A sermon by Alison Sampson on 1 Peter 2: 2-10 and John 14: 1-14

One of the things that sometimes frustrates members of this congregation is just what a disparate group we are. We come from different backgrounds. We live in different suburbs. We hold different values and different priorities dear. There are times when we find it hard to understand or communicate with each other, and there are times when we don’t even try.

I look around and I see this, too. We come from Werribee to Warrandyte. We come from the inner city and we come from outer suburbia. We come burning for social justice, or yearning for a safe holding place, or seeking just a little kindness. We come with mental health issues, or painful life stories, or powerful personalities which can be difficult to manage – and I certainly count myself in this last group. We come with kids, lots of kids, who are sometimes quiet and sometimes rocketing around the room. We come with partners; we come with loneliness; we come with joy. Indeed, we are an odd bunch: we are, in fact, a rabble.

If it’s any consolation, this isn’t just the story of our church. Friends and colleagues at other churches have often said to me, oh, our church is so difficult. If only we had just a few more members who were just a little bit more normal, just a little bit more like us… It seems to me that many churches feel that they are a ragtag mob.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if we were all mature, demure, quiet, polite, softly spoken, balanced and kind? Wouldn’t it be comfortable if we never experienced friction or frustration or conflict? Wouldn’t it be nifty if none of us had mental health problems or other issues? Wouldn’t it be great if our services were perfectly sedate, and never messy or noisy or rumpled by people weeping in the back row? Yes, it would all be fine and dandy; simply swishing, in fact.

But it wouldn’t be church.

Because the people of God have always been a ragtag mob. They have never fit together very well. Even in the earliest church, there were arguments and struggles over to who belonged, and who didn’t. There were arguments about women and men; Jews and Gentiles; slaves and free. On the one hand, women were hosts and sponsors and active leaders of early churches; on the other, women were told to submit to men’s authority. On the one hand, Gentiles were welcomed into the early church, just as they were; on the other, Gentiles were told they must be circumcised first. And so on.

At so, even at the end of the first century, there were lots of tensions. Men and women; slave and free; Jew and Gentile: who belonged? The early Christian churches were formed from groups of people from radically different backgrounds who held radically different expectations about how we should live – and don’t kid yourself that it was a comfortable experience even then.

Because we live in a society with weakened taboos, it can be difficult to understand how remarkably the early church crossed social divides. To give one example, many early Christians identified as devout Jews. And for a devout Jewish man to eat alongside a Gentile – let alone a menstruating Gentile woman – was unheard of. He would be, and feel, defiled; and he would be excluded from the temple and the rest of the Jewish community until he had undergone ritual purification. But this is exactly what participation in the church could lead to: sharing a meal across social divides, with consequences that are difficult for us even to imagine.

Tonight, we heard a little of Peter’s letter to the scattered churches. In the letter, he was trying to address what it means to be church and how to be Christian in diverse places and cultures. And even within this single letter, we see some of the tensions found in the first century church.

For example, Peter tells the recipients that they are God’s own people. Yet a little further on, in a bit we don’t read, he also says that they must obey the emperor, and that wives must obey their husbands. But the emperor regularly demanded that his subjects fall flat on their faces and worship his statue as it was paraded through the streets. Could a Christian, who must not worship graven images, truly obey the emperor when required to worship his statue? Probably not.

And what of pagan husbands? Well, pagan husbands could and would require their wives make the necessary sacrifices to the ancestors, and to the household gods which oversaw the grain and the store cupboards. But God’s people are to worship no other gods. So could a Christian woman be fully obedient both to God and to her pagan husband? Again, probably not.

In fact, one cannot obey God and obey the emperor; or obey God and obey one’s pagan husband. This is not to have a go at Peter, the emperor, or pagan husbands, but to show just how conflicted even the early church was about what it means to be God’s people. This group of slaves and Gentiles and Jews and women and men and free had trouble working out exactly how to do church and be church even then.

