Killing Racism
Transcript
Good morning. An extra hour of sleep. You guys have figured it out. You just need an extra hour and you're awake at this point. That's great. We'll go back to next week when I say good morning.
Do not respond. Alright, grab a Bible, go to Ephesians chapter 2. So we've been walking verse by verse through the book of Ephesians, studying that together. And we are in chapter 2. We're going to pick up in verse 11. As we get started this morning, I'm going to read.
We'll read together 11 through 16. And then we'll pray and I'll kind of talk about what we're doing this morning. So it should be on page 568 if you have one of these white Bibles. 11 through 16. Therefore, remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called the uncircumcision, by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands. Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.
But now in Christ Jesus, you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. Okay. So we just read what Paul just said was, hate Gentiles, which is all non-Jewish people. And hey, Jewish people, Jesus has made you one through the cross and he's killed the hostility.
So what we're going to talk about this morning is racism, is our own prejudice towards other races, other people groups, people from other cultures. And so before we get started talking about that this morning, I want us to pray for our own hearts, that we would hear this well, listen well as we step into something that is difficult to talk about and currently the issue and the idea is very inflamed and we automatically bring some baggage to the table. So let's pray for ourselves, for our time this morning, and then we'll jump in and start walking through this. God, we ask that what Paul says here would be practically true for us, that you would begin to kill the hostility.
We ask this morning that we would, with very clear sight, see our own hearts and understand our own tendencies towards prejudice of other people. We ask for your grace and we love you and praise you in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, so what Paul says here is that through the cross, Jesus eliminates racism. So that's a good news for us, that we actually, as Christians, have the tools to have a perfectly good group society of people who are of different races, of different cultures, of different backgrounds, and have joy and genuine real relationships with one another.
Now, Christianity has not always done this, but when Christianity has, it is beautiful and countercultural. And Paul says we do have the tools to accomplish this. Now, as we talk about this today, we are not going to be talking about systematic oppression or systematic racism or systematic injustice. We will spend some time talking about that at the beginning of the year. So we're in Ephesians right now.
We're going to pause Ephesians. We're going to do our gift series, which is right around Christmas every year. We talk about generosity and giving to kind of specific causes and not getting caught up in consumerism. We do that every year because by the time we hit Christmas every year, we've all completely forgotten that and totally bought back into the American dream. And it's helpful for us to re-remember, hey guys, here's some real specific things Jesus said. And so we're going to do that again.
And then at the beginning of the year, we're going to do a series on the image of God. And in that series, we will spend some time talking about systematic racism. But today we're going to talk more about our own personal prejudice. We're going to talk to all the racists in the room. Good morning. It's good to see y'all.
Here's how this works. This issue has cultural historic baggage. In 2017, for people who live in South Carolina, we have racial baggage. We do. We don't get to step into this conversation as third-party outsiders just looking in on it. We have historical baggage.
We live in the United States. We live in a racialized society, meaning that we notice race. You are aware of the race of the person you are speaking to. You tell people when you tell a story, and I notice this in myself. I'll tell a story and I'll say, man, I was in this store and this old black guy came walking in. Or I'll say, man, there was this super mean white lady behind the counter.
I just include that because I feel like you should know. It helps you picture the story. But what I'm doing is I'm acting as if this somehow matters to the story. And sometimes I might be willing to argue that it did. And so I'm noticing that we are people who notice, realize, pay attention to this kind of thing, that there's actually a social – I had this backwards, sorry. A social scientist named Andrew Hackler says, America may be seen as two separate nations.
Of course there are places where the races mingle, yet in most significant respects the separation is pervasive and penetrating. As a social and human division, it surpasses all others. What he's saying is that when you look at statistics, the thing that most adjusts income – in this article he's talking about income, college educations, health, life expectancy, the thing that most adjusts that in the United States is if you change the race. That as a social division, it surpasses all others. That we live in a racialized place. Now here's the thing.
We have baggage. In the United States, we had our most devastating war with the most casualties was the Civil War that was largely about slavery. Now I know if some of you grew up in the South, you have heard a lot of it had to do with states' rights. Sure, that may be one of the planks in the platform of why there was secession. I'll concede that. But when the guy who gets to be the vice president of the new Confederate United States says, now finally we'll have a whole country devoted to the idea that black people are inferior, it's a quote in one of his first speeches.
