[Modified transcript of a midweek message published by Horley Baptist Church on YouTube[1], June 2020]
There’s been a lot of talk recently about racism, but racism is just part of a larger human problem called prejudice, which all of us are guilty of.
There’s been a lot of talk in the past week or so about racism and America’s continuing battle with racism and it’s evident that it’s not enough just to be ‘not a racist’, we need to be anti-racist and really try and seek to remove this injustice of racism in our society. But racism really is just a branch from a much bigger tree a tree called prejudice. Prejudice is prejudging someone based upon a preconceived and usually unfounded opinion or a dislike or hostility. Prejudice could be based upon the country where someone is born or your accent or your sex or your outward appearance or your social economics status; it could be your religion or your political persuasion. These are all ways in which people can be prejudiced against others and really prejudice comes out of a fear of difference where variety is seen as a threat.
01:38 Humanity throughout his history has used prejudice as a reason to exclude and to persecute and to war against others. In the New Testament we’re told that the early church had to deal with prejudice within its own ranks because within the church there was a Jewish and non-Jewish Gentile divide, and between Jews and non-Jews, between the Jews and the Gentiles there were prejudices on both sides. There was distrust, there was dislike, there was misunderstanding.
02:18 It’s in this setting that we find Peter, one of the disciples of Jesus Christ, awaiting his lunch one day. He receives a vision from God, a vision where a blanket descends from heaven and a voice says to Peter to take and eat. Now Peter was a good Jew and there was no way he would eat these animals because they were unclean according to the Jewish cleanliness rules. These rules about cleanliness actually were what was driving a lot of the separation between Jew and Gentile. It prevented a Jew from eating or socializing or spending time with anyone who wasn’t a Jew. Peter sees this unclean food and says “there’s no way I’m eating that” and yet God says these words to him in Acts chapter 10 and verse 15 “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean”. Peter thinks about that and, linked with the arrival of some guys from a centurion called Cornelius, Peter comes the conclusion that God is accepting the non-Jews into his family and what this leads to is a Jewish religion becoming a worldwide religion.
03:46 The apostle Paul takes this even further in his letter to a church in Galatia that was having huge problems with prejudice within their ranks between Jew and non-Jew. Paul says “Look, there isn’t Jew or non-Jew, there’s not female or male, there’s not slave or free. It’s just one big family because of Jesus Christ”. Was Paul saying that everyone was the same? No, he wasn’t. Variety is important and variety is necessary and God loves variety – I mean, just look at his creation. What Paul is saying is there are things that unite us above and beyond our differences. The first and the most significant and universal of those similarities is the fact that all of us as human beings are bearing the image of our Creator, our God.
04:46 Actually, this is one of the main arguments against slavery that people like Wilberforce put forward. The logo of the abolition movement was a picture of a black man in chains saying “Am I not a man and a brother?” All of us reflect the image of the Creator God and therefore how can we possibly be prejudiced against anyone with that image. Paul takes it further in his letter to the church in Galatia and says you know that the thing that really unites us is that all who are followers of Jesus Christ are in God’s family. Blood is thicker than water and we have God’s blood running through our veins, we have his spirit living within us and that unites us above any difference, above any language barrier, over above any difference of opinion.
05:57 So let’s not focus on those things that make us different, let’s not fear variety, let us not be threatened by difference of opinions or different ways of thinking and doing things. Instead, let us be united by the fact that we are created in the image of God, that we bear the mark of our maker and that as followers of Jesus Christ we are joined by Christ and by the Holy Spirit
[1] YouTube link: Am I Not a Brother?
Bible references: Galatians ch 3 v28
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Contributed by Martin Shorey; © the Author
