This week we are presented with Acts 11:1-18 and John 13:31-35.

The Acts reading shows us Peter having to defend himself to the early church, explaining how he could dare to go and eat with Gentiles. Peter roots his defense in his vision of a sheet being lowered from heaven, full of animals considered 'unclean' to eat.  At seeing what must have been a revolting sight for him, the instruction comes, "Kill and eat!"  

Peter can't even stomach the command, "By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth." he cries out.  He gets the response, "What God has made clean, you must not call profane."  This is a such a revolutionary idea, that it has to be repeated for him three times.  This is a moment of catastrophe for Peter, his entire worldview and sense of identity is being destroyed.  To understand why, we need to take a step back from our own position.

We, as Christians in the Western world, have the luxury of being a majority religion in a tolerant environment.  Our laws, our customs, our national identity and institutions - even our skylines, replete with towers and steeples - are rooted in the faith we profess.  We are comfortable, confident - we may even, in our more honest moments, reach for complacent.

Not so Peter.  He has grown up in an oppressed backwater of a mighty empire, with its own predominant religion, and cult of emperor worship.  His religion is peculiar in its monotheism, in a world that manages religious tolerance by means of an expanding pantheon and a gestalt that takes in all newcomers - so long as they do not claim incompatibility with the norm.

He lived as part of a subculture under enormous pressure to conform, to sacrifice its individuality and become good little citizens of the empire.  His was a world in which, as Willimon puts it, 'A little bit of pork here, a pinch of incense or a little intermarriage was a matter of life or death for the community.  The dietary laws are not a matter of etiquette or peculiar culinary habits.  They are a matter of survival and identity for the Jews."

And yet, here is God rewriting those rules - asking Peter, and through him every Christian, to sacrifice a large portion of everything he's believed, and an even larger portion of how he identifies, and his family and cultural inheritance and history - because here and now God is extending his invitation, as he'd always promised to do, to every nation under the sun.  The incredible truth Peter is having revealed is that in Christ, through Christ, because of Christ, there is no long us and them - there's just Us, people, loved by God, and called into relationship with him and one another.  And that relationship, and that alone is the source of our identity.  That relationship, and that alone becomes for us our heritage, and our inheritance; our future, and our past.

Like those little clowns - each in their own little box, cut off and divided from those around them, existing in their own world, safe behind their barriers - Peter's world, and that of the earliest Jewish Christian believers (by which I mean all the earliest Christian believers) was starkly divided into us and them, Jew and Gentile,  Clean and Unclean. 

And this is why Peter is effectively on trial in front of the church - because he dared to act as if that were no longer true.  Are we brave enough to do the same?

Pause for prayer: Spend a moment in quiet, relaxing into God's presence with you, and ask him to guide your thoughts and reflections.  With Him, begin looking over your life, and the way you arrange things around you.  See if you can become aware of the barriers, judgements and divisions you use to make sense of the people, places, and tasks that make up your world.  Perhaps you might like to draw something simple on a piece of paper to help you visualise things in this way.  Now, when you are ready, start to question if those ways of understanding are rooted in heaven, or on earth?  Do they help, or hinder, the flow of love and grace into your life, and through you into the world?

Finally, bonus points for anyone who noticed I'd mixed up my miracles last week - Tabitha wasn't a small girl at all, but she was nonetheless raised from the dead, so I think the points made still hold true!