Somewhere to believe in

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Sunday 30^th April 2023

Psalm 19.1-6,14
Acts 13.1-3; 14.8-18

Last week, our post-Easter journey
            through the formative years of the early Christian community
took us to that pivotal moment of Peter’s vision of unclean animals,
            the divine command to kill and eat,
and his realisation that what God has declared clean,
            humans should not declare unclean.
 
The outworking of this was, as we saw,
            that the boundaries around the community of faith were blown apart.
No longer was God the holy prerogative of one group of people,
            but rather the good news of God made known in Jesus
            was for all people, without distinction.
 
And so, at the end of our story from last week,
            Peter baptised Cornelius the God-fearing Centurion, along with all his family.
A happy ending for all:
            and thus the Gospel went to the Gentiles.
 
Except, this was actually only the first act of a much longer drama…
            because although Cornelius was a Gentile,
            he was also the proverbial thin-end-of-the-wedge.
 
You see, he was already a God-fearer,
            he was already keeping the ten commandments,
            and observing the requirements of the Jewish law
                        to keep himself and his family ritually pure.
 
Cornelius may have been un-pure to Peter,
            until his vision convinced him otherwise,
but there was much more inclusion still to come.
 
In fact, the issue of how much of the Jewish Law
            gentiles were to be required to keep if they became Jesus-followers
            would dominate the early decades of Christianity,
with Peter and Paul having a significant falling out over it,
            before reaching a compromise solution.
 
You see, whilst Peter took the message of Jesus to Cornelius,
            Paul was taking it into places Peter hadn’t even imagined.
 
And this is what we see going on here
            in our reading today from the book of Acts,
when we meet Paul and Barnabas embarking
            on what becomes known as Paul’s First Missionary Journey.
 
It’s the late 40s, so about 15-20 years after the time of Jesus,
            and they set off from Syrian Antioch on the Eastern Mediterranean,
journeyed by boat to Cyprus,
            then again to the southern coast of Turkey,
before heading inland to end up in the region
            of the two cities of Lystra and Derbe.
 
Just as an aside here,
            the distances that Paul and his colleagues covered
            on his various missionary endeavours is immense.
 
A few years ago, Liz and I visited Turkey
            to visit biblical sites in the area around Ephesus,
and we would drive for two or three hours on a fast motorway,
            in 40 degree heat, to get from one place to another.
 
It is quite astonishing to think of Paul
            doing these trips overland on foot or by horseback.
 
But anyway, back to our story.
 
Lystra was a Roman colony,
            and although people in the countryside around it
            would have spoken the local dialect as well as ancient Greek,
                        (the language of the New Testament );
            archaeological evidence suggests that in the city itself,
                        the dominant language for at least official inscriptions was Latin.
This was a thoroughly Romanised city.
           
What this meant was that, as far as we know,
            when Paul and Barnabas visited Lystra
they were encountering people
            who had no background knowledge of Judaism at all.
 
This was not a crowd of God-fearing centurions
            desperate to convert,
it was a crowd well-versed in the Graeco-Roman pantheon,
            with no knowledge of Israel’s God at all.
 
And so, Paul went to the open space in the town,
            the first century Roman equivalent of Speakers’ Corner,
and started to tell people
            that the living God could be encountered
            through the Spirit of God’s son Jesus
who had been killed and yet was alive.
 
For the crowd in Lystra this was a new story.
 
He wasn’t trying to convince them
            that Jesus was their long-awaited Messiah,
            as he did when speaking with a Jewish audience;
and unlike Peter with Cornelius,
            he had no shared knowledge of the Hebrew Bible to fall back on.
 
This was evangelism from first principles,
            trying to explain the good news of Jesus
            to people who didn’t even know who God was!
 
Of course, they knew who the gods were
            – the Greek and Roman gods at least –
but they didn’t know who the one God was,
            the God who had been revealed to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
                        to Moses and the Prophets,
            and to their spiritual descendants down to Jesus
                        and then on to Paul himself.
 
