Acts 22; Race

The crowd was fine as long as Paul was a good Jew. He talked about his education and heart with no problem. He described himself as a mystic hearing voices and seeing lights others could not and still there was no problem. He described himself as a mercenary (a.k.a. terrorist if you are on the receiving end) and still everyone was on board. They could accept anything as long as it did not involve reaching out to gentiles.

Fast forward 2000 years and hit play. Most Christians are pretty good at accepting just about any education level -- from self taught to Ph.D. We might wince but I think most people do pretty good with mystics; at least the general view is that they are somewhere within the kingdom though most are not sure where and certainly don't want to sit too close to them. Most Christians in the USA have no problem supporting those who take the name of God as coverage for when they act preemptively in battle. So what draws a reaction today?

It probably varies depending upon which area of the country you live in. In my life, I grew up in a very racist area and never attended a congregation where there was an African-American member until I was at least 20. As a youth I watched a congregation fight over whether or not to evangelize a certain side of town. I was given all sorts of strange arguments that were just ethnocentrism cloaked in Bible. I thought those days were gone in our country until a few weeks ago when I overheard two men going off on Hispanics. Same arguments, same feelings, just different people group. In fact, same feelings as the people had around Paul, just different people group then also.

It is amazingly difficult for us to see past a layer of epithelium (skin) and cultural behavior to realize that the soul of each of us was created in the image of God. To see people in the image of the Creator and then choose to reject them is to reject the image of God. No one wants to be guilty of rejecting God and so we fabricate all sorts of reasons for why some people are really not people. Amazing. If we could just accept the little lesson from Genesis 1-2 (God created us all in his image), what a different world and church this would be.