November 2019
"Family" is a word that institutions covet these days. Every business says its people are family. Schools, both private and public, insist that they too are a family. When I got on the airplane to Honolulu last month, even the CEO of Delta Airlines got up during the safety video and started going on about how he and I and the whole team at delta were a family.
As a full-time husband and father, as well as part-time pastor, it can get a little overwhelming being a member of so many families at the same time, though in truth I still only recognize the legitimacy of two: the natural family God instituted at creation, and the supernatural one He instituted in His Church.
The irony is that all this bombast about family is coming precisely at a time when the traditional family seems to be falling apart at the seams. We may be justly suspicious that when everyone in town begins saying all the same things at the same time, it's parrot-talk at best, and at worst an attempt to take the faithfulness we owe to our real families and redirect it to some less than worthy institution, whether a business, or school, or even the federal government. American businesses, and institutions that operate like them, are particularly guilty in this regard, for they seem to want total faithfulness from their people without thinking that they have an obligation to be faithful in return.
"It is no accident therefore that the most universally recognized symbol for the family is the dinner table,..."
All this of course raises the question "what is a family?" Everyone knows it's a social institution of sorts, but we would've never attached such sanctity to it in the first place if it had been just like any other social institution. For in a family - traditionally conceived - the members are joined together not as mutually consenting partners in a social contract, but by a power beyond their own willing and upon which all of them equally depend for their very life. As my grandmother once said, "you can't choose your relatives" (indeed, it's not uncommon for people in the same family to positively dislike one another). But the strength of the family lies precisely in the fact that the bond which joins them together does not depend on their likes or dislikes, but rather on their shared dependence on a common source of life: children on parents, parents on grandparents, and husbands and wives on one another. It's no accident therefore that the most universally recognized symbol for the family is the dinner table, for it is here that everyone receives their portion of the common life, and family is a matter of life and death.
With Thanksgiving coming up, many of us will be spending time with our biological families. In November,we will also begin celebrating communion at New Temple Evangelical Church, a reminder that all of us are members of a spiritual family. Let us resolve, however, that this sacred observance not be degraded into an empty ritual, or that the word "family" be degraded into a mere slogan that we slap onto a billboard because it makes for expedient advertising. If the church is to make good on its claim to being a family, then it cannot conduct itself like a religious business, where love and faithfulness are on everyone's lips, but where their hears are set on numbers, dollars, programs and policies. If they will know we are Christians by our love for one another, then they will know we are not Christians by our failure to love one another.
It is God who has brought us together, and not we ourselves. He is the source of our life, and not we ourselves. Therefore, let the blood that atones for the old life, and the Spirit that gives new life, be the source of our unity.
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