ST MARY MAGDALENE - Apostle to the Apostles - Sunday 17 July

If it’s on the internet it must be true!

We all know, don’t we, that we have to be really discerning when it comes to choosing what to believe on the internet and what to take with a grain of salt.

The same rule can be true if you try to find out about the saints of old.

If you use your computer search engine to look up Mary Magdalene you will get some amazing information.  I looked up the first 10 pages Google identified for me.

I discovered that she is often assumed to be the woman who wept on Jesus feet or anointed his feet with perfume – but this was Mary the sister of Martha, or else an unnamed woman of ill-repute; which probably led to the next thing I discovered.

I discovered that Mary was probably a prostitute, and that she became the patron saint of fallen women – so in the Middle Ages many “Magdalen Houses” were built and run by nuns to gather such women in.

I discovered that there are five Gospels that are not in the Bible that tell stories about Mary.

I discovered that Mary was cast out of Palestine on a boat without sail or oars and she ended up in Southern France.  Relics of this are still present to this day.

I discovered that Mary was actually the married to Jesus and some say there was even a child.

I discovered that she had starring roles in 40 movies since the first in 1912.

But none of this is based in fact so what can we say about Mary Magdalene with any certainty?

Firstly, she is named more often in the Gospels than many of the Apostles – a dozen text references.  Apart from the birth narratives, Mary the Mother of Jesus rates just eight Gospel references.  So it is reasonable to regard Mary Magdalene as very significant in the Early Christian community.

Mary Magdalene was one of a group of women who gathered as followers of Jesus in addition to the men, and Luke makes it clear that these women were of sufficient well-being that “they used their own resources to help Jesus and his disciples.”  Luke 8:3   

Luke also mentions that Jesus healed her – the text says 7 demons, but since 7 is a symbolic number it is a bit difficult to know for sure what she was healed of.

This is the only reference to her prior to the Crucifixion and Resurrection stories.

• Matthew, Mark and John name Mary among the witnesses of the Crucifixion. 
• Matthew and Mark note Mary as one of two women who witnessed the interment of Jesus’ body in the tomb.  
• Finally, all four Gospel writers name Mary among the women who gathered at the tomb early on the Sunday morning and discover that it is empty and who then passed on the news or the instructions of Jesus, depending on how the story is told, to the Apostles.

Anything else that you think you might know about Mary is either the product of the accumulated tradition of the Church, or our tendency to merge the stories of the various Mary’s into one and say this is Mary Magdalene.

So, what do we make of this Mary?  Why is it that she occupies a very hallowed or noble place among the community of early saints?

In the language of the Church she is called the Apostle of the Apostles.  The word Apostle means a messenger or an emissary – one who represents the words of another.  Just as the 12 Apostles were sent by Jesus in the Great Commission of Matthew 28, so Mary Magdalene was sent by Jesus with a specific message for his disciples.

In the scheme of things this seems to be a very strange state of affairs.  As Dee reminded me during the week, in those days the testimony of a woman held no weight in the courts.  They were never taken seriously – I guess because women are so often hysterical!  And we get a little bit of resistance to the witness from the men, don’t we – but maybe that was because the idea of Jesus’ resurrection was unbelievable rather than because it was some hysterical women who told them.

I don’t suppose we will ever know, but it is clear from these references to Mary Magdalene, and her very significant place in the early Christian community, that she was acknowledged as someone special among the saints.

I really hold an egalitarian view of life in the Kingdom of God, but many in the church have held out an hierarchical view of things, even down to having a hierarchy of saints.  We have marked this difference by having different names for the kind of commemoration we have of a saint.  In the Anglican Church we have Principal Feasts, Principal Holy Days, Festivals, Lesser Festivals and Commemorations.  Just this year, Pope Francis has elevated the commemoration of Mary from a Memorial to a Feast – right up there with the Apostles, Peter, James, John and Paul.  Again, what this says is that Mary is really, really important.  We must not disregard her as an insignificant or bit player in the story.