You have to understand, though, there are some racial issues there. That we have some baggage. We have Jim Crow. We have the Civil Rights Movement. None of us get to walk into this just completely devoid of this. And here's the thing.
I don't care where you're from if it's Australia. Y'all still have racial issues as well. That it does not matter. Here, this is a worldwide phenomenon. The only places that you do not have racial issues and racial tension and cultural divisions are in places where there are no multiple cultures, multiple races. This is a human heart level issue.
And one of our goals as we enter into this conversation, we're not going to spend a whole lot of time on it because Paul doesn't. And we're studying through Ephesians, so we're taking what Paul gives us. But one of our goals as we enter into this conversation right now, this week, and as we hopefully continue this conversation, we have a couple of things that we want to promote here. One is we believe that we are sinners saved by grace, meaning that Jesus redeems the most broken, messed up parts of us, and that one of the ways that he begins to break down our sin is that we openly confess it. And so we want this to be, I know that in our culture, racism is one of the highest, most heinous, terrible sins that you can absolutely commit.
And so it becomes very difficult to confess to having racist thoughts and a racist heart and prejudice towards other people groups. But if we want it to die, we're going to have to talk about it. We're going to have to own it in our community groups, and we're going to have to allow people to own it because we believe that Jesus saves us by grace, which means that Jesus redeems racists and racial prejudice. And that's our hope. Secondly, we want to grow in reflecting the demographics of our city. So if you just do Lexington County, it's about 60% white, 20% Hispanic, 20% African American.
If you look at Columbia as a whole, it's about 40% white, 40% African American, about 20% Hispanic. We want to more accurately reflect that because that's what heaven looks like. We live in a place where white churches and black churches exist. And we want to overcome that through gracious pursuit, friendship, love, and laying down some of our cultural preferences. So those are some of our prayers as we get into this.
So let's look at what Paul's talking about, who he's talking to, why he's addressing this. So he begins, Therefore, remember, so when it says therefore in your Bibles, I just want, I want you to know this, and this is a hokey way to remember it. Whenever you read the word therefore, you got to look why it's, what it's there for. Like, why is it there? What is it in the text? Because it's always referring to what just came before it.
And so in this part of the text, Paul is saying, because we're saved by grace, meaning that Jesus saves us through his work, not ours, that none of us have anything to boast in, none of us bring anything to the table. It wasn't like Jesus said, okay, I'm here for all the good people. Okay, I'm here for all the Jewish people. Okay, I'm here for all the well-behaved. I'm here for all the moral. I'm here for all the people who've never watched an R-rated video.
Go ahead and line up. Like, that's not what he's done. He saves by grace, meaning that Jesus is here for all the messed up, terrible, broken people who will raise their hand and say, I need a savior. That's what he's talking about. He says, therefore, because we're saved by grace, remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh called the uncircumcision, that's in quotations, by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands. Okay, got to have a little historical background here as to why this matters for him to talk to the Ephesians and why it's a big issue.
So in Ephesus, we read when we started our first week of this series, we went to Acts and we read about how this church got started and we saw that there was extreme racial tension in the city of Ephesus. That the Jewish people were separate. And this is true for this time period. They had their own dress. They had their own language. Now, they would interact some.
They knew Greek, but they had Hebrew. They had their own dress, their own language, their own foods, their own guilds. They didn't participate. If you were a blacksmith, they had separate Jewish blacksmiths. They wouldn't let non-Jewish people eat with them. They had all of these regulations.
They were a separate group. And so what happens is Jesus is Jewish. I feel like I have to explain this because it's confusing. Judaism is a religion and Jewish is a people group. And they overlap. So the Judaism, Jewish people practice Judaism because they were both a people group and a religion.
And that's true even now. Someone can be Jewish and not practice Judaism or now practice Judaism and not be historically family-line Jewish. So at this time period, though, you were Jewish and you practiced Judaism for the most part. And if you didn't, you were thought very, very low. You had very low esteem in Jewish culture. You were outcast.
