Seeing What We'd Rather Skip

Transcript

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[0:00] So just a little bit introduction of our text. This is the story of the early church. The early church had growing pains. You can imagine any organization that starts small, just think of like a startup. We're in Silicon Valley, a startup, right? Ten people, they're working hard, writing code. They get really successful. The venture capitalists come and invest millions and millions of dollars, and they have runway, but then they have to ramp up, and they're like, we have to hire 300 new people. Well, that company is going to have some changes. There's going to be some road bumps, some speed bumps along the way. It's not going to be smooth sailing because you're going to be changing. You're going to have to develop new systems. So that's what happened to the early church to start off, basically, with 12 apostles at Pentecost, and then it says the number swelled by the thousands in short order thereafter. And they decided that besides preaching and all the other things we're going to do, we also need... We need to take care of people in our community. And so there were widows in the church, and they... Widows are very vulnerable people even now, but especially back then, they were very vulnerable. And so they needed some rationing of food and things like that.

[1:17] And so there were problems with the distribution of food, which we're going to look up, look at. And... We're going to look at this story, and we'll find that the problem that comes up with the distribution is solved.

[1:36] But the problem that's really under it is not solved. Okay? So this is a little bit of the learning and unlearning, okay? Just a little bit of cryptic there so that you might be a little more interested, right? So there's hidden, there's a bigger story, right? And I hope that we can uncover it today. So let's go to our reading, Acts chapter 6, 1 through 7.

[1:55] And... It's really small, but right there, the chapter heading, I guess, or the section heading, it says, seven men chosen to serve. So, verse 1. But as the believers rapidly multiplied, there were rumblings of discontent. The startup is having problems, you see. The Greek-speaking believers complained about the Hebrew-speaking believers, saying that their widows were being discriminated against in the daily distribution of food.

[2:30] So, the twelve called a meeting of all the believers. They said, We apostles should spend our time teaching the word of God, not running a food program. And so, brothers, select seven men who are well-respected and are full of the spirit and wisdom. We will give them this responsibility. Then we apostles can spend our time in prayer and teaching the word. Everyone liked this idea, and they chose the following. Stephen, a man full of faith in the Holy Spirit, Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicholas of Antioch, an earlier convert to the Jewish faith. These seven were presented to the apostles, who prayed for them as they laid their hands on them.

[3:19] So, God's message continued to spread. The number of believers greatly increased in Jerusalem, and many of the Jewish priests were converted, and the number of apostles was increased by more than two. Let's pray.

[3:32] Heavenly Father, thank you for your word, and we ask that you would add your blessing to it. In Jesus' name, Amen. Well, I want to preface, before I get to the text, I want to tell you just a short story about what's been happening in our church for about the last four years, actually. And that was when we started a very intentional journey into what we call racial justice. And that was pretty much right after the murder of George Floyd, in the summer of 2020. It seems like forever ago, doesn't it? It really is about four years ago. And can you remember, you know, it was a difficult time. 2020, the summer of 2020, COVID was in full bloom, lockdowns. We were not meeting here in person.

[4:15] And the Minneapolis police officer, you know, some people would say killed, other people say murder. I say murder, because it was grossly negligent at the minimum, held his hand to the cross. He put his knee on George Floyd's neck until he stopped living, basically, you know. And people were marching in the streets. People were furious. There were rioters who were destroying property. Cities were burning. And we began a national reckoning on race.

[4:46] The stuff that maybe we thought had been resolved, we realized wasn't resolved. Some people had hoped it was resolved. It wasn't resolved. And from then on until now, even now, there's been a real heightened awareness. Awareness of white privilege and diversity, equity, and for the church, this biblical exploration of racial justice. And actually, I would say the church has now begun to produce some really insightful works on racial justice. But one thing that we'll see is it has been behind the curve in a lot of this, which is sad, but I hope it's catching up. So after the riots, we were watching this from home, and we were very bewildered and asking what it all meant. And so we decided to pray. And some of you were there. We said, let's have a meeting. Let's have a special prayer meeting on Zoom, of course. Where else?

