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3.7 What might a new unity look like
In this session we hear about Peter’s vision in which God insists he eat unclean things. As Peter lives with the consequences of this vision, he discovers that for God, no one is considered unclean.
Receiving a new story
Share ways in which you have noticed the content, questions or insights from the previous Module showing up in your lives.
Tasty treats
Answer the following questions about Cicada Tacos:
- Does this sound appetizing?
- If you would not eat Cicada Tacos, please explain why.
Would you be persuaded to eat Cicada Tacos if I told you that experts say that they are rich in protein, vitamins and minerals, low in fat, and have zero carbs? If not, why not?
Food for thought
- Recall the feelings of disgust expressed over the cicada recipe. How might Peter have felt about being told to eat the unclean things? Might he have felt similar disgust about entering a Gentile household?
- Is there anything God might ask you to do that would evoke similar feelings?
- The vision appearing three times connects it with the shame of Peter having denied Jesus three times.
- What connection do you think Peter made between his shame and the command to eat unclean things? How are they alike?
- What enables Peter to make the leap from the command to eat unclean things to saying that “God has shown me that I should not call any human common or unclean”?
Wrap-up question
How has Peter’s pattern of desire been re-formed? What is he learning about God’s desires for the shape of religious communities?
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3.7 What might a new unity look like?: Receiving a new story
In the Discussion Forum of this unit, share ways in which you have noticed the content, questions or insights from the previous session showing up in your lives.
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Michele Barrett spoke at the London School of Economics February 26, 2016. Michele is “Professor of Modern Literary and Cultural Theory at Queen Mary University, London and author, with her son Duncan Barrett of ‘Star Trek: the Human Frontier’.” Prof. Barrett’s topic was “To Boldly Go: What Star Trek tells us about the world.”I attended the event through the magic of an online podcast ( http://bit.ly/1RsO15L ). Prof. Barrett’s initial words are transcribed and shared below because her ideas parallel so closely the practice, explained in great detail in Forgiving Victim, of defining personal identity in reference to ‘those others who we are not’.
“Space travel is the contemporary equivalent of the exploration that underpinned what we now call modern societies. This exploration was, of course, the foundation of the colonial nature of these modern western societies. But the exploration of the globe historically paralleling the scientific revolution in understanding the place of the earth in the solar system was in itself a very important development. And it’s important to emphasize that this was an exploration based on seapower.
“So space travel in Star Trek is an imaginative transposition of the period of early modern nautical exploration. The models, assumptions, techniques, cultures, aesthetics, and principles of sailing have been written into space travel. The naval exploration of the globe was a crucial element in the development of modernity. So the conquest of the seas allowed the western powers to define their superiority through other cultures. The exploration of space similarly allows for a definition of that which is specifically human. Now Stuart Hall expressed that in terms of ‘the rest acting as the constituted outside of the West.’ The West was only able to define itself by means of a contrast with inferiorized others.
“And space, we say, and indeed we argued functions metaphorically as the constitutive outside of the project to define humanity. And that such an enterprise should have trouble as we very clearly see negotiating the dangerous reefs of colonialism is hardly surprising.”
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Peter’s words “but God has shown me that I should not call any human common or unclean” must have had a devastating effect on his listeners, as it was so utterly counter-cultural in the Jewish world. Henceforth, no person was to be called impure or unclean. Peter has finally understood that there is no over/against in God, consequently, being on the inside of the life of God cannot legitimize any form of group identity which includes self-definition against another. Rich, I think that many of us are still struggling to grasp this. Professor Barrett seems to be one who has!
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Would you be persuaded to eat Cicada Tacos if I told you that experts say that they are rich in protein, vitamins and minerals, low in fat, and have zero carbs? If not, why not?
I don’t know if I could eat cicada tacos, regardless of whose hands prepared them. I wonder if a food comparison is an apt analogy for Peter’s profound change of heart following his unclean-food dream. James describes Peter’s breakthrough on page 317 of ‘Forgiving Victim’ as “… the day when the Hebrew religion went universal, and what we now know as Catholicism, Universal Judaism, was birthed into reality.”
“The day when the Hebrew religion went universal” happened because Peter responded to God’s call. How is God calling me in holy scripture to answer to God’s presence? Thomas Cranmer gives good advice in his collect, which we read each year on the Sunday closest to March 21st, the date Thomas Cranmer was burned at the stake in 1556.
“Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”
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Burning at the stake was, of course, a regression to the archaic sacred Rick. And sadly present in all the players in the Reformation drama, with the exception, (if I am not mistaken) of the Anabaptists. In this session we hear about Peter’s vision in which God insists he eat unclean things. As Peter lives with the consequences of this vision, he discovers that for God, no one is considered unclean.
