Spiritual Hiccups - Seeing Things Differently

The new governor in my state has drawn some political fire for his  cabinet.  With two positions left to fill, every member is white, and opponents are warning that we could have the first all white cabinet since the early 1960s.  In his defense, the governor says that he does not pay attention to race but looks only for the best qualified individuals, and that he asked two African Americans to fill cabinets seats but was turned down.

Now regardless of how one reacts to this situation, it does point to racial divisions that persist in our country despite some hopeful pronouncements that we were entering a post-racial age.  For some reasons, we human beings are quick to notice differences and divide ourselves into groups.  Sometimes these divisions are relatively harmless, but often they form the basis of preferential treatment for some over others.  Certainly we have made tremendous strides in combating discrimination of many sorts in our country, but the tendency to highlight our divisions remains.

Someone who had read the New Testament but had never spent any time in a congregation might be surprised to learn that such divisions are often more prominent at church than in many other places in our society.  While there are many exceptions, congregations remain one of the more segregated places in America.  This despite the Apostle Paul's words, "As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.  There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." 

In Paul's day, the big division was Jew and Greek, Jew and Gentile.  For Jews like Paul, this was how the world was organized.  It was simply how things were.  But when Paul encounters God's life changing love in Jesus, his world is turned upside down.  His old ways of understanding things disappear.  None of his human ways of seeing and dividing up the world work any longer, for all are one in Christ.

One of the problems of all religious institutions is a tendency for them to be domesticated by the culture they live in.  The religion is asked to bless the status quo of the culture.  This seems to be at the heart of Paul's conflict with Jewish Christianity.  Many of those first Christians presumed that the new life Jesus' resurrection ushered in still left old divisions in place.  Those others, the Gentiles, had to become Jewish first if they wanted to be Christians.  But Paul insisted that Jesus had fundamentally ended such divisions.

This may seem an odd transition, but I think that our continuing struggles with divisions of all sorts calls for a spiritual renewal.  It calls for a deepening spirituality where we go deeper into Christ, where we open ourselves more to the presence of the Spirit.  Often times people think of spirituality as a very private, personal thing with little connection to mission or social justice.  But Paul says that clothing ourselves in Christ, breathing Christ deeply into the core of our being, finding ourselves lost in God's love, is what changes us so that we see the world, and everyone in it, differently.  Only an experience of Jesus so profound that we can say our old self has died and a new one is born will allow us to live out what Paul experiences, a world where "there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." 

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