[5:32] And we were on for more than an hour. And we were, I think we also said, let's just talk about how you're feeling. What are you experiencing? What's going on in your hearts? And we sensed this movement of the spirit. And we said, let's keep this moment going. So we prayed. We absolutely prayed. But then we said, let's do more. And so we said, there's not a lot we can do. Like, we can't change the systems of this world right now. It's going to be hard for us to just, to do that as a small group of people. That takes time. That takes organizing. That takes voting. It's not an instant process. But we decided we could learn. And we could work on ourselves. And we could try to understand God's heart for racial justice. So we created what we call the Racial Justice Team, which you can join if you want. And it met, this is hard to remember this, but it met every week. We met every week for like four months, I think. And after four months, I think I said to the team, I said, if we're in a marathon, we can't be sprinting it. You know what I mean? Like, if we're going to do this for the long term, we have to meet once a month. Because if we meet once a week, we're going to burn ourselves out. But we had a lot of learning to do.

[6:38] We had a lot of organizing to do in those first early months, right? And so now it meets once a month. But for me, and I could tell you more, but I think if you've been part of the church, you know that the Racial Justice Team has come to you with all sorts of learning experiences like book studies, movie nights, trips out, all sorts of things. I would say that preaching, preaching of the church and the focus on the church has highlighted this issue more than it ever has in the past, right? So I think our church has definitely pivoted towards this, and I think that's good. And I'll tell you, I mean, I will tell you, I've been in, I think the other part is that the pastors were encouraged by the denomination to join cohorts of other pastors and read more of the books that I'm talking about, which we did. Both Victoria and I did that. And we would talk about our churches, and every now and then I would mention that the Racial Justice Team did this or that. And other pastors were like, what did you just say? What do you have? You have something called a Racial Justice Team? And I said, yeah, it's because we have a team. They're like, wow, we are nowhere near there. You know what I mean? So like just a little congratulations to you all, really, and I mean that,

[7:49] is that our church I think has been further ahead of this than even other, many other covenant churches. Not all, not all. So, you know, I think that's a good thing. So, pat yourselves on the back if it doesn't break your arm. Go ahead. Yeah, it's fine. That's good. So, you know, that was, we pivoted, we moved in a new direction.

[8:09] And for me, as I mentioned to the boys here, part of the journey was unlearning old ideas. That was kind of one of the biggest sort of breakthroughs personally for me, is that you were presented that the world is the way it is because of these sort of, you know, immutable properties. And when you're exposed to the actual reality of things, you understand that, for one thing, it's more complex than you thought, right? We can divide the world into binary things and that probably feels good, but it's always more complex than that.

[8:43] But that you're going to actually function better in the reality of the world if you unlearn those things that aren't actually describing the world accurately and you start learning what the world is actually like and what the human heart is actually like. And so it wasn't just knowledge, but it was habits. I had to unlearn some old habits and learn some new habits. And one of the things I unlearned was a particular view of scripture that I had. I had to, now I would say I come to scripture with a more critical eye, a little more open eye. And so I want to show you from this passage that we saw from Acts chapter 6, an unlearning and a relearning that I went through. And I think it might work. You've got to be taught about putting things into perspective. You've got to be taught about putting things into perspective. You've got to be taught about putting things into perspective. You've got to be taught about putting things into perspective. You've got to be taught about putting things into perspective. You've got to be taught about putting things into perspective. You've got to be taught about putting things into perspective. You've got to be taught about putting things into perspective. You've got to be taught about putting things into perspective.

[9:51] You've got to be taught about putting things into perspective. You've got to be taught about putting things into perspective. You've got to be taught about putting things into perspective. multiplying, you know, the venture capitalists came along, gave the early church billions of dollars, and they're like, we have to hire thousands more people. The Greek-speaking believers complained about the Hebrew-speaking believers, okay? This is not just language, this is ethnicity, okay? But there are some things going on, and the other challenge of the early church was all of the people in the original church were Jewish. Did you know that? Also, did you know that Jesus was Jewish? It's absolutely true. I knew some Catholic priests that I was hanging out with when I actually lived at Tantour in Israel for eight weeks when I was on sabbatical from my other post in Scotts Valley, and they were always joking. They're like, yeah, we know that Jesus is Jewish, but there's no way that Mary is Jewish, because Mary is the most Catholic person there is. Like, Mary in Catholicism is like, like, Mary was Catholic, but Jesus was Jewish. They're joking, they were joking, because really, of course, Mary was just as Jewish as Jesus, maybe more so, actually, you know. Anyways, so, but the