You were a sinner. You were separated. Okay. What we see in the story in Ephesus is that Jewish people become Christians and then the Ephesians starts messing up their political system and their economic system and they start a riot. And it says that one of the men stepped forward, who was a Christian, stepped forward to speak. And it said when they noticed he was a Jew, they chanted, great is Artemis of the Ephesians for two hours.
So he steps forward and they were going to listen. And then they were like, he's Jewish. So they obviously could tell by dress and look that he was Jewish. And then they just chant a racist chant, which was saying great. It's like chanting USA, USA. Or ole, ole, ole, ole.
Or ozzy, ozzy, ozzy. All right. There you go. All right. It's like that. They chanted this for two hours.
And so Paul, then though, people begin to become Christians. They begin to believe in Jesus and they become one church family together. And there's tension. Because you have Jews and Gentiles now trying to figure out how do we belong to Jesus together. So Paul's addressing that here.
And he says, remember Gentiles. And Gentiles is a term for all non-Jewish people. So in the Jewish mind, there were Jews. Everybody else. That is a form of racism. That they would take one group, that you elevate one race above all others.
That's what the Jewish people did. Jewish people? Everybody else. They just had a term for you're not a Jew. And they draw this line on circumcision. Weird place to draw the line?
That's what they did. So here's what that means. God takes Abraham. He says, I'm going to make you into a people group. And he gives them the sign of circumcision. If you don't know what circumcision is, ask Raz at the connect table when you leave today.
They give him the sign of circumcision. That's going to be the sign for this people group. And so they said, we're the circumcised. That's our sign. And everybody else is uncircumcised. And that's how racial slurs work.
You pick the thing that's different and you point it out. They were from the same area. They look the same other than dress. But they begin to pick the one thing that separates us. And you just, now that becomes a derogatory term. That's what we'll use to call each other.
So the uncircumcision. He says, okay, so Gentiles, all the people who aren't Jewish, you were separated. The Jews were in. And that's what the Jewish people thought. Verse 12. Well, remember that you were at that time separated from Christ.
Alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise. Having no hope and without God in the world. He is not saying that's what the Jewish people thought. He is saying that is what was true. That you were alienated from the Jewish people. You had no hope and you were without God.
Because God had picked the Jewish people and said, you're going to belong to me. And through you, I'm going to bless the world. And for a time, it was the Jewish people related to God correctly. And everybody else was out. Everybody else was excluded. And so the Jewish people began to say, we're the good ones.
We're the ones who are loved. We're the ones who have the covenants of promise. We're the ones who have the right culture and the right way to think and the right way to approach God. We're the ones who are the good ones. We're the ones who are in. And then draw a line.
Gentiles. Everybody else is out. And here's what the Gentiles did. Gentiles had a different form of racism. Pretty much all of us are okay. For the most part.
Greek. Scythian. Barbarian. Roman. Like we're all kind of in the same zone. The Jews are the worst.
That was kind of how they thought about it. They took one race and they lowered it below everybody else. There's actually a place in some historical writings where there's this Greek guy and he refers to Jewish people as they're prickly people. They're prickly. Which I guess is like a heck of a cut down at that point. But it just means they're unpleasant.
They're not nice to be around. They're kind of bad people. They just exist as this little minority that's separated from us and they're worse than everybody else. That's what was happening here. So Paul begins to write into this situation.
And here's what he says. The Jews say the Gentiles are out. The Gentiles say the Jews are the worst. Jews say we're the best. You were alienated without God in the world. And then verse 13.
But now in Christ Jesus, you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility. So what he says is we're now one. That Jesus in his flesh has broken down the dividing wall of hostility. That he's destroyed it. That we can be brought together.
That you who are far off have now been brought in. This is the gospel. This is what it was going to be forever. That God takes Abraham and says I'm going to use you to bless the nations. You're going to be a light to the Gentiles. Meaning eventually everybody's going to be brought in.
Which is good news for the majority of us in here because I don't think many of us are historically lineage wise Jewish. For the most part. Big old room full of Gentiles. What he says is you who were far off. You who weren't Jewish. You who didn't belong to the covenant's promise have now been welcomed because of Jesus.
