For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit. Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.(Ephesians 2:18-20)Today we pray for the immigrant population (that the Lord will give us favor and grace concerning immigrants and that we will be moved with great compassion for them).
The US has always been a nation of immigrants. Except for the tiny few that were here already, everybody in America came from somewhere else. This is a nation of 3 million people whose families all came from somewhere else.
My family were Scots-Irish. Ella’s were German. When they got here, they tried their best to become a part of the American landscape, the melting pot that was the United States. It was a difficult thing to do, leaving behind all of your cultures and traditions and adopting whole cloth brand new ones.
But it was worth it. You became an American, a member of a prized country.
I suppose that is what is hard for so many today. Today immigrants come to America and expect to keep doing things the way they did where they came from. They have not really changed lives, just locations.
And it doesn’t work. Instead of a melting pot where every one takes on the flavors of everyone else, we have become a salad, where each ingredient is different and the only ting biding them is the dressing. America is the dressing for a lot of people who will never come together in any common bond or identity.
That is the way it is in the church. When we come to Jesus, we become one with people all over the world. we are unique with unique talents and abilities. Yet we also are merged into the one church. What we do is not to stand out, it is to serve. It is not to gain recognition, it is to worship the one true Audience – God.
When we forget that, we become like the immigrants who come into America or England or France or anywhere else and expect things to be exactly like they were where they came from.
Service to God and membership in his family renders us accountable and servants to each other. 1 Corinthians 10:16-17 says: Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all share the one loaf.
Just like ingredients in a loaf of bread merge to become the one bread, so we merge to become the one body.
No comments:
Post a Comment
To comment, post your comment and click the anonymous button. It would be nice if you signed it so I could know who you are.
You are welcome to say anything you want as long as it is nice. If I don't like it, or it is ugly, I will take it off, place it into the garbage disposal, grind it up, and allow it to be flushed into the Gulf of Mexico where it will be eaten by a fish and then excreted where it will lie on the bottom of the ocean until it is covered up by other comments.