Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on Acts 11:1-18 and John 13:31-35.
The Old Testament book of Leviticus lays out a number of laws about cleanness and uncleanness. Certain foods are proscribed, like pork and shellfish. There are rules about how you butcher animals. There are rules about leprosy, which was kind of a catch-all term for skin diseases. There are rules about women. There are rules about foreigners. Rules, rules, rules.
All those rules are kind of hard to keep track of precisely, so over the centuries, rabbis constructed a fence around the Law. For example, there is a verse saying that it’s wrong to boil meat in the animal’s mother’s milk. Why, I don’t know. The problem is, all the milk from the herd gets mixed together. So to be careful, rabbis said, Just don’t boil any meat in any milk. And just to be certain, don’t allow any dairy products to touch any pots or pans that you use to cook meat.
They extended this fence to exclude people. Table fellowship is an essential part of being in a community. Hospitality is kind of important in American culture, but really critical in Middle Eastern culture, and was even more so in the first century. Who you shared the table with indicated who you valued as part of your community. I have heard it said that the entirety of Paul’s corpus of letters wrestles with one essential question: Should Jews and Greeks eat together?
One argument went that keeping separate from each other enabled Jews to maintain their unique identity. Perhaps that’s why Jews don’t eat pork—to establish that they are different from the other people who live in that region. Eating separately also ensured that no unclean food was consumed and no unclean people came into contact with Jews who were trying to maintain their ritual purity.
In the early days of Christianity, the predominant attitude was that the followers of Christ’s Way were fundamentally Jews first. Simon Peter held that position. He was part of the “circumcision party,” that is, the faction within the movement that believed in maintaining all of the Jewish laws and customs. Circumcision was the physical sign that a man was Jewish. Like most of the early Christians, Peter believed that all followers of Jesus needed to first become Jews by being circumcised, then be baptized, then keep all of the Law.
One day, he had a vision. It’s perhaps a bit difficult for us to imagine a vision of ritually unclean animals, but maybe we can think about foods that are acceptable in other cultures but that we don’t eat. That’s kind of what the ritual purity code was about—only eating the things that Jews eat. Peter has a vision of foods that were repulsive to him, but God tells him that all things are blessed by God, and what God has blessed, Peter should accept. He wakes from the vision of unclean foods and is led to unclean people. Cornelius and his Gentile household would have been considered unclean people that a good Law-observing Jew like Peter should not associate with, let alone visit in their own house. Yet God leads Peter to realize that all things are blessed by God. The gift of God’s love is not meant just for certain people who follow certain rules, but for everyone.
Now, I have not personally had any visions like Peter’s. Some people claim that they have, and others claim to have at least sensed God’s message in some way. We need to be careful in those situations. On the one hand, yes, I believe that God is still speaking to us. The United Church of Christ, one of our sibling denominations, uses a big comma as one of their key symbols to remind them and all of us that God has not stopped revealing herself to us. On the other hand, some people claim to have heard God saying something that is conveniently aligned with their own views. Kind of like the huckster preachers who claim that God is calling you to send them money. As Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, “Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good.”
How are we to know what is good? How can we know whether a prophecy or other spiritual leading is from God or Satan? How can we know whether we are being led towards or away from the divine? Well, we can test it. The test is this: Jesus was the clearest revelation of God’s innate character. Is the prophecy aligned with Jesus’s main message?
In today’s Gospel reading, we hear the opening paragraph of Jesus’s farewell address to his disciples. At this point, he has washed their feet and shared a meal with them. Judas had just left, on his way to betray Jesus and set in motion the process that led to his crucifixion, death, and resurrection. His time with his disciples is waning, so this is Jesus’s last chance to make sure they know what to do when he’s gone.
Jesus had taught his disciples a bunch of things over a period of three years. He taught that the Temple should not be a marketplace. He taught that they must be born again. He taught that he was living water and the bread of life. He taught that one day, Samaritans and Jews would both worship in spirit and truth. And he taught them to wash each other’s feet. Now was the time to summarize all of his teachings. What would he highlight?
Jesus gave his disciples a new commandment: that they love one another. He said, Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. Let’s think about what he says elsewhere in the Gospels, though. Elsewhere, he said that the Great Commandment is to love God and love our neighbor, which is really just plucking a couple verses out of Deuteronomy and Leviticus. So it seems like the new commandment is just the old commandment, with a little spin. Well, the reason for a new commandment is for a new covenant. When we talk about the Ten Commandments, we’re actually talking about the original covenant between God and the new nation of Israel. A covenant is like a contract, in the sense that it has terms and conditions. The conditions of the original covenant were listed out as ten individual rules. Jesus later on distilled them down and said, OK, I know you can’t keep track of all those rules, but if you love God and love your neighbor, you will fulfill your side of the covenant. But then he forms a new covenant, sealed in his blood. What are the terms and conditions of this new agreement? Love one another as I have loved you.
