Should We Have a Policy on Bacon?

Our church had a breakfast meeting today.  Instead of gathering in the church for prayers, hymns, confession and absolution, Bible readings, teaching, and Holy Communion, we gathered in the warm, modern room next door for bacon or vegetarian sausages in normal or gluten-free baps, plus flapjacks or gluten-free cakes, tea or coffee, and informal chat.  The tables were laid out with conversation-starter cards, or pictures to colour on the theme of Jesus as chef (relating to the story of Jesus’s disciples, after his resurrection, finding him cooking breakfast for them on a beach).

You could criticise this as being a theologically vacuous interpretation of ‘church’.  The picture to colour might have been a good children’s activity to reinforce a Sunday School lesson about the Bible story it illustrated, but colouring wasn’t a replacement for reading the story.  Still, it seemed more an activity that we could have taken home to do, rather than one to gather for.

The question cards could have been a good way of stimulating conversation.  Admittedly, only some of them were on explicitly religious topics, such as one which asked ‘If you were God for a day, what would you do?’ to which my reply would be, ‘If I were God, my perspective would be so different from my perspective now that I would understand all sorts of things, so maybe I should write them down for myself and hope that I’d understand them when I was me again.’  But they mostly asked interesting questions which were well worth discussing.

Unfortunately, several of the people there hadn’t arrived wanting to discuss complex questions that we can’t be sure of the answer to.  Being asked to discuss any question more profound than ‘What is your favourite pizza topping?’ could be a bit too challenging for people who wanted a familiar liturgy, hymns that were in the book, and a sermon which they could listen to or ignore as they chose.

Still, the one thing that didn’t divide us was the food.  Nobody complained that eating bacon was unbiblical and dumped overboard centuries of teaching that an edible mammal must by definition be a cloven-hoofed ruminant.  Nobody said that abandoning kosher food laws, when Jesus had said that not one iota of the law must be disregarded, undermined the whole of what it means to be human, the nature of the gospel, repentance, salvation, holiness, the authority of scripture, and the nature of the Church, and that King Charles would need to step in to Defend the Faith.  Nobody said that this required the church to split, because vegetarians could not accept meat-eaters as Christians, but would simply pray for them to repent and turn to the true faith.

Well, no, obviously not, you might reply.  After all, the Bible gives us clear guidance on the topic of vegetarianism, and whether to observe the Sabbath or not:

 

Accept the one whose faith is weak, without quarreling over disputable matters.  One person’s faith allows them to eat anything, but another, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables.  The one who eats everything must not treat with contempt the one who does not, and the one who does not eat everything must not judge the one who does, for God has accepted them.  Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To their own master, servants stand or fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand.

One person considers one day more sacred than another; another considers every day alike. Each of them should be fully convinced in their own mind.  Whoever regards one day as special does so to the Lord. Whoever eats meat does so to the Lord, for they give thanks to God; and whoever abstains does so to the Lord and gives thanks to God.

The fact that Paul discusses these topics implies that they were just as contentious in the 1^st century Church as same-sex marriage is today.  Paul could have written, ‘From now on, the rules are different, and eating pork isn’t forbidden, it’s compulsory as a way of demonstrating your liberation from the Law!’  There were instances in the past, horribly, of churches requiring Jewish converts to Christianity to ‘prove’ the sincerity of their Christian faith by eating pork, just as some churches even informed Jewish converts that their primary duty as Christians was to hate all Jews.  But the Church’s legacy of antisemitism is a topic for another day, and probably for another writer.

The point is that Paul didn’t behave like this.  Instead, he warned readers not to judge each other, and not to assume that there is only one acceptable type of ‘Christian lifestyle’ to which all Christians must conform.  The way he contrasts ‘those whose faith is strong’ with ‘those whose faith is weak’ looks decidedly patronising, but at least it was intended to dissuade people from the sorts of abuses that I described in the previous paragraph.  Respect each other, let people follow their own conscience, and don’t get in the way of someone else’s spiritual journey, is his message.

Sometimes, to keep the peace, the Church introduced a compromise.  For example, when controversies arose in the early Church over whether Gentile Christians had to obey the whole of Jewish teaching, the church leaders at Jerusalem, ‘after much discussion’, decided that it wasn’t a good idea to lay too heavy a burden on these Gentiles, and instead commanded them ‘to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood.’ 

This relaxing of regulations (probably) avoided infuriating (most of) the religious traditionalists (too much) while paving the way for a more liberal attitude to food laws as time went on.  But I can imagine that, like the Church of England’s current compromise that gay couples can have their marriage blessed in church but can’t actually get married in church, it probably resulted in a lot of angry people who considered that it either went too far or not far enough.

Still, it seems to have managed to avoid an outright split.  So why aren’t we following the same principles as Paul sets out in the passage from Romans?  Why are churches splitting over the question of whether same-sex relationships are a sin, or over whether same-sex marriages should be carried out in church?

‘That’s different!’ some conservative Christians may say.  ‘This is a moral issue!’  But to people two thousand years ago, worrying about whether Gentile converts to Christianity needed to conform to Jewish law, keeping kosher and observing the Sabbath would have looked the same way.  After all, Sabbath observance was right there in the Ten Commandments, not just some secondary bye-law.  And many modern people would consider that eating any animals (not merely eating non-kosher animals) is murder, which breaks another of the Ten Commandments. 

Killing animals (when it isn’t euthanasia) obviously harms them, and keeping intelligent, sensitive animals like pigs in overcrowded, understimulating environments certainly harms them.  But who is harmed by a loving, monogamous relationship between two people who happen to be the same sex?  And who is harmed if a couple who have this relationship want to be allowed to get married in church?

I suspect that this comes down to identity politics.  I don’t mean gay people claiming their sexual orientation as the most important part of their identity, but people who assume that being a Christian means that whatever defines them as different from non-Christians must be a central, indispensable part of the gospel message.  Sometimes people fight courtroom battles about things that aren’t even in the Bible.  For example, there was a case a couple of decades ago in which a woman sued her employers for not allowing her to wear a crucifix necklace to work, in spite of her employers pointing out that no-one was allowed to wear necklaces and that they didn’t have any objection to her wearing a crucifix as a badge.

The current church-splitting issue is, at least, over something that is forbidden (for Jews) in the Old Testament and not specifically legalised (for Gentile Christians) in the New Testament.  But the problem with this outlook is that people are still treating the Bible primarily as a set of laws, in which rules remain on the statute books unless officially rescinded (unless they’re ones that most people have forgotten about or can’t be bothered following – how many people worry about facing God’s wrath for collecting a few bits of firewood on the Sabbath?).

During the question-card discussions at our breakfast meeting this morning, we got onto the subject of environmental sustainability.  Our vicar jokingly said that he would like to buy the Isle of Mann, evict all the people and set up a 1,000-person self-sufficient community, ‘with no vegetarians, because we need meat.’  I pointed out that this didn’t follow; if half the population were vegetarian, this left more meat for the other half.  ‘Oh, no, it won’t work if we have different opinions.  We need to be of one mind – doesn’t it say that in the Bible somewhere?’  I suggested that if the community really needed to be made up only of people who held precisely the same opinions as its founder, then the ideal community size was 1.

He was joking, of course.  But if the church is to (a) survive as a community and (b) not earn the contempt of outsiders, we need to show that being one in loving and accepting each other does not have to mean holding a uniform set of opinions on every subject.