Waste Ground and Neighbours' Gardens - Sermon 6th April 2007
Acts 11:1-18, Revelation 21:1-6, John 13:31-35
(This sermon was considerably shortened in preaching! In fact, the first part was detached, and used in the evening service, but it does hang together with the thought that so much of the way we understand the world, and God, comes from the “mapping” of the universe we do in childhood.)
When I was six years old, we moved house, without leaving Rhyl, from 29 Sisson Street to 36 Lynton Walk. A lot of things seemed to happen to my take on the world round about then, and for maybe the next two years. I was six when I first came across a book on astronomy. By someone called Charles Hatcher, it was called The Universe, and I still have it in the study. I haven’t a clue how much of it I understood, beyond that it was about the stars, the same stars I could see above my head at night, and it explained that these stars were absolutely huge. I still remember several of the pictures and diagrams as though they are part of my mental furniture, without having looked in the book for years. One shows the sun, as a large dot, with the earth in orbit around it as a circle maybe four or five inches in diameter. The earth’s orbit – 93 million miles from the sun, 186 million miles in diameter – shown in white, is completely enclosed in a red disk, which is meant to give the comparative size of a red giant star. Below this is another disc – or actually only part of the circumference of a disc, which would probably have a diameter of maybe two feet, if the page could take it. And that is meant to indicate the relative size of a supergiant star.
The proportions have changed with the years, as astronomy and the modelling of stars’ internal processes has advanced. But the sense of scale remains. And for a wee boy much of whose life was tied up with Carmel Congregational chapel in Queen Street in Rhyl, the simple putting-together of such a vision of the size of creation with the open and sophisticated understanding of God that saturated that little Christian community, led me to an understanding which has really been part of the foundation of my faith ever since. It let me look up at the sky, not with an understanding of light-years, and parsecs, and the distance of stars (let alone galaxies!) – because who can grasp the truly astronomical – but with a sense that it was all unimaginably bigger than it looked.
And it left me with this thought, which has never left me: if the universe is this big, this vast – how big must God be?
Our new house was a pre-war semi, backing on to a piece of waste ground. And the fact of neighbours together with the fact that we backed onto waste ground, became very significant for my growing-up. In fact, it framed my understanding of the universe in a way just as important as Charles Hatcher’s The Universe. Because my brother and I were discovering the joys of football. And sometimes the ball would go astray.
The great Old Testament scholar John Skinner used to say that for the Hebrew mind, the world where life was lived – if you like, the ordered universe - was bounded by three areas of residual chaos. There was the desert. There was the sea. And there was death.
Interesting that our Epistle reading today doesn’t come from an epistle, but from the end of the Book of Revelation, where John sees the remade world characterized by an end of death, the disappearance of the sea, and an end to thirst, the desert’s quintessence.
Anyway, I suppose that the erratic trajectory of our many cheap plastic footballs mapped out for my brother and me a world divided into our garden, where it was OK to stay, and three surrounding zones – the two neighbours’ gardens, and several tens of acres of waste ground at the back.
Most often, the football would go over into the Lamberts’ garden – it was their house that was through the wall of our semi. Uncle Jack and Auntie Mag Lambert were a lovely couple, with two daughters at the end of teen-age. Auntie Mag could do a fine impression of pretending to tell us off when the ball went over yet again, but there was always the sense that, while it shouldn’t happen – Uncle Jack had his roses, and was fond of them – she understood what it was like to be children.
Oddly enough, the real fear, if our football went over the wall to the Lamberts, wasn’t so much that Auntie Mag or Uncle Jack might catch us, as that our mother would. Because then, we really were in trouble!
Much less often, the ball went over into the other neighbour’s garden. This was because you’d have to kick it right over the garage, which bounded one side of our garden, to do that. She was an elderly lady we didn’t see much at all. My parents did, because they went in to her, but she was very reclusive, and quite frail. For the ball to go into her garden was a much more serious business. Her garden was done by a “man”. Justifiably, she got cross if children came unbidden into it. There were lots of plants to break, and because of flower-beds, even getting into it over the fence by the garage meant that you risked causing damage. Detectable damage. A heavy leather one my brother got for a birthday caused a huge stooshie, as it took out several plants, and just had to be retrieved because it was too expensive to leave. We got detected in the attempt…
And this garden was spooky! It was shaded by trees, and closed in, and dark. It felt really alien. So while the Lamberts suffered their bombardment, we were careful not to let the ball go the other side!
