The Great Privilege of Joining God’s Family

We have been offered one of the greatest gifts we could ever accept. We have been invited to join God’s family. With this comes all of the amazing joys and wonders that should be a part of every family. The support of love, the comfort of home, and the trust of faithful consistency. Yet, this invitation to join God’s family is even greater than the greatest family, because in God our Father and Jesus our brother, we find these traits perfected and what’s more it brings with it a closeness with God, the creator, and realization of love.

This immediately addresses one of the greatest sources of privilege - our birth. We all have a sense that opportunity, health, and personal capacity somewhat depend on our situation. If our parents have money we may be able to get tutoring, and many other forms of support, not to mention good food, medicine, and hygiene. If our parents are loving, we will be more able to create healthy relationships, we will be more courageous to connect with others and be confident in ourselves. If our homes are safe, we will be able to explore, fail well, and be able to open up. I could go on. There is so much privilege or lack of privilege that comes naturally with where and to whom we were born.

As we are now being invited into God’s family, we are being invited into a more privileged place than any other we could ever have been born into. This is the ultimate setting right to privilege. We might not realize or be able to comprehend this. Just because someone comes to faith and gets to know Jesus, it doesn’t mean that they suddenly have enough food, or greater capacity or that they are healed. That is true, but only to an extent.

Here we come up against the faith problem that we still trust too much in physical things that we do in God. One of the fundamental ways we become a part of God’s family is by being led by the Spirit, as Paul mentions. This means that we are led by God, even when the physical and social realities are not leading us there. God’s Spirit is greater than all of that, so it can be greater in us. It did in the disciples. Here were these poor, uneducated, and rejected people - fishermen, farmers, tax collectors, prostitutes, and more. We can only imagine what their upbringings and lack of privilege were growing up, but they are definitely living in it now. Yet, when Jesus calls them to follow him, we see a transformation. They become a family with God as their Father, who welcomes and creates a home for so many. They become a community that reaches out and feeds those around them. They become wiser than any could imagine as even the Pharisees listening say “aren’t they just uneducated fisherman, where could they get such knowledge?”.

You see one of the first great gifts that comes with this invitation into God’s family is transformation. I am no longer a child of divorce, or distant from my family, or lacking grandparents, I have it all right here and in my relationship with Jesus. I remember as a child I realized this fairly early. All my grandparents were gone by the time I was seven. I was only ever close with my grandfather who died then. Yet, I never felt like I lacked grandparents, I had this great family in the church and I was created like their child.

There is one thing that is important to address and that is that sometimes our family and situational upbringing can get in the way of us knowing what a loving father or family can be through Jesus Christ. We can form assumptions, blindnesses, habits, and coping mechanisms that hurt not just our relationship with God, but also our relationship with one another - sometimes through no fault of our own. This can be really tough. We all have to realize that wherever we come from, we often hold onto something familially that gets in the way. In these situations, we need to be diligent in putting that experience aside and letting God speak for himself. This is a great act of trust in these situations, especially considering you might never have known someone trustworthy, but God will use even the littlest trust. Then we let this new love and safety from Jesus, help us to understand what we experienced in the past. Trust and know that God can transform even the things that seem a part of us and through this transformation, we can become more than we can imagine.

Already, we have been exploring the amazing and bounteous privilege that is this open invitation to join God’s family. Our readings today talk so much more about what this means. Romans shows us that as we are transformed into children of God we see that everything changes and is changing. Even creation itself, which is lovely and amazing and yet scary, will be transformed with us - the hurt of the earth is like its labor pains waiting for us to be reborn. As children of God, we also become heirs, not just of creation, but of what is God’s. We see in the readings that we are heirs of understanding, eternity, and more.

Our passage from Isaiah shows us that even if we have felt barren, empty, and alone, we will become purposeful, and creative, in a great family and with an ever-growing house. I love this vision of a barren woman, suddenly having more children than the married ones. I have known some amazing women, whether mothers or not, who have welcomed and lifted up the children in their midst in such a way that these children had support and families bigger than their own. Yet it is far greater than that, because God talks about us expanding our tents. It is like this barren woman’s house is growing to draw in lands and people. Even the other nations will be hers. What an amazing image of God’s gift to us, but also our purpose and privilege in sharing what God is giving us.

Our passages from Matthew are a little more difficult. Jesus is sitting with his followers and his family comes to him, but instead of leaving his followers he tells them that those who do the will of his Father are his brothers and mothers. This can sometimes feel like a rejection of Jesus’ birth family, but in this moment he is saying, God shows no favouritism over birth, but rather to those who live like they belong to his family, by listening to their father. We show who we belong to by how we live.

Then His followers ask why he speaks in parables and he tells them it is so that only certain people will understand - particularly them. Again, this feels exclusionary and we have a problem with it. Yet, what is the real difference between those that are speaking to Jesus and those that left? The big difference is the others left. They didn’t stay to ask or to seek more from Jesus. I can’t say what they wanted, but they sure didn’t accept his invitation to stay with him, get to know him, and become part of his family beyond anything else. Today, we have the bible, so we have Jesus’ explanation of some of the parables, yet so often we read them without the desire to draw close to Jesus, to know him, to become part of his family and so we too can read but not understand, hear but not know.

In God’s family, we are offered so much and some of the greatest gifts of family we can know without scripture: closeness, time, a kind of unity, faithfulness, and even a kind of favoritism that hopes to draw others in too. But the only thing that truly stands in our way is that we need to want to be part of this family. We have to want to have God as our Father, knowing that His knowledge and will is greater than our own and that His Holy Spirit will guide the way. We have to want to spend time with our older brother Jesus, knowing that he has the experience, strength, and relationships that will help us grow up to be like him. We have to want to have God as our spouse, knowing that faithfulness to him and a relationship of mutual self-sacrificial love with him will make us far more than we would have ever been without. These are not easy things to commit to, because they take trust, faith, courage, and more, but these commitments bring with them far more than we could ever imagine.

So this leaves us with an invitation that we are challenged to accept and grow into, but also an invitation to share in the work of this family. We are called now to share this undeserved invitation to others, to invite them into God’s family, to widen our tents, to bring in children not our own, to adopt the nations, so that they too can know God as their Father. Like our Father in heaven we share in the purpose of recreation - of bringing a new kind of creation, transformation, kingdom to those we meet and it is in this family where that happens as privileges and births are transformed and shared.

As Paul’s letter to the Romans reminds us, this doesn’t mean that everything is fixed, but it does mean that we already live in it; we already know a hope for all things. We can bear our struggles and trials, we can bear the struggles of others and of creation because we know that right now all of this suffering is just labor pains. Many of you know how much it can hurt to bring new life into this world. Jesus, creation and humanity are in the midst of those pains right now as he and sometimes we are doing the hard work of bringing about new life. Now, as we think about a new born baby, only imagine the joy that this new life in Christ can bring and we will begin to realize the great promise that is an invitation into God’s family. AMEN

Notes:

An invitation to become God’s family and all the privilege that comes along with it

Recreation

Transformation

Eternity

Closeness, time, unity, a kind of favoritism (but drawing others in too),

Not a rejection of his family, but an equal or greater acceptance/favoritism of those that are following him and seeking the will of the Father

Brotherhood

Motherhood

progeny

Growing home

Heirs

Knowledge

Redemption - growing up

How do we become children?

Led by the Spirit

Doing the will of the father

Accepting God as our husband - spouse

Staying - asking

Why can’t people hear or understand?

What is the purpose of this privilege?

To build that home

To bring in children - not your own

Possessing the nations?

Recreate

Bear with hope

Childrens Talk?