Hiding in the heart—Racism & Prejudice
June 13th, 2020 Jeremiah 17:5-11 Acts 10:23-48
We have witnessed more types of upheaval and trauma in our lives resulting from back to back incidents in the last few months than many have seen in a lifetime.
The worldwide pandemic of the corona virus and the tragic death of George Floyd along with the river of consequences flowing from both events have left us confused, angry, upset, fearful and prayerful.
We are looking for leaders who can lift us beyond the violence and beyond the tension of our day. There are some leaders claiming they have a plan to lead us to a better place if we would just vote for them. Somehow their promises have an empty hollow ring to them.
The protests marches, the rioting and looting, and the prayer vigils have called us all to look again at the racial divisions that separate us. We are wondering how did we get here and where is it that we should be going.
The tragic death of George Floyd makes us ask the question, “how did we get to this place at this time?” How could Derek Chavin place his knee on a man’s neck for nearly 9 minutes, choking the very essence of life out of him? How could officers Tou Thoa, Thomas Lane and Alexander Kueng, all Milwaukee police officers participate in this arrest with their actions and inaction and live with themselves.
Many have come to the conclusion that systematic and institutionalized racism are at the heart of this crisis as though institutions and systems are somehow inherently evil. I think we miss something if that’s as far back as we are willing to go.
You see I believe if you had of seen Derek, Tou, Thomas or Alexander, the day before this all happened, they would have looked very much, just like you and me. The same kind of conversations that took place in our homes, probably took place in theirs.
They have family members that they love and some of the dreams of getting ahead that we have. I doubt if they woke up that morning, with the goal of arresting and participating in the killing of any man of any color.
The evil that was lurking inside of them was hiding in the heart, waiting for a chance to manifest itself. We do ourselves a tremendous injustice if we refuse to recognize that same evil is hiding somewhere in our hearts. Though we may envision a place where everybody is treated equally, I want you to know its not a place in the future but a place rooted in the past.
There is only one place on earth where everybody is treated equally at all times regardless of their race, ethnicity, sex or age and that is at the foot of the cross of Jesus. Everyone there recognizes they are a sinner in need of a savior who can change their hearts. They all recognize they are in need of God’s grace, mercy and forgiveness, and they can’t do anything to deserve it.
As many wonder what can they do and who should they listen to in order for us to move forward, there is a voice silently calling out to every person, of over race, of every nationality, of every age, and it says “come follow me.” The invitation comes from Jesus.
But the invitation to follow comes with a price tag. Matthew 16:24-26 (NIV2011) 24 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 25 For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. 26 What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?
There is an interesting verse in the Bible that shows up early in Jesus’s ministry in the gospel of John. It says, but Jesus did not entrust himself to them, because he knew what was inside of a person. We want to believe that only evil persons commit evil acts. We even lift them to a status of being demonic, psychotic or insane.
But what really is on the inside of a person. What are we all really capable of? Have you ever thought of doing something evil, that you would never actually do, but the thought did pop into your mind? Why do you think you thought that thought? Again even though we like to think of ourselves as having good moral hearts, God’s view of the human heart is that it is wicked and full of deceit.
Yes we are capable of putting our knee down until it snuffs out the life of another.
Wickedness and deceit is part of the spiritual DNA of every human being and we take it with us into everything we build, create, organize and attempt to develop. That is how our institutions and organizations become corrupt. They are made by corrupted human beings.
Combine that with the knowledge that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil and we become capable of the unthinkable. At the heart of the decimation of the Native Americans in this country and at the heart of the Negro slave trade in America was the love of money.
Because God has given us all a conscience, we have to do something to be able to live with ourselves when we are mistreating other people. We make them out to be inferior to ourselves and as lesser beings in the sight of God. We project on to them the worse qualities that we see in ourselves. We give them names to degrade them and make laws to humiliate them.
It does not matter whether we write those laws on the pages of books as they did in the South with Jim Crow Laws, or allowed them to be written on our hearts as they did in the North and West in this country.