And so Paul speaks about God,
            and one man who had been lame from birth was listening,
            and he found the capacity to make the leap of faith, and was healed.
 
It is surely not insignificant that the outcast, the beggar at the gate,
            was the first person in that city to have an experience of faith.
 
As is so often the case with miracles in the New Testament,
            the result of his healing
            was that his exclusion from society was removed.
 
No longer would he have to sit and beg, unable to work.
            His encounter with the good news of Christ restored him,
                        removed the cause of his shame,
            and lifted him up, literally, to his feet
                        to take his place alongside the other citizens of the city.
 
I wonder if we might ponder for a moment
            who, in our world, are the excluded,
            who are cast down, and unable to take their full place in society?
And I wonder if we might consider the structures and systems
            that are at work in our world
            to keep these people bowed down to the ground?
 
I’m thinking, as we explored last week,
            of the racism that still runs through Western society;
and I’m thinking of the homophobia
            that still strikes deep into our church communities.
 
These exclusions of people based on their God-given identity
            run contrary to Peter’s revelation
that no person whom God has declared clean
            should ever be called unclean.
 
But I’m also thinking of the structures of inadequately regulated capitalism,
            where workers are exploited, where people are commodified,
and where who your parents were and where you were born
            still profoundly affects your ability to live a good and healthy life.
 
What, I wonder, would it be
            for us to do to people in our world
            what Paul did in Lystra,
to look at them intently, to really see them,
            to see those whom others ignore,
            and to say to them, ‘Stand upright on your feet’.
 
Sometimes, there is a mindset amongst some Christians
            that social justice is some kind of distraction from preaching the gospel;
that taking concrete and practical action in the world
            to address the injustices of people’s lives
is in some way not missional.
 
Well, in response, I say, ‘Tell that to Paul!’
 
When he found himself in a city
            where no-one spoke the language of faith,
            where the only gods being worshipped
                        were the gods of fear, exploitation and domination,
            his first missional activity
                        was to raise a broken man to his feet.
 
And I believe we should be doing the same.
 
This is why we are involved with London Citizens,
            taking action with others to bring about justice
                        for some of the most broken and bowed down people in our city,
            people whose circumstances of birth
                        have dictated their lack of opportunity to flourish and stand tall.
 
Through our partnerships with London Citizens,
            we lift them to their feet, we help them stand tall,
and we do so because we see them, and we choose to stand with them,
            and we do this because we believe
            that God loves all people, without exception.
 
Sometimes I hear people bemoaning the fact
            that we no longer live in a Christian country;
upset that people don’t know the name of Jesus except as a swear word;
            at a loss to communicate the wonderful gospel
                        of the good news we have received,
            because those beyond the church
                        no longer speak the language of faith in the way they once did.
 
Well, as Francis of Assisi may not have actually said,
            ‘Preach the Gospel at all times. Use words if necessary.’
 
Or, perhaps to put it around the other way:
            ‘When words fail, preach through deeds’.
 
Action to address the injustices of society is a gospel imperative,
            and Paul knew this well, as we see in our reading today.
 
But the people weren’t yet hearing him clearly.
 
They saw the transformation in the life of the man,
            but they didn’t yet have a framework of faith
            to understand what they have just seen.
 
The only matrix they had for this kind of conversion in a person’s life
            was that of their existing religions,
and so they proclaimed that the gods had come down to them in human form,
            and started to worship Paul and Barnabas as Zeus and Hermes.
 
And then it escalated as the local priest of Zeus
            came from his nearby temple with some oxen to offer as a sacrifice.
 
Let’s think about this for a moment:
            the only matrix through which the locals knew how to respond
                        to a work of divine liberation,
            was one which required an act of sacrifice by humans in response.
 
And there is something deeply human
            about this desire to sacrifice something to the gods
            in exchange for divine favour,
                        or in payment for blessings received.
 
