Kingdom Harbor

I was privileged to share a message recently at a multiethnic worship service combining three churches: 1) Lao Covenant Church, 2) Nuestra Esperanza Covenant Church, and 3) Brookdale Covenant Church. It was my first time preaching with a translator, which was not easy or natural. I tried to keep it short and sweet. Here’s my manuscript below, and you can watch the service here. -JB

For decades, Americans were taught the modernist myth of the “Melting Pot”—that all ethnic and racial differences would eventually dissolve into a unified national identity. Two problems: 

1. the melting pot “did not happen.”  
2. The bible tells a different story!

God is leading humanity toward a multiethnic community of redeemed worshipping around the throne in Revelation 7.  

“After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.”

Revelation 7

Pentecost and the Church

What is the church’s role in a divided, fractured society? First, we must view Pentecost as the reversal of Babel.  Babel resulted in humanity being scattered and divided by language, in order to thwart our attempt to build a sky scraper monument to our own pride and arrogance. 

Pentecost, on the other hand, represents a regathering and uniting together of a diverse people for the purpose of building—and becoming!—a temple that displays and reflects the glory of God. 

That’s right! Acts 2 is about God’s new Temple! The rushing wind of the spirit blowing into that upper room is an echo of the spirit filling the temple with God‘s Shekinah glory in the Old Testament. The temple was always intended to be a working model of all creation. Likewise, the church today is called to be a working model of the new creation in the making. 

Yet, significantly, this Pentecost miracle did not erase cultural identity. At Pentecost, the Spirit did not force the crowd into all speaking a single, new heavenly language; instead, the Spirit empowered the disciples to speak and the crowd of worshippers from every tribe, tongue and nation to HEAR & UNDERSTAND & CELEBRATE the “mighty works of God” in their own native language. 

This affirms that the gospel validates—rather than eliminates—our distinctiveness. At Pentecost, God was launching the New Humanity and building a unified, multiethnic church—the Body of Christ—to reflect the beautiful unity-in-diversity of the Triune God himself—one God, in three different persons. 

Today, as we worship here in different languages and cultures, we are getting a foretaste of heaven! We are a reflection of the Triune God! 

But it’s also hard. Different. 

Uncomfortable. Unfamiliar. 

We’re being stretched. 

Prejudices are being exposed. 

Preferences are being flouted. 

But this is how we grow. This is how new muscles are formed. 

Practice makes perfect. 

I want to look at a very familiar passage today, but look at it through the lenses of a multiethnic church.

Reimagining “One Body, Many Parts”

In the “One Body, Many Parts” metaphor of 1 Corinthians 12, Paul celebrates how each unique member of the Body is a gift to the greater whole. We often focus on the unique spiritual gifts each of us brings to the church. Thus, we thrive when each part is showing up and sharing their gift. A healthy body needs functioning arms, legs, eyes, nose, mouth, and so on. A healthy church Body needs teachers, greeters, nursery workers, administrators, musicians, and so on. 

But Today, I want us begin to view ethnic identity itself as a charism—a spiritual gift to be exercised and stewarded for the common good of the larger Body of Christ. Our ethnic differences are not a problem to be solved or melted down, but rather a gift to be shared and received with the rest of the Body.  Paul argues for a harmonious interdependence when he writes:

Verse 21 — “The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!”

When we fail to do this, we create a “handicapped” body. For instance, if the Latino church is forced to feel, “Because I am not a white church, I do not belong,” the entire Body misses the unique gifts that the Latino church offers the Body. Each ethnic part offers a different set of eyes and ears and mouth and hands that help us see and hear and speak and feel things that we would otherwise miss without them. 

Put differently, the white church cannot say to the black church, “I don’t need you.” And the Latino church cannot say to the Asian church, “I don’t need you.” Paul continues to develop this idea, saying: 

17 If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? 18 But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be.

In other words, if the whole body were seeing the world through Lao eyes or black eyes or Latino eyes, then how will it have ears to hear the cries of the other ethnic members? Or, if the whole body only had the ears tuned to one particular ethnicity’s experience, how will it be able to sniff out corruption or smell the goodness in the “other’s” experience? 

But in fact God wants to place us together in one Body with other ethnic parts in order to give us more well-rounded sensibilities, more holistic sense of sight, hearing, vision and a voice! Do you see the beautiful gift that we can each offer one another when we come together as One Body of Christ? Do you see how we deprive ourselves of so much when we do not welcome diversity into the membership that makes up Christ’s Body? 

Looking out at this gathering of Latino, Loatian, white and black Christians, I say:

We need to learn to see through your eyes!

We need to learn to hear with your ears!

We need your feet to lead us. 

We need your arms to help carry us. 

American Christians have often championed “color-blindness” as the ultimate goal of racial reconciliation. However, the biblical vision suggests this is a deficiency, not a virtue. If we seek to melt away our differences, we harm the Body’s ability to see holistically. 

To function as God intended, we must move toward a heightened sensitivity that recognizes our mutual interdependence. Our destinies are not parallel; they are interwoven.

Why the “Weaker” Parts Are Indispensable

But then Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 12:22-23 becomes more “politically meddlesome.” He dares to argue that the parts of the body that “seem to be weaker” are actually “indispensable.” In our social context, this may entail confronting and subverting certain power dynamics. In the New Testament vision of the New Humanity being created in Christ by the Spirit, marginalized ethnic groups are not to be pitied; they are to be given “special honor.” 

Now please hear me: I’m not peddling some woke ideology here. This isn’t some Leftist agenda rooted in Karl Marx. This is the Bible, friends. This is God’s Holy Word. 

This is Jesus’ teaching that “The last will be first, and the first will be last.” 

