Inclusion for what?

Acts 11:1-18

1 Now the apostles and the brothers and sisters who were in Judea heard that the gentiles had also accepted the word of God. 2 So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, 3 saying, “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?” 4 Then Peter began to explain it to them, step by step, saying, 5 “I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners, and it came close to me. 6 As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. 7 I also heard a voice saying to me, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’ 8 But I replied, ‘By no means, Lord, for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’ 9 But a second time the voice answered from heaven, ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’ 10 This happened three times; then everything was pulled up again to heaven. 

11 At that very moment three men, sent to me from Caesarea, arrived at the house where we were. 12 The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us. These six brothers also accompanied me, and we entered the man’s house. 13 He told us how he had seen the angel standing in his house and saying, ‘Send to Joppa and bring Simon, who is called Peter; 14 he will give you a message by which you and your entire household will be saved.’ 15 And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning. 16 And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ 17 If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” 18 When they heard this, they were silenced. And they praised God, saying, “Then God has given even to the gentiles the repentance that leads to life.”  

Revelation 21:1-5a

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

“See, the home of God is among mortals.He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them and be their God;

4 he will wipe every tear from their eyes.Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more,for the first things have passed away.”

5 And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.”

John 13:31-35

31 When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. 32 If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. 33 Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me, and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ 34 I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

We hear all the time that we live in a polarized world, and I’ve been thinking lately that one of the main fault-lines in our political/ideological divisions is the concept of inclusion.  Do you tend to think positively or negatively about inclusion?

For the Left inclusion, along with diversity and equity, forms the progressive trinity.  Inclusion is presented as an obvious good and its opposite, exclusion, as an obvious bad, the kind of value no right thinking/feeling person could possibly disagree with.  Only mean, closed-minded people would exclude those who wish to be included.   We can easily see how this emphasis plays out in immigration, where the Left is generally reluctant or even resistant to enforcing borders, or, especially in America, in the fight over trans women (biological males) competing in women’s sports.  In both cases - and in many others - the imperative to include is elevated over and above the purpose for which those entities (nations, sports leagues, clubs, whatever) exist in the first place.   The tension has been felt - and increasingly resisted - by corporations pressured to serve as vehicles of inclusion even when it doesn’t advance their business interests.  In some quarters, inclusion has become more important than the mission or character of the group people are included in.  

Is not exclusion, some definition of boundaries, necessary for inclusion to mean anything?  If everyone is included in something, what are you left with?

These are inherently conservative kinds of questions, even if it’s not only the Right asking them.  It’s not illegitimate to ask what happens to the nation if many, “too many”, foreigners (especially those from disparate cultures) immigrate, or if women’s sports are undermined by the inclusion of biological males, or if it’s really the role of corporations to advance cultural goals unrelated to their business.  It would be lovely to live in a world where these questions could be addressed honestly, but instead the Right in the West predominantly engages with these issues as battles in the culture war, fearing inclusion of others and retreating to the apparent security of exclusion.   Whatever the legal merits of the respective cases, the spectacle of the US rolling out the welcome mat for white Afrikaners even as it aggressively deports Latino asylum seekers has everything to do with signifying what kind of people are worth including.  

Questions about inclusion are nothing new.  In the passage from Acts we see Peter forced to defend himself for having eaten a meal with uncircumcised gentiles.  The prohibition on Jews eating with gentiles is rooted in concerns about maintaining purity and avoiding defilement, and while these levitical food laws seem arbitrary to us, ultimately they’re all about creating a bright line between the two groups, to engage in ritual practices which enforce inclusion/exclusion.  The scandal of a Jew eating with gentiles is that it blurs the lines between the chosen people and everyone else.  The inclusion of gentiles and their practices threatened to erode the particularity of God’s chosen people.  Excluding others insured they maintained their identity.  

