This week we begin a new series focusing on Christian community. Using the letter to Ephesians to explore this basic question: how to live as a community of faith in the best ways we can.
The church has changed an awful lot over the past 2000 years, but something that has not really changed is the struggle we have to be an authentic Christian community. Ever since the beginning, this has been a hard task for the church, because it is a fight against our tribal instincts. Human beings have always had a tendency to cluster into groups of people who are “like us.” In whatever ways are important to us, whatever values are foremost in our minds, these are the markers we look for in creating community.
And this is precisely what the church of Jesus Christ is working to overcome. The very radical thing that the church does is to cross over tribal and familial boundaries and create new community.
God, through Christ, is making a new family, adopting us as God’s own, kid brothers and sisters to Jesus Christ. Crossing over family lines – blood lines – and grafting us onto the family tree. All of us, and many more. The image of family is a strong one for the church. It is an image we use frequently. The joys and trials of family are things we think about a lot.
Because it’s a topic that most everyone has an interest in, there are many good movies about family. I watched one this past week, called The Family Stone. It came out about 10-15 years ago. It’s Christmas and all the adult children of the Stone family are coming home. And – spoiler alert – there will be tension.
Have you noticed that in most families every member plays a specific role? This is true in the Stone family, where they all have unspoken labels. The eldest son Everett is the successful child. He wants to make his parents proud. Susannah is the nurturing one, who spends most of the film in the background quietly caring for her young daughter. Ben is the free-spirit who marches to the beat of his own drummer, and the first to be blamed if something goes wrong. Thad is deaf and gay, the one they all rally around to support and protect. And Amy is the spoiled baby of the family.
This Christmas Everett is bringing home Meredith, the woman he plans to marry. Things don’t go well. Amy hates her. The rest of the family tries to be polite, but they look at Meredith like she dropped in from the planet Mars. She doesn’t seem to fit in well. The more nervous she gets, the more she puts her foot in her mouth, offending them.
Ben, however, takes an interest in Meredith – maybe he has sympathy because he knows what it’s like being the square peg in the house. Unexpectedly, they seem to be kindred spirits.
Pretty soon, a couple of other oddball characters get added to the mix. There is Brad, who has had an awkward crush on Amy since high school. And Meredith’s sister, Julie, who – unlike Meredith – does fit in quite well. Which creates an even bigger wedge between Meredith and the family. When Julie shows up, it’s like waiting for a car crash to happen.
The film is funny and sweet and sad and familiar, because we all know how challenging family can be. Family involves a lot of relationships that were not entered into by choice. And, in general, we are stuck with them no matter how difficult they are. And we all know they can be really, really difficult.
The thing we see happening with Meredith in the film is an example of how hard it can be to join a family. It’s like everyone has their place, their role, and there isn’t always room for someone new. They were all dismayed by Meredith, in one way or another, because they couldn’t figure out where she fit in. Even more of a problem, they didn’t need Meredith. They felt complete as they were, without her.
Family can be very hard. Just when you might think you’ve got it all sorted out, one little thing shifts, and everything is out of whack. It’s not easy being in relationship with a bunch of people you didn’t necessarily choose to be in relationship with. Which brings us to the church.
The letter to the Ephesians speaks of the church as family, as we are all, each one of us, adopted into the family of God through Jesus Christ. And this letter is deeply concerned about the matter of insiders and outsiders, and how the various members are treated. Because not everyone was treated well. The circle of membership wasn’t always open and inviting.
The message we hear in these words from Ephesians is that God’s divine plan involves gathering up all of God’s children into one family. Christ is the firstborn, our elder brother. The Jews who followed him were gathered in first, but the family did not end there. The gentiles from all the nations were gathered up into the family as well, to make up the body of Christ, the church, with Christ as our head. It is by God’s grace and for God’s purpose that we are gathered together, to be heirs to the promises God made so long ago.
The Jews, Christ’s brothers and sisters, needed to know that the family, the promises of God did not end with them. And the Ephesians and all the other churches of Asia needed to know that the family did not end with them. And we, of course, need to know that it does not end with us. God is still at work, gathering, reconciling, healing the world.
God has made us one family, in Christ, not to set ourselves against the world, but to welcome all the world into the fold. We are family. Not because we chose each other, but because God chose us. We are family. Not because we like each other but because God loves us. We are family. Not because we have so much in common but just because we all, each one of us, bear the mark of adoption.
You and I and all of us are beneficiaries of the love and grace of God through our Lord Jesus Christ. It’s a done deal. And because of that, other labels no longer have meaning. As Paul wrote to the Galatians, there is no longer Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free, for we are all one in Christ Jesus.
It’s like in the Stone family. Like most Christmas movies, everything resolves toward love in the end. Accepting one another, forgiving one another, and loving one another. And in the end they are all, every one of them, members of one big family.
By the end there is no longer uptight-and-awkward-Meredith and goofy-boy-down-the-street-Brad and I’m-only-here-because-my-sister-asked-me-to-come-Julie. There is no longer black-sheep-Ben and gay-Thad and spoiled-baby-Amy. There is one family where all are loved. The members are held together, in spite of their differences, by the love and grace of God.
There is so much more we can say about this matter of being in community with one another. But it begins with God. God chose us and loves us into community. We have been called, forgiven, and anointed as God’s own for God’s purposes.
We are here because God marked us as God’s own, as members of God’s family. And no matter how much things change, that will be the same.
