Fifth Sunday of Easter 2019

Lectionary readings: Acts 11:1-18 and John 13:31-35

Sermon notes on pigs in blankets:

Our reading from Acts is about food, and listening to the prompting of the Holy Spirit, and unity and diversity.

In our reading, Peter recounts the vision he was given from heaven in which he is instructed to prepare for himself a meal, using unfamiliar ingredients.

Eating is a universal need, one that speaks to us of our dependency on others. Food is a gift from God, to be received with gratitude and enjoyed with pleasure. That gift is for all: unity.

Food is also an expression of culture: diversity. For the Jews, what they ate and didn’t eat, and how they prepared what they ate, were markers of identity, means of knowing themselves as distinct from all other people. And that, too, was a gift from God: of all the peoples, they were called to know a particular blessing and to be the means by which God would bless everyone else; and so, it was important that they didn’t lose that distinctive identity. The rules relating to food helped guard that identity.

But here, in Peter’s critics, we see a pattern that recurs over and over again. The good gift that helps us to know who we are in the world becomes more important to us than the thing it signifies. And then it becomes the basis by which we progressively judge other people. They don’t eat the way we eat, so they are different…they are inferior…they are bad…they are our enemies…

We lose sight of the unity that underpins our diversity.

We live in a deeply divided society. Consider voting. We have moved from a society in which democracy is valued and it is recognised that people vote for various parties, to a society where we are encouraged to believe that people who vote differently to us do not deserve the vote. Democracy is undermined, not by a considered process that replaces it with something better, but by a process of dehumanising the other.

Through the vision he was given from heaven, Peter came to believe that God was including the gentiles within the new humanity. And the first step was to ask Peter to sit down and eat with people whom he would never have thought to sit down and eat with. To step from his world (Joppa) into theirs (Caesarea Maritima).

We should note that this works from both sides, and in complex ways. In Luke’s Gospel, of which Acts is the sequel, we hear about a centurion, very much like the one who sent for Peter, approaching Jesus for help. But this centurion won’t invite Jesus into his home, not because Jesus is the enemy but because the centurion does not believe himself worthy to have Jesus come into his home. The reality that he is by virtue of being a Roman centurion, the occupier—even if, by personal conviction, not the oppressor—is almost certainly at play here.

Food matters. What we eat, and how we eat, and who we eat with are issues of justice, questions that we need to attend to as the new humanity living within the old.

As a family, we are on a journey with food. We seek to be attentive to fair trade. To air miles. To seasonality. To packaging. We do so imperfectly, because there is no other way. We’ve gone from an omnivorous diet to a low-meat diet, and since Easter, as part of pressing into life in its fullness for ourselves and our neighbour and all creation, we have gone vegetarian at home. But we have chosen to eat meat when we are guests in someone else’s home, as a principle of receiving their hospitality. Because it isn’t about judging other people, it is about our all being on a journey, from different starting-points and at different speeds. We haven’t arrived at a destination. Some of my friends are vegan, and I can’t go there yet…but it may be that the Holy Spirit leads us there at some point on the way that lies ahead. It is not that eating meat is wrong in itself, but it is about attending to the impact of our current eating habits on the environment and on the lives of our fellow human beings around the world, and especially in poorer nations. The world cannot sustain our present levels of consumption, including but not restricted to, food. Nor can it sustain our present levels of division.

This week, we will eat many meals. Some, alone, with God. Some, with family, or friends. Some, perhaps, with people we don’t know and may not even be sure of. But we begin, gathered around the Lord’s table, sharing bread and wine.