Given the place of this woman as the first witness to the resurrection, as the one to whom Jesus entrusted the task of telling his Disciples that he had been raised to life, I think it really is sad that women have had to struggle over the years to feel validly part of the Christian community.

In the story of Mary Magdalene, in the story of Priscilla and Acquilla, in the stories of so many of the women in the early church we see women accepted as equals in the community of believers.

I want to see a church in which this is more and more the case.  We have come a long way in our lifetime in redressing the imbalance that saw all leadership in the hands of men – and the church is much healthier for it.

St Peter & St Paul

I don’t think I need to persuade you to the view that Peter and Paul were each very significant among the founding fathers of the Church.

Peter, of course, is portrayed among the Apostles as the leader, and there are some wonderful personal and one-on-one encounters between Jesus and Peter such as we read from John 21 today.  As you read through the Book of Acts you see that Peter and James became the significant leaders of the Christians that were in Jerusalem.

Converts dispersed from Jerusalem in those early years to the towns and cities around the Mediterranean rim, and we see a number of journeys by those early apostles and church leaders to the outlying communities to help establish the churches there or to support and encourage them.  But Peter and James remained in Jerusalem for at least the first twenty years following the death of Jesus.  In the mid-50s Peter went to Rome and led the church there.  Tradition has it that he was killed there by the Roman authorities in about 65ad.

Paul was not one of the Disciple Apostles.  Compared to the Apostles, Paul was a citizen of the world.  While he was clearly Hebrew and had been seriously trained as a Pharisee by Gamliel, he lived in Tarsus – a Roman town in Turkey – and he was in fact a Roman citizen.

Our Christian stories of him begin with him as a severe persecutor of Christians, but his encounter with Jesus on the way to Damascus in Syria was transformative and he became a great champion of Jesus.

His stories are recorded in the Book of Acts as well as in his own words in some of the letters in the New Testament.  He works very hard to establish his credential as an Apostle equal among the Disciple-Apostles because he says that he encountered and was taught by Jesus during a three year period he spend along before he started his ministry.

Paul, also ended up in Rome, about the time Peter was there and they were both executed in the mid-60s.

EARLY MISSION

Much of the work of the early Disciple-Apostles was seeking to persuade Jews that Jesus was in fact their awaited Messiah.  They generally did not detach themselves from the synagogues, but rather grasped every opportunity they could to make it clear that Jesus was the One.

But an interesting aspect of Synagogue life, especially in the towns around the Mediterranean to which the Hebrews had migrated, was that there was very often a group among them who were Gentiles who were very interested in Judaism.  Paul, with his Cypriot friend Barnabus, had a canny knack of telling these people the stories of Jesus so convincingly that they became Christians rather than Jews.  This might explain some of the trouble he seemed to have frequently with the Jewish Authorities.

This growing body of Christians from a gentile background caused problems for the Christians from a Jewish background, because the Jewish Christians still thought of themselves as Jews, so circumcision and the Law of Moses was kind of obligatory.  Yet these gentile Christians weren’t lining up for those bits.  This is what the meeting in Jerusalem which we read from Acts 15 today is all about.

WORDS OF ENCOURAGEMENT

So we have these two characters before us today, whose lives we celebrate and whose memory we honour.  And it seems to me that there are three things we might carry away with us as encouragement for our life together here at Holy Cross.

The first is that the ministry of Paul to the Gentiles shouts out to us all that the Christian Community was to be an INCLUSIVE community.  The Hebrew people had been used to separating themselves from Gentiles and sinners – basically believing that contact with gentiles contaminated them and made them ritually unclean.  But this Christian community chose to welcome sinners into it.  Following the example of Jesus who “ate and drank with tax collectors and sinners” the church seemed to make it clear that anyone was welcome here.

Now I think that is really important for us in the church today.  It is very easy for us to create barriers to make sure various groups of people don’t make it too close to us in the church.  But this is not the way it should be.  This should be a place of welcome or warm reception for anyone who feels marginalised or an outcast in our society.