And then he says this. What he says is he is our peace. He's made us both one. He's broken down in the flesh the dividing wall of hostility. So the wall of hostility that stood between the Gentiles and the Jews is gone because of Jesus.
What he just says is Jesus got rid of racism. Jesus got rid of prejudice. And now a really good question is how? You look. We got 14 through 15 here. It says for he himself is our peace who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of command.
Stress and ordinances. The question is how? I have a two-year-old son. And he says daddy what you doing? 14,000 times a day. Daddy what you doing?
Daddy what you doing? And I've begun to learn how to respond to this question because I'll be messing with something. I'll be working on something. He'll go daddy what you doing? And I'll say I'm fixing this. Daddy what you doing?
I'm fixing this. Daddy what you doing? And I've learned fixing this doesn't make any sense to him. I have to say I'm holding a screwdriver. I am sticking it inside of our television. I am tightening this down because you hit this with something.
And now I have to open it up and put it back. Like and then then he'll stop. Cool. He gets to see what I'm doing. Daddy what you doing? I'm driving you to school.
Daddy what you doing? I'm holding the steering wheel so that we do not strike other vehicles. And then he'll stop. And we get to ask that question of this. Because what Paul just said was Jesus fixed racism. Jesus what you doing?
How did you do that? I need more details here. I need you to explain how you actually went to work on racism because just saying you fixed it. I'm going to be honest with you. I'd like to look. I mean this happened 2,000 years ago.
Paul wrote this. I'd like to look at the United States and just kind of respond to Ephesians. Nuh-uh. You did not. But actually he tells us how he crippled it.
How he broke it down. How he destroyed it. How that dividing law of hostility goes away in the sweetest section. In his flesh the dividing law of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances. Now what does that mean?
Because he says this is how he did it. All right. By abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances. What he's talking about is God gave commandments to the Jewish people. Do this. Don't do this.
Do this. Don't do this. Then you'll be okay. And then they took those commandments. Don't murder. Don't steal.
These are the clean and unclean laws for the Sabbath. And then they made ordinances. So maybe if you've been arrested before, if a police officer knocks on your door and he says something along the lines of, you're breaking county ordinance number 2. It's a law. It's a legislation. That's what an ordinance is.
So then they made ordinances about how are we actually going to practice these commandments. But what it was, was a giant list of, here's what makes us the good guys. We believe these things. We hold these values and we practice them. We express them in this way. And that's what makes us good.
So they had core values, the commandments, that they practiced in a certain way. And that was their resume. If you do this, if you act this way, if you think this way, if you treat people this way, then you're one of the good ones. And what Jesus does is in the cross, he walks over and he takes everybody's resume. He balls it up. He throws it away.
And he says, you get to be involved because of me. My dad is an entrepreneur. He helps run some fireworks stores. And I know some of you all met me and thought, man, I bet he's super classy. I bet he runs a fireworks store. Yes.
I get to run a fireworks store. They're amazing. And we love to y'all. No, I'm sorry I'm going to do a commercial right now. But I just mess with you.
All right. I get to. I have one of the stores I manage. I get to just walk into the other stores. I've walked into the other stores before. Never seen the people before and started being like, hey, you need to come reprice this.
You need to do some of these things because it's my brother's store. He oversees it. But I just am there and I noticed this was wrong. So I'm being helpful. Do you know what my resume is? My daddy.
I didn't even apply. I didn't even have a choice. I was just told, go to work. He didn't want to see my resume. I can't get fired. I just get cussed at.
I still have to show up the next day. Let me tell you who hates resumes being pulled off the table. It's the people who had a good resume. Do you know who loves turning in their resume? People who have a bad resume. That's why when Jesus saves by grace, terrible sinner, racist, mess, messed up, hateful, lying, stealing people go, ooh, me.
That's why when people say church is so hypocritical, everybody in there is messed up. I'm like, right. Good people don't think they need Jesus. These people think they need Jesus. I hang out with my group and people start confessing terrible sins. And it's like, yes, thank you.
We need Jesus. He took our resumes away. And for people with terrible resumes, that's beautiful. But if you are a person who says, this is what makes me good. And he starts saying, no, no, no, no, no. And starts pulling that.
