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Trivia

           So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:26-28)

          Maybe it’s because I’m an Introvert. Maybe it’s because I’m of a certain political persuasion. Maybe it’s because I have been studying passages like today’s. It could even be because I was raised in the 60s and 70s. It could be something else entirely. Whatever it is, I tend to think that how a person thinks and what a person believes is ultimately more connected to who they are than one’s race, ethnicity, class, or gender/sexual preferences. And in a sense, those who disagree with me prove my point, because they believe that those things are more important than anything else.

          Paul wrote the above. He also wrote about women not disrupting church services or anyone disrupting the etiquette of the day. Women were to submit to their husbands (and husbands to their wives!) Children were to honor their parents.   Parents were to care for their children. Slaves were to work hard for their masters while masters were to treat slaves well. Neither Jew nor Greek was to see himself as superior.  

It’s not that the roles were to be eliminated, but that shared beliefs about the universe, its Creator, and the other residents thereof were more central to our identity than the color of one’s skin, whether or not one was permitted/required to wear a toga, or which restroom one used. And we see some of this in action today. Women who have had their throats slit, who have been set on fire, or who have been raped by men who aren’t legally supposed to be here are ignored. A man who happens to argue on the side of conservatism and/or Christianity (this is not saying the two are the same) was killed and people cheered. But let a woman of a different political philosophy die because she does something illegal, and protests start up across the country. Why? Because the color of someone’s political blood – their beliefs about God, the universe, and the others who reside therein – is ultimately more important than their physical characteristics, no matter what we may claim. 

As Christians, we are called to recognize two kinds of people. Those who are Christians and those who are not Christians yet. The latter may not ever become Christians, but we don’t know that. There are our brothers and sisters, and our potential brothers and sisters. Anything else is trivia.

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