A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on May 18, 2025 by Revd Dr Sam Wells
Reading for address: Acts 11: 1-18
Not long ago I reconnected with an old friend. We caught up on the latest news. He said, ‘You remember my daughter who’s been blind from birth? She’s 17 now and we’ve been told an operation’s available to give her the ability to see.’ I said, ‘What’s her biggest emotion – excitement, wonder, delight, impatience?’ His answer gave me a lot to think about. He said, ‘None of those. Her biggest emotion is fear. What if she doesn’t like the world she sees, and reflects she was better off in the world of her imagination?’
The recent Parish Pilgrimage gave me a chance to visit the cathedral museum in Siena, and discover a fourteenth-century painter with whose work I wasn’t previously familiar: Duccio di Buoninsegna. In a darkened room were a collection of meticulous and elegant works, mostly designed as altar pieces, telling the story of the Virgin Mary and of Christ. But what stayed with me, and was evoked again when I recently saw the Siena exhibition at the National Gallery, containing panels borrowed from that same room in the cathedral museum, was the astonishing gold of the backdrop to each of these artworks. Rather as a halo picks out the saint in a conventional medieval painting, in Duccio’s work the iridescent gold magnifies and intensifies each of the tiny particulars of these astoundingly detailed paintings.
The gold alerted me to the importance and holiness of the miracles and memorable moments the tiny paintings portrayed. But it also opened my eyes in wonder at something more commonplace yet more fabulous: the glory of the world around us that we constantly take for granted. My ordinary day begins by rising from cotton sheets made in factories who knows where, washing with water channelled from reservoirs through installations by plumbers, donning clothes fabricated by craftspeople across the world, boiling a kettle with electricity generated perhaps by solar power, preparing eggs from happy chickens, opening up the laptop made with microchips from countries far away. Within half an hour I’ve experienced myriad wonders of created and manufactured existence, and I haven’t yet beheld the wide sky half-hiding the universe of stars and galaxies beyond. My every single day is as wondrous as Duccio’s golden backdrops, if only I could open my eyes to take it in.
So when I heard my friend talk about his daughter’s eye operation, and her fear of being overwhelmed or disappointed by the gift of sight, I recalled Duccio’s paintings, and my everyday existence. I realised that for this young woman, sight would make the whole world look as Duccio saw it: spectacular and shiny and astonishing and pregnant with meaning, truth and wonder. But my daily familiarity has dulled that world to dreary greys and browns, not because my life is empty of meaning and truth, but because I’ve largely ceased to wonder, and allowed my attention to be diverted from the glory of the meticulous detail of existence and dwell instead on exasperation at American politics or surprise at last night’s football result or anxiety about a difficult conversation in the day ahead.
And then I reflected: this isn’t just an insight about our experience of existence. It’s about what it means to exist against the backdrop of eternity. Stay with the paintings of Duccio for a moment, and imagine our everyday existence as the figures at the centre of the painting – the Virgin and Child, or Christ washing the disciples’ feet, or the wedding at Cana. But these figures are set against a backdrop of shimmering gold. And imagine that gold as eternity, what I call essence – the realm of God, the interactions of the Trinity, the purpose of all things, the enormous embrace of our earthly reality by our heavenly destiny.
And again the process is the same: we turn the gold of wonder into the dull grey and brown of familiarity. God determined always to be with us in Christ. To this eternal choice we owe our existence – the world owes its existence. We didn’t cause it, trigger it, earn it, choose it, deserve it. We have no right whatsoever to question or criticise the terms on which creation came to be or the bloodthirsty and sometimes painful and tragic way life can shake out. Who do we think we are? We’re not entitled inheritors of a property deed, absentee aristocrats, who show up at a country seat, disgusted at the condition in which it’s been kept by the staff while we’ve been pleasing ourselves elsewhere. We’re like the young woman gaining her sight for the first time, overwhelmed by the glory of the story in which we’ve been invited to take part, overjoyed by the privilege of the relationship into which we’ve been welcomed.
If we think of the gospel of Luke and the book of Acts as a single story in two parts, we can identify three episodes so remarkable that the author’s only way to portray them is to tell the same story from several different angles. The first is the incarnation. We get the announcement of John’s coming, of Jesus’ coming, the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth, the birth of John, the birth of Jesus, the presentation in the Temple and the child Jesus talking in the temple with the teachers. Then there’s the resurrection. We get the women going to the tomb, the Emmaus Road, eating fish with the disciples in the upper room, and the ascension at Bethany. Now, here in Acts 10 and 11, we get a similarly momentous event from numerous perspectives. Like the incarnation it’s in seven scenes. We have Cornelius, a Roman soldier. Cornelius has a vision, in which an angel tells him he belongs in God’s company, and is told to bring Peter from Joppa. Then Peter in a trance sees a sheet descending from heaven with all kinds of food, each forbidden by Jewish law. Then Cornelius’ messengers reach Peter. By now it’s clear this is a reprise of the annunciation story, where an angel comes to Mary and announces God’s big plan. Peter accompanies the messengers 30 miles north to Caesarea. A crowd has assembled. So Peter preaches a sermon announcing God shows no partiality and faith in Jesus is for all. Then the Holy Spirit falls on the company and all are baptised. Then finally we have today’s part of the story, where Peter has to explain himself to the believers in Jerusalem, who are alarmed by the ingathering of the Gentiles.
