Welcome to Tim Minut Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Keith Simon.

And I'm Patrick Miller.

Would you rather die than be segregated?

Would you rather die than allow someone to

break apart what Jesus has brought together?

That might sound like a question you don't think you're

going to have to answer in your life, but it's a question that Christians had to answer during

the Rwandan genocide in 1994. At the time there was a ethnic genocide which was being perpetrated

against the Tutsis by the Hutus and in this particular instance they were

Christians on both sides of this ethnic divide and there's a story

about 13,000 Christian refugees. They were from both ethnic groups, Hutus and Tutsis,

they'd been dislocated because of the war and these militias came in and they told the

Christians you need to segregate you need to divide into Hutus and Tutsi so that we

can treat you differently and the Christians said no we're not going to do it. Jesus has brought us together. He's brought us together and we're not going to allow you to separate. They said no you've got to you've got to and finally the Christians refused for long enough that the militias mowed down they murdered all

13,000 people. They said yeah we would rather die than allow someone to separate

what Jesus has brought together. When I think about people responding that way,

it feels like a world apart.

It feels like a different universe,

because when you think about Christianity in America today,

right now almost everybody in America, if you pay attention to the news, is thinking about

the question of race and how should we as Christians respond to that? That's not a new question. It's not a new question in history. It's not a new question for Christian. It's certainly not a new question for Keith and I in our community. And so we wanted to spend some time thinking about this issue biblically.

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