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This section of the course focuses on Acts, Chapter 10 where Peter realizes that God loves all persons equally, regardless of their human condition. Luke illustrates Peter’s profound insight through the metaphor of Peter’s vision of “profane and unclean food.”
Peter’s real intuition was not about food. It was about the offer and extent of God’s love. God called Peter to love both Jew and Gentile giving Peter to understand that no human condition or religion can encompass God’s forgiveness. Just as God forgave Peter’s past prejudices, so also Peter forgave himself. Forgiveness involves knowing the facts of a given period or event or life and then understanding them in the light of God’s universal love.
“German Shepherd | http://bit.ly/1QD4h6t”, a short video produced by Swedish filmmaker Nils Bergendal, speaks to a change of heart that was similar to Peter’s. Bergendal’s protagonist, David Paul, lives with his mother, a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust, who inculcates in her son a bitter attitude toward all Germans. “German Shepherd” describes how David establishes a forgiving relationship with Germans by traveling regularly to Berlin where he finds many German friends.
David explains that his German friendships allowed the inner trauma, conditioned in him by his mother, to move outside of himself. Childhood wounds remained but no longer controlled his actions and beliefs because when the trauma was outside, that is existing as an embraced personal history, the scars from his childhood wounds are no longer antagonists.
David Paul’s story resonates with me. I grew up in a family haunted by my mother’s struggle to escape the real and imagined terrors of Chicago’s pre-World War I South Side neighborhoods. My mom was born in Chicago in 1910, which was the year the first phase (1910-1930) of “The Great Migration” of African-Americans to the large, northern, industrial cities began. I was born in 1947, seven years into the second movement (1940-1970) of “The Great Migration.” Those who left the South for Northern cities settled not just in ‘industrial cities,’ but in ethnic neighborhoods, specifically working-class, European-American neighborhoods. My mother began life in a community that disappeared when white families moved away as Great Migration immigrants arrived. Her family moved to new areas of Chicago several times during her formative years. My family of origin moved out of changing neighborhoods twice in my early years. While a change of residence is not necessarily traumatic, it is traumatic when it’s blamed on outside forces identified with a particular group of people.
The ‘social other’ of my formative years conditioned my thinking through the lens of racial prejudice. Like Peter, I am finding new understanding and a change of heart. Like David Paul, the scars of my formative years now are the keys to my forgiveness and atonement and not as ‘forgive and forget’, which can never encapsulate the essence of what it means to forgive. No. Forgiving is not about forgetting. Forgiving is about remembering.
Making sense of the present is contingent upon remembering the past in the light of new understanding. Letting go of the past is not about forgetting but about remembering and reinterpreting what has gone before. Peter changed his interpretation after God came to him with a vision reflecting what Peter initially saw as “profane and unclean” food. Today we are called to “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” God’s Holy Scripture, where we find both God’s call to forgive and the guidance we need to reinterpret the past and to live into the future through God’s forgiveness.
Thomas Cranmer expressed this well in his Book of Common Prayer collect quoted here:
“Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”
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Forgiveness is such a fundamental aspect of what the new unity looks like. Inclusivity brought about by forgiving and the realisation that we are also broken people. But the ‘forgive and forget’, ‘the less said the better’ and ‘let bygones be bygones’ superficial schools of thought only muddy the waters. As you know Rich, forgiveness can be, and often is, a long, difficult process where reconciliation is not an essential element, although it is a wonderful outcome. We have to remember, so that the situation does not arise again, but we must, above all, learn to let go of the anger and bitterness. Is this the experience that you have known? Isaac and Esau are a perfect example of the difficulty of forgiving; anger, fear, a desire for revenge, a long physical separation and a gradual transformation to the realisation that “to see you, is to see the face of God”. Than a parting in peace.
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How has Peter’s pattern of desire been re-formed? What is he learning about God’s desires for the shape of religious communities?
Acts, Chapter 10 describes Peter’s initial movement towards a new pattern of desire. Peter captured the essence of his new understanding when he said “… God has shown me that I should not call any human common or unclean.” Peter learned that the victimizing practices of religious and cultural purity codes did not match God’s love for all regardless of beliefs, practices or place on any cultural map of human relations.
Peter understood, perhaps for the first time, that personal boundaries are permeable zones of contact, not barriers for exclusion. New patterns of desire, which are congruent with God’s love, emerge from the place of society’s outcasts, which where we hear God most clearly. The place of the victim, places where we find victims cast out from the dominant society, becomes the center from which God’s true religious community takes shape and grows.
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