Exhortation for September 28:

We sometimes think of the church as a collection of families, and in some respects that is true. More fundamentally, though, the church is a family. We are brothers and sisters of one another because we are all brothers and sisters of Jesus, whose Father is also our Father. This is what Jesus says in our sermon text this morning. When his own mother and brothers come to visit Him, he doesn’t stop what He is doing to see them, and He even seems to deny that He has any obligation to them. Instead, He redefines His family as those who “hear the word of God and do it.”

This is not an isolated statement. In fact, one of the most striking things about Jesus’ teaching, especially to a Jew of the first century, was His redefinition of the boundaries of family. One of a man’s most basic obligations was to bury his family members, particularly his parents; but when a disciple asked to bury his father before following Jesus, Jesus said, “Let the dead bury their dead.” Honor and love to parents was an obligation so fundamental that it barely needed to be mentioned; but Jesus said, “You must hate your father and mother to be My disciple.” When someone exclaimed, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that nursed you,” Jesus answered “Blessed, rather, are those who hear the word of God and keep it.” He insisted that He had come to bring a sword, not peace, and that the sword would divide families — father and son, mother and daughter, daughter-in-law against mother-in-law and so on.

For Jesus, the basic family was not the blood family but the family of disciples, the band of brothers and sisters gathered around Him. For Jesus, blood was not thicker than water; baptismal water was the thickest bond possible. For Jesus, the family was defined by the table: those who ate and drank with Him constituted His family.

This thread of Jesus’ teaching has many implications, particularly about how Christians should respond to contemporary attacks on the nuclear family. But I want to make an application closer to home: A family where parents don’t know the children and children never talk to the parents is a highly dysfunctional family. And a church that is divided into groups by age, where the kids don’t know the seniors, and the students never talk to the middle-aged members, where each member family is closed to every other family — that is a highly dysfunctional church.

As we are getting TRC underway, it is imperative that we not only believe we are a family, but that we live as a family. It’s very comfortable to remain within your own segment of the church, and have minimal contact with those outside your group. But that is not how families live, at least not healthy families. Don’t just say that these people are your brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers; act like it. Jesus’ words about the church family are among the words that we should not only hear but do .