Racial Reconciliation: Devotions From Time Of GraceSample

Guess who’s coming to dinner

Are you a Harry Potter fan? Then you know what a “Mudblood” is. The pure-blooded wizards could be very arrogant, looking down at a young wizard or witch who might have a non-magical parent (a.k.a. a “Muggle”). When Draco Malfoy called Hermione a Mudblood, it was a racist term of contempt.

Harry Potter is fictitious. Moses is real. And there is tribal pride in real life too. Moses had married a woman named Zipporah, and she was not an Israelite. Moses’ brother, and especially his sister, resented the woman for her racial background: “Miriam and Aaron began to talk against Moses because of his Cushite wife, for he had married a Cushite” (Numbers 12:1).

The land of Cush is located between the second and third cataracts of the Nile, today’s Sudan. The Greeks called the people who lived there Ethiopians (i.e., “burnt faces”) because of their dark skin. Though Zipporah was from the Sinai Desert region, Miriam must have believed her to be part African because of her dark skin.

Our country has a long and bitter history of fear of miscegenation, i.e., mingling of the races through intermarriage. Has anybody in your close family dated or married outside the tribe? You can be God’s agent of racial reconciliation by making “other” people in your family to feel welcomed and respected.

After all, everybody on earth is descended from the same parents. The only race that really matters is the human race.