/ http://pleasantview.ia.us.mennonite.net/Pleasant_View_Mennonite/Sermons en-us Sun, 22 Nov 2009 04:41:08 GMT Caravel CMS RSS App Race and the Will of God http://pleasantview.ia.us.mennonite.net/Pleasant_View_Mennonite/Sermons:CB3=s51009.rtf@CB3
5/10/09
 Race and the Will of God
 Acts 8:26-40

Fellow citizens of the kingdom of God,

So today is Mother's Day, but the theme of this sermon is how God wants us human beings of different races to lovingly and graciously see ourselves as one people. Not quite the same theme. Mother's Day. All races being one people.

 I did, though, come up with a couple stories that combines those two things. I've told this story at least once before, but when it comes to combining Mother's Day with being against racism, this fits oh so well, I think .

Back in the mid-90's, I was at a Mennonite anti-racism conference in Chicago . One of the speakers was an African-American woman. She said that we who are white should confront other white people when they say and do things that are racist, instead of leaving people who are racial minorities to be the ones who bring it up.

During the question time, a white man in the audience asked, "Well, what if you're really just not comfortable confronting people?"

And the speaker said, "When someone says something about someone of another race, just think of it as them saying something about your momma. You wouldn't let it go if someone insulted your momma, would you?"

And the man said, "Well, yeah, I'd probably just let it go."

A lot of the peace-loving Mennonites in the audience nodded and laughed nervously in sympathy to that.

But the point is that every person is our brother and our sister. God doesn't care much at all about who is whose biological relative. God doesn't care much which group or country a person is part of. People can have a thing about who is there own kind. From God's perspective, it seems that our own kind is just human beings. Every person is our brother and our sister. People sometimes have the attitude that our main obligation is to our own biological family. But that is not in the Bible. In fact, the Bible teaches us otherwise.

Any person who is suffering or hurt or in need or mistreated IS a member of OUR family. So on this Mother's Day, I will say that it's good to be loving, caring, and nurturing toward our biological children, if we have any. But parenting is Christian parenting -- parenting is part of the kingdom of God -- to the extent it is loving, caring, and nurturing toward ALL children of ALL ages.

So on this Mother's Day, here's a word from the kingdom of God to all of us adults: be a parent to whoever, of any age, needs it. That may not be Hallmark's way. But it's what Mother's Day and Father's Day are about in God's eyes.
One more Mother's Day story about this. In Old Testament times, long before Jesus was even born, there were some things that people thought God wanted that kind of supported being prejudiced against other groups. One was that people from certain other groups were not allowed in temple to God. They were seen as too bad or dirty or something to be symbolically close to God by being in God's temple.

[read Deuternonomy 23:2-3]

The Moabites were a people who lived near to the people of Israel back then. There were the enemy. And it said, right in the Bible of God's people, as a direct command from God that no Moabite should enter the temple or be considered part of God's people. And no descendent of a Moabite, even to the tenth generation. If you believe the Bible and live by it, you had to obey that, right?

Well, a little later in the Bible, there's a story of a woman named Ruth. You may know this story. She was from Moab. She was one of those Moabites. I won't go into the whole story, but she became friends with a woman from Israel. Then she ended up marrying a guy from Israel named Boaz.

 Here's the Mother's Day connection. This Moab named Ruth, she became the grandmother of the famous King David of Israel . So King David was the third generation descendant of a person from Moab. And interestingly, he actually was the one who came up with the idea of building a temple to God. And his son, Solomon, a fourth generation descendant from a person from Moab, was the one who built the temple to God.

So in the book of Deuternomy, it said that a descendant of someone from Moab shouldn't even go into the temple. But then later, it was descendants of someone from Moab who actually who were the ones who built the temple. And they certainly did go in, too.

Maybe this was God's way of saying, "That stuff about being prejudiced against Moabites -- it's a bunch of B.S.."

When old commands presented as being from God conflict with God's purpose of bringing all people together, those old commands, ignore them. That's what God's people have always done when led by the Holy Spirit.
When Christians talk about "the Holy Spirit," it's a way of talking about God acting in people's lives.

When our Lord, the Son of God, Jesus, was on the earth, the first time he's recorded as mentioning the Holy Spirit was in some comments at a religious gathering in his hometown. He'd already being doing things in public, and to try to give these folks in a hometown a sense of what he was doing, he opened the Bible and read from chapter 61 of the book of Isaiah, where it says, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news to the poor, freedom for prisoners, sight for those who are blind, relief for the oppressed."

