Neither slave nor free

It began in a humble mission on Azusa Street in Los Angeles in 1906, and the revival that broke out there startled the watching world. Part of it was the sheer fervor, the prayer and the expectancy and the sense that God had drawn unusually near. But what truly scandalized the onlookers was who was in the room together. This was an age of rigid lines, where the color line ran through nearly every public space as if it were a law of nature. Inside that mission the line seemed to dissolve. Black and white worshiped side by side under the leadership of William Seymour, a black preacher; rich and poor knelt together; men and women sought God in the same crowded room. Observers marveled that the wall the whole society took for granted had, for a time, washed away. The break here was God's own, not a program anyone designed. The Spirit was poured out straight across the barriers the culture held most sacred, enacting in a storefront what Paul had written long before: that in Christ there is neither slave nor free.

There are walls inside you that you did not choose so much as inherit, lines your culture taught you to read as simply the way things are. A prejudice you never examined. A division you assumed was natural. A category of person you keep at a quiet distance without ever deciding to. The pattern of Pentecost is a God who does not respect those lines, who pours Himself out precisely across the boundaries we are most sure of. Azusa Street is a reminder that when the Spirit genuinely falls, the first casualties are often the divisions we had baptized as normal. So the question this break presses on you is uncomfortable and personal. Which line are you still defending as natural that the Spirit means to wash away? It is easy to celebrate a hundred-year-old revival that crossed somebody else's color line. It is harder to let the same Spirit cross the ones still running through your own heart. But that is where the break wants to go: not into history, but into you.