you are what you eat

 

Summary: over-identified tribalism blinds us to the grace of God at work in and through people who do not look like us.

It has been said, ‘You are what you eat.’ Everyone eats, but what you eat, and how you eat, is inseparable from cultural and religious identity. Just across the street from my vicarage, I can eat Chinese or Indian food, sometimes pizza (this takeaway is more often ‘between owners’ than it is a going concern), fish and chips — our national dish, originating with Jewish immigrants — or a traditional ‘British’ carvery. We are a nation of immigrants, and we are all shaped by all of the other immigrants. Some are pushing us to be ‘a nation of strangers,’ but that would be a violation of who we are. The table has always been the God-given mechanism for transforming strangers into friends.

There is a significant moment in the story of the Church that is recounted (in fact, this story is recounted more than once) in the Acts of the Apostles. Peter is praying on the flat rooftop — the space for hospitality, for entertaining guests — when he has a vision. He sees a vessel, like a sheet, lowered from heaven. It contains many animals and birds that, as a Jew, he was prohibited from eating. He hears a voice instructing him to rise (as from the dead), sacrifice what had previously been an unacceptable sacrifice, and eat. This he refused to do, for he was an observant Jew. But the voice from heaven told him that God had now redesignated these creatures as permissible food. Three times, Peter is instructed to eat. Three times, he refuses. Then the vessel is withdrawn up to heaven. Immediately after this, a delegation arrives searching for Peter, asking that he comes with them to the home of a Roman centurion, and Peter understands that the vision was a form of preparation for this moment.

The Law of Moses gave instructions concerning what the Jews could eat, and how it was to be prepared, and also what they were prohibited from eating. These serve as a cultural marker. To live in the world as part of this people, of all the peoples of the earth, is to embrace certain parameters. You are what you eat.

This does not mean that other people, who eat according to different scripts, are inferior in any way, including morally. It is simply a way of being distinguishable, as a person embedded within a community.

Labels are helpful. They can also become unhelpful. I am autistic. This helps me to recognise that I am not a law unto myself, but part of something bigger; and that that thing in itself is part of something bigger still, the whole neurodiversity of human experience. But if I allow myself to conclude that being autistic makes me better than allistic people, I have missed the point. The same applies to any label or marker that might describe me, in part, shaping who I am.

As a consequence of entering the home of a Roman as their guest, Peter faces excommunication by a group of hard-line believers whose identity is overly bound-up in the cultural markers of circumcision (in my English translation, they describe the Gentiles as uncircumcised, which sounds purely descriptive; but in fact they are using a slur) and dietary rules. In their eyes, he is no longer one of them.

These men have already made a distinction between themselves and the wider group of believers of whom they are a part. They are the ones, in their own eyes, who are really serious, really committed, true believers. But their over-identification has caused them to be agitated in spirit — not only agitated against others, but agitated within themselves. Peter meets their hostility with grace, and this grace moves them from agitation to a state of quietened spirit, of being at rest within themselves, of being at peace — within themselves as well as with their neighbour. This is the work of the Holy Spirit — whom, Peter affirms, has been given to the Gentile believers just as to the Jewish believers. Their spirits quietened, his erstwhile accusers are able to recognise that God can bring about life-embracing change in others, without their needing to become like them. Healthy assimilation looks like embracing diversity, not uniformity. Is it possible that they recognised the same gift of repentance — the ability to change, to embrace life in its fullness — at work in themselves?

The Church has never managed to grow beyond hard-liners, those who labour in missing the point — who, as Jesus put it, refuse the grace of God for themselves and prevent others from accessing it too. In neurodivergent language, those who require those who are different to them to mask in order to be accepted (tolerated).

But neither has the Church ever managed to grow beyond the grace of God, who gives the Holy Spirit, empowering change, enabling us to embrace a vision that extends beyond our own cultural and religious markers.

‘You are what you eat.’ ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’