Longer Tables, Shorter Walls: All Nations Belong
Reflections
The disciples speak, and God accomplishes an intercultural miracle in which everyone hears the words in their own native language. God broke boundaries of culture and region in an intimate way by meeting people through the intimacy of their own home language. This is the opposite of colonizing behavior. God made no demands for cultural assimilation but instead affirmed each of their languages as worthy vehicles for meeting God.
— Drew G.I. Hart
- In this passage, God is doing something new, with the coming of the Holy Spirit
- The Holy Spirit is moving in 3 ways
- Spirit of God is moving the believers into a belonging that celebrates and values differences over conformity
- Usually unity demands conformity, to be assimilated, to forget your own culture
- For a long time, church demands similar conformity
- Salvation means being disconnected from our people, from our community, and brought into the white family of God. “Between me and the other world… Blackness should be demonized, and whiteness divinized… That was the terrifying thing about what I had become. My body and my Blackness had become a problem, and I had let it. I had passed into the other world, the white world, and I had become free, and wet, and washed, and clean, and white as snow, and white as white folk desired me to become… That day, when I went down dry and my body came back up wet, the waters bringing me into whiteness won. I came up new: I was not Black — I was Christian. At least that’s what I was told: My Christian identity was more important than my racial identity. –Danté Stewart, from Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle
- Second, Spirit of God is moving the disciples to interculturalism, as opposed to just multiculturalism
- Lastly, Spirit of God is moving people to love; the focus should not be just the gifts from God, like speaking in tongues