But then there was the waste ground. At the back of our garden was a large electricity substation, big enough that the ball didn’t often fly over it and into the three-foot-deep grasses and weeds and big gorse bushes that filled its maybe forty or fifty acres. If it did, it was often lost. If we found the ball, it was often burst. But I remember an odd psychological reaction I had to this waste ground.
We weren’t forbidden to go into it. At least, nobody had ever stopped us. My parents had said nothing about it. But I always felt uneasy when I did. I always felt, when it was my turn to get the lost ball, that I was pushing forward into something I didn’t understand.
Part of it was that this was where the big boys and girls went. Untamed twelve year olds. And teenagers!!! Actually, you hardly ever saw anyone. Sometimes you’d see a group of them, at the other end. But you had the sense that this was where these older kids went to exercise a freedom you didn’t have yet. Maybe it was the freedom that worried me. And since there was no prohibition against going there, since it didn’t worry my parents, because it was right behind our house, my lack of freedom to explore this area was clearly – and I think I knew it at the time – in my own head.
But I desperately wanted to go and explore it. Because about seventy yards from our house, much further than I’d ever been on a quick dart to recover a lost ball, largely covered in gorse and weeds, was something I really wanted to examine. I had seen its steel beams – exotic beams, with circular holes in, to reduce weight – with my telescope from my bedroom. I knew what the pile of rusting metal was. It was the remains of a crashed Martian spaceship.
I can remember agonizing about it one summer day. And I can remember climbing the back wall, and over into the scratchy weeds. And pushing through the dense undergrowth, well over waist height. And getting to the strange machine. I couldn’t tell what it was. It looked a lot less like a crashed flying saucer at this range. But the fascination with the “spaceship” was suddenly replaced by a different feeling. I looked around, and thought “This is all right!” “This is OK…” Here I was, out of the garden, on my own initiative, having chosen to explore a place I wasn’t sure about. I wasn’t sure what laws or regulations covered this bit of the universe. But it seemed to be perfectly all right for me to be here.
I had made a sort of judgment. Here was a zone not covered by the Laws of the Neighbours’ Gardens. Here was a zone I had judged, morally, to be different. And I had taken responsibility for this. It was down to me. It had been my call.
And then I nearly jumped out of my skin! A gruff male voice called my name. It was Mr. Savage, the Geography teacher from the High School. Actually, a less savage man probably never walked the earth. And Mr. Savage simply said what a nice day it was, and asked if I’d seen his Siamese cat.
What a day! I’d stepped beyond the boundaries, not just of what I knew was safe – our garden – but what I understood to be covered by the Law of Mum and Dad – the neighbours’ gardens. And a grownup had confirmed for me that it was OK to be here.
Acts chapter 10 is one of the central chapters of the book, and crucial for us to understand the nature of the Christian faith. The Church is born entirely within the horizon of Judaism. It consists entirely of devout Jews. And yet there is from the beginning a crucial, and powerfully creative, instability in this setup. The Church is composed of devout Jews who ascribe to Jesus of Nazareth a total ultimacy that they are just beginning to explore. And one of the most characteristic things about the Jewish faith is that it ascribes total and exclusive ultimacy only to God.
It actually took the Christian Church something over four hundred years to sort out this paradox – that for us as Christians, only God is ultimate, and yet Jesus Christ is ultimate for us. It wound up with the Church explaining how, and in what sense, we Christians believe that Jesus Christ is God incarnate. And also in what senses we don’t!
We know that in the early stages of this process, within the New Testament itself, one of the first places these tensions showed was in two questions – can you be a Christian without being a Jew? Can you become a Christian without basically becoming a Jew first? Practically, this means: do Christians have to observe Jewish dietary and ceremonial law? And most pressingly for Paul, with his mission to the Gentiles: do converts to Christianity have to accept circumcision? And not “just” (just!) circumcision! Circumcision implies acceptance of the whole Jewish law.
