Message
We are one family in Christ, with a Father who gives us all the support and love we need to grow up into the ideal family: the family of love and respect
Sermon
Most of us have heard the Sister Sledge song ‘We are Family’, and although it is about the sisterhood of feminism, I tend to start singing it in my head as I drive toward South Yarra. Why? Because the congregation of South Yarra Community Baptist Church is my family, that’s why.I know, I have blood relations who are really my family, but consider this scenario: At age six (on your birthday, in fact!), you arrive in another country with your parents and only other sibling. The only blood relative in this country is one of your father’s sisters, who moved some time previously with her husband and two children who you don’t really know. You grow up, calling your parents’ friends and work colleagues ‘aunty’ and ‘uncle’ as a sign of respect. Your sibling grows up, gets married, and eventually moves because of work, 1500 plus kilometres away. You grow up, move out of the family home, and finally find work 800 kilometres away. You meet someone you love, and marry. His blood relations live 400 km away, except for one sibling on the other side of town, who eventually moves back to their hometown. Both his siblings and yours have children at a much younger age than you. In fact those children’s children are the same age as your kids.
Keeping up with me here? No? Well, all I’m saying is that for me, history has repeated. I grew up a long way from family, and the same is true for my kids. They don’t have grandparents, aunts, uncles or cousins to visit for Sunday lunch, birthday teas, Christmas or any other celebration. Getting together with family involves a great deal of organisation, and endless travel. There are days when the effort required far outweighs the benefits of getting there, or at least that’s how it feels.
Families these days are often fragmented. Children rarely buy a house in the same suburb as their parents; instead they often travel interstate or even overseas in search of satisfying job opportunities. The busy-ness of modern life means that some families can go for years not seeing each other, and with every passing day it becomes harder to remember them as relations, and they gradually become strangers. We have more in common with work colleagues, neighbours and others with whom we interact daily sometimes than we have with our own parents, siblings or children.
So, I adopted you guys as my family. There are some of you who I refer to as ‘little brother’ or ‘little sister’ – and please take that as a term of endearment – ‘cos I’m pretty sure that I am older than you, and it is my way of expressing my affection and respect. Those who I’m fairly sure are older than me, get the more respectful ‘aunty’ and ‘uncle’ from my kids, or at least from me when I talk to them about things involving you.
Adoption – the legal, formal version and the pseudo version I inherited and use - has its bad side and its good side. On the one hand, there is a feeling of not belonging. You don’t really know who you are. You’re never quite sure of things. Hopefully, most adoptive parents are loving and kind, and do their best to make up for the feelings of loss and abandonment felt by the adoptee. It is hard on all three sides of the relationship triangle – the biological parents, the adoptive parents and the person caught in between.
When I read the stories where we’re told that God has adopted us as his children, I feel a bit perturbed. I know a couple of people who have told me they are adopted, and probably know a lot more who are, but I’m not aware of the fact. Of those I know there is a spectrum of experiences and feelings that are sometimes hard for them to process. So I wonder how they react to writings like the one tonight – the promise that God has adopted us all through Christ.
If adoption has been a good experience, then I’m sure that the feelings evoked by passages like this from Ephesians will be readily accepted. If it hasn’t been all that great, though, I wonder how hard it is to accept that the love God wants us to have is designed to overwhelm those feelings of abandonment, of being pretty much second class to those people who have ‘natural’ parents and family around them. I imagine that there is a lot of anger, frustration and grief to be overcome sometimes before we can actually accept ourselves as worthwhile and loveable. Believing that we actually are loved just for being ourselves is a hard enough concept in today’s society, where materialism and success are the yardsticks of determining the value of people. Try starting from a feeling of failure because your ‘real’ family didn’t want you, and the belief is twice as hard to accept. It isn’t impossible though. Being adopted hopefully means that someone loved you enough to take you into their hearts and home, to make you part of their family, and equally someone loved you enough to let you have that opportunity.
I figure that legally, Joseph adopted Jesus, since he was God’s child carried in Mary’s womb. Joseph stepped up and took on the role of ‘father on earth’, and I’d guess that his love for and pride in Jesus would have been no different had the child been his own. The baby born in the shed at the back of the pub was recognised from the start as something special by all who visited that humble place. Gazing on a Nativity scene helps me to understand where we fit into God’s scheme of things. That baby, lying in the feed trough (somehow ‘manger’ doesn’t seem right any more) was helpless and defenceless, unable to do anything for himself. From the beginning of his life, though, that baby knew he could depend on both his fathers to help, protect and teach him. This was a baby who grew up loving, and being loved by, God. This is the baby who taught us that we are not helpless, defenceless or unable to do things, but we cannot do anything alone. The baby who helps us to understand one of the gifts that he brings: another father on whom we can depend for help, protection, teaching and most of all love. It’s as if, in a big exchange of gifts, God's child was adopted by us so that we might be adopted by God.
All God wants us to do is accept that love; the same love he gave to Christ: the love which was before creation and which will endure forever. God wants us to let him be the loving, giving, accepting father, mother, brother, sister and friend he wants to be to us. Allow him the joy of adopting us as his children – no longer can Israel claim God as their own, exclusive property. Confide in him our problems, let him lift our burdens, and hold our hands, just like real family do with each other.
My view is that we are actually a very lucky group here at South Yarra. We are small, and although that bugs some people, I think it’s great. We can all get to know each other much more intimately than if we were a church of four thousand. We are more sensitive to each other because we are more aware of each other’s circumstances. We are more loving, simply because we have that knowledge and awareness. We have the opportunity to drop our masks and be ourselves because we don’t need to fear what others will think. We are united in our love of Christ. We are united in the love of God.
Every day, I pray that God will protect ‘my South Yarra family’. In my mind’s eye, I look around this room and name each of you as ‘mine’. I hope that I can learn to love and cherish you as God does: that even when we have our disagreements, we know that deep inside the love we have will remain undiminished. We are the body of Christ. We are brothers and sisters in his holy name. As our liturgy says ‘you are mine and I am yours’ – that goes for us to each other as much as for each of us with God. We may be a company of strangers, but we are family.