The Fifth Sunday of Easter, 18 May 2025, Austwick
“What God has made clean, you must not call profane”
This week, we have been troubled by the thought of being affected by uncleanness. By unclean water, that is. Reports that local people were being advised to boil their water before drinking it, rised anxiety for many. For those in the area affected, and for the rest of us living uncomfortably close by, we stopped taking for granted water, that most fundamental thing in our lives, and started treating it with suspicion and taking extra care around it.
This situation may have unsettled us, but it may have helped us to understand what life is like every day for those many people in the world who live with the problem of unclean water all the time.
In a recent school assembly we looked at a film about Uqueque School, in South Africa, which has 320 students but doesn’t have its own water supply. A student called Kwenele explained that the area around the school has a few boreholes but not enough for everyone, and the waterways are often polluted or dry. In the school, sanitation is poor, and sickness is common, affecting students’ learning. A Salvation Army project is providing Uqueque with a borehole pump and toilet block. Kwenele said, “Clean, reliable water will change our lives”. [1]
In situations like Kwenele’s, and like this week’s Yorkshire Water Bentham ‘boil alert’, our understanding of uncleanness is determined by the science of public health, by testing and analysis. But some of our ideas about what is clean and what is not, come to us in other ways.
What would you drink, and what would you never drink? We cringe at those celebrities in the jungle forced by Ant and Dec to down cocktails blended from mealworms, crocodile anus, or vomit fruit. That’s an extreme example of course, designed for TV entertainment. But we all have our own preferences: my mostly teetotal Nan would never have a Snowball at Christmas because she once got giddy on one, but instead she’d insist on having a gin, which of course was far more potent, but, as she thought, it looked ‘clean’. I love green tea – visits to Japan nurtured my appreciation of that – but I understand others who turn up their noses at it, and say, it’s like drinking grass. And while I’ll drink coffee if kindly offered it, it’s never my first choice; the taste, the whole culture around it, I just don’t get. What would you drink, and what would you never drink?
These choices come down to our personal tastes. And many of our ideas about what we should put inside us come from our culture and from religion. Some branches of Christianity insist on abstinence from alcohol, for instance; likewise, Islamic teachings strictly prohibit its consumption; most Hindu religious texts generally discourage it.
All of this helps us understand what is behind Peter’s strange dream about four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. It’s a dream which plays on the very strict food laws of Peter’s people the Jews: and which addresses the issue he was facing as a leader of the Jewish Christians who were beginning to see Gentiles also come to faith in Christ. This caused the Jewish Christians to have to change the way they saw these erstwhile outsiders. They had to learn to share their faith with them. They had to learn to share their food with them. They even had to learn to eat the Gentiles’ food.
The Gentiles had their different ways, their different eating and drinking habits, and different other habits, which Peter’s people would have regarded as being unclean, profane.
But when the voice in his dream told him, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane,” Peter’s heart opened to what God was now doing in the world. He realised that the food wasn’t the real issue. The food symbolised the real issue: which was that, in God’s eyes, people of a different culture were clean, and pure, and good, and loved, and that he, Peter, must open his arms, and share his faith – and his table – with them. [2]
It was for Peter, as it may be for us, a hard lesson to learn – that in God’s eyes there are no ‘strangers’; only neighbours; that in the way of Christ outsiders must be “treated as equal, welcomed with love and accepted as neighbour.” [3]
We’ve moved beyond food and drink now, into the area of human relationships. And in this moment, when our political leaders are intent on exaggerating the differences between peoples, fostering our fear of others, building distrust, increasing division, it goes against the grain to say that everyone, of every colour, race or creed, is equally loved and valued in God’s heart, and that “What God has made clean, you must not call profane”.
The artist Malak Mattar entitles one of her paintings, “My Skin is Not a Sin”. It is a beautiful study of five women of different colour dancing together with a garland of flowers in the company of a dove of peace. Malak is a young Palestinian artist, and so she knows what it means to belong to a people who others call ‘profane’. A recent documentary on the Israeli settlers featured a rabbi who calls Palestinians “savages”; and another settler who refuses to even accept that they exist. [4]
When a people regard another people in this way then they can do anything to them, however inhumane. They can deprive them of water, for instance. The Israel authorities re-route 83 per cent of the water under the Palestinian West Bank to benefit Israeli cities and settlements, leaving West Bank Palestinians just the remaining 17 percent, so that they receive only limited amounts of water irregularly. According to the United Nations, in 2017 some 180 Palestinian communities in rural areas in the occupied West Bank had no access to running water. That was eight years ago: the situation is likely to be worse today. [5]
“I’ve always tried to be a citizen of the world,” said Malak Mattar in a recent interview, “But then I’m always reminded that I’m stateless.” So to create a work of beauty like “My Skin is Not a Sin” is an act of hope, as well as defiance. [6]
This hopeful defiance is shared by Jenna Fischer, who volunteers with the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, protecting Palestinian shepherding communities from settler violence. She says, “Israel says it’s doing what it is in Gaza and the occupied territories in my name, because I’m Jewish and because they want to maintain a Jewish homeland. Everything I have learned from being Jewish says that this is not the way that you treat people, and that we can do better.” [7]
Jenna says that she follows the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam, or “repairing the world”, which means living with our neighbours in peace. This is a work to which people of goodwill from every faith are called. We begin to play our part in “repairing the world” when, like Peter, we pay heed to the voice which tells us, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane”.
Notes
[1] Salvation Army, Self Denial Appeal 2019 – Be the Change – Week 5 South Africa – Kwenele’s Story. Salvos Studios / YouTube.
[2] See my 2019 talk, Peter’s funny picnic – disbelieving the ‘disgusting’ lie.
[3] Amelia Braddick, Bishop of Chelmsford criticises Starmer over ‘island of strangers’ immigration speech. Church Times, 15 May 2025.
[4] Stuart Heritage, The Settlers review – this vital film forces Louis Theroux to do something he’s never done before. Guardian, 27 April 2025; Louis Theroux, If you were shocked by my film on Israeli settlers in the West Bank, you haven’t been paying attention. Guardian, 10 May 2025.
[5] Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, p.19; Wikipedia: Jordan River; Amnesty International, The Occupation of Water. 29 November 2017. Referenced in my 2017 talk, On Jordan’s bank: crossing over from distrust to understanding.
[6] Hakim Bishara, Gazan Artist Speaks About a Lifetime of Trauma and War. Hyperallergic, 26 May 2021.
[7] Liam Syed, Israeli Settlers are Erasing the West Bank. Tribune, 13 May 2025.
