Making Space for Love

I’m going to let you in on one of the worst kept secrets of all time. It is this: we don’t like change. What?! I hear you cry. But it’s true. How many times have you heard someone reminisce about how things used to be better? Perhaps there’s something you wish was like it used to be. The good old days through rose-tinted glasses when… x, y, z, fill in the gap. And why is that? Why is our instinctive response to shy away from change, and to cling instead to what we already know, even if deep down we can see that there is room for improvement? I wonder what your answer would be. What makes you wary of change?

But change is also the stuff of life. It has made each of us who we are. In fact, your very presence in the world is an example of change. Change has given you the life you have. And it has improved the world in countless ways over the millenia. As an example, here are just a few highlights of pivotal changes, going back through the centuries, that have helped build reality as we know it: In 2001, the Netherlands became the first country to legalize same-sex marriage. In 1947, Jackie Robinson stepped onto the field and broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball. In 1900, women were allowed to compete in the Olympics for the first time. In 1893, New Zealand became the first country to give women the right to vote. In 1526, William Tyndale printed the first English Bible, so that ordinary people who didn’t speak latin could read the Bible for themselves. And long before all of that, in the first century, the early church wrestled with one of the most important questions it would ever face: Can Gentiles—outsiders—truly belong in the community of Jesus?

Every one of those moments brought with it controversy, pushback, even outrage. Why? Because change can feel threatening. Each of those turning points asked people to alter their view, to stretch their hearts, to make space for someone they hadn’t seen as part of the story before. And I think it is this making space that scares us. We worry that if someone else is let in, that we might be pushed out. That there won’t be room for everyone. It’s something I’ve heard parents talk about - that their heart was so full of love for one child, they wondered how it would be possible to love another one that much as well. But the heart has this wonderful capacity to expand, and another child simply increases our ability to love even more. The addition does not result in subtraction, but makes the whole bigger.

And history has often proved the same thing: changes can often make the whole of society better and bigger and richer for everyone. Not only that, but when we make room for more people to experience dignity, love, and belonging, we’re stepping into the kind of change that reflects the very heart of God.

So back to the question about Gentiles. Can they, even they, be part of the new church? These uncircumcised, unclean, ungodly people who cannot claim Abraham as their ancestor? Can God really want them as well? In our reading from Acts the apostle Peter is being sternly questioned by the early Christian community because he has shared a meal, fellowship, faith, and friendship, with Gentiles, and the Jewish Christians are appalled. This wasn’t just polite disagreement. This issue cut to the core of Jewish identity and tradition - centuries of laws about cleanliness, about who was in and who was out. Peter had crossed a line - a big, red line that set off all the alarms.

But interestingly, Peter hadn’t done this without some quite direct prompting. He has to be poked pretty hard by the Spirit, through a vision of animals being lowered down from heaven. In the vision, there are a variety of animals presented to Peter which were considered off limits for eating - unclean animals - and Peter is told three times, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” But this is more than just about resetting food boundaries. It is also about people. It’s about the dividing walls coming down, about a re-categorisation of all people as being equally created by God, and equally welcome in the kingdom.

As a result of this vision, Peter has a profound change of perspective. As he explains, God told him to ‘not make a distinction between them and us’. Not to make a distinction. I suspect that if there’s anything that comes to us just as naturally as a dislike of change, it is the impulse to draw distinctions between ourselves and others. But God tells Peter not to. That everyone is equally welcome and equally valid as part of the new kingdom of God. Peter sees it with his own eyes, when the Holy Spirit is poured out on the Gentiles, just as he previously saw it descend on himself and the other disciples at Pentecost. No distinction between even the 11 closest to Jesus himself, and these later believers from another land and culture.

So what does this mean for us, today, in this place, in our context which is again so very different and still perpetually changing? The call is part of what it is to be an Easter people - to be people who live with their hearts open, not afraid or closed away, but moving forward with hope and curiosity. If we are serious about being people of Christ, people of Jesus, people of this God who makes no distinctions, then we have to be serious about being people of welcome.

It isn’t easy or comfortable, but faith isn’t supposed to be. If you find that it is, perhaps that is an invitation to explore where you might be stretched instead, where your faith might be asking you to consider change. If we do this and let go of old boundaries, let go of our yearning for what was and is, and instead look ahead to what is to come, we will probably find something better: a table that is bigger, a love that is wider, and a community which more fully reflects the kingdom of God where everyone is equally welcome.

“Who was I that I could hinder God?” asks Peter. This turning point for him changed everything, and led to us being gathered here this morning. Now we, too, try to listen and follow what Jesus teaches. “By this,” Jesus says, “everyone will know you are my disciples—if you have love for one another.”

This kind of love will stretch us, and ask us to pay attention when the Spirit invites us to make space where we’ve been comfortable keeping things closed. But the Spirit is always making all things new, and this change is the stuff of life. So let’s encourage one another in being a community that reflects the wide, welcoming heart of God. Let us love as Christ loved us.

Amen.

Acts 11:1-18; John 13:31-35