You hold on to it. He's got to wrench that out of your hands. And so when he says, Jesus destroyed the wall of hostility by abolishing the commandments expressed in ordinances. What he's saying is, he took away everything you used to say, I'm what's good in the world. And once that's removed, racial hostility is removed. Let me explain how.
Most of our racial hostility does not begin with simply these people have a different racial background. It's actually, most of it, a cultural hostility. They're different. Speak differently, act differently, think differently. That's why if someone ever says, man, you are so white. For the most part, they do not mean I'm talking about the melanin levels in your skin.
For the most part. They're referring to your job, the type of food you like, how you dance. They're referring to culture. If someone ever says, oh, yeah, he's, if you ever hear someone say, yeah, he's, he's, I mean, he's not really black. They're referring to culture. They're not talking about skin tone.
That for most of us, the lines are cultural lines. Now, they're cultural lines that are drawn right on racial lines. They overlap. And so it becomes really easy to take cultural prejudice and begin to just apply it to a whole race. But as soon as Paul removes, here's what makes your culture good.
That's what he took away from the Jews. Here's what makes you present to God. Here's your resume. As soon as he removes that, as soon as Jesus takes that away, then we have nothing that we get to look at and say, here's what makes me special. Here's what makes me good. Here's what makes me one of the good ones.
Here's what invites me in. Now, this is why, I want to just pause for half a second. This is why whenever anybody comes along and says to you, the way we really worship Jesus is we practice all of the old Jewish laws and rules. The way we really, the way you really get to be involved is that you pick up on all of the old ordinances and commandments. When you do that, you practice the Jewish festivals. That completes, the reason why that's a lie is that Jesus got rid of that in the first place.
The answer to that is no. Secondarily, if you are non-Jewish, the answer to that is no. Because they didn't even make the Gentiles in the New Testament do that. How are you going to come reapply that to me now? And then they took it away from the Jewish people. You don't even get to practice all of this to say this is what makes me okay.
This runs along cultural lines. Let me explain. I heard somebody explain this one time to me, and it was helpful for my brain. He said in every culture. So a pastor who's in Memphis, and he's now in California.
His name's Brian Lourdes. He said in every culture, there are three different types. There's C1, C2, C3. This isn't in the Bible. This is just a way to think about it, but it helped my brain, so I'm going to try to explain it. There's C1 culture, C2 culture, C3 culture.
C1 culture is you have historically come out of a certain type of culture, but you have completely adopted another culture. He said this would be Carlton from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Wear sweater vests, speak a certain way, Acts a certain way, dances like this. C2 is someone who is culturally fluid, can go back and forth, can fit in one culture or another, get along with one culture or another, appreciate one culture or another. And then C3 is someone who is culturally rigid, like their culture, believe in their culture, do not leave their culture. Their culture is the best culture.
And he pointed out that most white people in the United States are here. He said this is Will Smith from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. He's culturally rigid. He wasn't going to fit in. He always wore his sweater inside out to kind of visually represent this. And what he said is most white people are here.
He said you will hear white people say, I'm not racist. And he said for the most part, that may be really true. They're not just saying I dislike someone because of their skin tone. Because what a lot of white people will say, I'm not racist. I love Carl from work. I know Dave.
He's great. He's saying what they often are saying is, I know this C1 guy who's completely adopted my culture and we get along fine. And that they're actually just really culturally rigid. They're not drawing lines based off of skin tone. They're drawing lines based off of culture. And he says most white people are here not because they're evil.
Most white people in the U.S. are here not because they're bad, not because they're evil, but because they live in a place that is predominantly their culture. So they never had to change. I heard a poet, he kind of does spoken word stuff. His name is Michael Borne. And one of the things he talked about was he was at a friend's house taking a shower. He's an African-American guy.
And he said he saw the shampoo and it said for normal hair. And his argument was not everywhere. Like I don't think that's normal hair at Benedict and Allen. That's abnormal hair there. That was his point was that for most white people in the U.S. We've got normal hair and normal culture and normal food.
And everybody else has culture. Everybody else. There's the normal way to preach and then there's a black way to preach. There's normal regular music and black music or Hispanic music. There's normal food, regular, like this is just normal. And then there's, it's because we've always been in the majority.
