No More Barriers

       I never thought I would see my uncle’s face in a photo in Alstair Cook’s book America .  I certainly never thought I would see it in that terrible context.   The photo is of a lynching of two black men that took place in Marion Indiana in 1930.  My uncle lived in Marion at that time.  The man in the picture sure looks like him – a younger version of the uncle I knew and loved and lived with for awhile when I was growing up.   

       The scene is a lynching but it looks like a party.  People young and old --  women and children as well as men – celebrate under a tree from which two bodies are hanging.  One happy couple look like they’re on a date.  In the left foreground is the man who could very well be my uncle.  He was a wild one in those days.

        I’m not sure it is him.  There is another man in the picture with a tattoo on his arm who is pointing up at one of the bodies.  That man looks for all the world like Heinrich Himmler who later became head of the Nazi S.S.  I’m pretty sure Himmler wasn’t living in Indiana in 1930.  But the other man in the picture could well be my uncle.  In the late 1920’s the Ku Klux Klan was very strong in Indiana .  About 30% of native born white males in the state including my two grandfathers were registered members.  The Klan controlled the state government for several years including the legislature and the governorship. 

        I look back at this history – and my own family’s involvement – and I am baffled.  What were they thinking?  How could they possible square membership in the Klan with their Christian faith? 

       The announced goal of the Klan was to protect White Christian America.  But they were certainly not protecting the America enshrined in the Declaration of Independence – where we say that all men are created equal.   They weren’t protecting the free America their own ancestors had fought to establish in the Revolution and Civil War.  And they certainly were not protecting Christianity.  For the Bible makes it very clear that an essential feature of our renewal in Christ is that we adopt the point of view of God. 

       Do you remember what happened to you when you put your faith in Christ?  Paul says that you “died with Christ.”  Back in Colossians 2:12 he says that when we were baptized, we were actually buried with Jesus.   The result, as Paul writes in 2 Corinthians is that we are now a “new creation.”  And part of being a new creation, we now read in Colossians 3:10 , is that we are “renewed in knowledge according to the image of the One who created us.”  In other words, our minds are reshaped according to the mind of God.  We begin to see life through the eyes of God.  

       The next verse, verse 11, says that one of the things that must change because our nature has changed is the way we look at other groups in society.  For, as we learn in Colossians 3:11 , God’s eyes are colorblind.  They aren’t just colorblind.  They are distinction blind.

       Paul says first that in Christ there is no longer such as thing as Jew or Greek. 

       Before the coming of Jesus the barrier between Jew and Gentile was high indeed.  The Gentiles had contempt for the Jews – their poor country, exclusivist and backward ways.  And the Jews returned this contempt tenfold.  They claimed that Gentiles were only created by God to be fuel for the fires of Hell.  It was not even lawful for a Jew to render help to a Gentile woman in labor for that would be to bring another Gentile into the world.  The barrier between Jew and Gentile was absolute.  If a Jew married a Gentile, the funeral of that Jew was carried out.   Contact with a Gentile was the equivalent of  touching death.  Even to go into a Gentile’s house rendered a Jew unclean for the worship of God.

       This barrier found literal expression in the dividing wall in the Temple at Jerusalem .  This was the wall that separated the portion of the Temple Gentiles were allowed to enter from the portion that the Gentiles were forbidden to enter upon pain of death.  During archaeological excavations of the last twenty years, a brick from this now destroyed middle wall from the temple has been discovered.  The limestone slab measuring nearly a yard across has this inscription: “No foreigner may enter within this barrier and enclosure around the temple.  Anyone who is caught doing so will have himself to blame for the ensuing death.”  In less polite terms it means: “Trespassers will be executed.”

       But Paul writes in Ephesians that Jesus has now broken down the barrier of the dividing wall or partition.   The purpose, as Paul writes in Ephesians 3 verse 15, is to make Jew and Gentile alike into a new person – a ember of a new society which is neither Jew nor Gentile but Christian.

       In Greek there are two words for new.  There is neos which is new simply in point of time—like the New Year.  A thing which is neos has come into existence recently, but there may have been thousands of the same thing in existence before.  A pencil like this one is neos.  But that same factory has produced millions exactly it.  Then there is the word kainos which means new in point of quality.  A thing which is kainos is new in the sense that it brings into the world a new quality of thing which did not exist before.

