CS 6 - This is not in line with the gospel!
It was a normal lunch with a pastor just outside the city of ATL. Our time ended early and so I decided to visit the downtown area of the local city and get to know it. I did a quick Wikipedia search to see what kind of demographics were in the small city. The page read; 44% Black or African-American, 38% White, 7% Hispanic and 6% Asian.
As I was driving through it I noticed the First Baptist Church and decided to check out their website and see if there was any diversity in their staff, particularly among the leadership team. Their staff was all people who were white. How does this happen in a city that is majority black? This is unfortunately true for so many churches around the nation, the staff don’t look like their community.
A similar experience happened to me as I was walking around the Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. This place is known as the Lynching Memorial. It has documented over 4,000 known lynchings in our country that have been ignored. As I walked around the six acres of land, I sat down on a concrete bench and started to cry wondering, “where was the church during all of this?”
How does this happen? If there is one institution that is to model a different reality here on earth when it comes to racial and cultural unity in Christ, it’s the church. But far too often, the institution too many times reflects the culture rather than the kingdom.
I would argue that they don’t have a proper understanding of what the gospel is and what the gospel does. Paul did. And this is why in Galatians 2, his whole motivation for confronting Peter was that his actions “were not in line with the gospel.”
As Pastor Crawford Loritts has said, “There is what the gospel is, and what the gospel does. There are cultural barnacles attached to the Gospel!” The gospel (good news of Jesus) reconciles us to God and to each other. It’s clear that we get an understanding of what the gospel is and what the gospel does through the story of the Bible and how we end up with Paul confronting Peter to his face because of the gospel.
Reconciliation across color, class, and culture has always been God’s idea. It started in the Garden in Genesis 1 and 2 between Adam and Eve, and will end in the city coming down from heaven to earth in Revelation 21 and will be a gathering of his people in Revelation 7, “from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb”.
God wants his family to be reconciled and has been pursuing this all through the narrative of the scripture from Creation (Genesis 1-2), Fall (Genesis 3-11), Redemption (Genesis 12-Revelation), and Completion (Isaiah 65, Revelation 21). After the fall Adam and Eve felt hatred towards each other for the first time and it created division among God’s people. The last act of rebellion before God intervenes is Genesis 11 at the Tower of Babel as God scattered people who were trying to erect a tower, “so that we may make a name for ourselves.”
This is significant. The last act of rebellion before God intervenes in Genesis 12 is to scatter people who were trying to become like God. God then intervenes in Genesis 12 with the call of Abram, works through the broken people of Israel, their kingdom is divided, and Jesus finally comes to announce that the Kingdom of God is at hand.
Jesus comes and preaches a different kind of kingdom that is about restoring people back to the Father, and as a result, back to each other. He sits with the sick. He visits a tax collector’s house. He sits with a Samaritan woman at the well in Samaria. Jesus is modeling what it means to live out reconciliation across color, class, and culture as a result of being reconciled back to God.
Then, he tells his disciples to go do the same thing in Acts 1:8, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Imagine the surprise of the new Jewish believers in Jerusalem that Samaria is even mentioned, since in that context, they were considered half-breeds.
Then, something beautiful happens in the early church in Acts 2 when the Holy Spirit descends upon the new church. “Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken. Utterly amazed, they asked: “Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language? Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!”
What happens in Acts 2 at Pentecost is a reversal of what happens at the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11!
In Genesis 11, God scatters. In Acts 2, God gathers.
Why is this? Because God is in the world reconciling all things back to himself, this includes us individually back to God, and corporately back to each other. This is precisely what Jesus is praying in John 17, “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.”
Latasha Morrison with Be the Bridge says it like this; “The truth is that each ethnicity reflects a unique aspect of God’s image. No one tribe or group can adequately display the fullness of God. The truth is that it takes every tribe, tongue, and nation to reflect the image of God in his fullness. The truth is that race is a social construct, one that has dived and set one group over the other from the earliest days of humanity. The Christian construct, though, dismantles this way of thinking and seeks to reunite us under a common banner of love and fellowship.”
This is why we as believers in Jesus moved against the sinful system that has divided the church in America since its inception. This is why celebrating the risen Christ is so important, because in the life, death, burial and resurrection of Christ, God has dealt with every sort of divide between God and his people and as a result of between his people. Paul says as much in Ephesians 2 about the Jew-Gentile divide, “For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility”. In the words of Pastor Crawford Loritts, “Of course we’re anti-racist, because as Christians, we’re anti-sin.” The story of God is that he has come to move against every form of sin that humans have created to divide us, from the Tower of Babel, to the divided kingdom of Israel, to the Jews and Samaritans, to the Jews and Gentiles, etc.
God has been writing a story of horizontal reconciliation all throughout the history of the world. It started in the Garden and it will end in the City, and through the power of Christ’s Spirit, he is calling the church to live into the same reality here and now.
