As everyone probably knows by now,
tonight marks the final episode in the eight-season television series, Game of Thrones. As a long-time
preacher, I know that beginning a sermon by referring to this program is
probably not the best strategy for getting listeners on your side. Half of the
audience can think of nothing else today, while the other half cannot wait for
this whole thing to be over. But Game of
Thrones has become such a pervasive cultural reality that thinking about it
just might help us make sense of our common life and find our way together
through the thicket of this morning’s scripture readings on the Fifth Sunday of
Easter.
I am a local boy, a native of the
Valley. I served parishes and schools here in L.A. for the earliest part of my
ministry, then spent the last years in other parts of the country, retiring in
Washington, D.C. three years ago and moving back here. I started watching Game of Thrones when it began in 2011
and faithfully followed the first four seasons. And then I got tired of it.
If you live and work in the nation’s
capital, you are surrounded on a daily basis by conflict, intrigue, enmity,
skullduggery, and overall, all-around double-dealing and bad faith. One night
while watching the season four finale of Game
of Thrones, I asked myself, “Why do I need to watch this? It’s exactly like
my daily life.” And it was true. Watching the Lannisters, Starks, Targeryans,
Baratheons, and Greyjoys plot against each other in pursuit of power was
exactly like leafing through the morning pages of the Washington Post. Why should I watch Game of Thrones? In D.C., it’s a busman’s holiday.
So I put Game of Thrones aside in 2014 and started bingeing Friday Night Lights instead. That turned
out to be what my junior high health teacher might have called a “good wellness
decision”, although frankly I could give another sermon about how the Dillon
Panthers took over my emotional life for a while. Anyway, I lived happily
without the Game of Thrones for five
years until around last Ash Wednesday. There was simply so much cultural hype
around Game of Thrones this spring that
I decided to devote my Lent no to Bible reading , but to catching up in time
for the series finale. (Hey, I’m retired!) You might say I gave up sanity for
Lent. I may have done this because I want to be current on all the latest buzz.
I probably did it because in retirement there really isn’t enough conflict in
my life. Who knows?
Now at this point you are probably
asking yourself, “Why on earth is this
man we don’t know going on about Game of
Thrones? What can it have in common with the New Testament, the part of the
Bible from which our three readings are taken this morning? Don’t worry: there
actually is a connection, and it centers around the interrelated questions our
scriptures pose about conflict and identity.
You may have noticed that the thread
that ties our weekly scripture readings together in Easter season is our
passages from the book of Acts. Instead of Old Testament readings, in Easter we
read the narrative of how the earliest followers of Jesus responded to his
resurrection in their common life. Week by week we learn that, at least in the
author Luke’s estimation, the early Christian community became the Body of
Christ in the world. Now that Jesus is gone they have his power to bless and
heal. They also encounter the same enmity and scorn that Jesus faced in his
lifetime. As Acts has it, we, the church, are continuing the life and ministry
of Jesus in the here and now.
But as you’ll also notice in today’s
reading, this earliest group of Christians was marked from the beginning by
conflict. They simply couldn’t agree on how to do anything. There were many
disagreements in the early church. The first, seen in several gospel passages,
was between the itinerants and householders. Since Jesus and his followers went
from place to place, the early question arose, “Can a settled person with a
house, job, and family be a Christian, or does one need to drop everything and
get on the road?” There are always people in any movement who want to make the
rules tougher and more exclusionary than others do.
Acceptance of householders was settled
on the principle of inclusiveness, and it was followed by another, more
persistent question: can a Gentile be a Christian, or must all church members
be Jewish? If you listen to the New Testament reading in church on a weekly
basis, you’ll notice that almost all of Paul’s writing is taken up with this
question. In some way, it’s a version of the itinerant/householder problem: do
we make the rules strict, or do we make them loose? Is this an open society, or
do you need a secret handshake? You’ve probably seen this issue play out in any
group you’ve ever been part of.
In today’s reading from Acts [Acts 11:
1-18], we hear Peter recount a dream he had. He tells the dream because he is
being criticized by the strict rule-abiders about his eating with the goyim, the pagans, the Gentiles, who do
not observe the Jewish food laws. In the dream he sees a vision of all the
creatures of the earth: “four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and
birds of the air.” And then a voice says to him, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat.”
Here is Peter, an observant Jew who probably followed the Torah’s distinctions
between kosher and treyf hearing a divine voice announce
that it’s now OK to eat bacon and lobster. “What God has made clean, you must
not call profane.” Translation: every food is now kosher.
If every food is kosher, the same must be true of the people who eat it. The distinction between clean and unclean
didn’t just apply to foodstuffs. It also applied to human beings. If the
Gentiles eat it, you can eat it too. And you can invite them in to your party.
If you are clean, they are clean. So the simple act of declaring all foods to
be clean leads to the understanding that the church must turn outward now and
embrace all people regardless of their ethnic or racial or religious identity.
The Acts passage we heard this morning is important because it established the
principle we have forever tried to live by in the Christian community: when put
to the choice between exclusion and inclusion, we always eventually side with
an expansive, not a narrowing, vision of the gospel.
While it may be entertaining to watch Game of Thrones combatants try to box
each other out, in the church’s life and witness, we are always called not only
to practice inclusion but to advocate for it in the wider world. This is why
our arguments over race, gender, and sexual identity have always been so
important, and it’s why our witness usually goes against the prevailing
culture. Christians always stand for inclusion. “What God has made clean, you
must not call profane.”
And that raises the related question of
identity. If everyone is kosher, why
do we make such a big deal about the categories into which we divide ourselves?
The earliest Christians were obsessed by the difference between itinerant and
householder, Jew and Gentile. Modern Americans can’t stop thinking about our
own ethnic, racial, religious, and sexual/gender identities. Yet the same
principle spoken to Peter should obtain for us all: “What God has made clean,
you must not call profane.” In Game of
Thrones the clan or family you belong to determines everything about you.
That’s fine for a pseudo-Medieval TV show, but it’s no way for a multicultural
society to live. In 2040 there will be no majority racial or ethnic group in
America. We are all, together, in this.
The good news of Easter is about the
way Jesus’s resurrection has power to heal and transform our lives. The world
of conflict and contention, the one we see acted out on daily cable news and in
bloody fantasies like Game of Thrones is
not the way things finally are. From Revelation this morning we hear, “I saw a
new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed
away.” God is making us and our world a new creation. We are no longer defined
by the categories into which we would separate ourselves. We are free to give
up the bad ideas that set us against each other, that limit and confine us.
On this Fifth Sunday of Easter, let us
be bold enough to accept God’s invitation to step in to the risen life shown us
by Jesus and lived out by the earliest Christians, who dared to redefine
ancient notions of purity and cleanliness in order to open up their household
to the world. What God has made clean you must not call profane. That goes not
only for others. It goes for you too. It’s time to give up all false,
judgmental notions about everyone, even ourselves. We can all live new and
hopeful and risen lives now, opening our arms not only to the world but to each
other. In the words of Jesus from this morning’s gospel, “I give you a new
commandment, that you love one another.” That may sound funny in Westeros and
Washington, but it’s the only way to live for those of us who follow Jesus. So
let’s start this process together and let God’s loving risen inclusive justice
heal and bless us as we walk together to that new heaven and new earth we so
deeply long for. Amen.
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