I learned from watching the video at church the phrase 'racial shaming' and how we do this all the time....but discovering that God is truly color blind....

13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Last night, my wife and I attended our church's showing of the Legacy of Dr. John Perkin's, a man of God who stood for racial reconciliation and showing the world that God is color blind when it comes to true Christianity.  As I watched the video of his life, it occurred to me that his life could have gone the other way--the way toward anger and hate toward the white establishment because of the injustices he saw, but instead he chose to allow Jesus Christ, God's precious son, to fill up his core being and change him from the inside out, and teach us that God desires reconciliation, not segregation.

I heard a term last night that I hadn't heard before. It is the term racial shaming. We do this whenever we try to puff ourselves up with our superiority because of our race or religious upbringing.  We shame people when we get scared that our property values are going down because diversity is moving into the area, or we drive by what appears to be a mosque 'opening soon' and we immediately have nightmares of sharia law, and instead of getting to know the person of that religious affiliation we shun them. I saw this as a young boy growing up in St. Louis Park, Minnesota- the home to the largest group of holocaust survivors- when I witnessed Jewish boys being bullied and called names in the school play yard such as 'Christ killer', or whenever they got off the school bus at home and waited for the Talmud Tora school bus to come to take them to their Hebrew learning studies.

I remembered when Barack Obama won the first Presidential election how excited most African American's were that a black man won the highest office and for the first time they could tell their children that if you work hard in school and do the very best you can, you too could be President. 

I remember growing up in the 1960's watching with anxiousness the riots in our inner cities, seeing news reports of lynchings of black men in the south, and then hearing the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." 

At the central core of both of these men was a love for Jesus Christ and their willingness to forgive those who harmed them.  

It is time for all of us to stop the racial/religious shaming and begin building bridges with those who do not share the same race or religious affiliation.

In the end, love is what is going to win people to Christ just as I Corinthians 13 reminds us, '13 And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.