Easter 5 - Year C

Acts 11.1-18; Revelation 21.1-6; John 13.31-35

Those of you who receive the Cathedral notices on email may have seen that the Faith and Growth group here at the Cathedral have this month been recommending a podcast to listen to. It’s called Sacred, and is a series of interviews by Elizabeth Oldfield of people from across a wide spectrum of public life. She’s interested in building understanding, a sense of common ground, across the divisions and rancorous arguments of our present time. Her way in to helping us understand something of what animates and characterises her interviewees is to first ask them what they consider sacred. What is of most, and fundamental, importance to them. It’s a question I invite you to ponder – what is sacred to you? She often clarifies the question – which elicits a variety of different answers – by remarking that you can begin to tell what is sacred to you, by the visceral reaction you get when it is transgressed; the sense of shock, anger, disgust that is provoked when what you hold sacred is either dismissed or belittled.

I was reminded of that way of framing the matter by the story that Peter tells to the church in Jerusalem that we heard in our first reading. We have reached chapter 11 of the book of Acts. Chapter 9 recounted the conversion of Saul, become Paul. And the whole of chapter 10 is the extraordinary story of the Roman centurion, Cornelius, who in a vision is told to send men to Joppa and fetch a man called Peter. Meanwhile Peter is having the unsettling vision that he recounts again here in chapter 11 – of a sheet being lowered from heaven full of animals considered by Peter to be unclean to eat. And he is told to, ‘Get up, kill and eat.’ When he protests that he has never eaten anything unclean, he is told, ‘What God has made clean, you must never call profane.’ And at that moment the men sent by Cornelius arrive, Peter is persuaded to return with them, and ‘make no distinction between them and us;’ he is met by Cornelius, upon who the Spirit also comes, and Cornelius and his whole household are baptised.

This all happens after Saul’s conversion but crucially before Paul comes on the scene. Here is the moment when Christianity begins its journey into its universal faith, and its break from Judaism. Paul will, famously, take that mission to the Gentiles and run with it; but here is the start.

And at the heart of this moment, Peter is asked to partake in something he previously felt to be beyond the pale; what he previously thought sacred is undone by the Spirit. There is here a crossing of a fundamental taboo, something that goes to the heart of how Peter understood his identity is put aside; and all in the name of God.

The medieval mystic, Mechtild of Magdeburg wrote: ‘The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw and knew I saw all things in God and God in all things.’

In response to our reading from Acts, we read Psalm 148 – a wonderful psalm of praise that names God in all things:
Praise the Lord from the earth, you sea-monsters and all deeps;
fire and hail, snow and fog, tempestuous wind, doing God’s will;
mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars;
wild beasts and all cattle, creeping things and wingèd birds.
Sovereigns of the earth and all peoples, princes and all rulers of the world;
young men and young women, old and young together.
Praise, O praise the name of the Lord.

It’s a psalm that makes the implicit claim that God is in all things and all things are in God. And it is fundamental to the Jewish faith that Peter shares, that God is the one true God of all the earth. That fundamental belief exists alongside, and is expressed in, the sense of the chosen-ness of the people of Israel. That the one true God has entered into a special relationship with this one people. That people have been chosen to live in covenant, and through that bring light, display that Lordship and presence of God, by being a blessing to all. And that light and blessing is known by the Jewish people through living the covenant; marked by circumcision, maintaining a distinctive practice of dietary and other laws. Peter is steeped in that covenant relationship; a relationship that has continued to sustain and animate Judaism to this day.
But this is the moment when Christianity begins to emerge as something distinct to Judaism, as something radically other than a reforming movement within Judaism. For Peter is asked by the Spirit to relativise, put into fresh perspective, the markers that have separated the people of God from everyone else. In our reading it is the circumcised – those whose very flesh carries the mark of distinctiveness - who question Peter and what he has been up to. And he can only testify to the work of the Holy Spirit to say that he has been called to go beyond what he previously thought was the boundary marking the sacred from the profane.

If the distinctiveness of Judaism is seen in its ability to endure incredible hardship, through faith in God’s covenant and the shared practice that flows from that, then the distinctiveness of Christianity is different, for there is no one practice that sustains the church. You can argue that it is a set of beliefs that characterises Christianity– beliefs expressed in the Nicene Creed that we will shortly say. Or perhaps it’s seen in the communion that we will shortly share - but that is practiced in a multitude of different ways and with different emphases across the universal church. Perhaps what most endures is Christianity’s ability to re-invent itself. That whenever it threatens to harden into particular forms of practice, the life, death and Spirit of the Risen Jesus are encountered anew; what was formerly thought to be sacred is broken open. And, above all, that breaking open happens when God is revealed to be present in the face of those previously thought to be strangers. And strangers now are friends.

As Peter said, ‘If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?’ The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us.

Alleluia. Christ is risen.