Belonging

I want to use the collect for this Sunday as my sermon focus, more than that, a particular phrase from the collect.  “Grant, O merciful God, that your Church, being gathered together in unity by your Holy Spirit …”

To be gathered together in unity by God’s Spirit.  That brings to my mind a picture of people being included, united, brought together by a common bond that has as its purpose doing good.  It points to what it means to belong to a fellowship or organization that honestly represents the love of God.  That can be a most potent and life giving thing.

Have you ever considered how important it is to belong?  It is one of the central issues of human existence.  In fact, it is one of the first and most basic concerns of human life.  Because, when we discover in our hearts that we belong, in other words that God wants us to be here, our lives take on a whole new energy and meaning.  Truly belonging and knowing we truly belong gives us a sense of deep security.   What that means is that somewhere deep within us our personhood is validated, ratified by others outside our natural family.  Because of that we are brought closer to the realization of God’s unchanging acceptance of us.

In all these facets belonging is something that we all need, deep within ourselves.  That need cannot be satisfied by cheap substitutes, even though we may try to do just that.  Only genuine love, the kind that comes from God, can give us the sense of belonging that satisfies our deep need to belong.  The pathway to belonging is through our faith and the Eucharist reminds us each time we participate in it that God’s love for us is unchangeable. I want to spend the next brief minutes with you looking at belonging and its implications for us as members of the Christian faith and as children of the living God.  For me, that brings to mind Baptism.

Baptism is the Sacrament of belonging; the sign that the Church uses to tell us of God's awesome and eternal love for all of us.  In Baptism we welcome into the fellowship of the Church the adults and children who, like us, seek a deeper knowledge and experience of the grace of God.  Our task, as the Church, is to build a fellowship into which new members may come and experience the grace of God.  Each new Baptism in the Church brings this responsibility sharply into focus; we are reminded that God has chosen us and we, in our turn, are to be his agents by welcoming others into the fellowship of grace and respecting their right to belong to it.

As Christians we are called to help take the message of God's love into a needy world.  Belonging is so crucial for us humans that when we feel that we don't belong we can actually get sick.  There are a lot of people in this world who don't feel that they belong and there is a lot of sickness originating from that single feeling.  I see that as a significant piece of information in terms of how we are called by God, through our Baptisms, to live and work in the world.  We are here to help those who are on the "outside", begin the process of feeling that they have a place where they are on the "inside," that God wants them to be here.

Sometimes the sickness that originates from not belonging is so virulent that some people do not respond to the outreach of the friends and family.  For belonging is a mutual action, it involves being chosen and choosing.  You cannot belong to anything if you're not chosen for membership and by the same token you do not really belong unless you accept what it means to be a member.  As Episcopal Christians we realize that member in the “Family of Faith” is strange to modern ears, due to membership requirements in clubs, service organizations, and other secular groups.  Member in the “Family of Faith” is automatic from God's side, the Creator wants us to belong, God's Son came into our transitory world so that we might know that we belong to his eternal kingdom.  But sometimes the message doesn’t get through and we see people striving in all kinds of ways to validate their personal niche in God’s Creation.  St. Augustine, many centuries ago, put this need in a particularly concise and meaningful way; he spoke of human relationship with God and proclaimed that, “Our hearts are restless ‘till they find their rest in Thee.”  The great frustration for modern hearts and minds is that we look for the validation to be evidenced in tangible, material ways, and that’s not the way God’s love is discovered.  It is discovered it is discovered by an act of trust, by having faith that God’s love for us is real and under girds our whole existence and that of all Creation as well.  That's all well and good and perhaps without knowing it we carry that need deep within our inner selves and the tension of the need to belong and to have evidence of it can be a profoundly frustrating experience.  We all want to have the security that belonging and trusting that we do belong, regardless of what the world around us may seem to claim.  That's why the Church has the Sacrament of Baptism, to proclaim as a true certainty that we do belong here and that our belonging has a meaning.  Each of us may find that the sense of belonging fluctuates; sometimes it’s strong, at other times it seems to have vanished.  That is why the Sacrament of the Eucharist is so crucial.  It gives us the opportunity to experience, at a deeper than conscious level the constant presence of God’s love for us.

To belong then, we must first understand that we have already been chosen, through our birth, by God.  The difficult part of the equation is for us to understand and trust this a truth and to choose back.  And when we do choose back, we become aware of why we are here; to find ways to touch the lives of other people in such a way that they also have their belonging validated.  We can see this dynamic at work in a family.  Parents may choose to love a child, or a child its parents, and when the choosing is reciprocal there is tremendous potential for overcoming the obstacles of life.  We see evidence of this, in terms of needy people in the work of Mother Theresa.  Her constant care helped countless poor to renew and re-direct their lives; they knew, at last, that they really did belong.

All of this potential exists and comes to fruition because some clear cut things happen for people when they know they truly belong.  Let's see how this would work if we apply it to our membership in Church so we may more fully understand what we are doing on behalf of persons we welcome through Baptism.

Here is what happens when you know yourself to belong to the Church, and have accepted the call of God to belong with all that it entails.

When you truly choose to respond to God's call to belong to God's kingdom, you discover that you're not alone.  All of us are born as separate and distinct persons and that means that no one can literally get inside our selfhood and live it for us, in that sense we are alone.  Yet, there's more, when we come alive to the realization that God's living Spirit resides in us without dominating our lives, yet as a loving presence that accepts us and unites us with the Eternal, our solitude as individuals is radically changed.  We know ourselves to be, and to belong in a profoundly moving manner.  Not only is God's presence far more real, but also the sense of fellowship we have with other Christians becomes far more powerful, in fact the whole world around us looks different to our eyes.  We see, in a very real sense, as God sees, and such a vision changes the way we interact with others and regard ourselves.  The sense of acceptance that this kind of belonging brings to a person provides a strength that helps us to transcend the pain of all of the mistakes, tragedies, and stupidities that we humans all too often perpetrate upon ourselves and others.  This realization of belonging, in its turn, generates a desire to include others in the awareness of this profound acceptance and to do so in the gentle way that God accepts us.  All of this brings to a human life a sense of meaning that helps us to meet and master the worst that life can throw at us and at the same time to rejoice and accept all of the blessings that life holds as well.

All of the things that I have said about belonging are inherent in the Baptism service and in the Eucharist.  As we go through these ancient and Holy actions let us be aware that they are as contemporary as the moment in which we now live, they speak to us of an eternal answer to a deep human need, the need to belong and to respond to what belonging means.  As you receive the bread and wine, the Body and Blood of Christ, at the altar rail, I pray that you may also receive a sense of the deep and abiding love that God bestows upon you, and declared through God's Son.  In these actions, God is telling you, as clearly as it can be told, "You are one of my children and you always will be."  And I pray that you may take that love with you wherever you go, to bestow it upon the people with whom you live, work, and have contact in your life.  Most of us know how big a difference a sense of belonging makes for us.  If belonging makes a difference for us as individuals, think what it can do when we spread it around in a responsible and loving way.  Remember the words of the Baptismal anointing, place your own name in the spot that needs a name and then hear, "you are anointed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ's own forever."  If this assurance resides at the heart of who we are our lives will be different and they will make a difference.  Every Baptism and every Eucharist is a reminder to each of us that God is always with us.  And when we do a deed or say a word to bless another person's life God magnifies that word or deed in ways that we cannot conceive.  These are marks of belonging that each of us has known, our mission is to magnify such events until the earth is filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.