May I speak in the name of the Blessed and Holy Trinity, One God in three persons.

From our first reading from Acts Stephen said, ‘I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!’ But they covered their ears… 

Perhaps we all have the experience of seeing a child, not wanting to hear something being said, covering their ears and making a stream of sound out of their mouth. Perhaps, if we’re honest, we were once that child and sometimes we might be tempted to behave in the same way today. To act like that when we’re being told things we don’t want to hear, whether of a personal nature or simply about the craziness of the world in which we live. Yet maybe the world is the way that it is partly because we’ve stopped listening to people we don’t like, don’t agree with, don’t feel at ease with?  

Last week I spent a little time seven miles away from a country where women are not only denied education but virtually eradicated from public life.  A country where there are arbitrary detentions, torture, and where critics are silenced. I wasn’t passing by on the other side, but at altitude – complete with drinks and complimentary snacks – above Afghanistan.  

Flightpaths across the world have been altered by events in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe. Watching the inflight tracker, Tehran appeared to the south as we crossed the Caspian Sea – then Ukraine and Russia to the north as we flew across the Black Sea. It reminded me of the narrow corridors of privilege that cross our world and ensure that we comfortably bypass the realty of contexts very different from our own. But this isn’t simply a passive inconvenience. The increased flights over Afghanistan are now contributing to an estimated seventy million dollars of annual income for the Taliban regime.  

There is a lot of truth in the saying that ‘ignorance is bliss’. However, I think faith and theology push us to ask deeper questions and work towards an accurate understanding of how our lives are connected to the lives of people who aren’t simply travelling with us along narrow corridors of privilege. You might know the acronym PLU’S, which stands for ‘people like us’. It’s been around a long time and describes the fine line we draw between the kind of people we recognise as similar to ourselves, and the rest. As the author Rudyard Kipling observed: “All the people like us are we, and everyone else is they“.  

It seems to me that a defining feature of the Gospels is that Jesus flatly refuses to make this kind of distinction. Time and again we hear it in the Gospels as Jesus resolutely refuses to stick his kind of people and instead demonstrates a determination to be with and for all people. Let’s just look at a few examples. 

Jesus shouldn’t have been speaking with a Samaritan woman – alone.  

He shouldn’t have responded to the urgent petition of a Roman military officer.  

What’s he doing having dinner with tax collectors?   

Surely that woman, bleeding, should have been disciplined for touching his cloak – not met, and blessed and healed?  

What on earth did Jesus think he was up to, listening to a Syrophoenician woman banging on about her sick daughter?  

Even on the cross, he gives the time of day to a criminal seeking salvation.  

And this isn’t to mention the lepers, the mad and the unclean.  

Surely, he should have been focused on saving the right kind of people? People like us? 

What did Jesus think he was doing? 

On long flights I love my noise-cancelling headphones. The sounds around me disappear and I’m happily cocooned in my own little world. My ears are covered and I don’t need to see or listen to anything too upsetting. I think we all have invisible equivalents to those headphones. The gentle pull to be with those who echo the same views we share and value. To avoid too much troublesome noise disturbing our imagination even our faith. But there’s a problem with that.  

Jesus says: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life”. Not his teaching but his person – the whole life, death and resurrection is the ‘I am’ who we have invited to step into our lives. This ‘I am’ spends time with a lot of the wrong sort of people. Perhaps, not people like us. And if we live out our call to be disciples, then we should also find ourselves in uncomfortable places, with people who aren’t like us, living and learning what it means to grow into the likeliness of Christ. 

Amen.