Peter explains himself by recounting a dream in which the Lord told him repeatedly, despite his objections, to kill and eat unclean animals.  Just as this dream ended, three men arrived to summon Peter, and summarized the upshot of the dream: “The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us.”  Once he arrives at the destination, Peter began to share the Gospel, and before he’d even finished the Holy Spirit “fell upon them”, then Peter had them baptized immediately.  Upon hearing this, those who had questioned Peter then rejoiced that God had included the gentiles as well.  

It’s difficult for us to appreciate that the inclusion of Gentiles was hardly inevitable.  A major theme in the Acts is the conflict between those who thought that Gentiles first needed to become law-observant Jews (as signified by circumcision) in order to join the church, and those who argued that - given what they’d experienced - law observance is irrelevant to their inclusion.  Christians tend to badly misread what’s at stake when it comes to the law.  It was not, as we tend to think, that Jews thought they earned their individual salvation by keeping the law; rather their conception of salvation was decidedly communal - “All Israel shall be saved, as Paul himself said” - and the law the means by which God’s people delineated themselves.  

That the gentiles received the Holy Spirit, that they were made equal to the Jews, included in God’s family without having adopted the law, was a shocking development for everyone in involved.   It was only natural for some Jews to feel as if, like the parable of the laborers in the vineyard, that these Gentiles were receiving the same wage despite only working the final hour.  Not only did this seem unfair, dispensing with the the law threatened to dramatically alter, even erase Jewish identity.   In a world which, then as now, was characterized by tribalism, it’s a remarkable testimony to the power of what they had experienced that the early church essentially decided to remove all preconditions for inclusion in the Body of Christ.  Christians didn’t need to be anything else in order to be Christians.   Anyone could receive the Good News and become part of the community.  It’s difficult to overstate just what a revolution this represented.  The church was and is, as we say every Sunday as we recite the creed, a universal church, a communion across space and time which aspires to include absolutely everyone.   

It’s no exaggeration to say that Christianity invented inclusion.  The church introduced the world to the possibility of a community which transcended all human divisions.  And, in fact, more or less all the liberal, universal values which Westerners take for granted find their origins in the revolutionary ideas Christians birthed into the world.  It’s easy for secular liberals to presume that these values have always been and therefore will always be, but it is a particular kind of story - a story of which God is ultimately at the center - which makes these values intelligible, and as that story is forgotten and rejected, we should not be surprised if the values it upheld lose their support and crumble.  

The things is, Christians don’t first and foremost have values, we have a God who has been revealed in Jesus Christ.  And if we value inclusion, it is because we gentiles know this God as one who included us in God’s promises.   But for understandable reasons, we tend to adopt the dominant patterns of thought as our neighbors, and we want to find common ground, so we learn to elevate our values above the God in whom anything of value finds its basis. 

Every Sunday we also declare, along with the children, that “God is love”, which is an, maybe the essential truth, but it’s also one onto which it’s easy to project our conceptions of love.  In our culture “loving your neighbor” means letting them do what they want, accepting them for who they are.  This is, at bottom, a negative love; it is more about not excluding than any positive conception of what inclusion might mean.   Even the “Christian conservative” version of this is to describe the Gospel primarily as a means of escaping of hell rather than in terms of the kingdom of God.  

The typical “inclusive” Christian message is that, “God loves you just the way you are”.  When we hear Jesus words in John -  “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” - that the imperative here is for Christian community to be welcoming of all people.  And, to be clear, that would be a really good start, especially since so often churches, fearing inclusion, have failed in the most basic task. But the full Christian vision is more like, “God loves you just the way you are - and you need to change.  It is exactly because God loves you that God desires your transformation into the likeness of Christ.”   We are included not merely to affirm who we are, but so that we might all become more than we are.  

If I have a favorite Bible verse, it is the one we read from Revelation: “And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’” The Bible concludes with a vision of a new heaven and new earth, the creation reborn, resurrected, a new creation transformed in the same way that Jesus himself passed from death to new life.  We should take quite seriously that when it says “all things” what it means is all things, that nothing falls outside the scope of God’s redemptive purposes.  Having created the world out of nothing, we really should expect that God brings about - insists upon - the inclusion of absolutely everything.