For the most part. For most, most people. That's what he says. That there's culturally rigid people who draw this line along cultural lines. And what Paul says is that all the things you took and said, here's what makes us great. That you drew culturally.
And there are things that I really appreciate about my culture. That I want to say. I want to elevate. I want to say this is what makes us great. He's saying all of that's been removed because Jesus is the only one who you get to put forth as, here's what makes me okay. Only in Christ.
So I love biscuits. Love them. They are a part of my culture. Parties. It's a part of my heritage. I went to Spice Junction over in West Columbia.
And this was the first time this had ever happened to me. It's an Indian restaurant. The lady was really nice behind the counter. And I, she was helping me see some stuff. And there were a few things I put on my plate that I put in my mouth. This was the first time this had ever happened.
I didn't even know this could happen. My body did not recognize it as food. My immediate reaction was, I don't know what this is, but just get it out of your mouth. I was able to control that. But it was the first time ever.
I was like, there was no flavor that I recognized whatsoever. Now I will tell you, it wasn't great. And I might be willing to say, Indian food's not that great. But what I'm saying is, for a guy who has Hardee's heritage, Indian food's not that great. Some of it was okay. But only if it tasted like other things that I already like.
And that's what we do culturally. But as soon as we start saying, and this one's the right one. And this is the one that ultimately should overshadow all the other ones. And we'll allow, your language is cute. Your dress is cute. You can, you know, I love having Mexican restaurants around here because I love Mexican food.
But I need it to be Americanized Mexican food. We'll allow some amount of it. But mostly I want our culture to be the dominant culture. And that's what happens. And that's where Paul says, no. As soon as you start doing that, you're broken down.
Now, let's keep reading because I think we need a little more clarification here. Verse 15. By abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two. So, making peace. So we're going to put this on.
He might create in himself one new man. Here's what happens. When Jesus gets rid of the ordinances, when he gets rid of the commands, he comes in and he makes one new man. He does not say, sweet, everybody can now be Jewish. Completely adopt this culture. What he says is, I'm making a new people.
There are things in your culture that are good, that reflect God, that reflect his values, that demonstrate the gospel. In every culture. Because every culture is made in the image of God. There are things in culture. So what will happen sometimes is it's like, okay, so I can't say that I don't like this.
I can't say that this is wrong. I can't say that this culturally is bad. No, you can. But you have to do it like a Christian. Here's what I mean. Can I address sin in your life?
Absolutely. I should. If we're friends and we're walking together, I should point out where you're wrong. But I have to do it like a Christian. Not like somehow when I point this out, it makes me better and I'm trying to help you behave and be as good as me. I have to do it as a person who's saved by grace.
So I have a friend, Quincy. He was baptized here last year. He's in my community group. And he does, he produces his own music and he does raps and stuff. And one of the things I've been talking to him about or we're talking about, I was like, man, I think one of the issues with rap music is it just glorifies violence and sex. It has this whole picture of how you treat women.
It glorifies drug use. We had that conversation. And then I thought about the music I listened to. That's the night that the lights went out in Georgia. It's about a girl sneaking in and shooting somebody because her wife's been cheating on him. Or, uh, I might have been born just plain white trash, but fancy wasn't my name.
Apparently, it doesn't glorify sex and violence if Reba sings it. Lay, lady, lady. Lay across my big breastplate. Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. Bob Dylan, like he can sing stuff. We don't notice that.
Oh, Red Solo Cup. Anything by Toby Keith. I started thinking of songs. I was like, man, pick an album. Half of that's violence. Half of it's sex.
Half of it's alcohol. Really, what I was in some ways saying to my friend Quincy was, I don't appreciate how explicit y'all are with it. How clear you make it. I need it to be, I believe in miracles. Which is about just hooking up with somebody. But it's got a good little, you know.
Sounds nice. It says the word miracle. That's in the Bible. Come on. That we can point out what's wrong, what's broken in a culture, but we can't. I read an article and it was talking about the kind of the race debate that has begun and been intensified over the past couple years.
And it was just, they just polled white people and black people. So what they did, just asked them a bunch of questions. I don't remember all the questions. I remember the first one was, race relations get worse when we talk about it. And my response to that was a couple years ago. And my response to that was, yeah.
