A recent issue of Maclean’s magazine had as its cover story
an article entitled, “Is God Poison?”
The article explored charges made by a number of atheists,
that belief in God, and in particular, organized religion of any stripe,
be it Christian, Muslim, Jewish or any other religion,
has always led to persecution and conflict.
Christopher Hitchens, an atheist whose upcoming book is entitled,
“God is Not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything,”
charges that religion is the most extreme form of in-group/out-group marker
ever known to humanity.
Some of you who are familiar with Hitchens
may not be surprised by his statements.
After all it was Hitchens who famously wrote a book and a documentary
criticizing Mother Theresa.
For nearly 400 years the Roman Catholic Church,
when it came to considering elevating a person to sainthood,
would appoint a church lawyer, to argue against the process of canonization.
It was argued that this procedure would ensure
that due care would be brought to the canonization process
and that the status of saint would not be easily achieved.
The lawyer who was appointed to this role was called The Devil’s Advocate.
Though this role was abolished by Pope John Paul II in 1983,
in 2002, Hitchens was asked by the Vatican to carry out the role of the Devil’s Advocate and testify against the canonization of Mother Theresa.
So think what you will of Hitchens but I find it difficult to brush aside his comment
that religion divides those who are in from those who are out
and that in the process, it creates division, conflict and strife.
It is true that religion, of every faith background,
has been part of human conflict for as long as anyone can remember.
Certainly our own Bible is full of such accounts.
The Old Testament is mostly about God’s relationship with the people of Israel.
Because of Israel’s chosen status, conflict met the Israelites at every turn,
with their neighbours and even amongst themselves.
In the New Testament the claims of Jesus led to his crucifixion
and the witness of the disciples resulted in their persecution as well.
And when Christianity grew,
from being a persecuted minority religion to the religion of empire,
it moved from being the persecuted to becoming the persecutor in many ways.
I don’t need to remind you about some of the horrible things
that have been done throughout history in the name of religion.
And today, what about Islamic fundamentalists, who in the name of their god,
committed those horrible acts of terror and carnage on 9-11?
What about so called Christians and Muslims
savagely mutilating each other in too many places in Africa?
What about Jews and Muslim’s in Palestine, Hindu’s and Sikhs in India?
I could go on.

Which is why our texts this morning are so critical for us as people of faith.
There needs to be a difference
between living as people who have our hope in God’s promise,
both for today and for the future,
and living as people who then somehow translate that promise
into an abandonment for the outcome
of those who many not share our sense of the promise.
Jesus, in John’s gospel account, says to his disciples in predicting his death,
“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.
Just as I have love you, you also should love one another.
By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
There are times when we, and speaking for myself, when I,
would very much like to interpret Jesus’ commands in a very restrictive way.
Love those who are like us.
Love only other disciples,
after all Jesus was surrounded only by his followers when he uttered these words.
But I know that such a restrictive interpretation
just won’t jive with the same Jesus who said earlier in the gospel,
God so loved the world that he sent his only son
so that anyone who believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life.
So clearly when Jesus says we should love one another just as he has loved us,
he intends that we love all people,
all those for whom God sent his only son,
all those who have been invited by God’s grace to believe in him.
There are no exceptions.

We must be a gracious people,
for as our other text this morning from the Book of the Acts of the Apostles makes clear, it was once our part to be the outsider
when it came to who was in and who was out.
Our text from Acts 11 is a seminal text in church history.
Since the resurrection of Jesus and the command to go and make disciples,
most, if not all, of that disciple making had been confined to the Jewish people.
Jesus was a Jew, his disciples were Jews,
the people in Jerusalem who Peter and the others were evangelizing, they were Jews. After all the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures,
had made clear that God’s covenant had been made with the Jewish people.
So why would they even begin to imagine that non-Jews, Gentiles,
would be part of God’s covenant plan?
It had always been clear to the Jews that God had set them apart from the other people. In fact the Mosaic Law took pains to point out
how the Jewish people had been set apart from others to be God’s chosen people.
Part of that Law was called the Holiness Code and contained, among other things,
dietary restrictions on what foods were permissible and what foods were unclean.
In the Old Testament Leviticus 11 speaks of these restrictions,
commanding that the Jewish people were only to eat animals
which had divided hoofs and also chewed the cud.
Oxen, sheep and goats were permitted,
but camels, rabbits and pigs were considered unclean.
Fish were only allowed if they had scales and fins.
No shellfish, lobsters, oysters or crabs.
Many birds were restricted and most insects as well,
although insects that had jointed legs above their feet with which to jump,
such as grasshoppers, locusts and crickets, were allowed.
And all these restrictions were explained by a simple statement,
“Be holy, for I am holy,” declared the Lord.
There is no reason given other than that God had commanded this
to set his people apart from the rest.
They were in, the others were out, or so it was thought.

