Jesus's Chosen Family
Pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers.” - Matthew 12:49
Let’s stick with this idea about ‘chosen family.’ In Jesus’ last moments of his life, he surrounded himself with friends (Matthew 26). It’s not that Jesus is rejecting his family, but rather modeling that family extends beyond the people you are related to. Family, is also, chosen.
This notion of chosen family is especially important in a community like ours, City Church. As a beloved community of misfits, we all come with a wide variety of experiences with family. Some of our community has been rejected, outcast, and cut off by family based on beliefs and identity. Others in our community have lost family. For some, family is a turbulent place of fractured relationships and relational instability. Or maybe family lives far away and the day-to-day feels distant from connection to family. For some, family generally offers a place of safety and warmth. “Family” means many different things for each of us with many different connotations. In this holiday season, when the word “family” is said, the acute reality of our situations is more alive than ever.
Whatever family means to us--chosen family invites us as a community to reimagine family. Chosen family provides one another connection, belonging, support, and acceptance. Chosen family moves beyond individualism and the containment of the nuclear family and towards communalism and kinship. Chosen family offers friends’ rides to the doctors, a couch to sleep on, a meal to make together, conversation in pajamas, unedited belly laughs, showing up with soup when someone is sick, calling just to say hi. Chosen family is a well to draw from in the good times and the bad.
I imagine Jesus’ warm inclusion of misfits modeled this type of chosen family or another way to say it is, “the kingdom of God.” Rachel Held Evans imagines God’s kingdom similarly, “This is what God's kingdom is like: a bunch of outcasts and oddballs gathered at a table, not because they are rich or worthy or good, but because they are hungry, because they said yes. And there's always room for more.”
Today, would you reflect deeper on what chosen family means to you? How does chosen family resemble the kingdom of God lived out? How have you been embraced by others? What areas of your life can you extend kinship to others?
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- Dottie Oleson