[11:03] early church was all Jewish. As the church grew, Pentecost, the gospel was presented to people in other languages. Now, a lot of those were believer, Jewish people from other parts of the world, but there were also world called proselytes, people who had joined Judaism. But what did Jesus say? He said, I'm gonna make you witness. Acts chapter 1 verse 8, I will make you witnesses in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and all the ends of the earth. Okay, so, and think about Genesis chapter 7, I read it earlier, through your descendants, did you catch that? The very, I try to emphasize it when I, when I'm reading, sometimes I kind of give a little bit of zing to the part I want you to pay attention to, a little hint for a future if you want, but at the end of our Genesis reading, the angel says to Abraham, really speaking for God, through your descendants, who could that be? Probably Jesus, right? Through your descendants, I will bless all the nations of the earth, not just the Jewish people, right? Your descendants will bless other nations. So God always has this outward motion from Jewish people to Gentile people, okay? And so the early church, the biggest, one of the biggest issues in the early church was, the early church was Jewish,

[12:17] but non-Jewish people, Gentile people, joined the church. And if you look at the book of Galatians later in Acts, there's this controversy. Some people were saying to be come and actually Megan Megan mean, Megan Langsdorf preached on this a few weeks back. It was really good. This idea that the early, the Jewish believers who became Christians said, all you Gentiles need to become Jews first, step one, step two, then you can become a Christian. And the Gentiles, they were so Gentiles are like, I don't want to do that because that involves some really difficult personal choices that I don't want to take. And so that conflict, Paul talks a lot about in Galatians. Paul talks about it in Romans chapter 9. Later on in Acts, they have a council about it, right? And they said, okay, the Gentiles don't need to become Jews to become Christians. You can go straight to becoming a Christian. Like in Monopoly, you go straight to jail without passing go. But jail is becoming a Christian, which is actually true because the early Christians were put in jail. See, so it works. Monopoly is all there. Yeah.

[13:33] But there was conflict in the early church. Paul talks about tearing down the dividing wall of hostility. And he's talking about the dividing wall of hostility between Jews and Gentiles. They did not get along. And here they were supposed to worship together. Uncertain. Sunday mornings. Do you think that went well? You know, we have these sort of idyllic versions. Oh, the early church, all this harmony. It was just so wonderful every day. No. You know? It was about as bad or worse than this church. No, I'm kidding. But like any church, like there's divisions in all sorts of churches. But there's two races, two ethnicities or more, multiple ethnicities in the church. Different languages, different cultures, different diets. You know, what were the potlucks like, right? They had to talk about food. They had to talk about table fellowship. It was not easy. So don't think the early church was all roses. The early church was beset by a lot of ethnic disputes and problems. And chapter 6 tells us one of them, which is the non-Jewish widows were not getting as much food as the Jewish widows, right? And why does that happen? Because people just, the people in charge were probably Jewish Christians. And they're like, we're going to get food.

[14:51] We're going to give our, we're going to give our, our mamas a little bit more because they're, they're our, they're our family. Not really understanding that Jesus said, I'm creating a new family. A new family of God that has nothing, you know, that has, that there's no favoritism between people, right? And so it was a failure to live into the ideals of the early church. And it was a problem, right? Okay. So we can, we can put that. So they were, that's, that's the problem, verse 1. Now just flip real fast. Through verse 2, the 12 called a meeting. Okay. Go to the next one, Andres. And that we, this is what I, I, you know, this sounds really smart. We apostles should spend our time teaching the word of God, not running a food program. I think we're off to the wrong, on the wrong track here. Because they're like, this is not an important enough issue for us to deal with. So this is mistake number one. Do you get that? It seems like they did the right thing, right? Because it does solve the problem, but it, but it doesn't. So they select seven men. That's really good. Then we can spend our time in prayer and teaching the word. Let's go to the next slide. Here's the list of men that they found, all great guys.

[16:00] And then let's go to the next one. And God's message continued to spread. The number of believers greatly, problem solved. It all is, and they all lived happily ever after. So there's a problem. So this is in scripture and it looks like a success story. Okay. Can I tell you that it's not a success story? Would you get mad at me? Or at least can I challenge your assumptions about this verse? Okay. Let's, let's put it away. So there are some really annoying books that are written about like the, the Bible has all these leadership and organizational principles in it that will really help you run your business or your family or your whatever. And so they go back to things like Moses was overwhelmed by all the people coming to him. And so his father-in-law Jethro says, Moses, why don't you? Why don't you appoint some people to handle all these questions for you? Right? Just smart stuff. And then you can devote yourself to being my mouthpiece and you can do the big stuff and you can let other people do the little stuff is kind of how it is. And so what is it? It's delegations, great leaders delegate. Woo. You know, isn't that great? Great leaders delegate and they have great, they have a good org chart. That's a good org chart.