I'm not talking about it. It's fine. And I went through the rest. I took the little test. I just answered the questions. And do you know what I found out?
I'm white. That was what I discovered. I took a little quiz and it turns out I think like the average white person. And that scared me because it means I don't think like a Christian all to me. Because if I just line up with white people, I'm off. Because the Bible corrects culture.
It celebrates culture, but it corrects it as well. One of the beautiful things in scripture, in heaven, it says that he looks and sees heaven. This is John in the book of Revelation. He says, I saw every tongue and every tribe and every language and every people. And one of the things that's beautiful about that is that it means that Jesus is redeeming people from everywhere. You know what else is beautiful about that?
He could still tell they were from a different tribe, a language, a people. We don't get to heaven and he goes, here, all of you have this skin color. Now we can get along. You get to heaven and he says, here, everybody has the blood of Christ. Now we do the blood.
And there's parts of your culture that make it. Biscuits are in heaven, you guys. They're there. Consumerism isn't going to make it. One of the things that people say often is, well, you can tell this culture is dominant by how it works in the world. And honestly, all you're saying is, I'm taking my cultural grade sheet.
I'm grading the rest of the cultures based off of what I value. And now we can say what's good. When this ought to be our grade sheet. That's what Paul says. That's what he's getting at here. That as soon as Jesus wrestles your resume out of your hands.
Your hostility towards other cultures and other races and other people groups dies. And that we get to be made into one new man. Verse 16. And might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross. That ultimately what accomplishes this is Jesus on the cross. That it was one body that brought us to God.
That we have one thing that fits on our resume now. Jesus. And I will tell you, if you are trying to put something else on that resume. It's not the one the Bible has given you. If you were trying to say Jesus plus or Jesus and. Yeah, yeah, Jesus.
But also. It's not the one we get. We get one body on the cross. Jesus. We're saved by grace. We don't get to add anything in.
And through that. We reconciles both to God in one body through the cross. Thereby. Because he did this on the cross through Jesus. Thereby. Killing the hostility.
Here's what this means for us as Christians. If we have racial, cultural prejudice and hostility. We are failing to believe the gospel. I grew up in a home. Where we freely used racial slurs. All of them.
Didn't matter. Used them. Whole jokes. And our basic attitude was, well, as long as it doesn't affect how we treat individuals that we encounter, this is fine. And you've got to understand that there are some things that are just terrible about that whole group. Not the individuals, but the whole group.
And there's a difference between them and how they act. Really, what we were saying was, not racist. I just value my culture above and against all others. But everywhere in my heart that that still grows is me. I'm jerking my resume back out of Jesus' hand. Slapping it back on the table and saying, here's where I'm going.
I don't want to believe the gospel right here. I want to think more highly of myself than I ought to right here. I want to elevate myself above you right here. I want my good works to take place right here. And that we need, as Christians, Jesus to come in our hearts and begin to kill the hostility. It is a violent word on purpose.
That he comes in and begins to root this out in us. That we need Jesus to go to work. That we need to lay down our resumes. That we need to realize everywhere that this is growing. And some of you just became a Christian or you've been a Christian for a while or you're walking with Jesus. And honestly, this has been left alone and not really paid that much attention to because it doesn't play that much of a role in your active life.
And you have so many other things you're working on. But in our church family, this has to become one of the things that we talk about, that we confess, and that we walk over the way. We have very few non-white people in our church family. Which means that this is something that is at work in our church family. In the way we live, in the way we interact with people, in the way we automatically drift towards and put around us. That on some level, it's at work.
Now, it can also be at work in other people. It can also be at work in people who dislike and have a racial prejudice towards us. Like, I get that towards white people that are trying to do this. And honestly, I'll say to the people in our church family who are of a minority, stay with us. Stick. Help us see it.
We're blind to it. We don't see it that often because we don't ever walk into situations where we are the minority. I remember walking into one of the things that I've noticed, and I have to address it this way for two reasons. And I'm just trying to help you understand. I'm not trying to say it's bad to be white. I actually like being white after it's straight.
