BH Bulletin - Monday 15 March 2021

Thought for the Day by Dave Howarth
​(Lead Pastor Holy Cross Church)

In 1963 Martin Luther King spoke of his dream, where people will not be judged by the colour of their skin. And yet racism today is rife. His dream is way off coming true. Indeed, our world is a world divided. There is a depressingly relentless cycle of racial hostility, and political strife, and military conflict.

Then there are personal conflicts: tensions between colleagues in our offices, the cruelty and hurt online, and the cruelty and hurt in many households in our neighbourhood – perhaps in yours. All of us will know something of the pain of broken relationships: the broken hearts; the broken lives.

Billions is spent trying to control divisions, to keep us from strangling each other, and on diplomacy and social work and education and so on. But if there’s progress in one area, it’s often short-lived. And even if it lasts, there’s always another division elsewhere that’s starting or continuing. We’d love to wake one morning to find that hatred, bitterness, division and warfare were things of the past. But we seem no closer to a solution to all this hostility.

Yet there is a passage in the Bible which describes a group of people who used to be deeply divided, but who are now “one”, that is, utterly, deeply, permanently united: “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility” (Ephesians 2.13-14).
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There is a way to achieve Dr King’s dream. There is a way to bring deep and lasting peace between people. It is the cross. And only the cross. So consider what a great act of love it is to our society for you and I, individually and together, to promote the message of the cross.
Dave

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