        The word that Paul uses in Ephesians is kainos.  Paul writes that Jesus has produced from Jew and Gentile a new kind of person—the Christian.  Chrysostom, a preacher in the early church said that it is as if one were to melt down a statue of silver and a statue of lead and that the two should form themselves into a statue of gold.

       Jesus breaks down walls of ancient hatred and distrust between racial and ethnic groups and unites us as one new people – the people of God.  This doesn’t mean that we cease to be white, black, Latino, Asian – or male and female – nor should we.  But it does mean that what binds us together – Jesus Christ – is much greater than what drives us apart.  And it also means that we have absolutely no business allowing or even creating walls between people that Jesus gave His life to break down.

       About thirty years ago the World Council of Reformed Churches, of which our Presbyterian church is a part, labeled the Reformed Church of South Africa heretical for its support of apartheid.  That was not just political grandstanding.  It is biblical truth.  Racism is heretical.  Racism is sin. 

     In Revelation 7:9, God gives the old Apostle John a vision of ‘a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people, and language, standing before the throne of God.”  This John, who received this vision of peace and unity, was a former racist.  Luke tells how John once asked Jesus for permission to call down fire to destroy a village of Samaritans – a form of ethnic cleansing.  But John has learned a better way.

       Paul says that a second distinction Jesus has erased is the distinction between the way believers worship.  We can’t reject people because of their race.  But can we reject other Christians who don’t do it our way?   That’s the meaning of the circumcised, uncircumcised reference in Colossians 3:11.  Today it would be between the traditional music people and the praise music people – between the hand wavers and the arm lockers – between the incense lovers and those whom incense makes sneeze.       

       Despite the grim photo of the lynching in Marion , the Indiana Klan that my grandfather’s joined was primarily not anti-black but anti-Catholic.  There weren’t really enough blacks in Indiana to be anti until the migration of Southern blacks to the North to work during World War II.  The big issue was in Indiana was Roman Catholics – and the suspicion of an ongoing plot by the Vatican to subvert our Protestant way of life .

       So weren’t my grandfathers at least sort of right to draw a line on the basis of who worships the right way?   

      God’s word says no.  In fact, in Ephesians 3:10, Paul tells us that God doesn’t draw any lines on the basis of how believers choose to worship Him.  In fact, Paul writes there that God specifically designed his church to demonstrate the great range of things that please Him.  He says there that it is God’s purpose to use the church to reveal the “many colored” nature of His wisdom to the entire universe. 

       The bottom line is that God loves variety – and especially variety in His church.  We may largely prefer to be sing praise songs with our arms locked to our sides – but all that is is a preference.  It just makes us one small flavor in the rich banquet that is the church.    Jesus says in John 4 that God’s only requirement is that we worship Him “in spirit and in truth”.   Every thing else is irrelevant.

      But how about on the basis of cultural achievement?   Can we draw lines there?  Again Paul  says “No.”   You don’t get to exclude the barbarians.  You can’t even reject the Scythians. 

      Barbarian was a Greek word that denotes “speakers of gibberish.”  When a barbarian spoke, it sounded to the cultured Greek or the cultured Jew like he was just saying “bar bar bar.”  That’s the source of the name – bar-bar-ian.

      Who are the Scythians?  I am a Scythian!  According to an old book in the Fort Wayne , Indiana public library, we Wilkinsons weren’t just Scythians.  We were the kings of the Scythians.  You can bow after the service.  Of course that same book also traces the Wilkinson family line all the way back to Japeth the son of Noah so it’s a little suspect. 

       The Scythians were a nomadic people who lived in the steppe area of what is now the Ukraine .  The reason Paul includes them on the list is that they were an extreme example.  Cultured first century people saw them as the lowest of the low – kind of the way the Irish immigrants were treated in 19^th century America .  The name Scythian became a by-word for a lack of culture.  So Paul says, “Even the Scythians get included in what Christ has done.”

