Following Sunday’s sermon, the following joke was shared with me. I’m told it is an original! “When God asked Abraham what sort of family he wanted to have. Abraham said, ‘I’ll have one with the Lot!’” (If you’re missing the punchline, go back and read Genesis 12:1-9!)
But it reminded me of a story (I almost included in the sermon) that Jim Barr, a former minister of this church, told years ago about a friend of his, an older woman, who received a knock on the door one day. There were two women there and they said they were looking for the house of… and they named this woman’s mother. They said they believed that was her married name and would it be all right to ask some questions about her?
The woman told them that was her mother’s name, that she had died a long time ago, and invited them in. They were initially awkward, but then it came out. Their mother had recently passed away, but they had just discovered that she was adopted, and they believed her birth mother was Jim’s friend’s mother.
As you can imagine Jim’s friend was in shock, but they told her what they knew; the year that their mother had been born – it was just before Jim’s friend’s mother had moved to Melbourne from the country and married her father – and they showed her their mother’s birth certificate – with her mother’s maiden name on – and they pulled out photos. There was an unmistakable family resemblance. The woman could see herself and her family members in the face of this woman and those of her family.
And these three women cried together and embraced each other – recognising they were her nieces, and she was their aunt. She had found she had more family than she realised!
This is one of the changes we are facing as a denomination. Can we draw boundaries around who is part of God’s family – who is part of our family – and who is not? Are we prepared – like God is – to have a family with the lot!
This was one of the significant challenges for the early church. How was a church of people with different ethnic and cultural and religious backgrounds, with different beliefs about diet and purity, to come together? Could they recognise the family resemblances, the work of the Spirit, among them? Could they discover family they never knew?
And so, Paul writes to the Galatians, “As many of you were baptised into Christ have clothes yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus…” and Paul also incorporates Genesis 12:1-9, “And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.”
The question for our churches is, if Gentiles were included then (Acts 15) based on the evidence of the Spirit in their lives, shouldn’t LGBTIQ+ people be included now based on the evidence of the Holy Spirit in their lives?
We are called to be family-oriented people – as I mentioned on Sunday. And sometimes that means discovering we have more family than we realised!