Belonging Beyond Biology--July 8, 2022
"For though you might have ten thousand guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers. Indeed, in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel." [1 Corinthians 4:15]
It is always a gamble in this life to love someone. It is even more of a gamble to love someone without the pressure of biology that "makes" you obligated to certain people.
I feel some sense of that risk, that precariousness, in my own house every day as an adoptive father. There is always a certain background awareness that the voices from the outside world (or voices from inside, as well) could hurl the spiteful accusation at someone you love, "You're not a real family. You don't really belong together!" Some days it doesn't rear its head at all, and others it's there in the room like the presence of a poltergeist--unseen but shaking everything else.
And in a very real sense, the whole experiment of the past two thousand years--that one we call "church"--is an exercise in that same risk. We are a chain of lives, twenty-centuries in the making and counting, bound together by the common risk that we can be a "family" without biology. We do not all share the same DNA or parentage, but we dare to stake our lives on the claim that we are indeed a family, bound together in love because Jesus says we belong, no matter what anybody else says... ever.
That really is a radical thing to say, don't you think? For essentially all of human history, we have defined belonging in terms of either likeness or lineage. Your family was defined in terms of those with whom you shared biology--even before our ancestors know about things like chromosomes and genetics. Clans, tribes, and people groups were all defined in terms of biological sameness, too, as basically much larger, extended families.
And then along comes this strange new kind of community, of whom Saint Paul was a member, that spoke and treated its members like a family--even using the language of "brother" or "sister" for one another--but which did not function according to the old rules, or stay within the lines of ethnic boundaries. From almost its earliest days, the community called "church" deliberately crossed lines of nationality, tribe, language, and culture as well as social status or even biological markers, such that this same Saint Paul could write to another congregation, "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for you are all one in Christ" (see Galatians 3:28). And yet, even though the church was not formed by biology, it saw itself as a family--really and truly a family, but without the limits of biology.
The church didn't even grow the way other kinds of families (or tribes, clans, and peoples) grow. Other kinds of groups have to have more children--and of course, they are constantly prone to the fear of whether other groups are getting larger, or whether theirs is shrinking, or whether they will be "replaced" by other demographic groups. That fear has a way of making people insecure, irrational, and idiotic. But the church was, from its beginnings, a different kind of family. The family called "church" doesn't birth more members--it baptizes new disciples. The love that binds us together also reaches across the lines of sameness to include folks who would have otherwise been deemed unacceptable "outsiders." And even more radical, the early church actually lived like their community was a family, from sharing resources to eating together to sticking it out with each other even when they had strong disagreements. Compared to a time like ours when we so easily bail out on each other or walk away because we are too polarized, the new kind of family belonging that the church practiced was downright revolutionary.
It just amazes me to read Paul's words here--he is both so confident and so vulnerable at the same time. Here is a man who, by all accounts, did not have a spouse or children of his own, and who quite likely was looked down on by a lot of people in his culture because he didn't fit the cookie-cutter expectation of family and marriage. And everybody knew it--Paul didn't hide the fact that he was single, and he didn't give the false impression that his kids were all just left back home while he traveled the world. That was a risky thing for Paul to be, in some ways. And yet he calls everybody there in the church in Corinth his spiritual sons and daughters--and he takes the colossal gamble that his readers will hear that and take him seriously, rather than with mocking laughter. Paul really does think of these people back in Corinth as family--as children to whom he bears and obligation, and for whose development he takes responsibility. He knows that somebody at any moment could call him out and say, "You're not our real dad, Paul--you don't even have kids of your own!" and yet Paul believes they all really and truly share a mutual sense of family belonging. It is a belonging beyond biology to be sure, but it is real, and it is solid, because it comes from Christ Jesus.
I wonder what it would look like for us to take our belonging in Christ as seriously as we take our belonging in biological families and households. I wonder if we would let people slip through the cracks so easily, or break away from others because we're convinced they are the problem. I wonder how much more at peace we would be because we really believed, deep down, that it's not our same-ness or our shared biology that makes us worthy of a place at the table--it is simply grace, and it always has been.
How can we look out for one another today as family in Christ? Who is someone you know who needs the assurance they are unconditionally loved? How would it change your approach to the day to know that you are not alone, no matter what you face in this life, because you belong in the family called church?
Go. Step in into all of that. Know that you belong.
Lord God, assure us of our belonging, so that we can extended it to others who are waiting to hear that they are a part of your family, too.
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