In our interpersonal relationships with one another,
            we are hardwired to a transactional understanding of what it means to relate.
 
If someone comes to dinner at your home, they will bring a gift
            – a token offering to express their gratitude for your hospitality.
 
If someone gives you a gift with no reason,
            maybe just because they thought you’d like it,
the chances are you’ll reply,
            ‘Oh, that’s so kind, I’m sorry I don’t have a gift to give you back’.
 
We are not used to receiving without expense.
 
At a commercial level, the transactions are more quantified:
            we know what work is expected of us,
                        and what we will receive in remuneration,
            but there is still an expectation of giving something up
                        in order to receive something back,
            whether that is time, or effort, or money…
 
And humans have been writing this transactional system
            into their theology since time immemorial.
Most ancient religions included some aspect of sacrifice in exchange for blessing.
 
What was unusual about Christianity
            was the conviction that this sacrificial system had come to an end.
The once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus,
            the sinless one who died to unmask and expose
            the forces of evil that keep people trapped in cycles of sacrifice,
is a central message of Christianity.
 
And so Paul and Barnabas are quick to resist the offer
            of the locals in Lystra to hail them as gods and offer sacrifices to them.
 
This then opens up their moment to preach,
            to turn deeds into words,
to teach those who lacked the appropriate grammar of faith
            the new language that would help them give shape
            to belief based on grace and not demand,
                        on free gift rather than transaction.
 
When I was preparing this sermon,
            I was discussing it with Dawn, and she told me a story.
 
There was once a village, and their local priest every day came and took a chicken to sacrifice to the local gods, to keep them happy.
 
But the village had a problem, they were running out of food and the people were hungry.
 
They turned to their priest who said that the gods were angry and punishing them with hunger, and required more sacrifice. So, they sacrificed two of their precious chickens that day.
 
But still they were hungry, so they sacrificed three chickens the next day. Yet still they were hungry.
 
And then a prophet arrived, and proclaimed that it was the will of the high God that they should sacrifice no more chickens.
 
And soon the people were no longer hungry.
 
The problem with sacrificial systems
            is that they demand more and ever more to sustain themselves.
From grain, to animals, to money, to time,
            and yes eventually to human lives.
 
We literally sacrifice people on the altars of our gods,
            and if you think we don’t, just go and walk around the West End
            and see the broken lives of the people begging on the streets,
most of whom are the victims of people trafficking,
            being exploited unto death to fund the organised crime syndicates
            that supply this city’s insatiable demand for illegal drugs.
 
This is why we need the good news of a God who says,
            ‘The sacrificing stops here!’
 
This is why we need the good news of a God
            who sees the outcast, the vulnerable, and the exploited,
                        and declares them pure and holy,
            raising them up and setting them on their feet.
 
This is a gospel message for our time,
            every bit as much as it was for the Pagans of Lystra.
 
And so, having demonstrated God’s concern for the broken,
            and having challenged the culture of transactional sacrifice,
Paul then, and only then, attempts to frame his faith in words.
 
And he does so by using what theologians these days
            would call ‘natural theology’.
This is the attempt to establish religious truths by rational argument,
            without reliance on revelation.
 
So Paul points them to nature,
            saying that the witness to the goodness of God
is to be found through observing
            the heavens, the earth, the sea and all that is in them,
in the rains from heaven and the fruitful seasons,
            in good food to eat and in hearts full of joy (14.15-17).
 
If Peter has established that God is already at work
            in the world beyond Israel,
Paul here takes this to the next level:
            God is woven in and through creation,
and can be known through our experience
            of the goodness of the world around us.
 
The place Paul goes to establish common ground,
            a common grammar of faith, with the Pagans of Lystra,
is to go back beyond the prophets, beyond Moses,
            beyond Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
to the goodness of the created world itself.
 
And in our world,
            where people no longer share the grammar of faith with faithful Christians,
where our words and our proclamations fall on ears that are deaf
            not because they cannot hear us, but because they cannot understand us,
I wonder if we need to put our faith
            in the truth that actions can speak louder than words.
 