Now when it was reported that Peter, the leader of the apostles,
had evangelized and even baptized the family of Cornelius,
a Gentile centurion from Caesarea,
the others in Jerusalem demanded to know why.
Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?
Sounds suspiciously like some questions we’ve heard before,
such as when the Pharisees asked of Jesus disciples,
why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?
Peter appears before the others and explained his actions,
beginning with the account of the vision he saw while staying in the city of Joppa.
A large sheet containing all manner of unclean animals was lowered as if from heaven. A voice said to Peter, “Kill the animals and eat.”
Begin a good Jew, Peter was sickened at the thought.
“By no means Lord, for nothing profane or unclean has even entered my mouth.”
The voice responded, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”
This strange vision was repeated three times
and three times Peter refused to eat the unclean food.
After this, Peter was summoned to Caesarea to the home of Cornelius.
What he found was a devout man who was told to send for Peter.
As Peter then explained who Jesus was to Cornelius,
suddenly the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word
and even the Gentiles received the gift.
For Peter, it was suddenly clear.
How could he call profane, that which God had made clean?
The vision was only a prelude to the main revelation,
that God had made the Gentiles clean.
The Holy Spirit was sent to the Gentiles as well as to the Jews.

The apostle Paul would later write in his letter to the Galatians,
“In Christ there is no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or free,
there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.
And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring,
heirs according to the promise.”
Peter explained that if God gave to the Gentiles
the same gift he gave the Jews when they believed in the Lord Jesus Christ,
how could he then hinder God?
When the rest of the Jews heard this, they were silenced.
And they praised God, saying,
then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.

So we are all heirs of the promise.
Once God had chosen a select people through whom he would reveal himself.
He set them apart to be holy, as he is holy, to be his covenant people.
Now, through his son Jesus, as God had planned all along,
we are all God’s covenant children,
all invited to be part of God’s plan of saving grace, no exceptions.
It’s a wonderful, affirming, inviting text,
and yet it can also be a very dangerous text.
It can be dangerous because it challenges our understanding
of who might be acceptable to God.
Every generation has its Gentiles,
those who are considered unclean and unacceptable.
And yet the Spirit told Peter to go to the Gentiles
and not make a distinction between them and himself.

But we still do make distinctions, don’t we?
There are still some we find hard to accept
and find difficult to believe that God would accept.
Think for a moment about those who play the role of modern day Gentiles in our lives. Think about the distinctions we continue to make
between those who are in and those who are out, at least in our eyes.
Is the drunk aboriginal man who staggers into the sanctuary during worship in or out?
Is the kid high on drugs who comes to sleep it off in a pew in or out?
Are those who practice sexually immoral behaviour and lifestyles in or out?
What about those who cheat on their spouses,
who abuse their wives, husbands, parents, children, are they in or out?
And that’s just the people in the church!
Let’s not even go beyond these walls, to the people of other faiths or to the atheists.

But when Jesus invites us to love one another in the same way that he loved us,
he isn’t asking us to worry
about why God would choose to love the people we find very hard to love.
Our love for people, all people,
is not a pronouncement of God’s favour on them,
that somehow by our love we are judging them to be acceptable in God’s sight.
Only God makes those determinations,
but our love for people does make a statement about who we are in God’s eyes.
For as Jesus says, by loving one another, with no exceptions,
we show ourselves to be his disciples.
Our responsibility is to love, to be compassionate,
to be merciful, to be invitational, no exceptions.
In a world where there is so much hatred, bitterness, division and strife,
is it not the role of the church to model a different approach, a different example?
Is it not the faithful, obedient responsibility of the church to be disciples of Jesus?
After all what does the song say…Yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love. Hitchens has a point.
The church and we followers of Christ,
have for too long been very good at wanting to keep some in and some out,
wanting to make a distinction between those who are acceptable and those who are not.

God alone will be the one who decides what and who is acceptable to him.
And God has said that there will be a day of reckoning for all people.
But my friends, God’s mercy is wide and his love is broad.
This is the bottom line.
The good news of Jesus Christ leads to life.
Not life as we know it, limited by the prejudices of human beings
and the strife that characterizes so much of contemporary living,
but life as God intended it to be.
No one is unacceptable to God.
No one is excluded from the faith that brings new life and eternal hope
to all who will open their lives up to the goodness and grace of God.
No exceptions, not even us.
No matter who we are, where we have been, or what we have done,
the same God who did this new thing in the Gentile world
will also grant to us the repentance that leads to life.