“In this new life, it doesn’t matter if you are a Jew or a Gentile…

“circumcised or uncircumcised, barbaric, uncivilized, slave, or free. Christ is all that matters, and he lives in all of us.” (Col. 3:11)

What would our world be like if we who follow Jesus lived into this truth?

All over the world, the division between people who are different from each other is a central struggle. I’ve heard some say it is the biggest social problem for the 21^st century.

Whether we talk on the global level about genocide and ethnic cleansing, or in the political realm about the destruction of bipartisanship…whether we talk about racial discrimination or the glass ceiling for women in business…or whether we simply look at the tension on playgrounds between the “cool kids” and the ones who are not; it seems we don’t have to look very far to find examples that prove that the new life where Christ is all that matters has NOT arrived.

To be human means to have differences. God has created us infinitely and wonderfully diverse. God loves and takes great joy in our differences…but we ourselves don’t always see it the same way.

“Different” can quickly degrade into “inferior.” But to be Jesus People, to be people who allow God to change our hearts and our minds, means we will fight that trip down the slippery slope.

To follow Jesus means to refuse to try and gloss over and ignore our differences. It means to refuse to let “different” mean “below me”. To be Jesus people means to practice embracing others. We want to be open and intentional in building relationships across the dividing lines of gender, age, ethnicity, wealth or poverty, and culture.

It should go without saying that we believe this…

…but I don’t feel completely comfortable leaving it unsaid.

It is really not that long ago–within the lifetime of many in this room–when the laws in our country kept blacks and whites separate from each other. It is really not that long ago when laws and cultural norms, even for Christians, seemed to miss the clear teaching in the bible that Jesus supercedes all of our differences and has made us all one in Jesus Christ.

So it cannot go unsaid that we at Newberg Friends stand with Quakers and other Christians around the world in believing that every person is created in the image of God. Every person has infinite value because each one is the handiwork of our infinitely creative God.

In all of our differences…in our maleness and femaleness, in our rainbow of skin tones, in our western and eastern mindsets, in our thousands of languages, our millions of clothing styles, our huts and our barrios and our castles and our farmhouses and our slums…it is when we put all of our differences together that we all together reflect the image of God.

One day we will join people from every tribe and nation around the world to worship God forever! This is how God intended it, and this is what God loves.

Our struggle is that we’ve warped the world in such a way that we much prefer being with those who are like us to being with different “others” who reflect what heaven will be.

Ken Fong is pastor of an amazingly diverse congregation in Southern California. In an article I read, he reminded us that Jesus taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done…on earth as it is in heaven.”

Our prayer and our practice leads us to fight our tendency to only be with those who are like us…to go outside our comfort zone to embrace the “others” who are different from us. Here’s something else Pastor Fong said:

“This is where the church and Christian organizations need to challenge our sinful tendencies. I tell my congregation now, ‘I used to think my job was to make you all as comfortable in this life as possible so you wouldn’t be uncomfortable in eternity, but I think I got it backwards. I now think my job is to make us all uncomfortable so we can be comfortable together forever.’ We need to start rehearsing our future.

This is God’s heart, Jesus’ call, and our desire as a community.

And it is so, so difficult to do.

If ever we needed a reminder that to practice being a Jesus person absolutely requires the power of God within us, it’s with today’s topic. If ever we needed a reminder that life as a Jesus person isn’t about our determination and will power and checklists, that it IS about loving Jesus and wanting to be like him, it’s today.

What thoughts went through your mind, what feelings did you have as we read the Colossians passage 3 times?

Maybe they were like this woman in our congregation.

Thoughts on this subject make me feel immediately uncomfortable because I know that I need to follow through on some nudges from the Holy Spirit. I have a deep sense that I need to take the initiative to reach out to others of diverse backgrounds and for various reasons, I have not. I know in my head and heart that the Kingdom of God is of course very diverse and I don't want to experience "culture shock" - so to speak - in heaven when I find myself in a place that it is anything but all white. I also don't want to miss out on all that God has for me in the here and now by living in a rather protective bubble with folks who are very much like me.

But I find that in my natural day-to-day routine I do not run across others that are too different from me.

How do we practice embracing others when our normal, day-to-day routine includes a lot of people who are just like us? What does it look like, what steps can we take to intentionally build cross cultural bridges?

Any kind of embrace, any hug, begins with open arms.

To practice embracing others means first to take the big risk of opening our arms and showing another person we invite and are open for a relationship.

The burden for the beginning is not on the other, but on me, to risk showing my openness. There are huge rewards, huge gains and benefits to us when we are open to learn from those who are different. We experience it here at NFC in our diversity of ages. We are a community with the rock solid foundation of years of maturity in Christ combined with the energy and life and vitality of those who are brand new to following Jesus.

Embracing others makes us richer, and helps us to see a fuller picture of who God is. We’ll never discover these truths for ourselves unless we take the risk to open our arms and demonstrate we’re willing for an embrace.

Will you put up with a very simplistic example?

As a kid, I was a notoriously picky eater. One time in 1^st grade, I made a mistake about what was being served for hot lunch. When I got to school without my lunch from home, and found out it was TACOS (yuck!), I went to the office and had the principal call my mom because I sure wasn’t gonna eat THAT!

I literally remember the first time I ate at Taco Bell in high school. I took the big risk…there was a girl involved, so I had to be brave…and was absolutely shocked to discover that I loved it. I’d been missing out because of my refusal to be open to anything beyond the familiar pizza and hamburgers.

Most of the time, our risks to open our arms and be willing to embrace are much more challenging.

In the bible, I think of the example of Ruth, who became the great-grandmother of Israel’s greatest King, David. Becoming that took a huge risk on her part; she had to cross huge ethnic and cultural and religious boundaries that were in place.