I don't wake up feeling bad. I do think because we're in the majority, we don't see and feel what some of our non-white brothers and sisters in Christ are saying to us. I don't think we see it. I don't think we feel it. One of the ways that I have to pull this into a different situation, I have to think about it. My older brother used to pick on me a lot.
And there are times in life where I will enter into a situation and I suddenly feel bullied. I feel picked on. And my reaction is not fitting to the situation. It goes to this place in my brain where I respond really poorly. I respond really violently. But for people who've never been picked on or never felt put in a corner, you may not understand that.
Now, I was playing ping pong the other day with a friend of mine, and he beat me. And then afterwards, he was going to hug me. Not nicely. It wasn't a friendly hug. It was a, oh, there you go. And I came out here.
Because I lost. So I was already annoyed. I put way too much into ping pong, you guys. But I lost. And then I felt like he was just going to come show his dominance over me. And I went to this, like, five-year-old bullied chap who was going to just assault someone.
He came at me. I was like, don't. And then I, like, twitched. Left the room. Came back and was like, I'm sorry. That may not have fit the situation.
I'm kind of a psychotic sinner. But it tapped into something in my brain in a different area where there's some people where they respond in a certain way. And it's because they've always felt this. They felt it so many times before that when they enter in a situation, regardless of what you were thinking and what you were attending, they feel it. One of the ways I've noticed this is I walked into a winged place in West Columbia. I opened the door.
And I stepped in. And I was the only white person in the room. And I had two immediate thoughts. And both of these may be wrong. But these were my two immediate thoughts.
Oh, my bad. Like, I didn't realize I wasn't supposed to be here. And then, secondly, I was like, I bet the wings here are really good. But as a white person, I hadn't walked into too many situations where I was the only white person. I get to roll around everywhere being a part of the majority. And when I get in situations where I'm not, I suddenly feel it.
I noticed it. And as a white person, I can say, when we don't talk about race, everything's fine. Because I don't notice it and I don't feel it at all. And so what I'm saying to our minority brothers and sisters in this room, help us. Help us see it. And don't push away from the table.
We're going to say things that people who've always been in the position of authority and majority are going to say. And you've got to help us see it. And help us grow. Help us walk out of that. In order for us to begin to kill this hostility, we need somebody pointing out where we are just believing things that aren't true and aren't in line with the gospel. And ultimately, we need Jesus to go to work in us.
Because everywhere we practice this and believe this, we are not believing the gospel. And therefore, racial and cultural hostility and prejudice has no place among God's people. No place. And that's for everybody. Racial and cultural prejudice has no place among God's people. And that's how we have the tools to begin to practice a harmonious group of people who can repent of sin, walk openly with Jesus, and be a picture of what the gospel actually looks like to everybody in the midst.
Band's going to come back up. We need to begin to see where we've begun to elevate our own culture, our own people group, our own. Some of it's good. Some of the things we see and we say, no, the Bible affirms this. The Bible celebrates this. That's okay.
But where we've begun to just draw lines on our own culture and our own preferences, we need Jesus to go to work to begin to kill the hostility. And we need to spend a minute just praying and asking. The Holy Spirit would help us see it. Help us walk openly in this with each other. So we might actually begin to look like this is a group of people where the gospel has taken root.
And that's what Paul was writing to them to say. Y'all get to be one. Your new primary reference group is the church. Is I belong to Christ. That's first before everything else. Let's begin to practice that here where we get rid of the things that don't fit with Jesus and we accept the things that do and we celebrate differences.
We celebrate what's beautiful about the different cultures. We repent of sin and we walk together as a bunch of people saved by the blood of Jesus. Let's pray. God, we ask for your grace as we walk in this. As it's tense and difficult to talk about and even where in maybe some of the stuff that was said today, it wasn't helpful or wasn't as clear. We ask for a whole lot of grace and an empowerment by your spirit to be a group of people who are Christ's first, covered by the blood of Jesus, who have fully submitted their resume to the shredder.
It's been nailed to the cross so that what we bring to the table is that Jesus was good enough for me. I'm free to be a sinner who's slowly being changed into the image of our king. We love you. We praise you in Jesus' name. Amen. Y'all stand.
Let's sing.