Monday of the First Week of Advent

Lectionary: 175

I say to you, many will come from the east and the west, and will recline with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob at the banquet in the Kingdom of heaven."

Jesus loves the little children
All the children of the world
Red, brown, yellow
Black and white
They are precious in His sight
Jesus loves the little children
Of the world

I've just come from a meeting chaired by a woman. I could not tell if she is red, brown, yellow, black or white. I would bet that this woman, who has been in the VA for several years, rarely encounters my issue; I hope that no one ever asks her about it. It's simply not important.

How fascinating that, when Jesus describes people coming to "recline with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob at the banquet in the Kingdom of heaven," he does not mention their respective colors. Rather, they come from "the east and the west." His point seems to be that they come from different places, not that they are different kinds of people.

With people moving continually on the trade routes through Galilee, traveling from every part of the Roman Empire to every other part of the Empire and beyond, Jesus saw people of every bodily type. They were tall and short, fat and thin, dark and light, hairy and bald, bearded and clean shaven. They had far more accents than we can imagine today, but managed their trades and travels nonetheless.  Neither his culture nor his religion taught him to distinguish between different races. He had no knowledge of such artificial and useless distinctions. There is only one kind of person.

The children's song, popular in American Christian camps, is well-intended but it reinforces the notion of "racial difference," a discredited, pseudo-scientific way to classify people. This distinction, created by "white people" has been used to "prove" that the "white" race is superior to "colored" races. People who wanted to believe it were persuaded; others kept silent before the threat of violence. 

In his book, Gods of the Upper Air, Charles King shows how the Nazis of Germany used the American science of eugenics and our system of racial apartheid to engineer the extermination of Jews. As African-Americans were separated from European-Americans in neighborhoods, schools, employment, transportation, recreation, entertainment, medical and dental care, churches, and cemeteries, Adolf Hitler would segregate Jews from Aryans. Many Germans read and studied Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race as a scientific documentation of a war that must come between the "races." Only after seeing the death camps did Americans recognize the evil of eugenics and embrace the virtue of a multiracial society.

But, recently, as the World War II generation disappears into history, we are seeing a resurgence of racism. Like Lady Macbeth's damned spot, it reappears in the night of fear and ignorance. The same people who put up Christmas creches in their front yards bar Holy Families from entering their country. As Jesus predicted, even Christians are deceived by this fake science and this phony fear:

False messiahs and false prophets will arise, and they will perform signs and wonders so great as to deceive, if that were possible, even the elect. ​

Rather than fearing the enormous variety of human beings, with their many shades and hues of color and their different sizes and shapes, Jesus invites people from east and west to recline at his table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They are in our neighborhoods and schools and places of work. We must invite them to join us in prayer.