God's Grand Family Reunion--May 13, 2026

God's Grand Family Reunion--May 13, 2026

Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely spiritual you are in every way.  For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps fumble about for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us..." (Acts 17:22-27)

We've been talking all year about how the church is like a "found family"--a community that includes people from every language, background, culture, nation, and ethnicity. That might seem impossible, futile, or at least uncomfortable--like cramming too many people into an elevator or forcing folks who have nothing in common to all of a sudden be roommates. But to hear Paul tell it, especially in this passage from Acts that many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, we are only being reunited into the family we were always already a part of.  The claim of the Gospel is that all human beings belong to a common family, and when God gathers us together in Christ, we are really only being brought back into the united family of humanity that we were always meant to be.  To be a Christian, then, isn't like being on an airplane with other passengers you have nothing in common with except a common destination of heaven; it's being brought to the family reunion in which all people everywhere have a place at the table.

This is a really big deal to let sink in, because sometimes we let ourselves be divided along lines of culture, language, or ethnicity as though those differences are more fundamental that our common humanity.  It is terribly easy to get swept up in a "Me and My Group First!" mentality that supposes the people who share my language, skin color, cultural traditions, or perspective are more important to God than those outside it.  It's easy to believe that we are supposed to look out for the interests of "Me and My Group First!" because "that's how the world is." After all, plenty of loud voices at a host of different podiums have told us so, right? But... Paul's speech here to the people of Athens begs to differ. He says that's how the world isn't, because we belong already from our creation to a common human family that binds us together into one more powerfully and more essentially than the differences which are often exploited to drive us apart.

In fact, from Paul's perspective, all human beings are doubly bound to a common human family--first, because God made us all, and secondarily from that, because God made us all from one common ancestor.  That flies in the face of many centuries' worth of pseudo-scientific racism which taught that various people groups were irreconcilably too different and came from different origins, and therefore, that one group could be ranked against another to determine who was "superior." An awful lot of terrible things have been done in human history, much of it far more recent than we care to admit, and were undergirded by the false theological claim that different tribes, cultures, or racial groups were not really all one underneath. And terrible things are still done, often with supposed religious justification, by the logic of "Me and My Group First." Paul rejects all of that as nonsense, because all human beings are members of one human family.  On that basis, the Good News of Jesus is meant to be shared with all people, even with all the ways we are different from one another.

Sometimes we can get so insulated inside our own little homogenous bubbles of "people like me" that we forget about the existence of folks who speak, dress, think, and live differently from us.  Or we can become so comfortable only ever interacting with folks who are "like us" that we start to see anybody else as a threat, a danger, or as an enemy in competition with me for the things I want.  The New Testament says a loud NO to that way of thinking, and instead reminds us that we Christ-followers are simply in on the early stages of God's grand design to host a family reunion for people of "every nation, of all tribes and peoples and languages," as the book of Revelation says it.  And the first followers of Jesus made the pivotal and faithful choice to follow the Spirit's direction to reach out and invite everyone they met to come to that family reunion and belong in the community of disciples in the present, not just in the future. Surely it was tempting at some points to think, "What if we only invited people who we already like, or already have things in common with?" Surely it meant choosing the often more difficult path of making accommodations with one another to hold space for people who didn't all speak Hebrew, or didn't all eat the same foods, or didn't grow up with the same customs.  But the early church of the New Testament era was convinced, as Paul's words here remind us, that the unity we find in Jesus is not a novelty but a return to the unity that all people have already by virtue of belonging to the one gigantic human family tree and as beings all made by the same one living God.

When we take seriously the Scriptures' claim that all people everywhere belong to a common human family, and that God's intention is to reach all of us with the love and news of Jesus, we can no longer accept the faulty "Me and My Group First" mindset that pretends the lines we draw between "us" and "them" are more important that the embrace of God around all of us. It just doesn't hold up.  And instead, we can see ourselves, like Paul, on the invitation committee of God's Grand Family Reunion everywhere we go--reaching out to anybody and everybody we meet, no matter where they have come from, how they dress, what language they speak, or what else makes them different from us.  Paul is convinced that anybody you ever meet is already in some sense a part of the family--sometimes folks just need to hear that invitation to belong.

Who might you be led to speak a word of welcome and love to today?

Lord God, help us both to hear your assurance of our belonging in your family, and to speak it to others you are inviting to the party.