Easter 6: Moving Beyond the "Tribe"

Acts 10:44-48

Psalm 98

1 John 5:1-6

John 15:9-17


The following news story was recently featured on National Pubic Radio: “When pollsters ask Republicans and Democrats whether the president can do anything about high gas prices, the answers reflect the usual partisan divisions in the country.  About two-thirds of Republicans say the president can do something about high gas prices, and about two-thirds of Democrats say he can’t.  But six years ago, with a Republican president in the White House, the numbers were reversed: Three-fourths of Democrats said President Bush could do something about high gas prices, while the majority of Republicans said gas prices were clearly outside the president's control.  The flipped perceptions on gas prices isn’t an aberration, said Dartmouth College political scientist Brendan Nyhan.  On a range of issues, partisans seem partial to their political loyalties over the facts.  When those loyalties demand changing their views of the facts, he said, partisans seem willing to throw even consistency overboard.”  In short, what the study highlights is the strength and blindness of tribal loyalty.  Human beings appear to be hard-wired to abandon even reason when it comes to sticking by their group identity.  So we can begin to understand how difficult it is to change a person’s mind when it goes against that of their colleagues, co-politicos or, in the case of St Peter, their co-religionists.

Much of the first chapters of the Acts of the Apostles is pre-occupied with questions as to how Gentiles are to be accepted into the new Israel.  The thought of the earliest Christians – who were, of course all Jews – was that they needed to fulfill the mandates of the Mosaic law – including circumcision and adherence to the dietary requirements outlined in the Torah – in order to come to baptism.  After all, baptism – or a form of it – was already the rite by which Gentiles joined the Jewish faith.  The coming of the promised Messiah in the person of Jesus made no difference.  To join themselves to Jesus the Jew, they must first become Jews themselves.  The fact of the inclusivity they experienced in the person of Jesus, the fact of his commitment and care for the marginalized, the fact of his reaching out beyond the cultural divide of Jew and Gentile, or the social divide of men and women, or even the religious divide of clean and unclean did not really sink in; none of these were sufficient facts to overpower the ingrained allegiance to group, the ingrained tribal identity.  And yet eventually the truth of who Jesus is and what God was doing in Jesus overrode a narrow definition of the “group”, opening the floodgates for many considered beyond the pale to be gathered into the kingdom vision of inclusion and generosity.

If we follow the figure of Peter we can see this whole dynamic played out in one person.  He certainly was a devout Jew, and like all the other Jews who confessed Jesus as the Messiah saw the necessity of continuing to follow the Mosaic law, and of encouraging Gentile followers to do the same.  He clearly struggled with this – perhaps the facts had already begun to tally – and his struggle is dramatized by the writer of the Acts of the Apostles in Peter’s vision of “all kinds of four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air” (Acts 10:12) accompanied by a voice saying “Get up, Peter; kill and eat.” (Acts 10:15)  Peter balked at the prospect: “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean.” (Acts 10:14)  And the voice responded, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane”. (Acts 10:15)  This happens to him no less than three times.  In an odd and experiential way God laid the facts before Peter, that the divisions and allegiances which he clung to in the past were dissolving away in order that something less particular, yet far more glorious, could be inaugurated; and immediately, upon the vision’s end Peter is called to the house of Cornelius, “a centurion of the Italian Cohort”. (Acts 10:1)  What he and his companions discover on their arrival there is an entire household of Gentiles among whom was clearly evident of the presence of the Holy Spirit; now the facts were stacking up.  He finally is convinced, the facts trump his tribal allegiance, and he says : “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit as we have?” (Acts 10:47)  Subsequently, in the fifteenth chapter of Acts, it is Peter who, at the very first Church council held in Jerusalem, speaks in favor of the inclusion of Gentiles: “And God, who knows the human heart, testified to [the Gentiles] by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us; and in cleansing their hearts by faith he has made no distinction between them and us.” (Acts 15:8-9)  His arguments convinced the others gathered.  We cannot fully appreciate the significance of that decision, but it shaped Christianity as a faith that could move beyond tribal allegiance, affirming that “God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” (Acts 10:34-35)

Now, I do not mean to suggest that the “facts” as to God’s will and purposes presented in Jesus and in the records of the early Church are of the same nature as quantitative facts of polls and percentages.  But experience itself is a kind of fact, and we can still resist the truths made known to us by our experience in seeking to remain faithful to pre-conceived ideas based on tribal allegiance.  I recall once when someone I knew made a racist comment, deprecating the work ethic of African-Americans – they simply said that black people were lazy.  I pointed out their black neighbour whom they knew and liked, who was well-educated and industrious, a pillar of the local community.  Their response?  “Well he’s not like the others”.  It was easier simply to make an exception, than to allow the truth of their experience – the facts living literally next door –  to threaten their allegiance to a particular world-view, to open their mind and heart to something larger than their immediate group.  How far we human beings will go in order to keep intact our world-view, our allegiances coherent.  And while we may argue that tribal allegiance is just an expression of loyalty, it is at best a mis-placed loyalty, at a worst a facile argument to maintain the status quo.  In his letter to the Romans, Paul writes “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Roman 12:2)  As we look to the end of the Easter season and the more conscious celebration of the resurrection, it’s not a bad question to ask if we are living according to the pattern of old allegiances, tribal allegiances (and tribes come in many forms and guises), or whether we are engaging with new possibilities conveyed to us by new information, new facts, new experiences.

At the Watergate hearings in the 1970s the Republican senator from Indiana, Earl F. Landgrebe is quoted famously – or infamously, perhaps – to have said, “Don’t confuse me with the facts.  I’ve got a closed mind”.  His loyalty to Richard M. Nixon trumped even the simple facts laid before him in the hearings.  How frightening, how destructive, how dangerous is this sort of loyalty.  It can not only blind us to possibility, but to the truth of what is happening around us, to the truth of the facts, whether quantitative or experiential.  It can be surprising the extent to which the faith of Christ calls us beyond conventional relationships and conventional loyalties, how it presents a vision of relationship and of relating which can take us far beyond where we comfortably would want to go.  The cheap inculturation of Christianity can sometimes keep us from engaging with its invitation to go beyond family alliances, social boundaries, party lines and to examine situations in the light of new facts and new experiences.  It can sometimes make us to forget that Christ’s resurrection bridges the petty divides we so tenaciously hold on to in order to establish and affirm our identities.  It can make can keep from engaging in God’s abiding promise that he is making all things new in ways beyond simple understanding and exceeding all that we can desire.