Preached at Holy Cross, Seend
Readings – Acts 11. 1-18; John 13. 31-35
“But I said, ‘Not so, Lord: for nothing common or unclean hath at any time entered into my mouth.’”
Do you like eating lizards? Will you go home from church and enjoy tucking into an iguana steak for your Sunday lunch? Or will you perhaps, to accompany a salad in this warm weather, rustle up a quick chameleon quiche?
Your Lunch? © Gerry Lynch, 30 November 2006, Curaçao.
I’m guessing that most of you aren’t actually that into lizard meat. Therefore if I told you that not eating lizards was an essential criterion of getting into heaven, you wouldn’t exactly lose sleep about it.
That’s one of the problems with rules. It’s easy to keep rules that we would never in any circumstances want to break. It’s easy to be enthusiastic about rules we have no intentions of breaking being enforced on others, especially people we don’t like—even as we try to wriggle out of the rules we don’t enjoy following ourselves.
Of course we need rules. How many of us, if we’re being honest, would pay our taxes on full and on time every year if we didn’t know that HMRC would fine us otherwise? How many more deaths were there on the road when drink driving laws were laxer and less rigidly enforced?
But no set of rules can match the complexity of real life. After every major sporting event, we see fans of one team complaining about bad refereeing decisions that everyone else thinks were fair. I believe Man City fans were upset at the referee after they lost the FA Cup Final yesterday. A football match is a lot simpler than life. Every set of rules can be interpreted in different ways. They all also contain plenty of loopholes. We are all inclined to interpret the rules to suit ourselves, and see what we want to see. In that light, it should be no surprise that we all know people who are very firm about sticking to the rules and making sure other people do too, but are also unkind and selfish, perhaps even cruel.
It’s far easier to keep a set of rules than to live a truly good life. It’s hardest of all to know when justice or decency demands that you break one of the rules, even at risk to your reputation, your liberty, and even your safety. We should never bear false witness—but what if a friend’s abusive husband is at door and we’re hiding her in the attic? We should honour our father and mother, say the Ten Commandments, and rightly so—most of the time. But what if our father is a bully and our mother his enabler? Rules can never be the whole story of leading a good life.
One of the main social functions of religion has, historically, been to police boundaries, often in a way that is healthy for societies. Yet we all know that can easily descend into tribalism – who is “us” and who is “them”. Scripture is clear that all human beings are God’s children, made in His image and likeness.
Peter had a puzzling vision where God seemed to tell him to break the Jewish laws on what types of meat were forbidden to eat. Soon afterwards he was sent to a man named Cornelius, who was not a Jew, and who had himself had a strange vision. Peter broke the rules on associating with unbelievers to visit Cornelius at home, and soon God made clear through the Holy Spirit that Cornelius and his friends were to be welcomed as full members of the Church. Christianity had taken its first step towards becoming a faith that could truly embrace people of all cultures and nationalities.
Our Gospel reading this morning is the start of Jesus’ series of speeches given to His closest followers at the Last Supper, often called the “Farwell Discourse”, His final instructions to those closest to Him.
In this introduction, Christ calls the apostles “little children”. It’s easy to miss that strange phrase. Stranger still when we remember that soon afterwards, in the same series of speeches, He will tell the same apostles that they are no longer His servants, but His friends, because now He has passed on to them everything of significance He received from the Father.
How do we reconcile all this? Is there a sense in which the apostles were children, and are we still so today? I think there is. A good parent gives their children freedom, the appropriate amount of freedom for their stage of development. The Garden of Eden myth is about how the human race went beyond the limits our heavenly father set for our healthy development and so caused a rupture in our relationship with God and His creation. The Old Testament is the story of God’s faithfulness to His people even as time and again they proved themselves unwilling or unable to stick to the rules God gave them so they could flourish, and how they often suffered as a result. The modern world is that story writ large, with humanity as prone to selfishness and short-sightedness as ever even as we develop ever more powerful technologies which snap the social bonds between us and threaten our environment. We are like teenagers who’ve stolen Dad’s car keys after downing half a bottle of his best whiskey.
Jesus came on a rescue mission, to heal the rift that humanity opened by exceeding God-given limits. Today’s Gospel reading is set in the hours before that rescue mission would reach its final objective on the Cross. Christ didn’t give us a new and updated set of rules, but instead gave His life to make up for our inability to keep any set of rules in a truly just and decent way.
At our worst, we still behave like unruly children, yet the freedom that we snatched in Eden has in Christ been regranted by God to us as friends, His partners in redeeming the cosmos, made in His image and likeness.
The freedom God gives us is frightening. It’s so much easier to have some simple rules to follow. It’s comforting to think that as long as we don’t tell lies, murder anyone, or eat lizards, we’re in God’s good books and on our way to heaven. Freedom is a more challenging thing, with more grey areas than the Laws of football. Yet that freedom is also a large part of what makes us like God.
At the same time, we do still need rules, and we need to ask how to discern where the legitimate limits to Christian freedom lie. In the Anglican tradition, it has always been understood that this emerges from patient engagement with the interaction of three sources of God’s revelation. One is the Bible, the second is the tradition of the Church over two thousand years, and the last is our God-given reason. Rest too heavily on the Bible, and we kill the Spirit with dead letters; rest too heavily on tradition, and we become stale and stagnant; rest too heavily on our own reason, and we soon discover that it becomes unreasonable, prone to delusions and departing from the Christian tradition entirely.
Applying this method will still leave Christians with plenty to disagree about. But we shouldn’t necessarily fear this. Our reading from Acts is about one of the many such disagreements that convulsed the early Church as bitterly as divisions over same-sex marriage do today.
As the Church struggles with the latest episode in its perpetual divisions over the limits of freedom, we should remember the rule with which today’s Gospel reading concludes – Christ’s command that we love one another. Therefore, our disagreements should also be in love. None of us, after all, is very good at keeping the rules or Jesus wouldn’t have had to come to save us.
Now thanks be to God the Father, who has given us the victory through Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Top image—another critter of Curaçao. © Gerry Lynch, 1 December 2006.
