John 13:33-35
Acts 11:1-18

You would have thought that it should be clear sailing for the Christian Church in that first generation. The leaders there in Jerusalem had all known Jesus personally, so the authority for their movement was clear. What would Jesus have said? What would he have done? Perfectly straightforward.

But it seems that God had other ideas. The story we have just heard from the book of Acts is crucial to everything that happened next because it established that there was not going to be any "business as usual" for the Christian Church. God is always ahead of us, always calling to us from a deeper, broader, more expansive and inclusive place, and always impatient for us to catch up. And while it's only human that we should try to establish a status quo, get our heads around things and figure them out so as to know what to expect, what will be expected of us, where the boundaries are, the minute we get stuck there, it is not faithfulness. Faithfulness is readiness to listen to the Stillspeaking God, readiness to respond.

Peter was as human as any of us, and as one of Jesus' closest friends, he had the right (if anybody did) to be confident that he understood what the way of Jesus was about and how it worked. God had to be very persistent to break through to him. The dream was powerful but it didn't work the first time. Or the second. Or the third, for that matter. A big bedsheet coming down from heaven carrying an assortment of all the animals an observant Jew knew you weren't supposed to eat. The law was clear. No shellfish. No birds of prey. No reptiles. There they all are, and a voice from heaven says, 'Get up, Peter, kill and eat.' Three times Peter gives the right answer - 'Of course not, I wouldn't think of it.' Peter knew a test when he saw one. But three times the voice comes back, 'Who are you to call unclean what God has called clean?' It didn't make sense. Clean and unclean were clearly spelled out in the Bible. What was this?
(Maybe you too have had dreams that went around in circles. You wake up more tired than when you started.)

Peter is rescued by a knock on the door. Three men asking if he'll come - they have questions about God. He's tired - and they're Romans. No reason why he should do anything for them. But somehow God is prodding him, 'Go with them, Peter!' So Peter goes. And finds himself telling the Jesus story to a group of non-Jews, the first time since Jesus himself that anybody had done that. It was against all expectations, and when they asked him to stay for a meal, it was against his religious scruples as well. But by this time it was clear. If God was in this, and it seemed God was, then God wasn't a respecter of Peter's scruples. God had a different agenda. The bottom line, as Peter would later convey to his friends, was that it was no business of his to hinder what God was so clearly trying to do. God was taking a bunch of outsiders and inviting them in. It was unthinkable and the controversy nearly took the early Church down before it had had a chance to start. The arguments might have made election week in 21st century Britain look tame. Fortunately Peter won. With that the goalposts moved, massively. Christianity embarked into the great wide world.

It's a challenging message for a 350-year-old church. With all that tradition and experience behind you, how could you possibly remain open to a restless God who calls from the future? I can just imagine the church meeting in a place like this if someone like Peter were to come with his story. 'Sorry, Peter, but you're seriously mistaken. We're very clear who is inside and who is out. We know clean from unclean. We can quote you the scripture to prove it. Go away - you're a heretic.' We religious people are good at getting stuck. It's why there was a Reformation all those years ago, because God wanted the church to move and the powers-that-be wanted it to stay the way it was. Sometimes the stuck-ness among us it's stubbornness. But sometimes it's just faithfulness getting it wrong. We did hear God speak way back when. Goalposts were part of that and we know where they're supposed to be. It's tricky when the Holy Spirit wants to move them again.

But there's a test you can use to judge whether some new initiative is of the Spirit or not. "I give you a new commandment," Jesus said to his friends. "Love one another just as I have loved you. By this everyone will know that you belong to me, if you love one another." Peter's revolution was the discovery that love applied to Romans too. Love was bigger than he'd ever allowed himself to imagine. Love is always bigger than we imagine.

It means that if a church is to be truly faithful, it has to keep listening. Its doors have to be open wide. Whenever its first reaction is to say no, it needs to dig deeper, just to make sure that the trouble-making voice isn't God's. It means that far from the stereotype we've acquired for tired old prejudices and outmoded thinking, we Christians should be on the cutting edge of pretty much everything. More inclusive. More responsive. Committed to justice. Intellectually adventurous. Morally courageous. People of the big picture, of the future God wants to build as well as the present we know. If we are anything other than that, God will get a new reformation going. It has happened before. It has happened many, many times before.
An example. January a year ago, just after we'd all woken up to just how disastrous the credit crunch was and the cliff edge we were walking economically here and around the world, the social responsibility officers from across the churches organised a day for Christian reflection on the crisis. It began with analysis of what had gone wrong, as clear and intelligent an exposition as I have heard or read anywhere, before or since. And then a new vision. Not an economic recovery to bring us back to the old familiar oil-guzzling lifestyle many of us had been questioning anyway, but a New Deal that would deliver economic vitality and jobs through developing those alternative energy sources and sustainable technologies that we need if life on this planet is going to survive at all. It was bracing, not least because it was practical. I recognised God in it through that combination of a vision that took my breath away and the utterly practical word that said, start by doing this.

Peter, make my church inclusive of everyone who hears and believes. You can start with this group of Romans who will be knocking at your door in five minutes' time.

Expect the unexpected. Make love your number one, non-negotiable criterion. And keep moving. Don't get stuck. Respond to the living God who always has more to say. Let obedience be to God first and to tradition only as it continues to serve God's ways. It's a riskier life but ultimately the only one that can be called faithful.