The Table Where Everyone Sat

In 1960, four Black college students sat down at a whites-only Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. They were refused service. But they stayed. Day after day, more joined them — Black and white, young and old — until that counter could no longer enforce its dividing lines. What struck observers was not just the courage of the protest, but what happened after the counter was finally desegregated. Former protestors and former opponents sat side by side, eating the same food, sharing the same space, as if the wall between them had never existed.

The Apostle Paul knew about walls. He lived inside the most meticulously constructed boundary system the ancient world had ever seen — the Torah's elaborate code of clean and unclean, insider and outsider, chosen and unchosen. That law served its purpose, Paul says, like a guardian watching over children until they come of age. But when Christ came, the guardian's role was finished.

"There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

This is not the erasure of identity. Those Greensboro students did not stop being who they were when the counter opened. Rather, a higher identity overtook the old divisions. In Christ, we are not sorted by the categories the world uses. We are children of the Almighty — seated together at one table, clothed in the same grace, heirs of the same promise.