Secondly, I think these two men teach us that sometimes things change.  We generally like to think that our world will stay pretty much the same.  It makes us feel safe.  And this is perhaps especially so in the area of our faith life in the church.  But just as Peter and Paul had to make big adjustments to changes in their ideas about how things should be in the church, so we, in our day have had to adjust and move on all sorts of ideas about the life of our church.  We, all of us, tend to resist change.  We like things to be as we have known them to be, but as life and our community changes around us we find that we also have to change.

The third little bit of inspiration I get from the stories of these two men is that when we choose to follow Jesus we never know what’s around the corner.  And just as Jesus kept on in the way of his Father, even though he could see looming upon him the distinct possibility that the authorities would kill him, so Peter and Paul kept on with their sense of the mission Jesus had given them, even as they could both tell that circumstances were making it more and more likely that they would lose their lives.

I think this involved cultivating a confidence in our own sense of God’s call in our lives.  God has called each one of us here to be his people, to live out our lives in relationship with God and in service of one another.  Sometimes, the doing of that is really easy.  Things go well, we can see the results of our efforts, and we feel greatly encouraged.  But other times, we seeking to follow in his way it seems as though everything around us is railed against us doing it.  But following the example of Jesus, and Peter and Paul, we can be encouraged to just keep on being God’s person here anyway.

The rule of life is simple – just do it! – even if things seem to be stacked up against us.  God knows and will honour our faithfulness.

PROPER 10C - In God We Trust

Down and out.

That is how life was for the two widows in our stories today.

The woman in Zarephath was preparing what she thought would be her last meal.

The woman in Nain was burying her son and, being a widow and unable to inherit from her son, she was facing immediate homelessness.

This was as down and out as anyone could be.

When such circumstances crash in on people today they might have family supports to carry them through, they might have access to some Social Security safety net income, but they might not – and for them life is very tough.

But the story emerging from these two tales is one of hope.

Firstly they encourage is to trust that God will provide.

I have seen communities in which this encouragement has expanded into what we might call a “Prosperity Gospel” – if we pray the right way God will give us what we ask for.  I don’t think either of these women became rich beyond their wildest dreams.  But in their desperate need, God became present in Elijah and Jesus to meet their need give them a new way forward.

The second thing emerging from these stories is the encouragement to be content with what God has given us.  This is very hard in our modern consumer society – we grow up being taught that we can do anything we aspire to and that if we work hard enough we can get anything that we want.

It becomes really hard for us to even imagine what enough is let alone be content with enough.  I would dare to suggest that “enough” is probably far less than you currently think you need in life.

But these stories encourage us all to trust that God will make sure we have enough.

I know that some of you think of our church here at Holy Cross as a “little church”.  Sometimes we feel desolate about the future of the church because we have become so small.  But I want to encourage you to trust that God will ensure that we have ENOUGH.

You may remember that parable of the Kingdom of Heaven in Matthew 13:  “The Kingdom of Heaven is like this.  A woman takes some yeast and mixes it with a bag of flour until the whole batch of dough rises.”

If we are to trust that God will make sure we have enough, we also have to trust that in God what we do have is enough to be the Kingdom of Heaven in this place.

TRINITY C - Can We Make Sense of the Trinity?

There is a standing joke around among ministers that if they ever had theological students working with them when Trinity Sunday came around they would get the student to preach the sermon.  I obviously have not lived by that rule, and I think our student might be rather glad about that.

But why is it so?

Celtic image of Trinity

We all know that the Trinity is the one central doctrine by which we judge the orthodoxy of other churches by.  Yet it is still a doctrine that most preachers find difficult to tackle.

It seems to me that the idea of the unity of Father Son and Holy Spirit as One God is something that we know to be profoundly true and yet we find it almost impossible to explain its meaning in language that is governed by sense and logic.

Last year I used a metaphor of the ancient theatre world to try and express it, but that didn’t work for some of you – and you told me so.

I had a thought recently that was affirmed in our Thursday Prayer group last week.  It involved the simplest and most accessible image for us.  We westerners use a particular idea when we speak of our human being.  We speak of having a body, soul and spirit.  We have a sense of these three as separate aspects of our selves, yet we know that each is indivisible from the others.

