Simple, straightforward, yet tough to live

Sermon by Jamie Howison on Acts 11:1-18 and John 13:31-35

Prejudice—pre-judgment, literally—is a hard reality. I remember a friend from my university days, telling the story of how he’d been taking the bus home from school one day, reading Herman Hesse’s novel Siddhartha as the bus pulled up to the corner of Arlington and Portage where an obviously intoxicated Indigenous man boarded. My friend said he tucked himself as deeply as he could in his book, dreading that the open space beside him would be this man’s choice of seats… and sure enough it was. The man slumped into the seat, and then peered over at my friend’s book. “What are you reading?” he asked. “Um, a book?” my friend nervously replied. “What book are you reading?” the man replied, clearly demanding an answer. “Um, it is by Herman Hesse. Uh, Siddhartha.” A brief pause followed, and then the man said, “Have you ever read Steppenwolf?”, which is probably Hesse’s best-known novel.

As it turned out this man had gone to university, done a number of courses in literature, graduated with a solid degree, and then got caught in the swirl of alcoholism and addiction that had dogged so many people from his family and community. But he sure knew Steppenwolf, and he really wanted to hear my friend’s thoughts on this other book by Hesse. They rode together and talked about books all the way along Portage Avenue, till they hit the man’s bus stop, and after he’d gone my friend had to reflect on the prejudices he carried, and on the prejudice that had just been shattered.

There is a fairly serious set of pre-judgments at work in this evening’s story from Acts. This is how it began:

Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God. So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, saying, ‘Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?’

You can’t do that Peter, they’re not part of the recognized circle of God’s people. And the story is that you shared your faith with someone named Cornelius, a centurion of the Italian Cohort. A centurion, Peter? A member of the Roman occupying forces? Any Gentile is unclean, but this one is also an oppressor, Peter. This can’t continue. This isn’t right, it isn’t good or holy.

Then Peter began to explain it to them, step by step, saying, “I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision…” And what a vision it was. Three times he sees a sheet being lowered from the heavens, filled with animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of every description, and he’s invited to “kill and eat.” But no, he can’t, so he protests “By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.” The second time he sees this same vision, he hears a voice telling him, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” A third time the vision is repeated, and then messengers arrive from Caesarea, asking him to go with them. “The Spirit,” says Peter, “told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us,” and so he goes, and Cornelius is baptized, which touches him the exact same way that it had touched the Jewish believers. When Peter’s critics heard this, they were silenced. “And they praised God, saying, ‘Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.’”

Well, I can actually imagine that some of them at least still held on to some very real skepticism about it all, as this was a huge step for anyone born and raised as an observant Jew. In fact there is this passage in Galatians, where Paul tunes up Peter and Barnabas for no longer being willing to eat together with Gentile Christians, on account of “certain people coming from James” and putting the pressure on them to stop flouting the torah food laws. (Galatians 2:11-14) Old biases, old customs, old judgements die hard, even with a people soaked in the grace of Jesus.

Because, you see, the grace of Jesus is both simple and straightforward and tough to live in times marked by old prejudices. In this gospel reading from John, Jesus looks at his disciples and says,

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

Here Reynolds Price reminds us that in John’s telling of things, Jesus speaks only two commandments to his followers. Price points first to “the one broad command of John and his Jesus—believe that Jesus is Messiah, the Son of God, and God incarnate,” and then adds this:

Suppose that I assent, I do believe. What next? Despite the fact that, late in his life, Jesus urges his disciples to keep his commands, it is important to recall that only one other command is reported by John, the last-minute injunction that the disciples “love each other.”

Now this says to me that as John writes his gospel account he is wanting to drill down to the utter essence of Jesus, which is summarized as “believe that Jesus is the Christ,” and then love one another.

Easy as pie, right? Just believe, and then live it by loving one another. No complex system of laws—and there are 613 laws in the Torah—and no rigorous tasks or pilgrimages to be made to prove your faith. Just live it, and live it in love. In the late 200s the apologist Tertullian wrote of just how powerfully such love spoke to the Roman world, saying,

It is our care of the helpless, our practice of loving kindness that brands us in the eyes of many of our opponents. ‘Only look,’ they say, ‘look how they love one another!’ (Tertullian, 155 AD – c. 220)

And yet as I said, what is simple and straightforward turns out also to be tough to live out in times marked by both old prejudices and new pressures. I appreciate what N.T. Wright has to say about this tension.

Love is all about the other person. It overflows into service, not in order to show off how hard-working it is, but because that is its natural form. This is to be the badge that the Christian community wears before a watching world. [Yet] we have turned the gospel into a weapon of our own various cultures. We have hit each other over the head with it, burnt each other at the stake with it. We have defined the ‘one another’ so tightly that it means only ‘love the people who reinforce your own sense of who you are.’

And how often over the course of Christian history have we seen this happen? Tertullian wrote over a hundred years before the Emperor Constantine made Christianity a legal and acceptable faith within the Roman Empire, so he never had to face the politicization of faith that happened in the Empire, or across Europe during the Reformation, or in Germany during the Second World War. Yet even in Tertullian’s time it wasn’t always easy to love one another, as different groups and factions within the young church divided over all manner of theological and ecclesial questions. Tertullian himself would join a group called the Montanists, which embraced new prophecy and ecstatic worship, in a way that roughly parallels the Pentecostalism of modern times, and who were eventually declared as heretics. Loving one another is easiest when everyone else seems to hold the same orthodoxy—theological, social, and political—that I do.

So it strikes me that Bishop Wright is fundamentally correct when he insists that we need to transcend loving only the people who reinforce our own sense of who we are, and learn to love more abundantly. This is what Jesus did, after all. Remember all the Samaritans, centurions, tax collectors, lepers, and lame folk to whom he extended the hand of kindness?

To live and love like that is at once simple and challenging. And it is a path to which Jesus has been summoning us for 2000 years. May we have the courage to follow.