Under the old covenant, love of neighbor was kind of a negative law. To love your neighbor, don’t murder them, don’t steal from them, don’t covet their possessions. Under the new covenant, love of neighbor is a positive law. Serve them as Jesus served his disciples. It’s possible, at least theoretically, to avoid murdering and stealing and so forth if you still draw distinctions between Us and Them. It’s much more difficult to actively serve someone you think of as an outsider.
In the wake of 9/11, there was a surge in the number of hate crimes. There was an Islamophobic attitude in the nation, running so hot it overcame logic and reason. In India, Hindu is the dominant religion with Islam a close second, but there’s also the Sikh religion. Sikhs are monotheistic, though it is unclear whether their God is our God. They know God by a different name, Waheguru. Sikh men stand out in a crowd because they wear a turban as a religious headdress. Those turbans, and their brown skin, made Sikhs convenient targets for irrational hatred, even though their religion is totally unrelated to Islam.
Valarie Kaur, a third-generation American and a Sikh, was a student at Stanford at the time and made a documentary about the surge of hate crimes called Divided We Fall. The first victim was Balbir Singh Sodhi, on September 15 in Mesa, Arizona. Immediately, a Sikh in the community rallied a response. They blitzed the media with information about the Sikh religion and history. Ironically, Sikhs had immigrated to escape religious persecution from Hindus and Muslims in their native country. Balbir himself was a recent immigrant but well-known in his community. The media blitz turned him from an anonymous, brown-skinned, turban-wearing man—the Other—into a human being with a kind heart, who loved his family and community, who was in America seeking a better life. In response, thousands of people showed up for his memorial. His widow, who was still living in India and visited for the memorial, left feeling loved, not hated, by America.
That’s the key. That’s what Jesus asks us to do: to see each other’s fundamental humanity and respond in love. When someone is grieving, like Balbir’s widow, we grieve with them. Through that shared experience of grief, we can see God and experience God’s love. Similarly, when someone is hungry and we feed them, or lonely and we bring them into our fellowship, or oppressed and we free them, we can see and experience God.
Henri Nouwen was a Catholic priest and mystic. He once said, “Telling someone ‘I love you’ means, ‘You are a window through which I can see the infinite love that is God.’” Each person has that divine spark within them, a connection to the infinite love of God. If we can see past the masks that we all wear, we can see our shared humanity in each other, and through that window, we can see the love of God.
I just finished listening to an audiobook by Valarie Kaur in which she talks about making her movie, as well as a wide range of other experiences she had and learned from. She worked as an activist. She toured the country screening her movie and moderating discussions. While in law school, she worked in a clinic and represented a Latinx community that was struggling against the local police. Through it all, she learned that in every encounter, she had a choice. She could respond to provocation in kind, letting her attacker’s anger make her angry in response. Sometimes, that was the only choice—the attacker’s words and actions were so painful and dehumanizing that they stimulated her fight-flight-or-freeze response. In those cases, she had to find a way to release the rage that was provoked, under controlled circumstances to avoid danger to herself or others. Or instead, she could react with a sense of wonder. She could listen—truly listen—to the story beyond the words and actions. She could see a guard at Guantanamo Bay as an agent of an unjust system that systematically dehumanized detainees, or she could see him as a victim of a military structure that gave him no choice and stole his humanity as well.
Each person we encounter has a story. We can choose to flatten people into stereotypes, or we can choose to listen to those stories and find a way to see God in them. That’s what I have tried to do over the past few years. I have lived a pretty sheltered life with a lot of unearned privilege. As a teacher, historically, I just considered my students to be brains on a stick. But they’re more than that, and so are the patrons at the Mission, and so are all the people in the community that I interact with. By learning their stories, I have been able to see the world through their eyes, and I have been able to see God through them. If we only talk with people like us, we only get one perspective on God. By getting to know—really know—people who have different life experiences, we can see God in different ways and broaden and deepen our relationship with them.
Jesus gave us a commandment: to love each other as he loved us. That means that we don’t just have warm feelings towards them, but that we really know them and serve them. As we learn to see God in each other, we are able to serve God by serving them.
A couple weeks ago, I asked the question, Whom do we serve? Well, the basic answer is, the people we love. So today I must ask: Whom do we love? Do we just love people who are like us, people we already know? Or do we go outside our comfort zone to meet new people, to know their stories, to love them, and to see God through them? Again, the world is a big place, and it’s not possible for us to know everyone well enough to love them and serve them. So my challenge to you all, and to myself, is to think about who we are called to reach out to, to learn from, to love, and to serve.
I’d like to close with the Prayer of St. Francis. It’s a reminder to go into the dark places of the world and shine Christ’s light. To go where God needs us to share in his work. I want you to remember throughout the prayer that it is asking God to turn us into people of action, who sow love and who seek to love. Would you pray with me?
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.Amen.
Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi
Podcast: Play in new window | Download