On Sunday last my wife and I attended the service at St John’s Anglican Church in Albany, and what a wonderful surprise the Holy Spirit had for us on that Day of Pentecost.  After some time without a minister there are now two women priests serving the congregation and the whole place felt alive in new ways.

In her sermon for Pentecost, the minister made a comment about the function of the Holy Spirit and I think this is at the heart of understanding the significance of the Trinity.  She said that the work of the Spirit was to bind the Father and the Son together in love, and that bound in this way they formed a community.

Now this is as far as I need to go in comprehending the idea of the Trinity.  It is enough for me.  I don’t think we can ever find a satisfactory logical and reasonable explanation of it.  Every attempt will have flaws in the argument or gaps in the logic and through these our arguments could be destroyed.

But we all affirm the truth behind the idea of Trinity.  As I said in the Newsletter it is easy for us to get the one-ness of the Father and the Son, and the place of the Holy Spirit can be understood in its relationship to the Father and the Son.  Paul speaks interchangeably about the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ.  We get that, and I think that is really what the creed is trying to say when it says the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

Image inspired by the Icon in Rublev of the Trinity

But what does it all mean?

This question is not about making sure you believe the right doctrine.  It’s more of a “So what?” question, and maybe there will be a different answer from each of you or for each of you.

Something I want to pick up and link to some of the other readings we have had from John in this Easter Season is this idea of Community. 

Last week Jesus spoke in the John reading about his being in the Father and the Father being in him.  A couple of weeks before that Jesus is reported saying that those who love Jesus will do as he says and that the Father will love such a person and that Jesus and the Father would come and live with them.   And the week before that Jesus spoke of a new commandment that would make it so clear to the world that we belong together as Gods children.

In various ways these are calling us to live in the same kind of unity with each other and with God that we see in the idea of the Trinity.  Abiding is the other word we might use.  “Abide in me and I will abide in you.”

So we are called to live in close intimacy with Jesus and the Father.  And we are called to live as close companions with each other on the Way in the Community of faith.  It is in this Community that we should be abiding in the Father and the Son. 

This is why an important part of our life in God is that we are growing in our life of prayer and contemplation.  This feeds our relationship with the Father – our part of the abiding commandments – and empowers us as we then work out of our life in God to serve one another and those in need. 

If we do these things we will truly abide in Him and he in us.

Pentecost C - If These Walls Could Talk

This sermon was originally preached at St Matthews in Guildford on Pentecost Sunday 2013.  It is used here today because our Pastor is on leave for a few days.

I don’t suppose you have had many sermons on the Holy Spirit since Pentecost Sunday last year.  When we start talking about the Spirit, it’s not long before our words get terribly vague.  It’s hard.  But then most of the really important, undeniably real things in life are hard to talk about.

Talk about fire:

We can sit around a campfire at the end of a great day in the outdoors, or we can light the heater/fire at home on a cold evening.  It is good to be warmed by the fire.  I love the way the embers glow in a pulsating kind of way that seeps into your eyes and relaxes you.

But wait, I am talking about warmth and glowing embers, not fire.

Describe the wind:

Today, my wife and I will be in Albany and we will stand in awe at the Wind Farm as those huge vanes zoomed around making a whooshing sound like nothing I have heard before –the vane tip was travelling at 260kmh.

We will see the wind send spray cascading back from the waves on Middleton Beach or maybe even at the new Lookout at The Gap.  And love watching the bands of rain-bearing clouds travelled across the sky effortlessly and frequently.

But wait, I am talking about wind turbines turning, waves spraying and clouds travelling, not wind.

Now describe the Holy Spirit:

Well, it – wait, there’s the first problem.  “It” – the Holy Spirit is not an “it”.  The Holy Spirit is a person, but in English, Spirit has no gender so we run into a linguistic problem straight off.  In Greek and Hebrew Spirit is feminine and early Byzantine representations of the Holy Spirit did so using feminine figures.

So let’s just recall what happened on this day we call “the Birthday of the Church”.