It is with this understanding of the grand narrative of what God is doing in the world that we come to Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Paul writes his letter to the new Jewish and Gentile believers in Galatia because they were falling back into the works of the Law of Moses. There was a group of legalistic Jews (Judaizers) who were adamant that the new followers of Jesus, both Jew and Gentiles, must keep the Mosaic Law. They were opposed to Paul’s justification by faith message that he had been preaching and were convinced that the new Gentile believers should be circumcised.
The meaning of the gospel is literally, “Good News”. What is this good news that Paul was preaching to the Gentiles? That Christ has come to set the world back to order, to deal with sin and injustice once and for all, and so that a new world may come into this one. God the Father has sent Jesus into the world to reconcile the world back to him through the power of the Holy Spirit.
This is Good News! That we were lost and are now found. That the old sinful patterns of the world are gone and a new creation can flood this world. We are now called God’s beloved children and not enemies of God. We can now share in full fellowship and reconciliation in this new humanity across every racial, cultural, class, and gender divided. We can experience the joy of work in this world. And we can also experience the true peace of Christ in the deep interior parts of our lives.
This is primarily what Paul is arguing in Ephesians 2, “for we are saved by grace through faith”, in order to become this “new humanity in Christ.” Particular to the argument Paul is making in Galatians 2, it was the gospel that freed Peter from the way his Jewish culture had shaped him.
And yet despite the reconciling power of the gospel, there is a majority white church with all white staff in a majority black and brown city. Why does this happen? What got lost in translation from the gospel that reconciled people to God and each other that was announced in Jerusalem, took root in Antioch, went to Africa, and Europe and then came to the West?
The answer for me takes me all the way back to my seminary days at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary in 2007 in my church history class where we were discussing a thing called Platonic Dualism.
Platonic What?
The white evangelical church has historically divided the gospel because of the way it’s been conditioned by whiteness, which comes from Europe and is influenced by Greek thought and the Enlightenment. Plato, who was Greek, developed the thinking of dividing the body and the soul. The soul is really what matters and the body is secondary. This thinking began to be known as Platonic Dualism. It literally divides the body and the soul.
The church in Europe began to allow this heretical belief into its theology and emphasized personal salvation of the soul and neglect taking care of any of the physical aspects affecting the body. Why engage in social issues affecting the body when it’s really the soul that is the most important?
This type of heretical belief made its way into America and greatly influenced the way the white church approached the issues of slavery and racism. The evangelist D.L. Moody is famous for saying, “why polish brass on a sinking ship,”. The sinking ship being the world and the passengers that need their souls saved before it sunk into the depth of hell. This is commonly known as “fire insurance”. Salvation is only limited to believing in Jesus, avoiding the fire pit of hell and going to heaven when we die. Robert Chau Romero states in the Brown Church; “It thereby allowed for the genocide and dehumanization of native and African communities, and the presentation of a corrupt and **distorted gospel: "It's okay for us to decimate and enslave millions of 'Indians' and thousands of African slaves because we are saving their souls by sharing Christianity with them. Without us they'd just go to hell!"
It is this way of thinking that led to the slave Bible, where the white “Christian” slave owners would tear out any passages in the Bible that had to do with justice or a physical liberation. It is because of all of this way of thinking that we have segregated churches in the West, thus leading to the city I was visiting on this Wednesday afternoon. This is why Howard Thurman would write in Jesus and the Disinherited; “Why is it that Christianity seems impotent to deal radically, and therefore effectively, with the issues of discrimination and injustice on the basis of race, religion and national origin? Is this impotence due to a betrayal of the genius of the religion, or is it due to a basic weakness in the religion itself?” Look at these words that Thurman uses, “due to a basic weakness in the religion itself?” The religion that came out of Europe was weak
What does any of this have to do with Paul confronting Peter and being sanctified out of culture? Everything. If we don’t embrace a holistic gospel that God desires to redeem and reconcile all brokenness, we will not become the people of God he desires us to be. If we don’t embrace a gospel that reconciles us vertically and horizontally, we will continue to be shaped by a culture of whiteness that aims to divide us.
The good news that was breaking into the early churches in Galatia was destroying every cultural and gender barrier established by culture. This is why Paul says in Galatians 3; “‘ So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” This is a direct result of the gospel that comes to break down every sinful barrier established by culture. This is why Paul confronting Peter is so important! It was literally hindering the advancement of the gospel in Antioch.
I wonder all the time if the gospel is no longer advancing in the West because the church is not unified around Christ, but rather culture?
As the good news of Jesus began to take root in Galatia, reconciling people back to God, unifying a diverse people group and breaking all sorts of cultural barriers, it was a glimpse of what is to come when Jesus comes to restore all things. The death, burial and resurrection of Jesus has destroyed the powers of sin and death, but this is just the beginning. We then need to be sanctified out of how culture has shaped us and this is why we need the gospel!