Racism

I originally posted this almost three years ago. Perhaps it may speak to us today as well.

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I frequently speak at a variety of churches, but I'm not scheduled to do that this weekend. However, if I were, I would want to preach something like this:


Some of the earliest followers of Jesus were guilty of racism.

It wasn’t the ugly, violent, hate-filled, demonic brand that was demonstrated this week in Charlottesville. But it was still racism. It was the kind that said that some folks were in with God and others were out based on their ethnicity. The folks who were in were the people of Israel—faithful Jewish people. The folks who were out were the pagans of the world, commonly referred to as Gentiles or Greeks.

There was a kind of logic to this form of racism. Jesus was Jewish and so were his disciples. All of the drama surrounding Jesus took place in Israel, including the unleashing of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost, impacting thousands of Jewish pilgrims.

Jesus even once said, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

So, it was easy for the earliest Christians to embrace a form of racism that was grounded in their understanding of the ethnic nature of their faith.

It wasn’t that they didn’t care about the Gentiles in the world. After all, Jesus had commanded them to make disciples of all nations—an echo of God’s call to Israel’s first ancestor, Abram, a call for the people to bring blessing to all the families of the earth. But in order for those Gentiles to become Christians—the thinking went—they would have to conform to Jewish law and the ordinances related to dietary requirements, circumcision, and so on. Once that was properly done, they could join this new, emerging family of faith. They had to do this because Gentiles were considered to be unclean because they were not Jews but were instead part of the pagan world that stood far away from God. It was a categorical form of racism.

But then, one day, Peter—a chief leader in the Christian movement—had a bizarre vision of animals being lowered from the sky in a gigantic sheet. These weren’t just any kind of animals; they were the “unclean” kind that were not to be eaten by faithful Jews. And, yet, a voice from heaven ordered Peter to rise up, kill, and eat those animals. Peter was horrified and protested that he had never done such an awful thing in his life. The voice responded by telling him not to call profane what God had made clean. This happened three times and then disappeared.

Almost immediately afterward, some Gentile men knocked on Peter’s door and told him that their leader, a Roman centurion named Cornelius, had experienced a vision of his own and Peter had been in it. Cornelius sent his friends to find Peter and ask him to visit. Peter consented, still puzzling over this strange situation, and traveled with the men to Cornelius’s home.

When they arrived, the house was filled with Cornelius’s friends and family. It was a house full of Gentiles. It was a house full of unclean Gentiles. As Peter stood on the threshold of the house, he had to make a decision to either run for the hills or dive into a pool of uncleanness. He took the risk and stepped into the house.

Peter began to reflect out loud about how he was starting to realize that God’s acceptance of people was more broad and generous than he had ever imagined. And in short order the people were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to praise God. It was a phenomenon that had also happed to Peter and the other disciples. But it happened on this day to people who had never satisfied the requirement of conforming to the Jewish law.

When the other disciples heard what had happened, they challenged Peter’s actions, but then embraced his conclusion that this great gift of the Holy Spirit was not restricted to Jewish people.

This was, of course, a very positive change for these early leaders. But the change didn’t always translate to the everyday folks who were gathering in the Christian gatherings that were popping up in various places. There were still some who were saying that conformity to the Jewish law was a prerequisite for Gentiles to enter into the Christian faith; that Gentile ethnicity was a blockage to a life of following Jesus.

The apostle Paul had to address this issue in at least a couple of places. In the letter to the church in Rome, he showed that Jews and Gentiles both stood before God on equal ground. Ethnicity or religious legalism had nothing to do with faith in the God and Father of Jesus Christ. All people had the same problem when it came to sin. He summed up his argument quite succinctly when he said,

“For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

People, being human, find it easy to drop people into categories that too often are negative, resulting in suspicion, exclusion, and, as we’ve seen again recently, hatred and violence. Paul had to help the earliest Christians come to grips with an emerging reality called the church, a church that was often made up of a diverse population of faithful people. In that reality, they struggled to learn what it meant to be a people of oneness—oneness with God and with one another. So, Paul offered them this amazing statement:

“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

Now the people first hearing these words would probably have looked around the room and noticed that, indeed, there were still Jews and Greeks, slaves and free, male and female. The unique identities of the people were not swallowed up into a cosmic melting pot. They remained who they were, but in Christ Jesus they were one. This oneness would not flatten out their differences, even minimizing the problems faced by some of them (after all, the life of the slave, for example, would be markedly different in its quality than for one who was free). There would still be cultural, economic, legal, and gender advantages and disadvantages that they would experience, but in Christ they would live in a new reality of oneness. There were no categories of in or out, clean or unclean. They were all in, made clean by God in and through Jesus Christ.

There are too many stories in our world that are like what we heard about in Charlottesville. Governmental leaders are either unwilling or unable to deal with things like this in a nation that is as fractured, divided, and angry as ours. Suspicion permeates our society as neighbors fear neighbors and acts of violence become the staple of the daily news.

In the second century after Jesus, two plagues ravaged the Roman Empire. A third of the population died from disease, which could have been small pox, measles, or any number of highly contagious diseases. Many who were not sick fled the cities. Sick people were sometimes cast into the street to die alone. But there was one group of people who stayed behind to care for the sick.

It was the Christians.

Their love of life and lack of the fear of death allowed them to stay and care for those who were suffering. Because of their work, some of the sick recovered. But in the process, some of the Christians contracted disease and died. Nevertheless, they stayed.

We are living in a society that is suffering and sick. Will we fail to call out what is real about this disease and just hope it will all go away? Or will we come together and seek God, asking for a fresh empowering by his Spirit, that we might demonstrate within our own shared life the oneness of Christ that is not limited by race or ethnicity or economics or political preferences? And might we be the ones to step into the midst of this disease that surrounds us, speaking and showing the wisdom and love of God that does not allow racism or self-proclaimed superiority to build idols that will crush the most vulnerable among us?

It is important to recognize that, in the experience of Peter and Cornelius, racism was not broken by a strategic plan. It was broken by the work of God’s Spirit as people refused to let their differences become barriers to the work of God in their lives.

As I pointed out earlier, Jesus once said, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” This was not a statement of exclusion, but rather one of mission. The people of Israel had lost their sense of vocation, that they would be God’s people, not for their own sake, but for the sake and blessing of all the families of the earth. Jesus came to those lost sheep so that they might recover their identity and destiny.

Are we ever lost in that way? Is there a way in which God’s Spirit must renew our lives so that we might recover our sense of mission in the world? In the midst of the tragedies we hear about every day, is God summoning us to proclaim and demonstrate a new reality, a reality that Jesus called the kingdom of God? Or, in our forgetfulness, have we become lost? In our lostness, could it be that our voices forgot to declare that racism, in any form is wrong in general, and absolutely anti-Christ in particular when found in the life of the church?

It’s not the worst thing to be lost, especially if you know that you’re lost and someone is looking for you. The worst thing is to be lost and not know it. Or to be lost and not care.

And the greatest thing is to be found by Jesus, and to follow him into the broken world that he loves, finding the courage to stand for justice because Jesus has already gone before us into that tragic place.

May it be so with us today.