Hindering God – Easter V, 22 April 2016

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?”  When they heard this, they were silenced.  (Acts 11:17-18)

Hindering God seems a curious concept.  The church tends to assume that it is all the time facilitating God.  Next Sunday we get to hear a story from the infant Christian church.  Peter has been resting, recuperating perhaps, at Joppa, a coastal town.  He falls asleep in the sunshine and he dreams.  In his dream he sees a lot of animals in some kind of sheet let down from heaven.  A voice tells him to kill and eat – but these are animals forbidden for food in the Jewish Law.  I suppose the significance of their being let down from heaven is that, although ritually forbidden, they are nevertheless part of God’s gift in creation.  Peter says there is no way he will transgress the Law to eat anything profane or unclean.  He never has, he says, and he never will.  The voice says, What God has cleansed you may not call profane.  Later, back in Jerusalem, when Peter is taken to task by Jewish Christians for having associated with Gentiles, he tells them this story, and how the same Spirit of God had come upon Gentile believers as upon Jews.  To impede this, by prejudice, by inability to let go of former things, is to hinder God.

Perhaps we hinder God all our lives, in a myriad of ways, some of them trivial and some certainly not.  Our choices at various times, our attitudes, the effects we have had on other people, perhaps needy people, it may be without our ever realising it.  Peter says he refuses to hinder God any more by discriminating between Jewish followers of Jesus, and non-Jewish, Gentile, or pagan, followers of Jesus.  It was the first major test of the Risen Christ’s power to bring down walls and reconcile differences – and that battle, confronted that day in Jerusalem, is being fought still among Jesus’s followers, along the racial divides, whether women may be ordained, for goodness sake!... the status of homosexual people in the company of Christ… and other assorted issues.

It is pretty basic contemplative understanding and experience that it is our egos that hinder God.  It is simply that the ego, however worthy, tends to usurp, even in subtle ways, the place that belongs to God.  The ego may have a heavy investment in the primacy of men in authority, or in the exclusion in societies and families of what seems different or strange.  The ego knows what it likes, and does not like.  The ego may have been seduced by power, money or style.  The ego may have developed desires and ambitions which conflict with the way of Christ. 

In the rhythm of contemplative life and prayer, the ego is constantly, daily, being brought back into submission to God.  This happens gently and quietly, and steadily, in disciplines of silence and stillness.  And one way of seeing it is that we are seeking no longer to hinder God, by our actions, by our attitudes, by our requirements, by our noisy presence in God’s world.