Who Connects Us--November 15, 2019

Who Connects Us—November 15, 2019

“Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, To the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” [Ephesians 1:1-2]
Go to a family reunion or a wedding—or, I suppose if you have a dark streak, a funeral—and you will see a strange ritual re-enacted time and again. It’s the well-intentioned but often clumsy attempts people make trying to find out how they are each connected to the rest of the people in the room.

“How do you know the bride and the groom?” is one of those inelegant questions that gets lobbed across the awkward round tables at the reception, asked between people who don’t know each other from Adam but who have been thrown together to eat their stuffed chicken breasts over small talk. Or it’s, “Whose side of the family are you on?” Or even just, “Help me out—who are you?” You might get a perplexed look from the other person, as you each try naming people to whom you have some connection, like you are fishing for a coincidence: “Do you know Mary Louise? No? How about Uncle Frank? Oh, you know him from work—well, I’m a second-cousin, twice-removed.” Sometimes you end up with a look of delighted surprise to discover you have other overlapping social circles, too: “Honey, did you hear this? Bob and Cynthia used to live on Oak Street, too—they must have moved there just a few years after we moved away! What a small world!” Something like that.

It really is rather lovely to think that you could draw lines between each person in the banquet hall and some central figures who make them all connected somehow. Sort of a living human spider-web, with all the guests connected in some way to some distant matriarch and patriarch of a family, or to a bride and a groom, or to the deceased. If you really would try and sit each one down to ask why they are there, they will eventually identify themselves in terms of how they are related to those central people. “I’m the oldest great-granddaughter of Millicent and Henry,” or “I used to be the college roommate of the bride,” or “Matilda was my favorite aunt.” We define ourselves in those moments, not by our jobs or our bank accounts or our sports teams, but by relationship to a common central person. And no matter how different everybody in the party is from one another, they all are there because they are connected to someone at the center.

That’s how it is for us, the motley crew that is the church. We are a pretty strange collection of people from all walks of life, all nationalities, all tax-brackets, and all sorts of histories. And it’s like we have all found ourselves at this party and start to look around the room wondering what could possibly have brought this peculiar collection of people together. So we start to ask around: “What’s your connection to this shindig?” “Help me out—who are you?” And the answers start to come back with a common theme.

“I’m Paul, an apostle of Christ.”

“I’m from Ephesus—I’m one of the saints of Christ Jesus.”

“I’m a follower of Christ, too!”

“Say, I belong to Christ, too!”

And what do you know?—we have found our common connection. It is Christ who brings us together. It is Christ--here among us now, still, who connects us. It is Christ who defines us. When you are at a reunion or a reception, you let yourself be defined, even if just for an afternoon or an evening, by your relationship to the people or person at the center of the party. But for the followers of Jesus, this becomes a lifetime thing. Who we are is answered by whose we are. And we belong to Christ.

That’s where we start. That’s how we answer, “Who are you, really?” Not first and foremost by our jobs, our significant others, our houses, our political party, our demographics, our body-mass-index, or our income level, but in terms of Christ. We belong to him. And together with the rest of the strange bunch Jesus has drawn to himself, we are here at the party caught up in delighted surprise to see how far and wide his reach extends.

Lord Jesus, allow us today to define ourselves by our relationship to you before all else.