From works of justice,
            to a passionate commitment to creation-care and environmental responsibility,
if we are not walking the talk,
            we are not preaching a message that deserves being heard.
 
The God we worship,
            who calls us to follow by the example of Jesus,
            and who inspires our hearts by the Spirit,
is the God of the poor, the vulnerable, the exploited, and the broken.
 
But God is also the God of the cosmos,
            whose being is interwoven through all things,
who is known in nature, experienced through science,
            and worshipped through mystical encounter.
 
As Graham Harvey says,
‘the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and life is always lived in relationship with others… All that exists lives… all that lives is holy” 
            https://www.christiananimism.com/
 
Noel Moules agrees, suggesting that,
‘everything that exists is both alive and sacred, with all things being interconnected and related: that the earth, along with each animal, plant, inert object and natural phenomena are persons (or potentially so); a community of creation requiring harmonious relationships between humans, their ancestors and wild nature, nurtured by respectful and sustainable life ways’
            https://www.christiananimism.com/
 
Or, as the Psalmist put it,
 
The heavens declare the glory of God;
            the skies proclaim the work of God’s hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
            night after night they display knowledge.
There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. (Ps 19.1-3, NIV)
 
This is our faith, these are the words of our faith,
            and our calling is to proclaim the good news of God
who is, as Paul put it in his letter to the church in Ephesus,
            ‘one God and Parent of all,
            who is above all and through all and in all.’ (Eph.4.6).

To eat, or not to eat?

 Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

23 April 2023

 

Acts 10.1-17, 27-28, 34-35

It is almost impossible to overstate the theological significance
            of today’s reading from Acts Chapter 10,
because without Peter’s vision on the rooftop
            there is a good case to be made
            that Christianity would have died out soon after.
 
At this point in the story,
            only a tiny minority of Jewish people were following Jesus,
and the possibility for this small messianic Jewish sect
            to ‘peter out’, so to speak, was very high.
 
Judaism in the first century was itself a highly sectarian religion,
            a minority faith followed only
            by people from one specific national identity.
 
The Jews at this time understood themselves as the covenant people of God,
            as those called and chosen from among the nations
            to be God’s own people.
 
Their role was to bear the lamp of God’s grace among the pagan nations,
            shining as a beacon in a dark world,
            testifying to God’s faithfulness.
 
What their understanding of their role did not include,
            was seeking to convert all the nations of the world to Judaism.
 
In fact, it was surprisingly difficult for someone to become Jewish,
            and that wasn’t the point.
 
Rather, the Jews as God’s chosen people
            were there to highlight the sin of the world
                        through their covenant obedience,
            and so to point the nations to God.
 
And of course, there were always those beyond Judaism
            who responded to that witness,
and these were often known as ‘God-fearers’
            – Gentiles who rejected the pagan gods
            and worshipped the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
 
And the earliest Christians,
            those Jewish people who worshipped Jesus as their messiah,
similarly did not have a vision of their Jesus-following
            as relevant beyond the people of Israel.
 
Their missionary concern was to tell other Jews
            that Jesus was the long-awaited Jewish Messiah,
who had come to call Jewish people
            to a new depth of encounter with God.
 
So how do we get from there
            to Christianity as a faith that spans the globe,
with followers ‘from every tribe and language and people and nation’,
            as the book of Revelation puts it (5.9)?
 
The answer, at least in part,
            is that it happens when Peter has a vision on a rooftop.
 
It’s not for nothing that I just quoted from the Book of Revelation,
            because Peter’s vision is an apocalyptic event
                        – it is a moment when heaven is opened,
                        and a new way of seeing the world comes into being.
 
