“For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God…heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ – if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.” Romans 8:14,17b
My parents used to tell of a story from family life – the time when my younger sister left home, at around age 9 years old. In protest at being made to eat her vegetables, my sister packed a suitcase and trudged down the path at the back of our house. She ended up at a sympathetic neighbour’s place a few doors down. Listening to the tale of woe the neighbour gently asked what my sister had packed in the suitcase. Upon opening it, my sister proudly displayed her running-away necessities. There was one item there – a can of baked beans.
Families can be fragile communities.
And as the first sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina says:
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
When we hear the image of the church, the body of Christ, being described as a family, this can be jarring for many. Rather than a place of sanctuary, belonging and nurturing, families can be the site of the opposites – and children growing up in such families are often affected for the rest of their lives.
And like unhappy families, the church can be a place of dysfunction, where some – expecting a welcoming, nurturing community – are hurt beyond belief and leave, never to return.
But the image of family for the church from our reading from Romans this week is startlingly different.
Firstly, it is completely made up of children! Who, amazingly, Paul describes as ‘heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ’. Who are led by the Spirit.
Yes, we who call ourselves the body of Christ, the children of God, bicker with each other. Yes, we hurt each other. And yes, like my younger sister, we want to leave – and quite often do so.
The children of God belong to a family that struggles with the tensions required to stay together – through thick and thin – a way of living together with all the messiness and chaos of earthly life. Belonging to this family is not to be taken for granted – we may call ourselves children of God, but we have an immense responsibility to care for each other, to be truthful even when it might hurt, to say sorry. And this is never more needed than when we feel like giving up and leaving this family.
Like the wind blowing fiercely this first week of winter, the Spirit of God cannot be contained by our will and conception of what it means to follow Christ together. But it is only together that we may be graced with the awareness of the presence of the One who promised to be with us till the end of the ages.
Happy Pentecost to my fellow sisters and brothers!
Ceri
