Like Seashells from the Sea--July 29, 2024

Like Seashells from the Sea--July 29, 2024

"For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name." [Ephesians 3:14-15]

Put a seashell up to your ear, and what do you hear?  Well, of course, your junior high school science teacher would tell you that it's actually the sound of air moving through the chambers in the shell.  But poetically, we say, "You can hear the sound of the ocean and the roar of the waves."  There is something lovely, I confess, about the idea that you can hear the sound of the sea when you listen to a seashell.  At least in some sense, it seems right, somehow fitting, that the individual shells that have washed up on the shore should show some connection to the place from which they came.  It seems appropriate that they should reveal their origin, and that you should be able to tell by listening that the shells come from the sea.  

But even though it is not strictly true that the sound from inside a shell IS the ocean, it is true that the ocean does contain all those creatures, and that they have in fact come from the waters.  And when we speak of the ocean, surely we mean more than just the saltwater--we have in mind the fish and crustaceans, the kelp forests and octopus gardens, the thermal vents teeming with otherworldly life and the currents that flow where our eyes cannot see them.  We mean all of it--even down to the creatures with shells that eventually wash up on the shore.  They come from the sea, and so all seashells at least in some way take their name from that source.

I want to ask you think about that connection for a moment: that seashells are called what they are, even though they don't literally make the sound of the ocean, because their source is the sea.  They are creatures who come from the sea, no matter how well or how poorly you can hear a vaguely sea-like sound when you hold one up to your ear.  Their source still gives them their name.  And interestingly, these lines from Ephesians (which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship) make a similar connection between God and all families among all peoples on earth.  God, whom the writer describes like a "father," is the source from whom all of our families, our parents, our children, and all relationships of love come.  And of course, in some sense, that is true regardless of how functional or dysfunctional our families happen to be.  Our sense of family connects us to our Source--God--regardless of how "good" or "bad" our actual families are at loving each other well.  There's a sense, in other words, even when you look at an estranged or traumatized family, that there is a deeper, truer Love underneath it.  And that means that for whatever ways we have been let down by relatives or have come from dysfunctional family systems, as well as whatever ways we ourselves have let down our children, parents, spouses, and loved ones, we bear some mark of God's love that has given us life like our own parents.  The living God, who as Jesus says has birthed us into being like a mother and who cares for us like a father, is the Source from which all our familial love arises.  Our families, in all their diversity, take their name and bear some level of connection to the Source from which we have come, like seashells from the sea.

So what? Well, again, for whatever else the letter to the Ephesians is doing, at least here it is reminding us of the truly universal scope of God's love and care for the whole human family.  It is a reminder that God is concerned with all of us--people of every nation and land, of every language and culture, of every time and place, in all of our differences and diversity.  All of us, for all the ways our families differ from one another and all the ways we miss the mark of God's perfect parental love, are held within God's love like shells that retain their connection to the sea from which they came.  And that means, too, that there is never a point at which we can write anybody off as unimportant to God.  We never get to say, "Well, THOSE people don't matter--they have nothing to do with God!"  And we never get to dismiss people as entirely disconnected from God just because they aren't Christian or don't share our particular faith--the writer of Ephesians says that every family, every parent, every child (which includes every last one of us), bears the mark of God whose parental love is the source of our understandings of love and family, too.  I never get to say of anybody, no matter how different they are from my experience, "THOSE families aren't important because they aren't Christian!" because they are still connected to the universal human family whose source and progenitor is God.  Our connection to God is not dependent on our sameness, but comes from our common Source--the One whom Jesus calls "Abba--Father."

It is easy for us to think that God only cares about "my kind of people," or to assume that "my way of doing family" is the only kind that works.  And it is terribly tempting to think that people who differ from me are automatically wrong or unimportant because they don't fit my mold or my expectations.  The book of Ephesians doesn't let us make that move, but rather insists that all of us, from your closest cousins and next-door neighbors to strangers separated from us by an ocean or removed in time by millennia, are connected to the same God from whom our understandings of love first arise.  We are all seashells; we all share a connection to the sea.

In a time like ours when it is easy to retreat into our own little tribes and like-minded enclaves, the letter to the Ephesians insists we remember the universal sweep of God's love for the whole human family and all its branches.  Realizing that connection is there will make a difference in how we treat everyone we encounter today, even if it also means we are led into new directions we did not expect.

Lord Jesus, open our vision to see the breadth of your family in every branch of humanity.