This is apocalyptic at its most authentic:
            not some vision of the end of the world,
but a vision of a new world coming into being:
            the unveiling, the revealing, of a new way of being in the world. [1]
 
The Book of Revelation,
            written at about the same time as the book of Acts
                        in which Peter’s vision is recorded,
            offers its own vision of heaven opened;
and what the writer sees through the open door into heaven
            is a world where the blessings of God
            extend beyond Judaism throughout the world.
 
Four times in the visions of Revelation
            we get the repeated refrain
that those called by God come from ‘all nations,
            and kindreds, and people, and tongues’ (5.9; 7.9; 13.7; 14.6).
 
In both Peter’s vision and that of the Apocalypse,
            it seems that heaven’s perspective on the limits of God’s calling
            are far wider than those of the people receiving the vision.
 
Both John and Peter have to learn that God’s call goes beyond Israel.
 
For Peter, the key moment is on a rooftop as he’s feeling hungry,
            and he falls into a trance and sees heaven opened.
 
Coming down from heaven is something he finds repulsive:
            a sheet with animals on it, that he is instructed to kill and eat.
 
I don’t know what animal you would least like to eat,
            but for me it’s spiders.
 
A few years ago, Liz and I were in Cambodia
            and we were wandering around the local market,
and there was a man with a tray of fried tarantulas and scorpions,
            offering them for sale to eat.
 
It’s something for the tourists,
            and occasionally some brave traveller will give it a go.
 
But in fact it’s a problematic trade,
            as the spiders are foraged from the local forest,
            and the numbers are becoming severely depleted.
 
I’d like to say that we declined the offer of a deep-fried tarantula
            for sound ecological reasons,
but the truth is that we just felt the same way about that tray of spiders
            as I suspect Peter felt about the sheet of animals in his vision.
 
Three times he’s told to kill and eat,
            and he refuses not just out of disgust,
but because the animals on the sheet
            are those he has been brought up to believe
            it is against his religion to consume.
To eat them would make him impure.
 
And so the voice from heaven tells him:
            “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” (10.15)
 
This happens three times to poor Peter,
            perhaps recalling his threefold denial of Jesus,
            and the threefold command from Jesus that Peter ‘tend his sheep’.
 
But anyway, he’s then apparently let off the hook
            as the sheet is taken back up to heaven
and Peter is spared actually carrying out the command
            to eat his tray of spiders.
 
But then, through the following events,
            the meaning of the vision starts to become clear.
This isn’t about food at all,
            it’s about something much bigger.
 
Peter is greeted by the men who have come to summon him,
            and when he gets to Cornelius’s house, he tells his host:
 
‘You yourselves know
            that it is improper for a Jew to associate with or to visit an outsider,
but God has shown me
            that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.’ (Acts 10.28).
 
Interestingly, Matthew’s gospel tells us that
            when Jesus was commissioning Peter, he said to him:
 
‘I tell you, you are Peter,^[d] and on this rock^[e] I will build my church,
            and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. ^1
9 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven,
            and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven,
            and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.’ (Matthew 16.18-19)
 
And this is exactly what we find happening
            here in Cornelius’s house:
it’s the only occasion we have on record
            in which Peter used the power to bind and unbind
            things in heaven and earth.
 
He declares as an absolutely binding part of the Christian revelation
            that no human is to be called impure or profane.
 
And so, with this brief infallible declaration,
            Peter opens the gates of heaven to the gentiles.
 
But there’s a nuance here in the way the story is told.
            Peter doesn’t say,
                        ‘God has revealed to me that there’s no such thing
                        as that which is impure or profane’,
            but rather that God has said
                        not to call any person profane or impure.
 
It’s not that there is some objective truth of profanity,
            where no-one is really impure,
            whether or not some people mistakenly think that others are.
 
Rather, what Peter is saying
            shows that what we sometimes call reality
            is in fact merely a human linguistic construct.
 
Profanity, impurity, and the shame that come with them,
            are human constructs,
and we speak them into being
            in the way we speak to and of others.
 
If we describe someone as impure,
            our description is not independent of reality,
            but rather creates the reality of impurity in that person’s life.
 
