Sunday, September 14, 2014 | 4:00 p.m.

All in the Family

Layton Williams
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 67
Romans 14:1-12

I grew up as the youngest of four kids in a big blended family. My favorite times were always when my two older stepsisters—Margaret and Meredith—came to visit and our whole family was together. Those weekends and holidays were fun and boisterous times, but the truth is it never took long for drama to break out. We’d find ourselves arguing about who got to boss around whom, who got away with more, who was right, and who got to decide how we spent our relatively limited family time. I’ll admit that I was often at the center of that drama. But it sometimes seemed like my big brother, Josh, in particular only existed to annoy me, and I suspect he often felt the same way about me. Even as we loved each other, we couldn’t help fighting.

Family is complicated.

So it’s a little troublesome that in this passage Paul ties the idea of mutual welcome and unity to being brothers and sisters, or family, in Christ. In fact, this whole passage in Paul’s letter to the Romans is a bit strange. From the very beginning he seems to be talking out of both sides of his mouth. “Welcome the weak in faith,” he says with just a hint of passive aggression. Even as he tells us not to judge one another, he can’t help but call out some as “weak.” It’s almost as if Paul believes unity is important and must be talked about, but he’s not quite up to the task.

I confess that I often find Paul and his attitude frustrating, but as I read this passage I realized that maybe he frustrates me because I relate to him a little too much. Like Paul, I believe that we are all united in God’s love for us. I believe that this should be named and talked about. But I admit that I worry whether I’m up to the task of doing so. As soon as I started thinking through what unity and family really mean for us, things got complicated.

Too often, I think, we confuse “unity” with consensus and hollow peace. I don’t think the unity that we are bound by in Christ means that we should permit injustice to persist for even a moment just to keep the comfortable comfortable or to keep people in the room. I don’t believe unity means forgetting about what matters to us or agreeing with each other just to avoid conflict. And based on what Paul says in this letter about not judging others whose convictions and practices are different than ours, I don’t believe he thinks so either.

Instead of telling us to forget our differences, he merely tells us to remember first that we are sisters and brothers in the one God: family. But as we’ve already established, family, too, is complicated. In fact, the more I wrestled with this sermon and what to say, the more I found myself wondering whether Paul even thought about how complicated all of this stuff is.

Surely he would have chosen his words more carefully if he’d known that in this day and age families could be shattered by dysfunction, abuse, prejudice, and conflict. After all, minor squabbles between siblings are hardly the biggest conflicts that families find themselves embroiled in. In our families, we disagree about politics and faith, relationships, sexuality, and the fundamentals of how we live our lives. Despite our love for one another, at our worst, we wound and are wounded by each other. Family can be so complicated.

So what was Paul thinking? Maybe he was thinking that actually does sound a lot like church.

The community that Paul was writing to in Rome was struggling to overcome the things that divided them. And they weren’t small things either. The questions of diet and practice were a part of separate traditions that had always defined Jews and Gentiles, and now, in the face of these differing, deep convictions, the community was struggling to come together without abandoning these things that so mattered to them. And so they were judging and dismissing and rejecting one another even while they were held together by a common faith. And ever since those earliest Christian days, we’ve been arguing about how we love and whom we love and how we worship and what justice even means. Even as we try to be church together, we can’t agree on what exactly church is.

But Paul suggests that in spite of these differences we are family in Christ. And it matters that Christ is what makes us family. We know that in Christ we find a vision of the very best that we could be. So to think of ourselves as family in Christ, family rooted in God’s love, means family at its very best.

And even with all the ways that family can be complicated, we know that at its best family can be an amazing thing—that community, whether you were born into it or have painstakingly built it, that knows you deeply. The people you carry in your heart because you share something deep at your core. Those people whom you love and who love you no matter what you do or how far away you go.

As a child, I loved to get my mom talking about all the gifts she saw in each of us kids. We were all different, but she could just go on and on about how Josh could charm anyone and Meredith could ace every class or job and Margaret was so caring and how I could think so deeply. I loved listening to her talk about us. There was such love in her voice. It didn’t matter that we were different or that we fought like crazy; she loved us each for who we were. It was amazing to glimpse myself and my brother and stepsisters through my mother’s eyes.

Even in the worst moments of family conflict, I have held onto those conversations and my mother’s love for each of us. And it has given me hope that whatever comes between us, we are never really lost to one another.

If this is how a mother can love her children, how much greater then is God’s love for us? Paul’s letter reminds us that we are all bound up in that love—whether we can see each other through God’s loving eyes or not. Paul’s message is that whatever stories divide us and threaten to shatter us, what makes us family is that we all belong to one common, deeper story. A story that begins with the world being created by God in love and each of us created in that same love from which nothing can ever separate us. It’s not that our other stories, our other convictions, don’t matter. They do—and they are worth fighting for—but even as we fight, we are still bound up together in a deeper story.

Recognizing that we are family first means recognizing that we were made in love to love one another. And that when the brokenness of this world—when injustice and inequality—keep us from being able to love each other that way, we do not settle for a lesser kind of love. We do not settle for the brokenness that divides us. We do not settle for empty peace and hollow consensus. We fight for a world where family at its best—in Christ—can be lived out.

But Paul knew, and we know, that this world that we have now is broken. And sometimes loving each other and loving the world God calls for means we cannot exist without disagreement and conflict and even separation. On the days when unity and family are the hardest to understand and the most impossible to live into, that’s when it’s most important to remember that the story of this moment and this age, the story of discord and disunity—that is not, ultimately, the story that we belong to.

In peace and in conflict, in difference and in brokenness, in life and in death—we belong, all of us, to God. That is our deeper story. We were created in love and we are still held in that same love. All of us. Even when we cannot love each other, God loves us. And it is a powerful love—more powerful than any force of brokenness. It is the love that drew the universe into being, that created beauty from chaos. It is the love that runs through every spark and quark of creation and deep, deep through every human heart (no matter how deeply buried it seems). It is the love that turns death into resurrection and sin into new life. That is the love that knows us and binds us and makes us family. It has the first and final word. It is where we all began, and it is where we will one day be called home.

Here’s the truth: living in unity is hard. Maybe Paul isn’t expecting us to figure it out. Maybe he knows that we’ll never quite get it figured out on our own, just like he couldn’t quite figure it out for himself. So he’s showing us where to look for hope: in Christ. In Christ whose love for us and desire for reconciliation with us all overcame even the boundaries of death and hell. So even in the worst moments, when unity seems impossible in this life, when the enmity between us feels like hell and our only faithful way forward takes us on separate paths, we remember that our common, deeper story as family in Christ is still one of reconciliation and love.

When it is all so complicated that we have forgotten how to even talk about unity and family, we remember our common story. We take heart in the love that claims us all, and we hold onto hope for a better world. Because with a love like that, in a family like that—anything is possible.