The Disciples were all gathered together there in a house waiting for the Spirit to come, as Jesus had promised.

Sure enough, she/he – the Holy Spirit – came upon them that day, like wind, like fire.

American song-writer, Ken Medema has a song called “A crack in the wall” and two lines of it go like this:

I think I can see sunlightComin’ through a crack in the wall …And I’m gunna sing this song‘til the walls start a-tumblin’ down.

I think this give us a lead into a great metaphor for what Pentecost is all about – a whole lot a walls came tumbling down that day:

The walls that separate who could preach and who could not.

The prophet Joel’s vision was fulfilled:

All flesh was blessed by the Holy Spirit to proclaim the gospel – not just the male and the educated, but male and female, old and young, slave and free – they all became ministers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ that day.

Walls that separate who can hear the Gospel and who could not;

Walls separating people from this country and that country;

Walls separating my language from your language;

Walls separating the generations of young and old;

Walls separating the haves and the have nots;

They all came tumblin’ down that day.  The Gospel was proclaimed for the first time across barriers of nationality and language.  And the people understood and were saved.

But I wonder if you noticed – one more set of walls went down when the Spirit came upon them that day.

The story starts out with the Disciples safely in a house.  Somehow, and the details is not there in the story, the Spirit brought down even the physical walls of that house that were separating the Disciples from the world around them.  Suddenly they are outside proclaiming the Gospel to thousands of people, and later on that day they are gathered by a great body of water baptising people left and right.

That’s the Holy Spirit.  We only know some things by their effects.  Breaking down walls is an unmistakeable sign of the Spirit at work:  just as the sounds of leaves rustling lets you know the wind is there, or the smell of smoke lets you know there’s fire, so an ever-expanding circle of believers lets you know the Spirit is here.

So, the big question is:

Is the Spirit here in this church, Holy Cross, Hamersley, today?  Can we see any of the effects of the Spirit here?  What would these walls say, if they could talk?

Do we have eyes that can see the working of the Spirit among us? 

A welcome is also offered to those who bring their children for Baptism because this can be a wonderful time for people to hear the Gospel – the Good News that we are all loved and accepted by God.

I see people in this congregation from diverse traditions of faith before they came here, people with disabilities that might in other places become barriers, people across several generations.

I think that over the years some of the walls have come tumbling down.  There are signs here of people crashing through the barriers that society or tradition have built up so that others can hear the Gospel stories that can transform their lives – and in doing that their own lives have been transformed.

There is no doubt in my mind, no hesitation in saying the Holy Spirit is upon us!  We who are gathered together in this place have been touched by the flames of fire and swept up in the winds of change.  Old and young, male and female, whatever, we have all heard the Gospel and we are all empowered by the Spirit to go and share it.

But look out!  We think it is just us gathered here in this place.  But look again – we find ourselves surrounded by thousands of neighbours – people in our neighbourhood – who want to hear about Jesus.  They have heard the Spirit speaking their language.  Will the Spirit move us beyond these walls to gossip the Gospel, to share stories about the great love we have known to the people we meet in the park or the Square or the Shopping Centre – not strangers, people we know, our neighbours.

Sure as the sound of rustling leaves lets you know the wind is there, sure as the smell of smoke lets you know there’s fire, an ever-expanding circle of believers lets us know the Spirit is here.

And the Spirit is about to take us out there!  These walls are a tumblin’ down.

Let us pray:

God most wonderful, Friend most holy, our Easter season is climaxed by this reminder of you sending us your Holy Spirit in abundant power.

You have cast down the walls that divide people and prevent them from hearing the Gospel, creating the opportunity for every race and nation on earth to hear the Good news.

Embolden us with your Spirit to take that Good News beyond these walls so that every tongue may tell and every life display the wonders of your love.

Through Christ Jesus, who lives and loves with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God to be praised forever!

Amen!

EASTER 7C - Christian Unity

Today marks the beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity – the week leading up to the Day of Pentecost which we sometimes call the birthday of the Church.