This is Jesus declaring, “Blessed are the poor” and  “The meek, not the powerful, will inherit the land.” 

This is Jesus bringing a child on stage and saying, “The Kingdom belongs to such as these overlooked and underestimated little rug rats.” 

This is Paul’s admonition to “in humility value others above yourselves,not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others” (Phil 2:3-4). 

This is Brookdale Covenant standing alongside the families and friends of Nuestra Esperanza, and the broader immigrant community, during Operation Metro Surge. 

Why? Because we are called to be ONE Body made up of many ethnic parts, and so when our Hispanic brothers and sisters were suffering this winter (and continue to today), it was part of OUR own Body that was suffering. The Bible is very clear on this, even if partisan tribalism has confused and deceived many believers. Listen to the Word of God:

“But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, 25 so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. 

Because, my friends: 

26 If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.” 

From Complicity to Solidarity

The Body of Christ is called to be a visible sign of God’s reconciling grace. This requires moving from complicity to solidarity.  

A true Christoform life enters into another’s pain. It is not enough to have individual relationships; we must address the systemic wounds of the Body. If one part suffers, the whole body must suffer with it. Anything less is a failure of our baptismal identity.

Conclusion: Putting Away Childish Prejudices

I want to close by drawing our attention to where Paul’s argument goes next after 1 Corinthians 12. Which chapter comes next? Obviously, chapter 13, the famous “Love Chapter” so often ripped out of context and read at weddings as if it were about marital love. But there were no chapter divisions in the original, and Paul is continuing his argument, painting his picture of a unified Church characterized by diversity of gifts and different expressions woven together in love. 

Chapter 12 ended with, “Now I will show you The Most Excellent Way!” 

(Contrary to what one person thought when I preached this message, I am not sneaking in a reference from the 80s cult classic film, “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”)

Jesus said he was The Way. 

And the early Christians were called followers of The Way. 

So, do you want to know how we, here today, can make sure we are walking in the Most Excellent Way?!

The opposite of The Most Excellent Way is a life and community characterized by division, conflict, war, grievance, misunderstanding, avoidance, prejudice, etc. That “way”, says Paul, sounds like “a noisy gong and clanging cymbals.” 

The Most Excellent Way is a community swept up in the harmonious melody and rhythm of agape LOVE—that is, other-oriented, self-sacrificial care for our neighbor. This is the Most Excellent Way. This requires putting away childish prejudices and distorted pictures of “the other”.  The Scriptures invite us to “grow up”:

11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 

But the same is true for our churches. In order for churches to grow up into mature multiethnic fellowship and unity, they may need to put childish prejudices and self-centered preferences behind us. Adapting Paul’s challenging but timely words, we know all too well that:

12 For now [in this age of sin] we see [the other] imperfectly as in a mirror; but then we shall see [the other] face to face. Now we know in part [through our cultural biases]; then we shall know [others] fully, even as we are fully known….

Look around this room. We can’t help but see each other and know each other imperfectly due to our different backgrounds. But the Spirit is calling us all to grow up into greater maturity. To put childish prejudices behind. To welcome one another into fellowship honoring and learning from all of our differences. To pursue the most excellent way of LOVE.

The call for the modern church is to “grow up” into racial and ethnic intelligence. For too long, we have lived as children in the nursery of Babel, retreating into our own ecclesial tribes and worshiping in our own “native” styles while remaining deaf to the “ethnic other.”

We must embrace the “Way of Love” described in 1 Corinthians 13. When applied to racial division and ethnic ignorance, this love acts as dynamite, exploding our prejudices and allowing us to melt down our “axes to grind” into “plowshares” for the Kingdom.  

CONCLUSION

Let me close with one final observation. In the next chapter (14) Paul is still addressing unity within diversity. He is still confronting division and misunderstanding in the Church. They are fighting over which spiritual gifts are most important, most valuable for the ministry. Those who have the gift of speaking in tongues are feeling superior to those who do not. Paul reminds them that the gifts are given to each person NOT for their own sake, to boast about and feel special. Rather, spiritual gifts are given  to build up others and benefit the whole Body. He says, with some snarky sarcasm: 

18 I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you. 19 But in the church I would rather speak five intelligible words to instruct others than ten thousand words in a tongue [that makes me feel uber spiritual]. 20 Brothers and sisters, stop thinking like children….in your thinking be adults. 

Brothers and sisters, your ethnic heritage and unique expressions of faith—whether it be your unique worship style, your hospitality, your food, your history, your theology—its all meant to be a gift to the whole body, not to be flaunted and kept to yourselves and inside your own mono-cultural church services. Today, we are receiving the gift of diversity. Today we are embracing a unique expressions offered by each church represented here. 

But Paul wraps up his argument in 1 Corinthians 14 with a warning and a reminder that sometimes the message God wants to bring to us he will speak through the lips of a foreigner and stranger, perhaps even in a cross-cultural worship experience like today. Thus saith the Lord:

21 In the Law it is written:

“With other tongues
    and through the lips of foreigners
I will speak to this people,
    but even then they will not listen to me,
says the Lord.”

Are we today ready and willing and open to hearing from and experiencing the goodness of God through his multiethnic Body made up of many colorful parts and many different expressions? For, as God’s Word says:

13 We were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.

Let us drink deeply and more regularly of the Spirit of Pentecost, the Spirit that can make us truly One Body made up of many ethnic parts. 

The Bible’s Story ends with a throng of people from every tribe, tongue and nation all worshipping together around the throne in Revelation 7. Let’s cherish every opportunity we get to rehearse together in preparation for that glorious day! Amen.

Also check out my Short Video based on my longer essay on this same topic below: