God Shows NO Partiality
No partiality means He values everyone created in His Image. It does not mean He ignores choices or behaviors that are destructive to His Image in us all.
Christ is risen!
I grew up in the volatile 1960s when the Civil Rights movement was getting traction. I watched as a boy as marches and riots occurred around the country and our nation struggled with throwing off the scourge of racism.
By the way, how is it possible that the pigmentation of someone’s skin could make them less human than someone else?
It was a troubled time.
And, as usual, we humans did this poorly. I remember my grandfather, a retired Atlanta police officer, showing me around downtown Atlanta and where there used to be “colored” water fountains and “whites only” water fountains. He showed me the restaurants where there used to be the “colored” entrance in the back of the restaurant! And he did this with a mixture of “well, that’s just the way it was” and embarrassment at how it used to be!
And yet, how often through human history have we watched and, God forgive us, even participated in dehumanizing others based on preferences and prejudices? If it is, as we Christians insist, that all humans are created in God’s image, then partiality based on how a person looks, or where a person is from, is, frankly, ridiculous.
But we have to be careful here. It is also easy to fall into the current madness of “equity” and abandon all sober and sensible discernment.
Just because everyone bears the image of God doesn’t mean every act or every perspective is automatically worthy of preservation or celebration. We have such a hard time with sober balance.
Look at our lesson today in Acts 10:34-43:
IN THOSE DAYS, Peter opened his mouth and said: “Truly I perceive that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. You know the word which he sent to Israel, preaching good news of peace by Jesus Christ (he is Lord of all), the word which was proclaimed throughout all Judea, beginning from Galilee after the baptism which John preached: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. And we are witnesses to all that he did both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and made him manifest; not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. And he commanded us to preach to the people, and to testify that he is the one ordained by God to be judge of the living and the dead. To him all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”
St. Peter preaches that the coming of Jesus and the coming of the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost open his eyes to how God sees all humans. This is the natural result of becoming like God because Jesus allows humans to see as God sees.
And God sees us all as loved and valuable.
Peter is a good son of Israel. He knows how God promised Abraham, the Father of the Faithful, that God would make Abraham’s name great, that God would make Abraham’s children as numerous as the sands of the seashore, and that God would bless the whole world through Abraham.
He knows the story of God delivering the nation of Israel from Egypt; how God gave His Torah, God’s Law, through Moses; and how God led the people through the desert for 40 years, teaching them to depend on Him for their lives and their insights into God’s ways.
Peter knows the story of how God gave Moses a vision of heavenly worship, how Moses was instructed to make the “Tent” of Meeting like what God showed Moses, and how worship was done in heaven by the angels.
Peter was in a long line of Jewish people who had been shaped and formed for centuries by the stories of “God’s chosen people” and how God’s people were to live differently than those who did not have God’s wisdom for living.
But God never meant for this to create a superior race. It was meant to be an example to all humanity of how everyone was meant to be.
The Jews forgot that this was eventually supposed to include everyone. This amnesia of the truth reduced these people to something they were never meant to be: Proud of their status instead of seeing themselves as servants to the whole world. This spiritual blindness cost them so much!
And our spiritual blindness is just like their spiritual blindness!
St. Pachomios was a monk in Egypt in the 4th century. He was born in Upper Egypt and was drafted into the Roman army as a young man. Pachomios was amazed at the kindness of the local Christians stationed at his unit and asked who these people were. When he found out they were Christians, he committed to becoming a Christian and promised to serve the Faith with all his heart after he was released from military service. He kept his word and became a monk under the tutelage of the hermit monk Palamon. St. Pachomios excelled in his diligent piety and soon became a founder of nine monasteries where thousands of monks struggled for the Faith in dedicated prayer. A contemporary of St. Anthony of Egypt, who founded the hermit way of monasticism himself, St. Anthony said of Pachomios that he “walks the way of the Apostles. St. Pachomios is the father of cenobitic monasticism, where his rule for brother monks to live together in community became the standard for this kind of dedicated service to the Faith. St. Pachomios lived his “normal” Christian life informed and shaped by his commitment to following Christ as the Normal way a human is supposed to live!
Today, have you forgotten that God shows NO Partiality? Have you fallen for the trap of pride in a bloodline, a culture, or even a status that makes you think you are better than someone else? If you have, then you’re headed in the wrong direction. Our Faith is meant for everyone, and we, God’s people, His Church, are intended to show everyone the way home by being Normal Orthodox Christians!
P.S. You proved to be a chief pastor of the Chief Shepherd, Christ, guiding the flocks of monastics unto the heavenly fold, when you learned of the habit and the way of life that does befit ascetic ranks; having taught this to your monks, you now dance and rejoice with them in heavenly dwellings, O great Pachomius, our Father and guide.
Fr. Barnabas Powell is the parish priest at Sts. Raphael, Nicholas, and Irene Greek Orthodox Church in Cumming, GA. He is also the founder of Faith Encouraged Ministries and produces the Faith Encouraged Daily Devotional on Substack. Watch the Faith Encouraged YouTube Channel here - https://www.youtube.com/@FaithEncouraged
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