It is not true that ‘sticks and stones can break my bones
            but words will never hurt me’,
because words can be more destructive
            to a person’s identity than any act of physical violence.
 
Words of othering, exclusion,
            derogatory language, and shame-inducing belief,
create worlds in which real people
            are shamed, belittled, excluded, and othered.
 
Our words create worlds of pain,
            which we then force other people to inhabit.
 
So what Peter is saying,
            when he affirms that God has revealed to him
            not to call anyone profane or impure,
is that there is an indispensable grammatical rule in the Kingdom of God,
            which is that no-one must be spoken of at profane or impure,
            and therefore there must be no discrimination
                        against any sort of objectionable person.
 
Paul, in his letter to the Galatians,
            speaks of the divisions that marked humanity in the first century,
            naming male and female, slave and free, and Jew and Greek (Galatians 3.28).
Gender, social status, and ethnicity;
            and I suspect we’re not so far from those divisions in our world too.
 
And yet Peter says we must not declare
            another human being impure or unclean.
We must not declare another human being disgusting,
            because to do so creates a world
            where people come to see themselves as impure, unclean, and disgusting.
 
I want to read a short passage for you
            from a book by Vicky Beeching.
 
If you’ve never heard of her,
            it’s probably because you weren’t going to the right kind of church
            back in the noughties.
 
She has been described by the Guardian
            as ‘arguably the most influential Christian of her generation’.
After a spell as the worship leader of a Vineyard Church in the late 90s,
            she moved to Nashville
and her worship albums topped the Christian Music charts
            on both sides of the Atlantic for over a decade.
 
She regularly led worship in the Big Top at Spring Harvest.
 
In 2013, when the Same Sex Marriage act was passed in the UK,
            she unexpectedly spoke out in favour of same-sex marriage,
            and the evangelical church began to get deeply suspicious.
The invitations to lead worship dried up.
 
When she came out herself a year later,
            she was shunned by those who had formerly adored her.
She was declared unclean, profane.
 
In 2018, after gaining her doctorate in theology from Durham University,
            she published a book called:
            ‘Undivided: Coming Out, Becoming Whole and Living Free from Shame’.
 
In this book she speaks about Peter’s vision:
 
As I read about Peter’s vision, I felt as though I were there myself, looking at the sheet falling from the sky. For me, the “unclean things” on that sheet represented my gay orientation. And, like Peter, I was arguing with God, saying, “Lord, I’ve never so much as touched a person of the same sex romantically. I’ve kept your law and commandments. I would never disobey your word.” And what God had said to Peter, I felt he said to me too: “Do not call unclean what I have made clean.”
 
God was letting me in on a new perspective, one of radical acceptance and inclusion. “Do not call unclean what I have made clean” echoed around my head and heart. The person I’d always been—a gay person—was not something to be ashamed of. God accepted me and loved me, and my orientation was part of his grand design.
 
There was nothing unclean about it, and nothing to run away from. Just as the Gentiles could fully join God’s family, now LGBTQ+ people could too. They were on an equal footing with straight people, so there was no reason why they couldn’t love and be loved, marry and raise families, and enjoy full membership in church and society. If there was nothing unclean about gay relationships, there was nothing to condemn. God had spoken.
 
So says the wonderful Vicky Beeching.
 
But what has all this got to do with Easter?
            What was it in the story of the cross and resurrection
                        that led Peter, and John, and other early Jewish Jesus-followers,
            to a revelation that God’s inclusion went far beyond
                        the boundaries of their inherited tradition?
 
Well, James Allison suggests that it’s all to do with Jesus as the lamb of God
            – the innocent victim slain by the sins of the world.
 
At Easter, we find Jesus, the sinless one,
            being made ‘sin’ for the forgiveness of sins.
 
The pure and holy one becomes impure and unholy,
            in fact as impure as the grave:
within Judaism, any contact with a dead body
            rendered a person unclean and profane,
and Jesus’ execution as a criminal on the cross,
            and his burial in the borrowed tomb,
had rendered him as impure as it was possible to be.
 