[17:12] I like that org chart. You know, it's all like a pyramid. So good. Right? And so, and then you look at this passage here. Oh, the, the apostles are smart. Here's an issue. They want to address it. They appoint seven guys to take care of it. They can devote themselves to the really important stuff. Preaching the word, which is important. I mean, what am I doing right now? I think it's important. It is important. Preaching the word is important. Super important. Right?

[17:35] Um, so that's, that's what you see, but here's the issue. Is this an administrative problem or is it an ethnic prejudice? Is it a problem? Is it a problem of just being confused about how well to do something? Or is it a problem of the basic nature of humanity, which is to favor my own group over another group? And that's just built into our hearts. It's the aspect of sin. It's original. It's in there. Everybody, everybody has it. I'm going to be a little provocative. Everybody has it. Everybody has it. Okay. So what's the bigger problem? So what are the apostles do? They address the easier. Problem. The low hanging fruit, but it's not a problem of organization is a problem of the heart. It takes Paul to actually come around and clean up their mess. Some several chapters later. Very interesting, isn't it? And only Paul can do it because he has lived in sort of a multi-ethnic. He grew up in a more multi-ethnic atmosphere.

[18:40] Um, so here's the other thing, and I'm going to ask you to put for the, put it up again. Did anyone bring? Um, I want to show you some, you have one of these in front of you. Okay. It's pretty great. I know most of you do this on your phone, but this is some of this cool technology. Very easy to read the Bible this way. It doesn't have a touch screen, but it has these things called pages. And if you want to go forward, all you just kind of grab the corner. One is a little hard to do at first. You might hold your finger and then you go forward and then you're on the next page or you can go backwards. He's very, very good at user interface at the beginning. There's a table of content. You get my idea. Okay. I could go on, but so can you, everyone who has an actual Bible, not the NIV, because it's the end of eyes right in front of me who has an actual Bible with them or in their app, bring it up in your app, bring up this passage in your app.

[19:34] Um, here's the really interesting thing is these section headings I made note of where it says seven men chosen to serve, right? Those are not in the Greek text of the Bible or the Hebrew text of the Bible. Those are put there by the translation. Okay. They're not the translators of the Bible. They're there as a help to you to tell you what they think is important so you can kind of see what it is, but they kind of tip their hand there because they tell you what they think this next passage is about. And so this is the new living translation, which I generally like, but I think they failed because they think this is an administrative, that the, that there's an administrative problem and seven men are chosen to serve meals. It doesn't say there's racism in the early church. That's not, that's not the section heading. Why not pay attention to that? Why not? Now, who else has other, who else has other passage headings? Tell us your, your, um, Bible translation and your passage heading.

[20:35] That's better. Let's see. Okay. So the family grows verse seven. All right, good. That's the only different one I've ever found. Very good. Thank you. Who else has something different? Let me tell you what I have. I went through 10 translations, the most sort of the modern ones, right? So NLT says seven men chosen to serve the NRSV seven chosen to serve. They just dropped the word men. The NIV, it says the choosing of the seven, all. So all 10 translations, they're all just variations on the same theme, right? Anybody else have one? Yeah. The message says the word of God prospers. The word of God prospers. That's good. That's verse seven. What's the JV version? The Appointment of Stephen. The Appointment of Stephen. Yeah, I see. Because Stephen's awesome. So we have to kind of, yeah. This is like, it's the first reference to Stephen. He comes up later. So let's, it's a little Easter egg there. Yeah. Good. Anyone else? Krista?

[21:33] Seven chosen for special work. Seven chosen for special work. Yeah. Administrative work. Okay. So here's what I used to think. Before. Before our journey. I used to think that this passage was about just doing the right administrative stuff. Now I think this passage is acknowledgement that there are racial problems in the early church. Okay. Does that make sense? Very different view of it, right? Even though there's only one verse about it. But here's the interesting thing. All the translators, except for First Nations, which is good, but even they kind of missed it. But all the translators have said, this is about appointing seven men to fix this problem. It's about the administrative part, the choosing of them. It's about the process of choosing them. It's not about the problem itself. Here is what I had to unlearn as a white male. Okay. Is that we don't want to talk about race problems. Do you get that? We don't want to talk about them. Okay. Because if we talk about them, then it feels bad. And it makes us uncomfortable.