Having been committed to the ecumenical movement for many years I am familiar with the sentiments we seek to address during this week.

On the one hand there is room for some remorse over the history of division and exclusion that we have all been part of over the centuries.  Yet, on the other hand there is much to celebrate as we have found more and more opportunities to act in unity with our Christian brothers and sisters.

But it is hard.

I was reading up a little about the history of the Christianisation of the Nubian Kingdom many centuries ago.  Some suggest that the Christianity reached the ancient Kingdom of Makuria during the first century AD and this is plausible in context of the spread of Christianity into a near neighbour – Ethiopia. 

A few centuries later during the 6^th Century, however, we seem to have records of a Byzantine Queen Theodora determining to send missionaries to the Kingdom – but she got involved in a race with another group to get there first.  A missionary sent by Emperor Justinian, and representing the true Orthodox Church tried to get there first and failed.

These two competing expressions of Christianity were born out of the Credal Councils of the Church and divided over the divine nature of Jesus.  The Nicene Creed affirmed that he was fully human and fully divine, but Queen Theodora and her church friends believed that Jesus was always and only fully divine – they were called Monophytes.

Alas, a century further on the Arabs invaded and tried to force Islam on the Nubian people – some areas resisted for a thousand years but others converted – but they did not forget their Christian heritage. 

The Missionary movement of the 19^th Century very largely concentrated its activities in what we now call South Sudan, but their work revived the church in the Nuba regions.

It is sad that the missionary movement replicated the denominational divisions of Europe which were largely meaningless to the Sudanese people – but there you go. 

Part of the problem for the church in South Sudan is that the dioceses are based on ethnic tribal groupings of people – which is a way of ensuring a bishop will be recognised by all in that diocese.  Culturally, they are unable to accept diversity within the church.  That might help you understand why there is still so much strife in South Sudan even though they were given their independence a few years ago.

It seems that divisiveness is almost instinctive to us – yet the prayer of Jesus in John 17 is a call to us all in the church to be really counter-cultural.  It calls us to act against our instincts.  It calls us to go against all our cultural norms.

So, how do we need to change in order to live this way?

In our study this week of Marcus’ Borg’s book, The Heart of Christianity, we gave some consideration to this idea.  We were talking about being Christian in a world that is pluralistic – where there are not just other religions, but many different ways of being Christian.

Some people over the years have been very cautious about the work of the World Council of Churches.  They have somehow gotten the idea that the goal of the Council is to create a single homogeneous church which, of course, might mean we have to change a bit.  What Borg and the Council of Churches seem to get is that rather than trying to find some small areas which we hold in common and work together on the basis of that, we should be so self-contained in our confidence about the faith we have that we can celebrate the different faith that others have without feeling like we are compromising our faith.  If we can confidently celebrate our diversity then we will be able to demonstrate the Unity of Spirit that Jesus is praying for. 

This is not a case of putting aside any of the things we hold dear – rather it simply involves allowing others to do the faith differently than we do.

It is a way of saying that God and Jesus are too big for any one church to say it all.  If we can grasp this then we can celebrate those other Christians we might work with because when they are added to us we might actually be getting closer to all that God wants us to be.

So often in the Church we think one of our primary tasks is guarding the doors – checking up on who gets in and does not.  That is what our Creeds and Statements of Faith are about.  We use these to decide if someone can be included in our definition of what it means to be a Christian.  Somehow, when I consider the teachings of Jesus, I think God isn’t like that nor does God want us to be like that.

Our starting point should be that everyone is IN.

When we are IN and together like that, and when we seek to explore how we should be practicing the Christian life together – the things that we should be doing in Jesus’ name – then we will find far more people on the inside than if we had tried to keep them out at the door.

Jesus says very clearly that our WORK is to live in Jesus – to abide in him – in just the same way that Jesus abides in God the Father.  As we all live in this close and intimate relationship with Jesus, even though we might do the outward practices of our faith and order in the church differently, we will become the answer to Jesus’ prayer.

