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Emerging
from a church service on the rural island of Jeju,
south of the Korean mainland, a ten-year-old girl
came running up to our group that included three
Caucasians.
“Are you Americans?”
she asked in perfect English with a slight Southern
drawl. She explained that her name was Rebecca,
and she was from Georgia but visiting relatives
in Korea. She looked greatly relieved to find us
and began to talk rapidly about how hard it was
to be an American in Korea. My Korean-born daughter,
Janell, immediately related to her.
“Everybody expects
you to speak Korean, don’t they?” Janell asked,
delighted to find someone else who understood. Rebecca
did speak Korean fairly well, but she found that
her Korean relatives expected her to think and do
things differently than her friends in America.
Living in another
culture is hard work for anyone, but it is especially
bewildering for children who may not understand
the differences or find themselves caught between
two cultures. They don’t have to move to another
country to experience this culture shock. The stark
contrast between life in a homeless shelter and
the normal world of schoolchildren, serious illness,
the violence of war and the horror of terrorist
attacks are only a few of the ways children experience
displacement and alienation.
How does Jesus expect
us to respond to these little ones?
Throughout the Bible,
we see the family as the social unit by which God
intended human beings to be nurtured and protected.
However, beginning with the first family, a long
history of dysfunction and violence has intruded
upon this community structure. But God, in his patience,
continues to care for his wayward children.
At one point, God
made an object lesson of a man named Hosea. God
told Hosea to marry a prostitute, Gomer. They had
two sons and a daughter. Apparently, the children
were a great disappointment, and Gomer was unfaithful.
Then God revealed how the nation of Israel, his
family, was equally faithless. God poured out his
heart of compassion by saying, “When Israel was
a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called
my son. The more I called them, the more they went
from me. . . . Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to
walk, I took them up in my arms. . . . I led them
with cords of human kindness, with bands of love.
I was to them like those who lift infants to their
cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them” (Hos 11:1-4).
That’s what it means
to be a child of God—to experience that kind of
compassionate, faithful care, even when we are running
in the opposite direction. Our heavenly Father is
constantly bending down to care for his children.
Sometimes he works directly through his Spirit but
primarily through his body, the church.
The story of salvation
in the Bible is a record of how God has worked to
redeem the family—not just the nuclear family as
our culture has idealized it, but the extended family
or “household.” That includes multiple generations
of blood relatives, close friends, those related
through faith and even the strangers in our midst.
Deuteronomy 10:19
tells us, “You shall also love the stranger, for
you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Jesus
reinforced this in Matthew 25:35, saying, “For I
was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and
you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger
and you welcomed me.” James builds on that theme,
saying, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before
God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and
widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained
by the world” (Jas 1:27).
The purpose of the
church, the family of God, is to glorify God by
reaching out in love to the strangers among us—the
“orphans and widows”—who are suffering, hungry,
homeless, abused and alienated. We are to welcome
them into our household. Of course, that means sharing
the family values and, most of all, introducing
these newly-adopted family members to the Father
and his Son, who can be trusted completely. It also
means that we share our material resources and open
our hearts in compassion.
This is a family
built entirely upon adoption. Ephesians 1:5 explains,
“He destined us for adoption as his children through
Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of
his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that
he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.” We were
all aliens and strangers at one point. God in his
mercy drew us into his family. The apostle Paul
tells us, “But when the fullness of time had come,
God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the
law, in order to redeem those who were under the
law, so that we might receive adoption as children.
And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit
of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’
So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if
a child then also an heir, through God” (Gal 4:4-7).
Rebecca and Janell
both needed the security of family and culture to
give them a sense of identity and belonging. Each
of them found it in their nuclear families but also
in the warmth and love of the body of Christ.
Now it is our turn
to return the favor. Each time we care for a homeless
child or family, each time we seek to cross cultural
barriers to communicate in love, each time we risk
our status and resources to welcome a fellow human
being into God’s family, we extend the table in
God’s household. What else can we do in response
to the bounteous love that we have already received
from the Father but share it with our actual and
potential brothers and sisters in Christ?—JAS
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