"We are family!"
(I hope that some of you are now singing, ‘I’ve got all my sisters with me’, in echo of Sister Sledge!)
'We are family' was the refrain of the Summit between the Diocese of Kimberley and Kuruman and the Diocese of Oxford, that I’ve just returned from. ‘Family’ was the way we addressed, how we felt, about one another.
Family is a strikingly counter-cultural way to describe people who live a 20-hour journey away; whose first language and life experiences are different to our own. We don’t look or sound or dance alike. (At the Summit our K&K sisters and brothers danced with style and exuberance. The rest of us did what can only be described as the Awkward Oxford Shuffle.) And yet, beyond difference, and enhanced by diversity, we found family.
As I was leaving the UK to travel to K&K, the lampposts, roundabouts, pedestrian crossings and bridges of our communities were being decorated with flags, designed to insist on a much narrower definition of family and belonging.
These flags, displayed in this way, have been weaponised. They are ‘no entry’ signs for those who would make their home amongst us. They don’t welcome but exclude. These flags threaten. These symbols wound.
As Christian people we’re called, instead, to multiply those moments from the Gospels where Jesus radically redefines family. Live out that episode, for example, where Jesus appears to reject his family – who have, in fact, first rejected him – by saying that his family, his mother and his brothers are to be found, beyond biology, in those who do the will of God (Mark 3.31-35). Or reflect the agonising selflessness and imagination of the cross where Jesus dies for his family and asks Mary to become mother to his friend (John 19.26).
The family we found - we formed - at Kimberley Cathedral was this sort of family; one united, not by DNA or culture, but by staying close to Jesus; where difference was not something to be feared or excluded but embraced as, together, we imaged God. We are more when we are together.
Forming family across difference, not despite it, family where we delight in diversity, is an urgent and prophetic task for us. At a time when so many are defining themselves to the exclusion of the other, we need to show a different way, to point to the kingdom of heaven, where God will gather us from every tribe and language and people and nation (Revelation 7.9). And we need to live out this family life after the pattern of Jesus, where family life is characterised by mutuality, attentiveness, sacrifice.
And so, although I haven’t got all of my sisters (and brothers) with me, because Thato, Tshenolo and Tefo continue in South Africa (with a little bit of my heart), we are family. Let us live it.
+Mary
Bishop of Reading