It’s Us versus Them

By Josh Weisbrod in Deep Thoughts on 9/29/11

At a Sounders game the other week we were all singing a song that says “when it’s us versus them you can always count on me, when its us versus them it’s a sounders unity”. Now the point of this chant is to say that you can always count on your fellow supporters to stand for your team and your city, but it got me thinking about another dynamic in our lives. In our everyday lives there is an “us and them” mentality. When you are young you can experience it as a freshman who comes into a new school as the “them” while the seniors treat you like an outsider. When you are watching your favorite sport your attitude as a fan can shift from cheering for your team to a rivalry and dislike of the other fans. There are older people who look at young people as if they are another species even though they themselves used to be young. There are rich people who were once poor, and now they look at poor people as “them”. There are many instances of this dynamic. Some of these “us and them” interactions can be meant simply for fun, as in sporting events, but many of them create a divide between people who are all created equally by God.

This “us and them” mentality can make its way into our churches. We create a divide between those who are a part of the church and those who are not. We can develop this mentality that makes us think we are higher up than those people who are still living broken lives without God. This attitude can sometimes manifest itself when church people see a new person make a ruckus while encountering God. We have been so neutered in our faith that when a person comes before God and lays down their burdens we just hope they aren’t too disturbing. I don’t know if you see broken people give their lives over to Jesus, but it isn’t a quiet thing. It is messy and doesn’t follow some form of “sit quietly and fold your hands”. But what we fail to realize in all of that is that WE are THEM. Just because we have begun a relationship and another person has not, it doesn’t then mean that they are lesser than us. It doesn’t matter what kind of person you chose, what race they are, what age they are, what sin they have lived in, and what choices they have made because in the end we are all created in the image of God and His Son Jesus Christ died for us. We should love people based on how much the Father loved them, not based on how “like us” they are.

In Luke chapter 7 Jesus encounters a person that the Pharisees label as a “them”.

36 When one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, he went to the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table. 37 A woman in that town who lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume. 38 As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.

The Pharisees reaction to this is disgust. They wonder how Jesus could let this unclean woman touch him. Jesus says to the Pharisees 41“Two people owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. 42 Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he forgave the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?” The answer to this question is obvious, the one who owed more.

So now we have to look at ourselves and realize that if we are followers of Jesus then at one point we were all like that woman. We all have a debt that we could not pay. We all had sin in our lives and we poured ourselves out at the feet of Jesus, For some it was a month ago and for others it was a decade ago, but the reality still remains that we were once all sinners. The “us and them” mentality is a falsehood because we used to all be the “them”. And regardless of where we are at in our walk with God, we are all united by His love. That annoying person at your work is not some lower life form, as much as you might think they are, but they are a child of God who was bought at a price just like you. That person that you know is living in sin isn’t a “them” who just “doesn’t get it”, they are a person who has been created in God’s image. This means we need to rejoice when people come to God. We don’t treat someone differently because they look or talk different than us. We need to make the love of God and the church known to the community so we don’t appear like a building with locked doors, and we need to always remember that we are all created by a loving God. We are the church and we are a representation of God’s desire to have all people come to know him. We can’t create a divide between people because we have to represent that truth that God loves us all.

It’s all about love, not “us versus them”

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