[22:51] You get that? And if we talk about it, it might acknowledge that there actually is a problem. And we might feel like we might need to do something about it or listen or learn something new. Okay. Now there's a very interesting book I've read is called White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. I don't agree with everything in it, but she had a very good list of all the objections that people had to not going to things. Okay. You know, about things like learning about racial problems in the world. Oh, that's just too negative. If we talk about it, it will make it worse. I marched in the 60s. I don't need to hear this. You know, all these great objections to why I don't need to hear this. And a lot of it has to do with privilege. If you're white, you know, or in some other privileged group, you have the privilege of not talking about it. You have the privilege of not thinking about it. You have the privilege of not looking at it. And I think a lot of our translators here were like, okay. You should be putting it off. You should be putting it off. let's just say that this is about administration, not about ethnic problems in the early church. We don't see it because we don't want to be challenged by it. So that's what I had to unlearn is that this passage, and others probably like it,

[23:57] and even the people who translate our Bibles for us, are looking at it through a lens of privilege, looking at it through a lens of trying to avoid talking about things that are painful. And one thing that came through in the cohort that I went through with, we went through a cohort with first with just people of our same ethnicity and then with mixed ethnicity cohorts, was that when there are stories in the media of, for example, a black man being killed by the police, do you know that happens, seems to be on a somewhat regular basis, that in white churches people don't generally talk about it. They don't mention it from the pulpit. They don't say, this is bad, let's lament. This is, you know, and why would they not do that? Because we don't want to talk about it. We don't want to look at it. We don't want to, and we have the privilege of not doing so. But what one of the black participants said in the cohort was that that was painful to them, that it was when unacknowledged. By other churches that we couldn't enter into that pain that they were feeling. And you could say all sorts of things about whether this was justified or not, but that doesn't matter. Somebody died. And the feeling is there that it was really painful and it brings back really painful memories

[25:20] for our black brothers and sisters in Christ, right? But if we don't even acknowledge it, act like nothing happened, that's painful to them, right? So this is this idea of entering into the reality of the world and saying this actually hurt. This is a bad thing. Okay. So, what I've learned and partly from one of the books that we read called Prophetic Lament, if you read that, is that, you know what?

[25:45] It's okay to say the world is broken and that you're broken and that you're in pain. And if you do that all the time, of course, there's something else going on. But every now and then when that happens, it's okay to name it, right?

[25:58] Because that's just naming the reality that's there and it honors the people who are feeling it the most. And I think I've been living my life with this privilege, for so long that I didn't have to talk about these things. I didn't have to. I didn't have to deal with them. I didn't have to acknowledge that they existed. And I could say that this is about administration. This is not about racism in the early church, right?

[26:19] So, one thing the racial justice team has done, and we haven't really gotten that far with it just yet, but is that this idea that if there is another event, similar to what happened to George Floyd, along that line, that we would try to create space in church. For us to lament together, we would try to say more about it from the pulpit so that we name it.

[26:43] And one of the people that we talked to, the Genesis group, spoke to a woman who is part Native American at least, and she said something really interesting. It was more about land acknowledgments, but it was a more general principle, which was if you name something that's true, it takes some of the power of the devil away, which I thought was really provocative, right? Because the devil wants to know. He wants us to either lie or to avoid difficult truths. He does, because then we're not really dealing with the reality. And so if we can name something without talking, I'm not saying we should talk about it all the time, right? Because we have many aspects of what we do as a church. But to ignore it, right, is to make a mistake. But to name it is to take some of the power of the devil away and to come to it in our pain, but also to be open to God comforting us or guiding us through the process. And so I think we need to be open to the Spirit, to the response, a good and prophetic and powerful and compassionate response to the brokenness of the world, which I think the world wants to hear, right? So I think we need to be open. And as I said to the boys, I think it takes humility, gosh, to say, you know, I think I learned some things that weren't quite right.

[27:58] I need to unlearn them. I think I looked at Scripture kind of in a cookie-cutter way. I need to be open to seeing Scripture differently. I need to change. And as a person, like I say, I'm a white man. That puts me at some pinnacle of hierarchy in our society at least, to let go of some of that. Now, here I am talking to you, right? But we have Victoria's preaching once a month. I think that's a good thing, right? And we like to have other people preaching too. But to realize that as a white person, as a white man, as a male, it's okay for me to step back a little bit and create more space for other people to speak, to participate, to have ideas. And I think that's an unlearning of old habits. I mean, the old thinking was be exceptional, you know? Always be out there with yourself. Always put yourself forward. Always come up with your ideas. Always speak up if you have good ideas. And I think the unlearning is to say, make room for other people first. Make room for other people who haven't had voice first so that they can speak. And if they don't want to speak, that's fine. Then you can speak. But you want to create space for other people first. And that's ongoing. I have not arrived. I have not arrived.

