God Respects All Nations Equally: Cabarrus Clergy Coalition Comments

There are over a hundred Biblical passages describing God's blessings as belonging to all nations equally. We often lose sight of that reality. We skip over God's love for all peoples, perhaps because we get too caught up with our own nationalist identity and the desire to come out at the top of the heap.

We can call it inattention or we can call it something darker. It is simply hard for us to view other nations, other cultures, other ethnicities as claiming the very same importance to God we like to claim for ourselves.

We want to be special, different, or somehow more important. What God calls us to, however, is a recognition that God's love is equally available even to those nations we would consider our enemies. Like Jonah, we don't relish God loving them the same way God loves us.

Rather than tying our worth to denigrating others, however, God calls us to celebrate the diversity of life in all cultures, languages, and ethnicities. From God's promise to make Abraham a blessing to all nations through Jonah's attempt to circumvent God's gracious acceptance of Nineveh's repentance, we all too easily find ways to excuse our deafness to becoming our brother's keeper.

Our unwillingness to treat other peoples according to the dictates of God's loving embrace is difficult to overcome. Perhaps if we were to focus more strongly on how far God is willing to go in accepting us despite our failings, we might be more ready to accept those we consider less than worthy.

We struggle with commands to include the children of immigrants in the regular redistribution of the land. We struggle to embrace the descendants of Moab, even after finding one of them, Ruth, grandmother to King David. We struggle to include foreigners in our definitions of the neighbor we are to love.

It is not God's heart that needs to be opened to all nations. It is rather our own.

—©Copyright 2017, Christopher B. Harbin  http://www.sermonsearch.com/contributors/104427/ 

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