Two thousand years have passed, and churches are still asking questions. These days, we are not arguing over how to include Gentiles, and whether they must first be circumcised. But there are plenty of robust conversations across the Christian church about the leadership of women; about the leadership or even inclusion of practicing homosexuals; about the rights of those who were baptised as infants versus adults; about what it means to welcome children; and so on. Who belongs? Who leads? Who has a say, or a voice, or a vote? What makes a church a church? And where are all the normal people?

I find it very comforting to realise that questions like these have been asked for a long, long time; for as long as the church has been around, in fact. And so if we want some insight into what makes church, we might look back to its earliest days. And we will find that, despite conflict and confusion, the early church had some pretty good answers.

Let’s go back Peter’s letter. In the part we did hear tonight, he wrote: ‘Once, you were not a people’. What does this mean? Well, the Greek word, laos, means people or populace. More precisely, it was often used to mean a group with common cultural bonds and ties. So when we are not a people, we are just a bunch of humans with nothing to hold us together. Strangers in a crowd. Faces on a train. Or, in the version we heard tonight, a rabble.

And in many ways, at this and every church we are still a rabble. Every week, we join together with people from all different places, who have different histories and different values and different expectations and different ways of communicating. We come from all over; and we are thrown together only because of our faith and the worship service. Of course we often feel like a rabble.

And yet we have this one big thing in common: our faith in Jesus Christ. We are all here tonight because we have placed our trust in him; and many of us have been baptised in his name. Through this faith and this baptism, we have transcended our backgrounds and our culture. We have joined something new: God’s culture. And when we are a part of God’s culture, we are no longer just a rabble or faces in the crowd. Instead, Peter reminds us, by joining together we become God’s own people, a holy nation, a royal priesthood.

Of course it doesn’t always feel like it. This is because we are human, and flawed, and still in the never-ending process of embracing and embodying God’s culture. And yet just by fronting up and joining together, we are already God’s people, ready to proclaim his wonderful light.

It’s understandable that there are times when many of us want to belong to a group which is easier and which confirms all our values and habits and social norms. It’s tempting to want this from the church. But a homogenous group is not church: it’s a country club.

But the group we have here is much more interesting, because it’s a part of a culture which has always required its members to transcend human barriers. It’s a group which invites us to see past male and female, child and adult, gay and straight. It’s a group which asks us to take seriously readers of the Guardian Weekly and The Age and the Herald Sun. It’s a group which communicates across social class and cultural divides. It’s a group which requires us to break bread and drink wine and live in love and peace with whoever turns up to the table, no matter who they are, no matter where they come from.

We may not always understand each other. We may not always communicate with each other. We may not always like each other. But in responding to God’s generous mercy, and in joining together here around the table, we are committed to living in love from this day forth.

When we come together each week, when we share bread and wine around the table, and cheese and nibbles after the service, when we share our stories, when we listen to each other and encourage one another, we are already doing something strange, countercultural, priestly, and wonderful. We are already communicating across boundaries, and loving across human divides.

But it doesn’t stop here. We do this work here because it is our calling, and church is a great place to practice – but then we take it home. This week saw the delivery of a new federal budget which will make life significantly harder for the poor, for the chronically ill, for single parents and for other vulnerable people. This week saw Sam Newman yet again use the Footy Show as a platform for homophobia. This week saw further discussion over the proposed watering down of the Racial Discrimination Act, changes which have been slammed by the very people the Act is supposed to protect.

Rich and poor, well and unwell, straight and gay, Anglo and other: failure to love across boundaries is all the rage. But our calling is to live differently, both here at church and in every part of our lives.

We are a ragtag bunch. But in witnessing to God’s mercy and love, we become the people of God together. And the more we practice, both here and at home, and the more we love and listen and learn from each other across every boundary that the world throws up between us, then the more we will grow into this identity as God’s own people – and who knows where this will lead?