6/11/2025

When I think of summer, I think of peaches, watermelon, homemade ice cream, cookouts, vacations and (maybe because it includes all those things) camp meetings! 

Until the last year or so, I don’t recall a summer without a camp meeting of some sort. It was a week of absolute joy: enthusiastic singing, stirring preaching, great food, and wonderful fellowship. But camp meetings seem to be dying out everywhere. I found out Sunday that another camp meeting I loved back in the 80s has changed drastically. The old wooden tabernacle has fallen into disrepair and so now the few attendees left meet in a church building. 

Sure, times change; methods change. But what do we lose with the change?  In the case of camp meetings, we lose a sense of connection with the larger church. Growing up in camp meetings, I met people from all over the world. “Unified diversity” was on display everywhere as “angels of the opposite expression” sang, prayed, and fellowshiped together.  The African-American preachers [and the ONLY reason I label them at all is to highlight the fact that at the time it didn’t matter - it wasn’t “Black Brother Morgan” we went to hear, but simply “Brother Morgan”] were heroes to me.  Still are.

They knew me, a skinny little white boy from Alabama who played the piano, and they called me brother. The fact that I was a skinny little white boy from Alabama didn’t matter to them. What mattered was that I was in Christ.

I know I write about it a lot, and I talk  about it a lot, but I cannot overemphasize the importance of the unity of God’s people. We are one family. Jesus died to bring it about. He prayed for it on the night before he was crucified. Christian unity fulfilled Bible promises and prophecies. The  threat against unity inspired Paul to write almost all of his letters. Christian unity is the most visible sign that the church is a community unlike any other. 

As I mentioned Sunday, in biblical times, society’s divisions weren’t about race. The region around the Mediterranean was already a rainbow of colors as people of different “races” mingled freely. 

By the way, no one classified people according to their physical traits until the 1600s. François Bernier was the first to classify humanity into "races" in 1684. Biologists and sociologists have since debunked the notion, but honestly, they were late to the party. All they had to do was read their Bibles. 

To use Paul’s own words, there were the divisions of religion, Jew or Greek/Gentile (from the Jewish perspective, if you weren’t a Jew you were a Gentile, regardless of any other moniker); slave or free; barbarian (anyone who didn’t speak Greek were barbarians – their language just sounded like bar-bar-bar); male and female (men had power; women didn’t). 

Society was divided along those lines. No one crossed those lines, and you evaluated another human based on those categories. 

But then Jesus came along. Physically, he was descended from Abraham, to whom God promised that all the world would be blessed through his descendents. Wise Men from Persia worshiped him when his own religious leaders yawned with indifference. Gentiles had more faith in him than his own people did. He traveled with women and even encouraged them to learn. He ate with tax collectors and sinners. Before he ascended, he commissioned his disciples to take his message of good news to the uttermost parts of the world, fulfilling God’s promise to Abraham and prophecies in Isaiah. 

Jesus busted every barrier known in the ancient world! 

Why? Because the family Jesus came to create would transcend every category. Free people, slaves, males, females – ALL would worship together, sit down at meals together and fellowship together  as one family. 

This is the message of Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Someone disrupted the unity of the church and Paul was furious! Paul preached a gospel that brought people together, but Jewish meddlers from Jerusalem were rebuilding the walls between Jews and Gentiles – walls Jesus died to tear down!

No wonder Paul wrote about the meddlers, “let that one be accursed!”

In Galatians 3, Paul writes: “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.  There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” There is no longer. 

There are forces in our world, who thrive on keeping us divided. We live in a time when “identity politics” is a driving force. The concept of America as a melting pot seems to be changing to America as a smelting pot – instead of everyone melting into one people, we are being divided further and further down and identified by our differences. “Race” is kept in the forefront. 

But as believers, our identity is in Christ. 

That doesn’t mean we walk around in robes and sandals. No, we walk around in Jesus. Whether we teach school, build rockets, march in the band, raise a family – no matter where we find ourselves, we do it as if Jesus were doing it. Being Jesus to the world wherever we go, wherever we don’t go, by whatever we do or don’t do when we get there, by the way we treat our servers at restaurants, or  . . . you get the point. If we’re busy loving God and loving others, we won’t have time to live otherwise. 

Blessings,
Pastor Terry