Easter 5C - Radical Inclusion

When you travel overseas it is often necessary to take special precautions about the food and water that you consume because they might make you sick.  A friend’s recent trip to Sri Lanka created a constant anxiety for her about the water – but also about how well the food might have been cooked.

In our medicalised view of the world we have accepted as true the idea that what goes into you can indeed do you a great deal of harm.

This is not unlike the world in which Jesus lived where they had a religious tradition we call a “purity code”.  According to the rules associated with this if you ate certain things you would be ritually unclean.  If you touched certain things you would become ritually unclean.  And if you associated with certain kinds of people you would be regarded as ritually unclean.

And if you were ritually unclean it meant that you could not fulfill your religious obligations at temple or synagogue.  Depending on the gravity of the transgression the uncleanness would last a certain number of days – a day, a week, a month or even longer.  Generally a form of ritual washing completed the period of days and sometimes a sacrifice was required.

It is in this context that we have to begin to understand the story that was read from Acts 11.  On one level it is a story of the Holy Spirit of God trying to break through the thick skulls of the Apostles that the Gospel was a message for all humanity, not just the Jews – but as history bears out, Peter was not the great apostle to the Gentiles.  That commission was given to Paul.  Peter was the leader of the apostolic mission to the Jews.

But in using the metaphor of unclean foods to get this message across the voice in the vision says to Peter “Do not consider anything unclean that God has declared clean.”  It is these words that struck me most as I read through the selected texts for today.  So what are we to make of it as God’s word to us for today?

On another level I think this story could also be an attempt by the Holy Spirit of God to get through the thick skulls of the Apostles that this new Way of Jesus means an end to the Purity Code that had for so long controlled so many aspects of their daily lives.

This should not have been a new idea to the Apostles if they had been listening to the stories of Jesus as we have them recorded in the Gospels.  Jesus frequently challenged the purity code:-

• He ate with tax collectors and sinners (code for Gentiles).
• He did not mind the company of women – noting the haemorrhaging woman who was clearly “unclean” according to the code.
• He had no qualms reaching out to touch lepers.
• He touched the coffin of the dead son of the widow of Nain.

So, here in this story, Peter is being reminded again that the Way of Jesus establishes a new way to God that is not about purity – “If God says something is clean, then don’t go on saying it is unclean.” - it is about Inclusion.  Everyone is welcome!

So the question I then have to ask myself is do we still have remnants of a purity code in the church today and if so, what does it look like?

One example of it that I see in some places is a clear reluctance to mix with certain kinds of people.  This might be because their theology is perceived to be in error; or it might be because they live morally questionable lifestyles; or it might even be nothing more than that they are obviously much poorer than us.  In some of my ecumenical work I have come across good people who refused to join in the work of a committee because there were Catholics on it.  It was almost as if being close to them might contaminate their own reputation as Christian people.

In an earlier time in many churches people who smoked cigarettes or drank alcohol were regarded as something like social pariahs – people not to be associated with if you wanted to be really Christian.  And you might add to that women who wore makeup or had their ears pierced and etc. etc. etc.

But I think there are some more subtle ways in which we use attitudes and gesture to try and keep our little part of the Community of Christ rather bland and homogenous.  People who are not like us are subtly excluded from circles.  People who hold different political or theological views than our group are also shut out – very subtly.

Jesus is calling us into a very different kind of community than those that humans generally try to create in which we are all alike.  He does this by challenging us to recognise the mark of God in every other human being – we call this “the image of God” – and then to love that person who is bearing the mark of God.

This kind of radical inclusion stands in contrast to what we see in most of society and that is why John reminds of the words of Jesus that we have been given a new commandment (I actually think it is really an old one restated) to love one another.  When we do this, he says, people will really know that you are his disciples. 

This should mark us apart from the rest of society.  We should be a place that is welcoming and inclusive.  It makes me really sad to see the enormous amount of material on social media in which Christian people are excluding themselves from people whose sexuality or morality is troublesome to them.  Or people who want to reject others because of their theology or some other aspect of difference.

It is only when we welcome others and sit down at meals with them that we can ever begin to share our journey of faith with them as Jesus did and has called us to do.