Ruth’s story begins with Naomi, a Jewish woman with two sons who, because of famine, had to move out of Israel. She moved to Moab, one of the countries that was Israel’s enemy and who believed in false gods. One of her sons married Ruth, a native of Moab: an “other” if there ever was an “other.”

Naomi’s husband and both of her sons died, leaving Naomi and her daughters-in-law in a terrible situation. In a culture that required men to provide for them, they were not only in danger of having nothing, they themselves practically became nothing, practically lost their identity.

Naomi is so bitter and distraught, she tells her daughters-in-law to stay in Moab while she returns to Israel. The social norm to provide for widows was for the brother of the dead husband to marry the widow and take care of her, but Naomi had no other sons and no hope for any more to be born. There was no hope with Naomi, no reason for Ruth to risk leaving her home and culture and country and her gods.

But she did. Listen to Ruth 1: 8-17 [READ-or 12-17]

Ruth opened her arms to Naomi, and Naomi embraced Ruth.

Their lives became so intertwined, so important to each other. The choice for Ruth to return with Naomi to Israel saved both of their lives, because Ruth was willing to risk opening her arms for an embrace.

This is what God has done for us through Jesus. He has opened his arms to us who have made God our enemy. “While we were still sinners”–in other words, completely separate, other, and different from God–“Christ died for us.”

His open arms on the cross demonstrate Jesus’ willingness to risk it all for us, to model for us how we are to live openly to others.

In the early church, Barnabas is another example of someone who risked opening his arms to embrace.

Jews, led by Saul, were fiercely attacking followers of Jesus, killing some and scattering the rest around the known world. As these Jesus people were scattered, they boldly shared the good news about Jesus not just with other Jews, but took the risk to share Jesus with non-Jews as well.

This was a scary and a risky thing. In Acts 11, it says that Barnabas went and joined these Gentile Christians at Antioch. He risked opening his arms to Gentiles, and ended up encouraging them and blessing them. [READ 11: 22-24]

He didn’t stop there. When rumors began floating around that Saul, the great killer of Christians, had BECOME a Christian, most of Jesus’ followers were so scared they couldn’t believe it. Not Barnabas. He was a bridge builder and a risk taker, willing to cross very scary lines to open his arms and risk being hurt as he tried to embrace Saul. [READ 11: 25-26]

We need more people like Barnabas in our churches today.

We need people willing to take the risk to build relationships with those who are different, maybe even enemies.

Ben Gorman and I had a conversation this week over e-mail, and I want to share some of what Ben wrote. He’s a part of NFC, often sitting in the balcony in third service.

One of the first practical steps he talked about is being a person who is a “cultural broker.”

Cultures come with languages, mores and taboos, customs, rituals, etc., and when any of us is trying to learn about any new culture or subculture, it's helpful for us to have someone who is a culture broker, who can guide us and translate.  I play this role in a number of ways.  I translate, literally, for my second language learners, but I also find myself introducing them to many concepts that we take as givens in our Anglo-American culture.  That's been really eye opening for me as well.  There are so many things we assume to be universal that turn out to be foreign concepts to most people in the world.  In smaller ways I play culture broker for freshmen entering high school and for high school students who have never considered going off to college.  Those of us with college educated parents probably made that transition relatively easily because we were raised in household where many of the concepts of college living were taught to us from birth, but for many of my students the notion of college extends only a far as their exposure to college culture through television.  To them it's all impossibly hard studying mixed with binge drinking in Florida and frat parties.  Ideas like talking with professors after classes and studying with friends over coffee aren't depicted on TV, and someone needs to share that these are some of the greatest joys of college life.

What I love about this is how Ben is so practical in showing the many different ways we can open our arms and be willing to embrace others who are different. Sometimes it’s simple relationship building; being willing to learn and listen and be a cultural broker across the big and small gaps in our mutual understanding.

But of course, sometimes it’s much deeper and more important.

Again from Ben:

We can't welcome people in if we don't value them as people.  Part of that is valuing all the things they value about themselves.  I was once in a culture class and a student told the teacher she didn't like to acknowledge a person's ethnicity.  She wanted to see everyone as American, regardless of whether or not they were Mexican-American, African-American, Asian-American, or what have you.  The teacher explained that, as a Mexican-American, she understood that impulse, but that it was fundamentally wrong.  The teacher herself valued her Mexican heritage, and when someone told her that she was merely American, and that her Mexican heritage was irrelevant to them, she was insulted.  They were not valuing all of her, just the parts they wanted to see.  This was an important lesson for me; [embracing others] isn't just accepting the parts of a person I find convenient or even understandable, it's valuing the parts of a person that they value, even if I don't fully understand them.  We, as Christians, can't pick and choose the people we will [embrace].  Christ has already chosen for us, and the answer is everyone.  

Can we go beyond tolerating our differences?

Can we challenge ourselves to let God recast our minds and hearts to see the world as God sees it? Pastor Ken Fong writes: “As I grow in my yearning for God, I become more desperate to find the pieces of his image that can only be found in people who are different from me.”

This isn’t a call to political correctness. It is a call to yearn for God and be changed by God to see and embrace all the variety of humanity that reflects his image.

I’ll close with an example from a woman in our church that can serve as a good suggestion to us:

This is where the nudges from the LORD come into play. I know of three people I can take out for coffee who live in vastly different circles than I. I need to humbly ask these folks to coach me in being culturally sensitive and help me see their ethnic community through their eyes. I need to be taken under their wings and be shown how to appreciate the uniqueness of their traditions and values.

In our time of open worship, I invite you to ask God to give you his eyes, to show you how you might practice embracing others this week.