       Then what about building walls by social class – taking our gated communities too seriously.  That’s out too.  In fact, Paul finishes his list with “slave and free person.”  For Greeks and Romans alike, a slave, legally speaking, was not a person but a piece of property.  Aristotle could define a slave as a “living tool and a tool and an inanimate slave.”   But within the Christian community the slave, as much as the free person, was a brother or sister for whom Christ died.  

       Perhaps this was the way in which the gospel made its deepest impression on the pagan world.  A slave might be a leader in a Christian church by virtue of his spiritual stature, and freeborn members of the church might humbly and gratefully accept his direction.  In times of persecution slaves showed that they could face the trial and suffer for their faith as courageously as freeborn Romans.  The slave-girl Blandina and her mistress both suffered in the persecution that broke out against the churches of the Rhone valley in A.D. 177, but it was the slave-girl who was the hero of the persecution, impressing friend and foe alike as a “noble athlete” in the contest of martyrdom.  And in the arena of Carthage in A.D. 202 a profound impression was made on the spectators when the Roman matron Perpetua stood hand-in-hand with her slave Felicitas, as both women faced a common death for a common faith.  What real difference could there be for a Christian between bond and free?

       Christ is all and in all.  We have no right to try to rebuild barriers between people that Jesus has broken down by His blood – whether these are racial barriers, meaningless religious barriers, cultural barriers or class barriers. This isn’t just a message for the first century.  It’s a message for us in this century. 

       We are fragmented as a society.  Hurricane  Katrina revealed the divisions once again. We are also broken as a church.  Sunday morning is the segregated hour in American, life. We have much to learn and do before we can celebrate the unity that God desires and which Jesus creates.  But at the same time, we realize that wholeness is not the absence of brokenness – for us as individuals or as a society.  We all have brokenness.  Wholeness is what we choose to do with our brokenness. 

       What can we do with our brokenness as the people of Christ in early 21^st century Southern California ?

       We must begin with biblical principles.

       First, we need to learn to celebrate what Paul calls in Ephesians 3:10 “The many colored wisdom of God.”  God delights in diversity.  Scripture celebrates the colorful mosaic of human cultures.  It even declares that the New Jerusalem, the heavenly city, will be enriched by this diversity since ‘the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it,’ and the glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it.’

       Second, as the people of Christ, we need to adopt a sense of personal responsibility for building bridges between groups.  Someone said, “No single snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”  Well we aren’t snowflakes.  We aren’t just part of the system.  We are the people of Christ.  We are responsible to be his salt and light in this east county.

       Glen Keherin of Rock of Our Salvation Church, a multiethnic church on Chicago ’s West Side , tells about someone who learned to welcome those who were different from him.  He wrote, “I attended a wedding not long ago of a family that lives in the middle of the corn fields of Nebraska .  I remember standing on this farmer’s front lawn and seeing only one road, no other people and corn in every direction.  The scene couldn’t have been farther from the West Side of Chicago.  Yet, this particular farmer has developed one of the closest relationships with the people of our community of any volunteer I know.  It began the day he arrived with a work crew some years ago.  During that week, he got connected with people in the inner-city neighborhood and began to establish relationships.  All his stereotypes began to break down.  When he returned for a second visit, he told me, ‘The Monday after I came home from my first work trip to Chicago , I met with the same fellas I’ve been having coffee with for twenty-five years.  But this time, I had to get up and leave, because the same jokes, the same conversation, the same prejudices that never bothered me before now got to me.’  We need to be bothered.

       Finally, we need to model the new life of forgiveness and brotherhood.  Let us sow love and mutual respect.  Let us sow acceptance and affirmation of people for who they are.  Let us sow understanding and belief in persons.  Let us sow color blindness and the truth that we are all sinners in need of God’s grace, and that beyond all our artificial barriers and stereotypes, beyond all our prejudice and clannish ways we are one in Christ and we are all in this together.  Then we will reap cities that can breathe again, cities that will enlarge and enhance the human dimension, cities where children laugh and play and grow up feeling good about who they are, and where adults feel free and whole.  Jesus’ words are more than sentiment.  They are an order:  “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.”  They are an order and our only hope.