[29:18] And I could go on, but I'm not going to keep talking about too much more of that. I think I'm really near the end here. Let me just finish with this. The early church thought they could administer their way out of this problem. They thought it was a process thing, but it was a heart thing. It was actually a spiritual issue. Do you get that? It was a spiritual issue that manifested itself as an unequal, racist distribution of food to widows. So they solved the problem of distribution, but they ignored this deeper problem of the human heart and our prejudice. And so I'm glad that this passage is here. I'm glad that the disciples, as usual, got it wrong. Do you know how often the disciples get things wrong? And even after Pentecost, this is the disappointing part, but actually kind of comforting. Even after Pentecost, they continued to get it wrong in some way or another. They thought, oh, let's administer our way out of this problem. They didn't address the racial aspect of it until the Apostle Paul came in and actually led them through it. So that's good news, right? So I think we have to be careful just for us. Is there a racial problem in our world? Can you imagine in America, like, there's racial problems.

[30:31] Let's administer our way out of them. I don't know. Maybe. I mean, some of it could be good, but the heart is still there. It's like a, you know, whack-a-mole? You know, the thing? It's going to keep popping up. And I can't legislate that people's hearts get changed. All I can do is let God change my heart. And if I'm in community and in relationship with other people, that might rub off on them or it might not. I can't control that. But I have to do what God shows me. I think as a church, we can be prophetic about these things.

[31:12] Compassionate, welcoming, open to lament, but speaking God's truth into the world. And there are a lot of people who won't want to hear it. But I think there's a little segment of our population, even around here, that really want to hear it. They really want to hear it. They want to say, well, finally somebody is saying something. The other thing, and I should have talked about this earlier, is one of our superintendents, a black man, he's not a superintendent anymore, Ephraim Smith, he was talking about this. He said, in the civil rights movement, the civil rights movement, it was led by Christians, like Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was a Christian. He came at this issue with a Christian worldview. Do you get that? The Christians are not at the forefront of this movement anymore. It's different. It's been taken over by academics and other people. And some of what they're saying is right, and some of what they're saying is, I don't think is right. It doesn't conform with the scripture, at least. I think some of them think they can administer their way out of these problems. Because they can't admit that the human heart is really at fault. Or they think they can legislate that human hearts will be changed.

[32:19] They can't. It doesn't work. Only the Spirit can change us. Only the Spirit can give us gifts and new traits and things like that. And so the Christian church, because of that, it thought like this. See, it doesn't stop. The early church did this, and the modern church is doing this. Right?

[32:40] Let's administer our way out of these problems. No. We've lost the lead in this country. Probably in the world, on this issue. And so I thought, somehow, somewhere, and I don't know what this looks like, the church needs to regain that lead. It needs to develop, has to start saying something that makes sense, that people will want to listen to. I can't solve that for you this morning. We don't have time. Even if we had time, I wouldn't be able to solve it, because I don't know enough. I really don't. But I do know this.

[33:08] I'm on this path. I think we as a church are on this path. I'm open to learning more. God is asking me to see more. God is asking me to look more critically at Scripture. Okay? God's asking me to be more willing to enter into the pain that people from other ethnic groups are feeling when there's violence against them. God's actually asking me to do that. So to enter into other people's suffering. And support.

[33:32] God's asking me to be willing to see those places where I have more privilege and ask myself the difficult question, why do I have more privilege? Why? That's the why question. The disciples should have been asking, not how do we solve this problem, but why do we have this problem? That would have been a more fruitful work for them, right? So I should be asking myself, why do I have more? Why are poor people poor? Easy answers? No. No, thank you. There's more difficult. There's more complex answers to that, right? And God is asking me, what can I do with all this? Can I give up some of my privilege? Yes. Or can I use some of my privilege to bring about meaningful change? And that's another thing that we've been encouraged to do is, if you do have privilege, you can give some of it up, or you can, what they say is leverage it. You can leverage it into making change, prophetic change in the world. Okay.

[34:23] I lied about how long this was going to be. Sorry. But let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you again for your word. Thank you for your boneheaded apostles and the lesson they are to us boneheaded Christians. Father, help us. Help us to see anew, learn anew, unlearn old things, and learn new things that you want to show us through the Spirit. We ask it in Jesus' name.