The Healing of the Nations: It Takes One to Know One

If you missed yesterday’s post then please go back and read this first. It’s a brief history of racism in the Bible, and how Jesus’ ministry was consistently addressing it and dismantling it.

But that’s not the end of the story.

After Jesus is killed and raised from the dead, there’s another Jewish leader.

A guy named Paul, who was basically operating as a Jewish terrorist in his day, is hell bent on stopping this budding new Christian movement, that is, until he has an encounter with Jesus, and he learns 2 things, 1) that Jesus really is alive and has defeated death

And 2) he had been killing people who were the people of God.

Now imagine if this is you, you’ve been doing something that you think is actually in service to God, you have been excluding, condemning, making policy against, or even taking violent action against other people.

Paul’s not doing this just be a jerk, but as a way of honoring God, because he has the wrong idea about who God is.

And suddenly Paul knows Paul found out that he was wrong, and he had blood on his hands and stood naked and exposed as someone who had hated the God he worshipped because he had hated and killed people in the image of God.

He was the Cain, and he had just killed his brother.

And so he goes all over the world planting churches of the new people of Abraham, the father of all nations.

And so Paul becomes the reverse Jonah.

He becomes the new Shibboleth gate keeper but he makes sure the gate stays open

He goes to the widows of Isaiah, to the foreigner and families of the wife of Moses to plant churches, what he would call temples for them to belong too.

He builds new temples to be a house of prayer for all nations and turns the tables over in them when they forget that (1st Corinthians)

He goes all over the world telling people about the family of Abraham and calling people who he has no blood relationship with Brother and Sister and he means it.

He tells everyone about the King of the Universe named Jesus. He’s the first person in human history that would have told the Gentiles that everyone is equal.

And for all this Paul is constantly beaten, stoned, mocked, belittled and constantly arrested, he’s eventually killed with no fan fare and little attention. But he’s the man who changed your world. You’re hear today because Paul took the Gospel out of the 30 mile radius that is Judea and brought it to the entire known world.

Today there are certain things that you think are right and wrong and you have no idea it’s because of the blood and sweat and life and death of this guy.

Did you know that pity back in the ancient world was seen as horrible? Weakness was seen as just that, there was no sense of a victim having any moral status, but your world has changed because of the Gospel and the man who started Churches centered around them.

Around a man who says that God’s strength is seen in our weakness not our power not our strong arming our will on others.

You may see Paul as some oppressive, homophobic, sexist, pro-slavery and anti-freedom guy who talks too much about sex because he’s single and doesn’t get to have any.

But every category that I just mentioned is one that Paul gave you, and spent his life fighting against it.

Before MLK had a dream, Paul had a vision and it’s one that we need more than ever today.

A Church of A Different Kind

Whenever racism becomes a topic of media coverage, I cringe. It seems like the talking points are already solidified and many of us rush toward postures of defense and blame.

So let me get this out there. I am a racist.

I grew up in rural Arkansas in the 80s, not that it was my parents’ fault, they were incredibly hospitable and open to other people, not that it was my state’s fault, there were plenty of people who were doing lots of good work for reconciliation, but racism was in the air, and I breathed it.

When people want to know about my conversion to being a disciple of Jesus I tell them about when I was baptized, but then I almost always tell a story that happened a few weeks later. I was driving along with some of my friends, and we were passing by the home a new family that had just moved into our all white rural community in Arkansas.

Or at least it used to be all white.

Because this new family was black.

My friends wanted me to yell the “n word” out the window when we drove past. And I intuitively knew that my baptism meant that I couldn’t do it.

I had used that word plenty in the past, I had made those jokes, and now I knew it was wrong.

It actually devolved into me getting into a fist fight with some of my previously best friends, and having to walk four miles because I lost my ride…and my friends.

But as I was walking that day, I knew that day I was a Christian, I knew that I was a Christian more than I was a redneck, an Arkansan, a white person, or a farm boy, or an American.

That’s my conversion, or at least the start of it.

But I’ve come to realize that’s a main part of any Christians conversion.

It is to realize that we now belong to a new humanity, if you’ve been baptized than you don’t accept the labels of the world anymore.

You don’t accept skin color as the primary way to identify you or anyone, you don’t accept voting preferences or nationality as a way to identify people.

We are in Christ and that’s enough.

Here’s how Paul says it in 2 Corinthians 5:

For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.

So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ,the new creation has come:The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.

No longer do we view each other from a worldly point of view…

Or what about the way Paul says it in Colossians 3:

But now you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.

Notice Pauls says to “Get rid of all your anger, rage, malice, slander and filthy language” and in this context that isn’t so much about dropping the F bomb, it’s much more directed at that racist joke, the way you talk about “those” people.

Notice too that Paul isn’t assuming a universal ethic for everyone to live, but an ethic for the people of God that affects how we see everyone. “Here there is not Gentile of Jew…”

Paul says the same thing in a different way in Galatians 3

So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

The historian Thomas Cahill says when Paul wrote these words, this was the first time in human history that someone ever wrote down the radical, world changing idea that everyone could be equal.

This is what happened in Acts 2, it was a reversal of the story of Babel, (before Pentecost in the Bible, when there was a crowd it only counted the men, but this is the first time that women and children were counted too)

This is the Church Paul went all over the world trying to start.

Did you know that kindness comes from the word kin? The etymology makes sense, You like people who are like you.

But Jesus had a different vision, His people, His bride were, because of His work on the Cross, not to try to build their identity on who they were better than, but by the overwhelming, overpowering love of God.

Busride to Justice

So last year, I went on a bus ride with 10 black preachers, and 10 white preachers, all over the South to see the civil rights monuments together, and share our stories with one another.

We got to spend a half a day with the wonderful Dr. Fred Gray, the attorney for Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and the famous Tuskegee study. He also happens to be a preacher in the tribe of Christianity I come from, Churches of Christ.

Our first stop on this trip was in Birmingham Alabama, at the 16th avenue Baptist Church. The place where KKK members bombed a church, and killed four innocent little black girls.

As I stood in that church, and read the plaques memorializing these little girls, I had a moment where I was just overwhelmed with how evil we can be to each other. Bombing a church? Killing children? That sounds so evil and wrong, why a church.

But I’ve come to believe that those KKK members knew exactly what they were doing.

They bombed the right target, because this hope for dignity and equality didn’t start in Washington, it started in the Church.

One of the most inspiring things to me about the Civil Rights Movement is watching those videos of the march on Washington. The day that MLK stood up and told everyone about a dream he had, a dream that was bathed in the prophets of yesterday and a hope in a better tomorrow.

Thousands of people came from all over the country, rode buses and drove cars, they planned out there trips for where they could stop and eat or sleep in a segregated country where most restaurants and hotels wouldn’t serve them.

They did all that, just to be there that day.

But the most inspiring part of that day to me, isn’t just the speech, it’s the people, specifically what they were wearing. Go back and watch some of that old grainy black and white footage, you’ll see that the women were wearing their finest dresses and the men are wearing their ties.

You know why? Because they had just left church.

They came pouring out of church, worshipping a God who says that in Christ there is no segregation or seperation and then they came together and told the world about their dream.

Because it didn’t start in Washington, this dream, this hope started in a manger, and it ran through the pens of a man who wrote letters from prison.

It is the hope of the world, it is the healing of the nations.

It is the dream of Jesus, the life of saints and the hope of sinners, a city set on a hill, a counter culture for the good of culture, the healing of the nations and the life of tomorrow right here today.

This is what Jesus started and Paul planted

A City within a city, a church of differents that could make a difference.

It is a Church of a different kind.