God's Beloved Family

Matthew 25:34 – “Then he will say to the sheep on his right, ‘Come, blessed of my father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.’”

Two things strike me about this passage. First the phrase ‘foundation of the world’ implies that there is a plan, and that those who go along with the plan inherit the kingdom. I will come back to that in a later post. For now, I want to think about inheritance. In this time of CoVid-19, I see a lot of articles about end-of-life directives and wills. Although, my spouse and I had a will when we lived in Chicago, we have not updated it. We were inspired, as I’m sure many were, to update it as well as our healthcare directives. This entails thinking about who we want to deal with our possessions, and who we want to get our stuff. That led us to thinking about our families and friends. 

Families and friends are embedded in the concept of inheritance. We don’t give our money to random strangers. We want to support our families and friends, give them something to remember us by. In this passage, the word inheritance tells us that God wants us to be her family, that God considers us family. You’ve probably heard this many times, but let’s take a moment to drink that in: God considers us her family.

 

How does that make you feel? It makes me feel loved, but also a sense of belonging. That sense is hard to feel right now between our friends and family, because many of us are at home and cannot visit. Zoom, Skype, and FaceTime help, but they are no substitute for hugs. Good news! We don’t need computer programs or phones to feel loved by God. We only need to remember that God loves us and we belong to God and to God’s community. That is part of our inheritance as members of the family of God, the Church of Christ.

In times like these, especially if we or our family members have this disease, it is easy to lose that sense of community and belonging. If we have lost our job and must now stay at home, many questions assail us: how to pay rent, how to feed ourselves and our families, how to survive? For homeless people, the question becomes where to shelter. For prisoners, there is only dependence on others to keep them safe. For refugees and immigrants, there are worries about family members being incarcerated at the border or being incarcerated at the border oneself. There is also the ever-present danger that the president will try to take away more of our rights, more land granted to Native Americans, more money from taxpayers under the guise of emergency. There is no question that this is a trying time for all of us. The future seems uncertain and anxiety increases. The isolation only encourages anxiety and loneliness.

I have read many accounts of survivors of the Holocaust. One thing the survivors tend to have in common is that they found ways to feel loved and connected to God even in the hell of the concentration camps. They didn’t lose their humanity; they helped others. (This is not to say that those who died did not do these things.) I have found that doing something to make another person’s day brighter or to help them in some intangible way makes me feel more hopeful, more joyful, blessed of the father. I feel God’s presence when I am sharing what I have with others. I feel loved when I do things for others. I feel a sense of community when I do things for others. Even if all I do is fix dinner for my spouse and me. There are other ways to connect with God: pray, meditate, draw, listen to music, play music, write, dance, clean, cook, listen to a sermon, the possibilities are endless. 

My prayer for all of us today is that we feel God’s presence, that we feel connected with God as family members, and beloved as one who belongs. Because we all belong to God, however we conceive of God.

B