We need to understand that what we have in Acts is Luke’s own take on these issues. Paul’s account, stitched together out of his letters, would look a bit different! And Luke clearly has in mind a sort of evolutionary scheme, where certain things have to happen in order. Because of Luke’s understanding that Peter is the chief Apostle, it’s Peter who has to be responsible for the baptism of the first Gentile convert, and that’s what is narrated in Acts 10, and in our reading this morning from the following chapter. Peter is summoned by the centurion Cornelius, who sends a squad of three men to bring him to Caesarea.
While they are on their way, Peter is praying, around the middle of the day, and has put in his lunch-order. Things like appetite are usually supposed not to be allowed to interfere with serious prayer, but Peter’s hunger feeds into what happens next. He falls into something like a trance, and sees a container dangle from heaven, with every kind of animal in it – which to a Jewish mind means both clean and unclean animals. Three times a voice bids him kill and eat what he sees; three times he protests that it is beyond him to eat what the Law of God proscribes.
And the voice says “What God has pronounced clean, you must not call common…”
The men arrive, and Peter goes with them. He isn’t clear what Cornelius wants, and when he gets there, it’s clear that Cornelius isn’t too sure either – beyond that he’s quite clear that God has brought them all together…
So Peter starts to preach. And as he’s doing so, the Holy Spirit comes on everyone there. And what astonishes Peter and his Jewish companions is that the Spirit of God comes even on those who are not Jews. Even on the Gentiles. The Holy Spirit – like Mr. Savage in the waste ground – has confirmed that it’s OK to be in this territory.
So Peter baptises them, there and then.
Our reading this morning comes from the inquest into all this. Peter is back in Jerusalem, giving his report. And he is criticized by the Church there, all of them circumcised.
But the criticism is fascinating.
What Luke is interested in is this first baptism of Gentiles. What everyone at this meeting is presumably interested in is that Gentiles have been baptized.
But the criticism is: “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?”
It may be that Luke hates the thought of even mentioning that Peter may have been criticized for whom he baptized. It may be that Peter’s critics really were this mealy-mouthed, and wanted to pick him up on a technical breach of food-law rather than on the central issue.
But Peter answers them as though they had asked him about baptism.
They ask why he even had that much to do with these people. What they are really wondering is how come Peter basically let them into the church.
And Peter’s answer is simple, but definitive.
If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?
You see, what is happening here is that the Church is having to push forward into unknown ground, terra incognita. Her whole experience up to this point has been framed by a simple straightforward division. You are allowed to do this. You are not allowed to do that. You have permission to do this, you do not have permission to do that. You can be here – you can not be there…
But what opens up before the church in the “Cornelius Case” is something radically new. Because the Church is not the self-enclosed people of God that Israel was. The Church’s moral universe isn’t made up of just our garden, in which we can play football to our heart’s content, and the neighbours’ gardens which are covered by various kinds of law and prohibition. The Church has a boundary with a completely different kind of area. No clear rules. No protocols. No precedents. Nothing worked out as yet. Somewhere we haven’t been before.
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But God is here before us. In fact, it’s God who brought us out here.
Out beyond the settled and the usual. Out beyond where everything fits into a neat, all-encompassing legalistic framework that answers every question and tells you what to do in every situation. Out beyond our comfort zone, where we only need to mix with people like us, and where we can pretend that there’s something wrong, or deficient, with people who aren’t like us. Out to a place – like our place in contemporary culture – in which we suddenly realise that we don’t know the rules, can’t see clearly what we are doing, aren’t sure what happens next.
Just like me on my expedition to the flying saucer.
How did we get here? We don’t know. But God is here with us. And God is, in ways we can’t grasp, at work in the lives of people who are very unlike us, but who seem to be being drawn in with us to the remaking of the Church.
And all of a sudden, perhaps, we grasp that there is one fundamental law that still holds, in fact one that’s given to us as we, the church, press forward into this new territory. Jesus says it, in this morning’s Gospel:
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.