And the crowd thought that was all well and good. Very interesting. They maybe were imagining their own problems and the problems of people like them and wondering if maybe God would improve those situations.

But then Jesus made them mad. He said that the poor folks and the prisoners and the blind people and the oppressed folks whom God wanted to help -- they were likely to be people from other religions and others part of the world.

And at that, his listeners got mad. They turned into an angry mob. There's some weird part of us human beings that causes us to care more about people who are part of our group. People who are like us. We can be willing to have awful things done to people who are different in order to improve the lives of ourselves and people like us.

Exploit workers in other parts of the world to increase our own standard of living. Keep people with different skin color and a different language on the other side of the border in order to keep people like us wealthier. Bomb people in other parts of the world in order to make our own lives safer. Keep most of the African-American kids in the country in all-black schools that don't get nearly the funding they need to be decent places to go to school. So you get horrible all-black schools in East St. Louis and fabulous almost all-white suburban schools just a few miles away.

It's always been true with human beings. A hundred and fifty years ago, hundreds of thousands of people were coming to the United States from China to work. For example, high percentage of the workers who built the railroads through the west were Chinese. Until that time, the United States hadn't put many restrictions on who could come to this country. But then, most of those who came came from northern and western Europe. The Chinese folks looked different. And there were violent anti-Chinese riots by working people on the west coast. And by the late 1800's, federal laws were passed -- like the Chinese Exclusion Act -- which straightforwardly put racist restrictions on Chinese workers coming to America. And that's why we have a lot fewer ethnically Chinese people in this country than we would otherwise. Just like now we do that with people from Mexico and Central America.

There are different degrees of racism. And by racism, what I mean is to consider one's own racial group superior to enough racial group. And racism itself is really just one form of this very basic human sin: to see people in one's own group as more important than people in other groups. A word for that might be "tribalism." Tribalism.

A person's tribe is a group by which they define themselves. Sometimes it's done by skin color. Sometimes it's done by religion. Sometimes it's done by nationality.

The reason Barack Obama's father died is that, in Kenya, the Obama family is part of the Luo tribe. In Kenya in the 1960's, the Luo tribe lost out to another tribe in the fight over who would run Kenya. And so Obama's father -- despite his education and abilities -- lost his government job and influence. He got depressed. He started drinking too much. And he died in a car accident in his early 40's. He was trained to help run the country, but he had been of the wrong tribe.

In the 1990's, in the former Yugoslavia in southern Europe, the country divided into three tribes. They defined themselves by religion: Serbs, Croats, and Moslems. But lots of these folks weren't religious people. It was what they were by birth. They spoke the same language. They looked the same. But they were three tribes. And there was mass slaughter for most of the decade.

And so it goes. Shiites vs. Sunni Moslems in Iraq . Kurds vs. Turks in northern Iraq and eastern Turkey . Jews vs. Palestinians.

It's a human tendency. Races. Religious groups. Families. Kinds of people.

So does God have any opinion on all this?

Well, again, Jesus challenged people on precisely this issue. He looked for opportunities to let people know that God wasn't the God of any particular tribe. God was not the God of the Jews only, but of all people.

A few weeks ago, we focused together on remembering Jesus' death and resurrection.

And then a couple months after Jesus had been executed and returned to life, his followers had a wild experience. They were pretty much keeping to themselves. After all, the government had recently executed their leader. They weren't sure how safe it would be to go out in public much.

But then, when around a hundred of them were together in private, the spirit of God blew in on them like a wind. Imagine the windows open at home and then the wind picks up and blows into the house. One of the things that happened was that, immediately, these folks who'd known Jesus personally could talk about Jesus and be understood by people who spoke other languages. The very first thing, then, is that lines between tribes was broken down.

And these folks seem to have formed a single church, despite the language issues. There were difficulties.

The book of Acts is the story of the early Christians, and early on, it talks about the struggles between early Christians of different backgrounds. There were struggles. Human beings being human beings, there are always struggles when we share life together. And when we don't. Life isn't easy. So it isn't really a matter of whether of we have struggles and major challenges to deal with in life. It's more a matter of the extent to which we have struggles and major challenges that come from choosing Christ's path of absolute, unlimited, unconditional love for all.

No matter the paths we take, there are challenges and struggles. That's just life. The question is the extent to which our challenges and struggles are part of advancing the kingdom of God in the world.

