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A few nights before writing this article, I attended an interesting lecture here in the Cincinnati area, given by Svetlana Broz, the granddaughter of the late dictator of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito. The title of the lecture was "Clash of Cultures or Struggle Between Good and Evil." The subject was the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia after the death of Marshal Tito and the ensuing ethnic violence.

Dr. Broz' thesis was that there was peace and harmony between the various ethnic groups in Yugoslavia under the administration of her late grandfather. Serbs, Croats and Bosnians; Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox; as well as other nationalities, ethnic groups and religions all lived together in one national entity, in harmony and mutual respect, before evil nationalist forces were unleashed and some 250,000 people died in ethnic conflict.

The lecture, I suspect, may have presented an unrealistic depiction of the harmony that supposedly existed under Tito. Even where physical nations live in harmony, there is often tension and latent resentment under the surface. Nevertheless, the lecture was interesting for its utopian depiction of ethnic harmony among a mosaic of different groups that once coexisted in one political unit.

History of Hostility

The history of ethnic relations throughout most of human history, and especially in the 20th century, suggests that conflict, not harmony, is the "default state" in human affairs. The deaths of some six million Jews in the 1940s in central Europe attest to this. So does the cruel and barbarous conflict between China and Japan in the 1930s, as well as the "ethnic cleansing" of the former Yugoslav republics in the 1990s.

Unconverted human beings seem unable to coexist when there are racial differences. In the United States, ongoing ethnic tensions linger in many areas, often between black and white Americans, but also at times involving Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans and others. Injustices, both historic and actual, continue to shape the psyche of many, and to foment continuing hostility and conflict.

Surprisingly, even among God's people we find that intercultural or interracial relations are not always harmonious. The New Testament shows clearly that the calling of the gentiles into the Church of God was a traumatic and often unwelcome event for many of the Jewish Christians.

The history is fascinating. It begins with the introduction into the Jewish nation of a relatively small number of people of other ethnic groups who became fully integrated into the nation as proselytes, receiving circumcision and participating in all the Jewish laws and rituals. One such is included among the seven deacons selected and ordained in Acts 6, where we read of "Nicolas, a proselyte of Antioch" (verse 5). This man was probably a Greek who adopted the Jewish religion and later went on to accept Jesus Christ as the Messiah.

Later, we read of the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch, who was not a proselyte to Judaism, but had come from a foreign country to worship at Jerusalem (Acts 8:27). Some feel this man was ethnically Jewish, while others hold that he was the first entirely gentile convert. Either way, he was culturally different from the still almost entirely Jewish church; but being a loner, and returning to his native Ethiopia, his conversion didn't cause as much of a stir as did later non-Jewish converts.

What Peter Learned About Race Relations

In chapter 10 of the book of Acts, an entire non-Jewish family is converted. Cornelius, an Italian centurion and a God-fearer (verses 2, 22), that is one loosely associated with the Jewish religion, but not circumcised, was called of God and ready to be baptized. One might think this would have been cause for rejoicing, but not for everyone. The apostle Peter apparently had some wrong concepts to overcome, and they weren't overcome easily.

Peter's concept (and the prevailing concept in the Church of the time) was that only the Jewish people ought to be part of the Church. At one point, he withdrew from eating with non-Jews (Galatians 2:12). In order to teach Peter and all of us a lesson, God gave him the famous vision of unclean animals descending in a sheet from heaven, with the invitation to go ahead and eat (Acts 10:9-16). Three times the sheet descended and was taken up again into heaven (verse 16). Peter puzzled over the meaning of the vision, and must have been particularly perplexed at the thought of God asking him to consume unclean meats.

But meats weren't the point of the vision; God was revealing something much greater. Peter had hitherto held fast to the Jewish restrictions against table fellowship with gentiles (verse 28). But now he finally understood the lesson of the vision: "But God has shown me that I should not call any man common or unclean" (same verse).

Once resistant, Peter now understood one of the great principles of the New Testament: "In truth I perceive that God shows no partiality [is no respecter of persons, KJV]. But in every nation whoever fears Him and works righteousness is accepted by Him" (verses 34-35). It was to the astonishment of the converted Jews that God then sent the Holy Spirit on all those present, including Cornelius and his household (verses 44-45).

The ongoing controversy continued to echo throughout much of the New Testament, later leading to the conference of Acts 15, which was charged with the circumcision dilemma and the question of acceptance of non-Jews into the Church without circumcision.

God is no respecter of persons. This is one of the major lessons of the Bible, given particular emphasis in the New Testament as the Church went from being composed of one people, one culture and one ethnic group, to being a multiethnic, multicultural body united by the Spirit of God.

What those early Christians had to learn was that membership in the Church of God isn't dependent in any way on ethnicity, nationality or skin color. A human being becomes part of the household of God by repenting of sin, being baptized and receiving the wonderful gift of the Holy Spirit, which then makes him or her a child of God by reason of the Spirit, not of the flesh.

As the apostle Paul so succinctly put it: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:26-28).

The Challenges Today

Let's now rapidly jump over some 19 centuries, and come to the Church of God as most of us have known it in the 20th and early 21st centuries. What we find is a body of people based heavily in the United States of America, a multiethnic nation. Gone is the tension between Jews and gentiles of the first century Church; present is the tension and hostility that forms the social backdrop in many of the cities and rural areas from which God has called us.

Tensions abound in our cities, at times erupting in serious social upheaval, miscarriage of justice and even riots. This shouldn't surprise us; after all, Jesus Christ Himself prophesied of racial tensions. "Nation [ethnos, or racial group] will rise against nation," Jesus prophesied as one of the hallmarks of the last days (Matthew 24:7). And just as so many of the social trends around us are the most difficult pulls that we Christians have to combat in our own lives, so it may be with these prophesied racial tensions.

Yet we in the Church today have a very special opportunity: to model true, loving Christian relationships across racial lines, as mandated by the Bible. We must reverse the trend and show those who will take notice that the Spirit of God unites us as one people, bridging the gaps of different cultures, temperaments and racial features. The bond of God's Holy Spirit must unite us, and empower us all to provide a living lesson of true racial harmony, a harmony that honors Jesus Christ, who is the Head of us all.

Race Relations Committee and Web Site

To that end the United Church of God has established a Race Relations Committee and a Web site featuring writings by our own ministers on the subject, as well as other resources. We invite you to visit the site, at www.ucg-race.org.

Some have asked why the Church should need to have a Web site devoted to the subject of race relations. The answer is that the Church is to be an example to the world in every way. One of those ways is to demonstrate that Christians of all races and cultures can live together in the real harmony of the Spirit of God, and show what God's love can do among His people, of all different races.

We are to be the people of God in every way. Just as the early Church, part Jewish and part Greek, had to learn the big lesson of Christian love across cultural lines, so we in the Church today have a unique opportunity to demonstrate that we are God's people. We do this by building genuine loving and caring relationships in this multiracial, multinational and multicultural Church we are called to be part of. UN