In the beginning, God divides the light from the darkness, and thereafter, it seems, a line is drawn between two opposites. In Proverbs, we encounter the wise and the foolish, whose deeds take them down paths of either triumph or ruin. In Christ’s parables, light and darkness take the form of sheep and goats, righteous and unrighteous people, lost and found sheep or coins. Similarly, the line is drawn between the Jews and the Gentiles.

"Do not go into the way of the Gentiles," Jesus commands his disciples. "And do not enter a city of the Samaritans" (Matt. 10:5 NIV). This very line is blurred, however, when Jesus himself offers living water to a Samaritan woman (John 4:9). In this act, Jesus hints at the revelation of God’s universal fellowship.

The mystery with which Paul grapples is that Gentiles are fellow heirs, partakers of the same promise of salvation in Christ. Salvation, it turns out, is offered to everyone on either side of the line. It is this same mystery that is revealed to Peter in a vision of clean and unclean animals. "God has shown me," Peter realizes, "that I should not call any man common or unclean" (Acts 10:29 NIV).

Both Paul and Peter are challenged to set aside their notions of who is deemed worthy of the promise of salvation, because Christ had already "broken down the middle wall of separation" between Jews and Gentiles (Eph. 2:14–17). The new understanding revealed is that all people are called into God’s universal fellowship. A line is erased forever.

Or is it?

Labels are convenient. Walls give us a sense of security. The revelation of God’s universal fellowship challenges us to discard our own acquired notions about salvation, to step outside our comfort zones, to grow in our understanding of God’s grace. It challenges us to maturity.

This challenge is no less real for us than it was for Paul or Peter. Although we may no longer interpret "Jew" and "Gentile" as ethnic labels, these terms still represent our inclination to pretend that the wall that Christ abolished still stands.

Within the shelter of Adventism, we see ourselves as the Chosen People, the Remnant set apart from the world. We are the sheep, the found coin, the redeemed, the light on the hill, the salt of the earth. We are the metaphorical Jews.

By contrast, our Gentiles are perhaps the atheists and agnostics, the Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims—and ironically, perhaps even practicing Jews—as well as members of other Christian denominations and backslidden Adventists. Our Gentiles are those who have fallen out of grace, those who are out in the world when they should be on the straight and narrow path. They are the misguided, those who have not received "the light" or are reveling in darkness. They are our religious Gentiles.

We have other Gentiles too—the punk artist with objectionable lyrics, the beggar of questionable need, the convicted murderer rotting in jail, the abusive spouse, the swindler, and the sexual deviant. They are the unpalatable social strata and the scum of society whose sins and shortcomings would surely fill up the depths of the ocean in which God promised to bury our transgressions. These are our moral Gentiles.

When our religious, moral, and otherwise labeled Gentiles are accounted for, the circle we have drawn for ourselves as metaphorical Jews is very small.

The reality is, however, that the circle of salvation is far larger. It extends far beyond the very circumference of our earth. We have been born into sin and also into the offer of salvation. That is the unveiled mystery and the grand truth of God’s universal fellowship.

Accepting this truth challenges us to maturity. How? First by its universality: it challenges us to surrender the superficial lines that we have drawn in our hearts between ourselves and those we deem less worthy of salvation. Second, it challenges us by revealing that grace is meant to pass through our hands to others—this is fellowship.

God’s universal fellowship deals with our arrogance, false sense of superiority, and self-centeredness by leveling the playing field. This places us in relationship with one another and the world. When we come down from our high places and look another human being in the eye, human being to human being, child of God to child of God, we find the heart of the gospel.

Martin Buber’s most essential concern in the influential book, I and Thou, was, in his own words, "the close association of the relation to God with the relation to one’s fellow-men."1 Buber asserted that one cannot, in fact, experience a genuine relationship with God without also having a genuine connection to others and to the world. He who refuses to relate to the world and to other human beings in a genuine manner can only relate to God as an object, thus effectively devastating the possibility of a genuine relationship with the Divine. "He—and not the ’atheist’…—is godless," states Buber.2

"All revelation," according to Buber, "is a calling and a mission."3 God’s universal fellowship invites us to experience the fullness of the divine in relationship to others and to the world. When we experience genuine connection, we begin to move our belief from our heads into our hearts and hands.

A genuine connection to others calls us to view each human being within the scope of the equalizing truth that salvation is promised to all, Jews and Gentiles alike, no matter how we define those terms in our own hearts. It invites us to take seriously the quality of our relationships—in the circle of our homes, in the workplace, in our communities, and in the world, because all of our relationships occur within the circle of the universal fellowship.

A genuine connection to the world is a call, I believe, to social action and advocacy. Our role in the world is not just within the parameters of Christian evangelism but also as human beings aware of the complexity and wholeness of the body of Christ that is humanity. We are not separated from one another by race or culture or social class or geographical divisions. Rather, we are connected to each other by blood and breath, bone and life, by human emotion and divine love. As such, we ought to seek the opportunity to be proactive in social justice, religious freedom, humanitarian aid, and global peace. Christ’s message of hope is one of action.

Paul’s prayer is "…that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God." (Eph. 3:17–19).

It is only in the context of the universal fellowship that God’s plan of salvation transcends humanity and expresses divinity. It releases God from the realm of capricious and meddling gods and allows him to exist beyond human dimensions in the realm of Almighty. Rooted in love, we are given the chance to partake of and participate in the revelation of this divine mystery, which unveils the impenetrable dimensions of God.

Notes and References
1. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 171.
2. Ibid., 156.
3. Ibid., 164.

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