Lent 5
22 March 2026
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
Gregory Pope
LIVING OUR BAPTISM #6: BELONGING TO A FAMILY OF FAITH, BAPTIZED INTO THE BODY OF CHRIST
Galatians 3.26-29, 4.4-6. 1 Corinthians 12.12-14. 1 Peter 2.9-10
One of the greatest of human needs is the need to belong. Theodore Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, often delivered lectures to aspiring children’s book writers, and he would tell them that a children’s book should address at least one of what he called “the seven needs of children.” Near the top of the list was “the need to belong.”1
It is one of the crucial questions of our lives: “Where do I belong?” There is a reason so many children’s classics – and adult classics too – have as the main character an orphan looking for home, a place to belong. Every child has a physical, emotional, and spiritual need to belong. One might say there is an orphan in all of us, homesick for home, searching for our true identity.
Baptism is about belonging to God and belonging to a family of faith. Paul wrote of this in his letter to the Galatians as receiving adoption as children of God. God has sent the Spirit of his Son (Jesus) into our hearts, (and we now call God): “Abba! Father!
It’s been said that Jesus is the head of God’s Universal Adoption Agency! Indeed he is! Jesus came not only to start a movement of the love of God and neighbor he called the Kingdom of God. He also came to form a family of faith, what Paul called the Body of Christ. It began with the calling of the Twelve and then moved to a larger circle of disciples that included women as well. Jesus saw the community he was forming as a new kind of family, “more large than home,”2 deeper and broader than our blood family. Those who joined him became his mother, brother, sister.
Baptism is an initiation rite of belonging, belonging to God and to one another in a family of faith. So Baptism is best practiced in the presence of a church family. It is not solely an individual experience. In Baptism you join a family of billions throughout history.
I wonder: Is there a deeper human need than belonging? We try in America to champion an extreme individualism, but this project has led to an epidemic of loneliness. Maya Angelou in her poem “Alone,” writes
Lying, Thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where the water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
And I came up with one thing
And I don’t believe I’m wrong
That nobody
But nobody
Can make it here alone.3
Dietrich Bonhoeffer said: “The church is the church only as it is there for others.”4 When we live together in community, taking care of one another as a family, we are being the Church. God created the Church as a family of faith so that we all might experience spiritual and emotional belonging.
You don’t join a church as a moral obligation or to appear respectable in society or to create business partnerships or to find a romantic partner. You join a church to have a place to belong beyond your biological family, in case, God forbid, your biological family falls apart, or you become the last living member of your blood family. You join a church to say: “These are my people. This is where I belong. This is where I am loved and cared for. And these are the people with whom I serve who help me become Christlike.”
As Paul thought about the church one of his favorite phrases was that we are “members of one another.” We are not a collection of isolated individual members. Paul says we are members of one another baptized into the body of Christ. We are not first members of an organization or institution, but members of one another in the Body of Christ. As such when one of us hurts we all hurt, and when one of us rejoices we all rejoice. Together we grieve one another’s losses and celebrate one another’s joys.
As members of the Body of Christ Paul says we are each of us different parts of the Body with different gifts and different needs. And we honor the diversity of everyone’s gifts and everyone’s needs. Gifts and needs that know no boundaries of race, gender, or social class. Paul said that in the church: There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
These revolutionary words of Paul where all distinctions that divide us are broken down have often been too much for the church to handle. It was a social revolution in the making, a vision that still challenges us. 2,000 years later we’re still running to keep up with Jesus. I wonder: Can we form a community where male and female, white, black, and brown, rich and poor and everyone in between, more educated and less educated, liberal and conservative can live together in love? Or are there differences and divisions among us we will not allow the love of God to bridge?
The gospel truth is that in the beloved baptized community of Christ where we are following Jesus, naming Him “Lord, and pledging allegiance to the Kingdom of God, all our differences lose their power to divide. But we have to ask: Have we let that power loose among us? Is a diversified united family of faith what we truly want to be?
To speak of the church as the family of faith and the Body of Christ has an ethical dimension in how we relate to one another, how we seek to love and not hurt each other. Paul says we put away falsehood and speak the truth in love. We covenant to live together in ways that honor the dignity and worth of every person. We do not let disagreements tear at the fabric of the church family. Our differences are something we honor as we walk the path together toward deeper truth and greater understanding. We talk it out. We work it out. We love it out.
And because in Christ all our differences have lost their power to divide the Apostle Peter says to us, the church: You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people . . . Once you were no-people, but now you are God’s people. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
Peter says as the church we are a “chosen people”. The phrase “chosen people” has been used to do terrible things in history, so we use it carefully. The truth is: We have been chosen by God to tell others that we are all chosen and invite them to claim their chosenness. Just as Abraham and Sarah were told that they and their descendants would be blessed so that they might be a blessing to all the earth, so we are the Beloved of God so that we may tell all people that they too are the Beloved.
Peter says we are a “royal priesthood”. If, as we said last week, Baptism is the ordination of all Christians to be ministers, then we are as Baptist preacher Carlyle Marney said, “priests to each other.” We offer the grace of God to one another as we love and care for one another. We are all ministers here! There is no spiritually elite class called “clergy”. If I ever act like that, well, you should remind me otherwise. As the saying goes, you may “disabuse me of that notion.”
We are, all of us, “God’s people.” God has called us into being. Once we had no place to belong, now we have a place to belong. And it’s all by the mercy of God, Peter says, lest you think we are better than most to be called God’s people. Here in this place we are God’s people called into being by the mercy of God. We are members of God’s family. We all belong here.
A reporter once toured the country interviewing the elderly about their earliest memories. One of the people he meets is Bernum Ledford, a hundred-and-something year old Kentucky farmer. Bernum remembers being introduced to his great-great-grandmother as a child. Listen as he tells of the encounter:
“It’s Sunday afternoon, and my family decides to take me over to visit my great-great-grandmother. It’s a long trip. I’ve never met her. I don’t want to go all that way just to see some old woman. To make matters worse, when we finally get to her house, I see that she’s not only old, but blind, and not only blind but mean looking. And so, at first, I’m afraid of her.
My father says to her, ‘We brought Bernum to see you.’ She turns in my direction with outstretched arms and long, bony fingers and says: ‘Bring him here!’
They have to push me across the room. But when I finally get to her, I find that those hands that frightened me are gentle. She traces the outline of my face, and runs her fingers through my hair and down across my shoulders. And then I hear her whisper: ‘This boy’s one of ours. This child’s part of our family. This one belongs to us!’”
If you could hear God speak to you at your Baptism or to each of us in this room today, God might sound like a great-great-grandmother, tracing the outline of your face, running fingers through your hair and down across your shoulders, whispering about each of us: “This is one is ours. I called this one by name. This child’s part of our family. This one belongs to us.”
And that, my friends, is the gospel truth.
____________________
- Brian Jay Jones, Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination, Dutton, 2019, 204.
- A phrase belonging to novelist Thomas Wolfe.
- Maya Angelou, “Alone,” The Complete Poetry, Random House, 2015, 73
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Works, vol. 8, Fortress Press, 2010, 502-3.