Now this story – a story of Peter setting aside the Jewish laws of fellowship and initiation, eating together and becoming a believer, or what we’d call baptism and Eucharist, and welcoming the Gentiles – this story is widely regarded as the definitive story of inclusion. And we’re a church that likes to say we’re committed to inclusion. But see how, on closer scrutiny, this story presents a somewhat more nuanced notion of inclusion than we might normally encounter.
Conventional inclusion rests on the notion of hospitality. It assumes this is our territory, we play by our rules, and our identity is normative. So, if we host a party, it’s on our turf, we decide who’s invited, and we dictate when people go home. If someone arrives in a see-through dress, starts doing drugs, or looks like they’re going to throw up in the corner, it’s our call whether we ask them to leave. So what appears to be an act of generosity in being a host could be viewed more sceptically as a display of affluence and taste, an assertion of customs and norms, and a subtle statement of control. I’m not against hospitality: I’m just pointing out that hospitality may not be an adequate way of thinking about inclusion.
See how in Acts 10 and 11 there’s a confusion over who’s the host. Peter’s the Jew, so he’s at home. But Cornelius is a Roman centurion, so he’s in control of the land, which is occupied territory. Peter’s the Christian, so he gets to decide who’s in the church and who isn’t. But Cornelius is the one who’s seen the angel, and heard God speak. And Cornelius is the host whose messengers bring Peter to Caesarea, whose very name (Caesarea) suggests we’re subtly talking about Rome. This isn’t a story of benevolent and magnanimous Peter widening his inclusion to embrace the unclean enemy Cornelius.
What we need is a sense of another notion of what hospitality and inclusion are all about. It’s significant that the English language doesn’t have such a word. I’ve heard it called cultural intelligence, or CQ – which means the ability to adapt and flourish in diverse cultural settings. But that still suggests one retains the initiative. I’m going to coin a new word. Let’s call it not hospitality but guestability. Guestability means the grace and receptivity to act generously on other people’s territory. It means setting aside the privileges of being the host and being willing and available to accommodate and adapt and learn and appreciate. When you stay in someone else’s house, you check what’s a suitable time to get up, you bring a gift that may be helpful or thoughtful, you take an interest in your host’s furniture and express gratitude for their cooking and try to penetrate the mysteries of their dishwasher or recycling system.
What the story of Cornelius and Peter challenges the church to do is to change its default setting from hospitality to guestability. Peter’s in Cornelius’ home. He’s receptive to Cornelius’ breathtaking experience of the Holy Spirit. He’s realising there’s a whole dimension of God that he and his tradition haven’t previously encompassed. He’s not including Cornelius in something that belongs to him. He’s realising the Holy Spirit is inviting both him and Cornelius into something beyond both of them. Inclusion is in the end an inadequate and subtly controlling word. A better term is common discovery – something we more readily appreciate when we’re away from our own familiar territory. It’s not, ‘You can belong in my club because I’m generous.’ It’s, ‘Being with you is showing me there’s something beyond us both, toward which we’re each heading, and to which I’m realising you’re in many ways closer than I am. Let’s make our way there together.’
This is the moment of conversion – not Cornelius’ but Peter’s – and ours. Christianity stops being our entitled possession and becomes God’s astonishing invitation. Turns out we don’t get to hand out the invites, and the opportunity isn’t to become like us; it’s to become God’s companions. The Holy Spirit is constantly bursting open our narrow understandings of who belongs and what the rules are. We’re being transformed from weary entitled hosts to excited and grateful guests.
How do we learn to become guestable? By beholding Jesus, who doesn’t demand we meet him on his territory, but in the incarnation fundamentally comes on to our territory, and exercises guestability by eating with us, sharing our life, abiding with us and belonging with us. In him the whole distinction between who is guest and who is host and whose territory this really is becomes hopelessly and gloriously confused.
And the moment we realise this we become like my friend’s daughter. We move from a grey and dreary perception of mundane existence to a meticulously particular detailed life against a fabulously shimmering gold backdrop. We enter a Duccio world, in which we’re no longer fiercely controlling and patrolling the parameters of holiness and belonging but deliriously discovering the wondrous surprises of the Holy Spirit’s unfolding celebration. The world isn’t ours. The church isn’t ours. Our lives aren’t ours. All hospitality is in the end an illusion, a social construction to make us feel proprietorial and in control. Our life in every precious moment is a priceless gift, the world is a dazzling theatre of wonder, and the church isn’t an enclave whose boundaries we patrol but a dynamic meeting-place where we’re all guests and we’re all discovering and everyone’s en route to something ever more fabulous.
The Acts of the Apostles is saying, ‘Let’s all have that eye operation. Let’s all read the story of Cornelius and Peter. Let’s all let go of our desire to protect our territory. Let’s see that glorious gold back drop and meticulous detail of existence. And let’s discover the joy of what the Holy Spirit can do.’