And for those folks back then, they put in the time and effort to sort through a lot -- with the result that they more and more shared their lives with each other. Different backgrounds, different races, different languages, different cultures -- united by having caught a common wind of the Holy Spirit -- united by a common faith that the one true God is the loving, compassionate, serving God made known through Jesus.

They had among them a lot of economic struggles. We think we have struggles now, but those were the days before any government programs to help with financial emergencies. No food stamps or Medicaid or disability or anything. Now, a big part of the ways we live up to God's call to share with each other and care for each other is through government programs that draw on the resources of the whole society and that channel them to whoever needs them most.

The ones who spoke Greek felt like the widows and orphans among them weren't as well taken care of by the group as the widows and orpahns who spoke Aramaic. So they spent time sorting through it all together. They worked it out. It seems that they came to realize that it was a problem that the people in charge were all from one group: the Aramaic speaking folks who'd known Jesus personally. So part of the solution was to give authority over the money to the new people -- the Greek-speaking folks who hadn't known Jesus personally but had gotten into him.

This broadening of responsibility and power seems to have helped relationships in the group a lot. Those tribal barriers descreased. Less of "us" and "them."

The whole "us" and "them" thing -- not good. When the Holy Spirit found a way to bring different sorts of people together back then -- and the book of Acts is mostly the story of that happening -- when the Holy Spirit did that, it was God saying, "Among you humans who are all my children, there is to be no more 'us' and 'them.' There is to be only 'us.' You are all to be 'us' to each other. Sisters and brothers. One family without boundaries."

God pretty much seems to insist on that. This business of all kinds of people sharing life together regardless of biological relationships or race or culture or nationality -- it's not a side thing but part of the kingdom of God.

In fact, it's part of the very phrase: kingdom of God. Because we hear it so much, we're used to hearing about lots of different "kingdoms" in this world. France, China, Brazil, Mexico, the United States of America. Different countries, different kingdoms. But the borders between them are human creations that go in a different direction from God's kingdom. One kingdom, with one loving compassionate God over it all, and all people as part of it. That's the real lasting kingdom that matters. The others we shouldn't take too seriously but God's kingdom is already eternal and guaranteed.

Let me close with our Scripture reading as a great example of GOD's priorities about these things.

I mentioned that the Aramaic-speaking folks who'd known Jesus in person eventually named some Greek-speaking folks to handle the money to satisfy concerns that the Greek-speaking people in need among them weren't getting the financial help they needed. One of these Greek-speaking folks who handled the money for those in need was named Philip.

Philip was part of this early inclusion of different sorts of people -- different languages even -- into one visible community. God drew people like him in.

And then God used Philip to take another step. God sent Philip to a road. And there passed a man from Ethiopia. This guy was apparently a high official in the Ethiopian government whose official business had taken him through the land of the Jews. He'd picked up a Jewish Bible and was reading it when he passed by Philip.

Philip and the guy started talking. The guy had been reading about how someone would be battered and killed for the sins of others. That gave Philip a chance to talk with him about the whole thing with Jesus that had recently happened. The guy believed it and asked Philip to be baptize him right then and there. (That's how they always seem to have done it back then: right away, as soon as the person believed.)

This guy again was from Ethiopia. Ethiopia is a country in eastern Africa. And the people there have dark skins. They are black.

Now, race is sort of a thing that people have made up. The more direct sunlight a person is in, the better it is for their skin to be dark. And so people whose ancestors evolved in Africa are dark-skinned. People's ancestors evolved in northern Europe, where it's darker and cooler -- their skin is very light. And for people in between: their skin is in-between.

Skin color has to do only with how our skin is set up to handle the sun's rays. That's it.

But people sometimes make a big deal about it, though less and less, thank God.

But I just want to point out that God made a point of including people of different races in churches right away. Different religious backgrounds. Different cultures. The Holy Spirit made it happen -- telling the earliest Christians to do these things that would bring in different sorts of folks.

And for us today? We can be confident, I think, that the more we're a mix of people from different races and cultures and backgrounds -- the more excited God is about us. We actually seem to do pretty well at that here. We're a mix. And that is cool. It's God's way. It's important to God that we lay aside seeing ourselves as parts of other groups and tribes and instead see us part of just the human race who is universally loved and adored by the one true God made known in Jesus.
The kingdom of God is at hand. May the walls all come down.



Wed, 13 May 2009 13:42:52 GMT