Pentecost, the cure for Racism…
To solve racism, we must know how it began. The same what it started is the way it will end. You know that bird that got into the big home improvement store? It will have to leave through the same big door it entered, but now with help. Same with the racial tensions in our world.
There was a time before races. The human population on earth was all of one race, ethnicity, and language. They also were of one spirit—they thought the same, shared the same agenda, and joined forces together against God.
Yeah, that “against God” part is what killed it for us. The Lord knew that if humanity united together, nothing could stop them. They did not realize that their shared rebellion would destroy them all. On an ordinary day, unity would be a good thing, but when they conspired against Him, He executed a plan to preserve the human race.
He changed their languages. If they could not speak the same, they could not unite. It was not just their words that had been similar, but they were of the same spirit and desires and could communicate that with one another.
They must have been bewildered by the sudden change in their old friends. When you don’t understand someone, you tend to become suspicious of them. It appears He changed their languages according to their tribes or main family groups. People spread out and forged new civilizations among those they could understand.
When you are around people who do and say things you are not used to, you feel uncomfortable and tend to assume the worst. For example, they drive a horse and buggy and you just cannot understand why anyone would live without air conditioning. Someone else eats foods of which you can’t stomach the smell, let alone a taste. Another person grows his own fruits and vegetables and you cannot understand why anyone would go to all that work when he could just pick them off a shelf like you do.
The next natural step in our language contributing to racism is that we begin to label people according to their behaviors. Once we move from saying “that person stole from me” to saying “that person is a thief” we have now given our minds permission to treat them differently. The bully picks on the “weird kid.” The Nazi kills the “Christ-killers.”
The division of races may have spared humans from wholesale annihilation, but endlessly we’ve fought with those who were not like us. Before you blame God for this, remember that the division of languages was not the end goal. He had a bigger plan to save us.
Unity. Our Creator knows the power of us joining forces. He created us that way. However, He preserved the power of unity for us by not letting us all connect on the human level (language). Instead, He made a way for us to unite in a way that transcends words, corporate slogans, political ideologies, or groupthink. He shared His Spirit.
The amazingly unpredictable way He did this still captivates my attention. It’s the best plot twist in history. When all earth’s inhabitants joined forces at Babel, He changed their languages. A few thousand years later, when only about a hundred people gathered in unity with Him, He put His Spirit in them.
How did He demonstrate that He had done this? By giving each of them the ability to speak in languages they had never learned before. The sound of babbling broke out among those gathered as, once again, God divided the languages. This time, however, He did not divide the humans but brought them together as one.
The heartbreak and harms from racism began to be healed through those humans who now lived lives filled with God’s Spirit. The very day this happened, people from the sixteen major language/race divisions recognized that God was doing something unprecedented. When they heard the message of Jesus and realized His identity and His purpose to reunite people with God, many plunged into this new life—thousands in one day!
The Spirit within some of these believers began to overcome the prejudices their minds had held onto. Soon, people from many different cultures were praying together, eating together, and celebrating life together. It was scandalous to popular social expectations.
One church in Antioch went off the chain. They had Africans, Greeks, Jews, and other cultures leading the church together. People in that city probably visited the believer’s meetings just to see if a fight would break out. However, it was there that the followers of Christ first picked up the label of “Christian.”
I worry that some today who want to be considered Christian would not attend a church with multi-racial leadership. They might think, “I don’t have a problem with black people, but I wouldn’t want one to be my pastor.” You can’t claim to be filled with the Spirit and still hate other humans.
The Spirit doesn’t instantly cure your old prejudices, either. He works in us until we get it right. A man named Peter, the spokesperson on the day the Lord poured out His Spirit, had some deep prejudice. The Spirit took him into the same vision three times until he got the idea that he should not reject people whom God accepted.
Imagine visiting someone’s house where people left food on the floor, walked over their dirty clothes, and had flies everywhere. You would probably not want to eat anything they offered you. That’s how strongly people of Peter’s race felt about entering and eating in the home of anyone of a different culture/religion. But once the Spirit changed his heart, ol’ Pete went into the home the Lord sent him to, and he stayed there a while, eating what they provided.
Later, another preacher had to set Peter straight on this issue again. He had begun to stay away from meals where believers of another race were present. It was hurting the new Christians and creating a divide in the church.
We cannot assume we can solve racism with politics, protests, or value signaling. Racism resulted from God’s fail-safe measures at Babel. It will only be healed as people with Spirit-saturated lives learn to humble themselves to learn and listen and then let the Spirit in them make them one with people of widely varying backgrounds.
The celebration of Pentecost is God’s gift to not just save sinful humanity but to restore us from the division of races and cultures. He is still filling empty vessels with His Spirit today. There is no better way to live.