Sin that unites us: On race, diversity and oneness in Christ

Text: Galatians 3:1-9, 23-29

            After reading through the Galatians reading for this week I felt the need to take Harvard’s Implicit Assessment Test again. The IAT is something I first learned about in Malcolm Gladwell’s book entitled Blink. The test is a measurement of our implicit, often subconscious preferences for certain things over other things. This week I took the race IAT, which compares preferences for skin tones, and I did this because I’ve found it to be the toughest to “pass.” The test is on Harvard’s webpage and it takes about five minutes to do. It is basically a sorting test where you put words and faces into categories as fast as possible. There will be light-skinned faces and dark-skinned faces, positive words and negative words. You start by sorting based on faces only; if it’s a light-skinned face you click one letter; if it’s a dark-skinned face you click a different letter, then you sort terms; “joy” would be a good word, “awful” a bad word; “happy” a good word, “evil” a bad word; and so on. Then (and this is where it gets interesting) the light-skinned face and good words go on one side and the dark-skinned face and bad words on the other, and again you sort them as fast as you can. Then, it flips it around so the dark-skinned face is on the side with the positive words and the light-skinned face with the negative words.

            I have taken this test probably fifty times in the last couple years and I have never once come out anything other than favoring lighter skin tones. I say this as a confession but it is one that I share with everybody else I know who has ever taken the test. In Blink, Gladwell wrote that he, too, had a preference for light-skinned faces even though he is half-black. There are certain things—like racial preference—that are just interwoven parts of who we are. You might be wondering why I go through taking this test at all if all it ever does is convict me, but I think the main reason I do it is to remind me that I am not as fair and unbiased as I sometimes think I am. If you happen to think you are a person without biases I challenge you to try it as well; I think it will be an eye-opening experience.

            This has been a long, rambling segue to the reading, but I think it is a worthwhile one. The Apostle Paul is very concerned about being one in 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,” he says. And that is an absurdly revolutionary statement. But here’s the thing: I can’t pretend for a minute that that’s the world in which we live; it just isn’t. This is not even remotely a color-blind world or a world without ethnic, religious, and cultural prejudices. Biases are universal, and even if it isn’t skin-color then it’s religion or language or national or cultural affiliation or eye color or whatever; we will make up reasons to separate and distinguish between peoples. It’s what we do! There are people we don’t trust simply by the look of them, and we do this for reasons that are both practical and impractical, out of fear that is sometimes rational and sometimes misplaced. We might be one in Christ, but that does not make us feel any more secure around people different from us.

            This is a particular challenge in Kittson County, because this is an incredibly homogenous area by just about any standard. I’m not just talking about race—though that is certainly a part of it—I’m also talking about ethnic heritage and cultural diversity and even religious affiliation. As Garrison Keillor once said, “In Minnesota, even the Catholics are Lutheran.” That’s not to say there aren’t diverse opinions here and people who we look at and say, “Well, they’re different.” We do that here—and that’s exactly my point. Even in one of the most homogenous places in the United States we find ways to divide ourselves in fascinating ways. Some of these are useful and some are not. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have sports teams, for example, but at the same time the vitriol that sometimes comes from imaginary lines between towns would be comical if it wasn’t so problematic, and sometimes sports is the best example we have for how that functions.

            Again, these are not problems unique to Kittson County, but we’re also not immune to them. It’s our challenge of being one in Christ. If there is no longer any distinction between Jew or Greek, Bearcat or Wildcat; slave or free; Lutheran or Pentecostal; or Lutheran or other-Lutheran; if there is no distinction between male or female; pastor or lay person, then we have some work to do, because all of those distinctions are alive and well for us today.

            Part of the trick of being one in Christ is realizing that just because we are not the same—just because we have some things inherently different from one another—does not mean that we are any more or less children of God. Paul is pretty clear that if you believe in Jesus he claims you as his own; it doesn’t matter where you come from or what you’ve done or whether you are part of the right club. Those are all distinctions for our lives down here; Jesus Christ could not care less if you are a National Merit Scholar, a war veteran, a college graduate or a CEO; those are things the world uses to judge your worth, not God. What matters is faith. Our problem with this is that we like to say that so-and-so has such a great faith, or so-and-so is from a long tradition of the faith, or such-and-such person overcame such a trial that they have a better faith. As far as I see in Paul’s writings there is no distinction between a “good” faith and a faith less worthy. Your faith is as worthy as mine and, indeed, as worthy as any other. Christ does not work by a system of merit and neither is faith a ladder system.

            And more than that, it doesn’t matter if you are black or brown or blue or as pale as me; it doesn’t matter if you are a Lutheran or a Catholic or a Baptist or a Mennonite; it doesn’t matter if you get your theology right; it doesn’t matter if you are a Republican or a Democrat or an Independent; rich or poor, young or old, tall or short, funny or serious, boring or exciting, gay or straight, male or female, right or wrong. Does not matter.You are one in Christ.

            This is the kind of thing that seems criminally unfair. Shouldn’t the choices we make matter? Shouldn’t our good deeds make us more worthy? Shouldn’t we have to live our best life now to be one in Christ? Well, Paul says, “No.” That is how the world was before Christ; that was the world of the law where good, practicing Jews were righteous according to following the commandments. In Christ, all of that is nonsense. The law convicts everyone—both the pious and the crass.

            I feel convicted every time I take that race IAT test, and you know what? It’s good for me. Because in spite of my best intentions I am not the ultra-virtuous person I would like to pretend that I am. Neither are you. That’s the law speaking: you are prejudiced and you are unworthy. So what? Did Christ die for nothing? He died not for the righteous but for the sinners. For you. For Jew and Greek, male and female, slave and free. That’s oneness in Christ. It’s not believing that everybody is OK just as they are; that’s what you hear a lot about diversity; people like to talk about acceptance and respect and all of that, but something about that just doesn’t smell right. We know inside of us that not everybody is OK just as they are. No, oneness in Christ is exactly the opposite of believing everybody is OK; it is recognizing that the one different from us, the one who scares us, is unworthy, BUT so are we! That person who looks different than us, who sounds different than us, who makes us clutch our children a little closer or lock the doors of our car. That person is a sinner…

…just like you and me. And that person is our sister or brother. That’s being one in Christ.

            Thanks be to God.

            Amen.