The Family

Text: Galatians 3:23-29

Focus: Family Celebration

Function: To Help People see the family nature of Church

Form: 3 points

Intro: Today we are celebrating family. You are all invited to stay for a potluck and a program afterwards.

And I love the theme on the cover of the Bulletin: “You are all children of God.”

I confess, emphasizing that part of the passage, “you are ALL children of God” changes my perspective on the passage.

It seems like the times that I have studied this passage before, I have come to emphasize the line: “because of Faith...” you are all Children of God.

I have emphasized the part that in order to be children of God, we must have faith.

And faith is important. It is the difference. Faith is trust in God. Rest in God. Faith in God is born out of relationship with God.

I believe that a formal relationship with God is an important part of our faith journey.

But the emphasis of the passage is not that you must have faith, you must trust God, but that everyone who does is part of the family.

He makes sure we know what the family of God consists of. And it is a breaking down of barriers between ancient divisions.

For the Jews, it meant that their racial heritage did not make them any more special. The same applies for us.

Two of the other major dividing factions of the time are also shown to be irrelevant in the family of God. The first is the distinction between the classes of people who are free and who are slaves, remember, in Rome 2/3 of the population were slaves, it was a slave economy. And the section distinction is between the genders.

This Church, this faith, this family, cuts through ancient divisions between people to bring us all into the same place, Children of God.

We are all part of the family and the family realizes that every part is just as important.

There is an emphasis here that I remind myself to remember, “Because of our faith, everyone is important.”

It is like he is saying, “now that you have faith, see the value in every single person.”

And, I see the importance of the family analogy in the way we value others.

Look at 1 Timothy 5:1-2: ¹Do not speak harshly to an older man, but speak to him as to a father, to younger men as brothers, ²to older women as mothers, to younger women as sisters—with absolute purity.

I think there is an assumption here. And that is this, when dealing with family, we do not have the luxury of merely winning an argument, but with family, we have burden of working it out.

Now I know we live in a broken world and this is idealistic in nature. And I know that at best effort, sometimes it is not possible to work things out, or safety and other issues get in the way, but the idea is still the same, we talk in such a way as to not win an argument, but to work it out because we have to.

That commitment to family means that we value and respect the people here so much that we will work it out with them.

The love inherent in the family of God is designed to be unconditional. That does not mean that we do not have conflict, but it means that we live through it for the purpose of community.

God’s love is unconditional, so is ours.

Family love is also deliberate.

In my morning devotions both yesterday and today, I was reading the feeding of 5,000 Jewish people in the desert and the feeding of 4,000 Canaanite people in another desert by Jesus.

I am reading it in the Gospel of Mark, but in both Mark and Matthew, the author points out both miracles and then has a section where Jesus chides the disciples for their lack of faith later when the food supplies are running low.

I have always read those miracles as miracles that prove that if we, like the little boy, give our loaves and fishes, a small portion, then God will take what we have, and by the power of the Holy Spirit multiply it into miraculous force and great things could happen.

It was always a lesson in faith about giving our little bit to God and then God would multiply it.

It depended on a visible sign. But I wonder now more and more if the actual miracle was the miracle of sharing.

First, the boy offering his gifts as a metaphor for his talents is not present in the second account.

The emphasis in either point is not on the boy who gave, but on Jesus who made it adequate.

But the miracle of sharing, the miracle of community, the miracle of trusting God for the moment by giving what we have now to those in need with the trust that God will provide in the future seems to make more sense today to me.

But more than that, the disciples reaction to the need of the crowd and the problem with feeding the crowd is telling.

The crowd is hungry and Jesus tells the disciples to feed them.

Their answer is that the task is enormous. “A year’s wages would be needed to buy that much food,” they say.

The task is enormous.

They are being commanded to care for others.

Actually caring for others takes the willingness to sacrifice time and effort for them.

I hope it was the miracle of sharing because the value of stopping, caring and nurturing others is what it means to be a part of the family of God.

In First Corinthians 12, we get another look at this family called the church as it relates to the fact that it is also an individual body.

When one part of the body hurts or is sick, the entire body is in distress and is distracted.

When one part of the body does not do its job, or cannot do its job, the whole body, again, is affected and at times, it can even die.

Every part of the family is important and needs to be cared for and nurtured.

And again, it takes time and effort.

Actually, I am becoming more aware that it takes a lot of time and effort.

I remember taking biology in college and the professor was working out the ratio of sunlight to the growth of a plant and less than .01% of the sunlight is actually absorbed and used for growth.

And then I look at the corn as it gets tall (Lord, give us more rain), and I realize that all that sun energy is used to produce this big plant and out of that plant, we just use a part of a part of a part. The carbohydrates inside the husk of the kernel provides energy for our bodies. It is less than .01% of the plant.

So, the energy from the sun is reduced from an hundredth percent to a thousandth percent and then it gets consumed by the body and only a small percentage of that is actually used by us.

I remember thinking that God designed an incredibly inefficient system.

And then I thought of the thousands of years that humanity spent most of its effort just making sure that this process happened year after year and I realized something.

The culture does not live that way anymore. We don’t walk past our neighbors house on the way to the local village where we know and grew up with everyone anymore.

This ancient system of a yearly cycle of a lot of effort to survive brought the community together to a place where they depended on each other.

God designed the world for us to stop, take the time to nurture and care for each other. I see the importance and value of community. I see the beauty and value of the Church that, according to our scripture this morning is intentional about including outsiders.

I see that God designed the family, both the nuclear family and the Church family to be this place where people take the time to stop, care for and nurture one another.

I believe that we have to be intentional about maintaining our sense of family and interdependence since we live in a fast paced society and continue to build a place where we can all nurture and be nurtured.