(Acts 11 1-10)

1 Soon the news reached the apostles and other believers in Judea that the Gentiles had received the word of God. 2 But when Peter arrived back in Jerusalem, the Jewish believers criticized him. 3 “You entered the home of Gentiles and even ate with them!” they said. 4 Then Peter told them exactly what had happened. 5 “I was in the town of Joppa,” he said, “and while I was praying, I went into a trance and saw a vision. Something like a large sheet was let down by its four corners from the sky. And it came right down to me. 6 When I looked inside the sheet, I saw all sorts of small animals, wild animals, reptiles, and birds. 7 And I heard a voice say, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat them.’ 8 “‘No, Lord,’ I replied. ‘I have never eaten anything that our Jewish laws have declared impure or unclean.’ 9 “But the voice from heaven spoke again: ‘Do not call something unclean if God has made it clean.’ 10 This happened three times before the sheet and all it contained was pulled back up to heaven

It is easy to overlook the fragility of Christianity after Jesus’ death. There is a story of him arriving in heaven after his crucifixion. The angels welcome him back and ask him about his time on earth. What they want to know is does he have a Plan B. What will happen if the disciples he left are not up to the task he has set them? Jesus replies that there is no back up plan. The truth has been revealed to and now left with the disciples. It is up to them, and the Holy Spirit to make sense of what they have seen and heard.

We do not always appreciate that Christianity could easily have become a sect of Judaism rather than a truth for the whole world. Jesus was a Jewish prophet and it was not immediately clear to those in the early church whether or not Gentile Christians should either be circumcised or have to follow the Jewish dietary laws. In this vision from God Peter realises that the old order has changed and people need to be welcomed into the faith without any restrictions or requirements being laid on them. The heart of the Christian religion is that there is nothing that any of us can do to improve our standing in front of God. It is pure grace. You can earn someone’s respect but not their love. If circumcision or new dietary laws get absorbed into the new religion than the whole point is lost

The Early Church needed a way to understand and express the new truth they had learnt through Jesus Christ. This need to make sense our lives and to understand what is important is a basic human characteristic. I was taking a class for the Reception and Year 1 of the local primary school. We were in church and doing a picture treasure hunt where the children were given photographs of different objects in the church and then had to try and find them. While they were leaving one child said to me, “I am so…proud”; a second one looked at me and said, “I love you”; a third child went past and said, “Goodbye Potato head”. Each of them was putting their experience into a set of words that makes sense to them. They were children, aged only five and six and so they were picking ideas at random out of their heads.

The Early Church was going through this equivalent process in putting the life, death and resurrection of Jesus into concepts that made sense to them. It is how we live our lives as adults. We are continually taking stock, reappraising and reassessing in order to make stories of our lives that they have some kind of meaning. We all have our ways of making sense of things; our version of the children saying, “I am so…proud”, “I love you” or “Goodbye Potato head”.

When you go through this process with Christianity, please don’t tell me that you like Christianity because it upholds traditional Christian values; that it is something that you appreciate and would want for your children. This sounds both reasoned and reasonable but a God who became man, died and rose again is more exciting than this. Inevitably we take refuge in what we already do and know. We are reassured by boundaries and definitions and we instinctively try to put events into a familiar framework so that we can understand and make sense of what has happened.

Please don’t tell me that you are good enough to be a Christian or to come to church. Guilt and a lack of self worth are easy and useless place to look for safety and self-protection. Don’t sit on the edge looking in and feel that everyone else knows each other except for you. Shepherds Bush has a high turn over of people and on occasions as much as half the people in this church are new since I arrived 18 months ago.

Don’t make the same mistake of the Early Church and allow the simple truth of Christianity to be more complicated than it is. Un-crowd your mind and allow yourself to engage in your heart with what is important. Look for Jesus Christ both in the face of a stranger and also in your own heart. Allow the curious, inquisitive wondering side of yourselves to look for a self-expression that is distinctive and true only to you. Learn different ways of being in the world; accept the truth of this curious strange and wonderful story that Jesus Christ lived, died and was resurrected as a part of God’s love for the world