By far the most difficult laws to change are the ones that are hidden in our hearts. The sins of racism and love of money go together. We want to make sure that what we have, we get to keep for us and for our children and for those like us. We cannot allow, those people to take what we have.
Racism and prejudice are sins that keep revisiting us because of the messages we keep receiving from the culture around us. We can believe that because we have a friend of another race and get along great together, that we have ceased to participate in racism and prejudice and that’s now someone else’s problem. I want you to know that it is a challenge to keep following Jesus, even when Jesus has done some great things in and through our lives.
The apostle Peter became a bold follower, and great preacher after the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Thousands of people began to believe in Christ because of Peter. Peter was from a Jewish background. The Jews believed they were God’s chosen people, and that all other people were Gentiles who were unclean in the sight of God. They would not even eat with them.
So even though Peter had been touched by Jesus, hidden in his heart, was prejudice against Gentiles. Peter would not eat with them and would not enter a Gentile’s house. Yet Peter was a child of God.
You see the family of God is much bigger than we think and includes people we would exclude because they do not agree with us politically or people who are politically incorrect. But God knows that we are all in need of grace and mercy, just in different areas of our lives.
One day God dealt with Peter on this issue of racial prejudice. God gave him a vision which told Peter, stop calling Gentiles unclean. God sent Peter to a Gentile named Cornelius at Cornelia’s home. When Peter got there, the first thing he had to do was to humble himself and admit he had been wrong.
He told Cornelius, “normally I would not come to your house, but God showed me I was wrong and the views I held about you were also wrong. I am no better in the eyes of God than you are.” There is something about recognizing the same heavenly Father, that puts us on an equal footing with each other. Why does the Jesus in me have such a difficult time loving the Jesus in you? Because deep inside, we don’t want it to happen. It means we might have to change and humble ourselves.
Peter preached the message to a group of Gentiles and there was a second Pentecost. The same Holy Spirit fell on the Gentiles that had fallen on the Jews, and they too began speaking in other tongues. From that moment on, the church expanded to include people from all races and all nationalities.
Peter did a massive baptismal service to welcome in the new brothers and sisters. Now there were some Christians from Jewish background who believed you had to be circumcised in order to be saved.
They talked about Peter and let him know they were displeased of him going to “those people” with the gospel message. But when Peter explained his vision and how God’s spirit fell on the people, they backed down and recognized God was welcoming in all people.
After this experience, you would have expected Peter to have dealt with his racism and prejudice once and for all. After all, he and Cornelius were probably good friends now. Peter knew if he was in Joppa, he could stay at Cornelius’ home. They were tight like that. Peter could have gone throughout Jerusalem doing talks on racial reconciliation.
But if you fast forward a few years. We find Peter in the city of Antioch. Now we know from Acts that the church in Antioch is a very diverse church with people from Africa, Asia and Europe. The church is made up predominantly of Christians from Gentile backgrounds.
There are a few Christians from Jewish backgrounds present. Well Peter and the believers are acting like the body of Christ should act. They are talking together, having meals together and learning together.
But then a group of people showed in Antioch from Jerusalem. These were people who looked like Peter. The had the same Jewish background as Peter. They had powerful connections back in Jerusalem where Peter lived.
Peter wanted to make a good impression on these guys and he did not want to offend them. Peter knew they were not as liberated as he was when it came to eating and spending time in the homes of other racial groups.
Peter had a choice to make. He could either challenge them on the racist positions they held or he could distance himself from his sisters and brothers in Christ in Antioch. The Apostle Peter, the one who walked on water, and the one who preached boldly to the Sanhedrin and was ready to die for Christ was not willing to pay the price at this moment to follow Jesus.
Instead he pulled away from eating with those in the church at Antioch. The other Jewish Christians saw what he was doing, and they too began to pull away. Can you see how the fellowship and the unity of the church was being broken.
Even Barnabus started acting funny toward his brothers and sisters in Antioch. Peter was bringing a disunity to the body of Christ, and he wasn’t even aware of how dangerous his actions were.
