Welcome One Another (Romans 15:4-13)
Derek and his son, Samuel.
How can we ever expect the Israelis and the Palestinians, the Hutus and the Tutsis, the Indians and the Pakistanis, the Chinese and the Taiwanese (or the Tibetans), the United States and the Afghanis to live together peaceably if the church doesn’t show them what that might look like?
The church offers hope to the world precisely to the extent that God establishes the church to give the world a glimpse of the new world God has in store—a world in which wolves and lambs lay down together, a world in which Jews and Gentiles claim one another as family, a world in which black and white, rich and poor, gay and straight are no longer epithets to keep one another at arm’s length, a world in which Muslims and immigrants and refugees don’t have to spend their lives always looking over their shoulder for people determined to fear and hate them, a world in which that which unites us is always stronger than that which divides us.