Or, to put it another way,
            at Easter, Jesus becomes the scapegoat for humanity
            – the one on whom the sins of the world are laid.
 
The book of Leviticus tells the story of the origin of the Scape Goat:
 
 Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities of the Israelites, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task.^[a] 22 The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region, and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness. (Leviticus 16.21-22)
 
This process was the way in which the ancient Jewish community
            dealt with its sense of its own sinfulness,
            its sense of its own shame.
 
It laid that guilt and sin on the innocent goat,
            and sent it out in the wilderness to die.
 
And human communities have been doing this down the centuries ever since
            – it’s just that for most of the time the scapegoat is another human.
 
We declare someone, or some group,
            to be responsible for all the problems and dissensions in our society,
            and we scapegoat them, we expel them, we victimise them.
 
And we come to believe that they are genuinely dangerous:
            we use our language to construct a reality
            where they become for us unclean, impure, shameful, and guilty.
We do what Peter realises should not be done,
            and we call the innocent profane.
 
And this is what happened to Jesus par excellance on the cross:
            he becomes the victim hated without cause,
            killed without reason, sinful without sin.
 
But the impurity will not stick.
            The glory of the empty tomb is that the lie of the cross is exposed.
Because of the empty tomb,
            it becomes impossible to believe in the real blameworthiness of the victim.
 
And, as Peter and other early followers of Jesus discovered,
            if you can no longer believe in the guilt of the victim,
then no more can you believe in the linguistic construction of reality
            which created the ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the first place.
 
For Peter, he could no longer believe
            that God was only for Peter’s own people,
because to believe that was to declare the gentiles ‘unclean’,
            something he could no longer do
            in the light of the cross and the empty tomb.
 
Peter’s vision, received in the light of the events of Easter,
            showed him that the mechanisms of scapegoating,
                        of declaring the other profane,
            are nothing but a lie told by people
                        to justify their own sin, guilt and shame.
 
He realised that the resurrection of the crucified victim
            didn’t simply declare people clean,
but rather exposed and dismantled the whole mechanism
            which creates impure or profane people of any category in the first place.
 
It’s not so much that in Christ sinners are declared clean,
            but rather that no-one, NO-ONE, should be declared unclean.
 
In the kingdom of God,
            it is not possible for one person to judge themselves righteous
            compared to the unrighteousness of another,
because ‘God has shown us
            not to call any person profane or impure’. (Acts 10.28).
 
And so Peter baptises the gentile Cornelius and his household,
            as a sign and symbol of the new world that is coming to being in Christ Jesus,
            where no-one is declared unrighteous, not even a Gentile Centurion.
 
And if nothing and no-one is declared profane,
            then all things and all people are sacred.
 
It is one of the great tragedies of Christian history
            that scapegoating and witch-hunts
have formed such a dominant part
            of the way we relate to one another and to the world.
 
And what would it mean, I wonder, for us, here, today,
            to agree with Peter that God has shown us
            not to call anyone profane or unclean?
 
Can we speak into being a world where the victims are recovered,
            where the dominant narratives of ‘othering’ are silenced,
and where the universal good news
            of the death and resurrection of Jesus
is genuinely good news to those
            whom others reject, exclude, and enact violence against?
 
You see, the thing is, if you’re looking for God,
            then God will not be found in the empty tomb of the resurrection.
 
Rather the resurrected Christ is found in the face of the victimised,
            the excluded, the abused, and the rejected.
 
Whoever we would turn our face from,
            however distasteful they may be to us,
the spiritual reality is that they are a reflection of the face of Christ,
            the one who died on the cross
            for the forgiveness of sins and the redemption of all.
 
So let us speak a new world into being;
            and through and words and by our lives,
            the kingdom comes on earth, as it is in heaven.

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[1] This sermon draws extensively on James Allison, ‘Raising Abel’