Paul tells us about this in Galatians chapter 2. When the Apostle Paul arrived on the scene and saw what was going on, he confronted Peter in front of everyone. He basically said, “how dare you act one way in front of one group of people and act another way in the presence of another group!”
In other words, you had no problem accepting and participating in Gentile culture, but now because your friends have arrived you want to insist that all Gentiles have to participate in Jewish culture in order to be saved. Why are you trying to make them feel like second class citizens in the kingdom?
Peter wanted to follow Jesus, but he didn’t want to make a break with his friends from Jerusalem. His friends no doubt were good moral people, but that didn’t stop them from being prejudice. For some reason Peter was afraid to challenge their views.
Let’s look at how we got in Christ. Ephesians 2:7-10 (NIV2011)
8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast. 10 For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
God did not save us, just to take us to heaven. We were saved in Christ Jesus to do good works in which God prepared in advance for us to do. We are supposed to be announcing the arrival of the kingdom of God. According to Jesus that involves justice and the love of God. We are called to work for justice. That’s part of the work that God prepared in advance for us to do.
Some of us are missing the point in thinking that working for racial justice means that every church is going to be made up of every race. People will take the passage from Revelations of all tribes, nations, and nationalities at the throne of God to say this is what each church should look like.
When we talk about the body of Christ, the passage in Revelation is what the church already is and already does look like. We are already every nation, every tribe and every nationality. We are just scattered over the earth.
This is why we can’t have an unchallenged nationalistic view of the world, because what policies we have here may inflict injustice on our brothers and sisters in other nations. Jesus said, “it is by our loving each other that the world will believe the Father sent Him.”
Each congregation is only a fragment of the body of Christ. Someone has said the 11:00 hour is the most segregated hour on Sunday. The only time that would be sinful was if a church deliberately put up a sign saying you are not welcome to be with us at 11:00.
Most churches are going to be predominantly one race, because of geography. That does not make them any more or less racists or prejudice than multicultural or multiethnic congregations. The issue is, are you as believers in that congregation following Christ.
But most churches are not homogenous units even though they may be of one race. They have people from different socio-economic backgrounds, ages, political parties, and other things that separate us. Do we share a common purpose in seeking to live for Jesus Christ?
Does the majority voice in the church seek to squash those who are different? Justice demands that we think what is best for each of those groups and not think merely of our own interests. A simple reading of James the second chapter reveals the bias we often have in the church against the poor in favor of those with money and power.
The purpose of the local church isn’t to have a place we can come to and show off our multi-cultureness as proof that Jesus is the Son of God. The purpose is to have a place to come to to be equipped to go back out and do the ministry of Jesus Christ which is to bring about justice in this world. We are to be the salt of the world, but salt has to come into contact with something that needs salt in order for it be effective.
When you find yourself in a room, in a meeting, in a conversation with someone like yourself and a negative racial comment is made, what do you? When a vote is taken to pass a law that benefits you, but will negatively impact a different group of people who don’t look like you, how will you vote?
When a business decision or a policy decision is being made that will hurt another group, will you say anything to challenge it? When the pressure is on you, like it was on Peter, to go along with everybody else, will you make the same choice as Peter made? Or will you stand for Jesus and risk losing a part of what you have?
Another strange statement that Jesus made was Luke 12:51-53 (NIV2011) 51 Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. 52 From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. 53 They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”
If we follow Christ, when it comes to the sins hidden in our hearts, to get them out, we will find ourselves being divided and at odds with those who are closest to us. Racism and prejudice is not a battle we fight once and it’s over with.
It is a struggle that we have to turn over to Jesus time and time again, because it shows up in different ways on different days. If we fail to admit that it’s there, we have already lost the battle.
It’s one thing to work alongside a co-worker of another race. It’s another thing when someone moves next door. It’s something different when you son or daughter wants to marry one of them. Our initial reaction lets us know what’s hiding in our hearts.
How do we get out of this mess? Jesus said, “Iam the Way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. It is only when we understand there is but one Father in heaven, that we can see each other as true brothers and sisters in Christ. It was the Father who created us with different races in mind. God did it with a specific intention of making the body of Christ as beautiful as it can be.
