish faith. It took a good deal of teaching from Jesus to make his fellow-Jews realise that his message - of the coming of the kingdom of God - wasn't just for people like them. It was for everyone. Even Gentiles.
So when the Jewish Christian leaders of the Jesus People began to see Gentiles come to faith, it was a tremendous challenge to them. They had to change so many of their ideas about these other people. They had to learn to share their faith with them. And in many ways even more challenging - they had to learn to share their food with them. They had to learn to eat their food.
So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticised him, saying, 'Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?' Peter explained to them the dream that God had given him, in which God asked him to prepare a meal from food that he wouldn't normally touch. That tasty selection of four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. It was rather like you or me being asked to cook monkey's brains. Or eat a breakfast in that homeless hostel with food all past its sell-by date.
Peter refused at first saying, "[No], Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth." He didn’t want to have to try eating 'foreign muck'. But God insisted, "What God has made clean, you must not call profane."
Then Peter realised the significance of what God was saying. Because he knew that the food wasn't the real issue. The real issue was the challenge of having to accept that in God’s eyes, people of a different culture were clean, and pure, and good, and loved, and that he, Peter, was called to open his arms and share his faith - and his table - with them.
God told Peter not to call anyone profane or impure. At that moment Peter realised something profound about the kingdom he was in, the subversive upside-down Kingdom of Heaven, a kingdom in which ‘there are, in fact, no impure or profane people, where not even disgusting people consider themselves disgusting, [a kingdom] where we have learnt to disbelieve, and to help them to disbelieve, in their own repugnancy’. [4]
If we are living with a foot in both kingdoms - the United Kingdom and the Kingdom of Heaven - then we are called to unlearn our habit of calling others profane or impure.
If we are living with a foot in both kingdoms - the United Kingdom and the Kingdom of Heaven - then we are called to help those who are different from us to see themselves as equally invited with us to receive the grace of God, inheritors with us of his Kingdom. We are called to help people we may once called 'disgusting', to start to disbelieve that.
It's a wonderful calling and it's a sign of God at work in the world. It’s one way we can obey the ‘new commandment’ which Jesus gave his followers, ‘Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.' This new commandment means unconditional love for all people. Love, with no questions asked. Love, for people who may look differently, talk differently, pray differently, and even more noticeably, eat differently - than us.
Where do we see such signs that the Kingdom of Heaven is breaking into our world? Perhaps in one of the biggest headline stories of the past week - Pope Francis’ visiting the 50,000 refugees and migrants stranded in Greece, and taking a dozen of them into his Vatican home. A Vatican spokesman described this symbolic act as a ‘gesture of welcome’. As many commentators noted, this was also an expression of ‘gesture politics of the most powerful kind, designed to discomfort a continent that has lost sight of its core values’, where bigotry, nationalism and xenophobia are on the rise. [5]
You may have heard it reported that the Pope said that every Catholic parish should take in a refugee family. And hearing that, maybe you feel grateful that you’re not a Catholic. Or maybe you’re inspired to respond positively to this invitation to embrace the ‘other’, to open your arms and share your faith - and your food - with them.
How good it is to see signs that the Kingdom of Heaven is breaking into our world. It’s common knowledge that the most popular meals in Britain today originated in foreign lands: fish and chips is believed to have been brought over here by the French and the Jews at the end of the 19th century; and curry, now the UK's most popular meal, with its Indian origins.
When these foods first started to appear over here a lot of people would have avoided them, would have said they were bad, dirty, offensive... not English, not Christian... But we live in more enlightened times today; the Kingdom is coming; our diet has been enriched by the vast array of ethnic foods available in our shops and restaurants, from Indian and Italian to Chinese and Thai. Oh, and many people’s favourite, from the USA, Big Mac and Fries.
No longer seen as smelly, dirty, nasty 'foreign muck'. No longer regarded as sacrilegious, because it was the food of people of other religions than 'ours'. Gradually people came to accept these exotic foods, and now, most of us love them.
And loving their foods is a positive step towards loving people who are different, accepting who they are and what they do and what they eat. Such love - is a joyful thing. It’s a sign of the Kingdom of Heaven. Today, Jesus once again invites us to the table in which we all share his bread and all drink from his cup. No longer profaned but loved. And learning how to no longer profane others but to love them - unconditionally - instead.
Notes
[1] Sermon based on my previous outings on this subject, Acts 11: Peter's Funny Picnic, 28/4/2013, On eating rats and loving one another, 6/5/2007, and Acts 11 - On Peter’s Picnic, 2/5/2010.
[2] lovefoodhatewaste.com website.
[3] Racial slurs taken from The Racial Slur Database. Handle with care.
[4] James Alison, Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination, Crossroads, 1996, p.102
[5] Ian Birrell, Pope’s humanity puts us to shame, inews.co.uk, 18 April 2016.
Comments