Chosen Family

Matthew 10:24-39

One of my least favorite cultural tropes of evangelical christianity in general is the almost celebrated status of “persecuted” that many Christians seem to wear as a badge of honor and confirmation of their beliefs as the “true” expression of Christianity.

There are a lot of passages in scripture that talk about how Christians will face persecution and must not fear “those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” Persecution is a cherished narrative of White Evangelical Christianity—a narrative that leads Christians to feel a sense of righteousness because their beliefs might be mocked, or they might experience being treated differently because of their faith.  This was something we heard a lot about in youth group when I was younger, and we were constantly marshalled—like troops facing the firing line—to have hope can be strong in our faith. It made us feel like heroes and convinced beyond any shadows of doubt that we held the truest truth.

And the fact of the matter is this: Christianity throughout its history was persecuted.

But there was a moment in history when Christianity merged with the Roman Empire through the conversion of the Emperor Constantine.

And from that point, the largest portion of Christianity, which became “Roman Catholic,” traded its persecuted status with an imperial one.

The uncomfortable fact for us Christians is that we have a lot of historic and contemporary persecution that we must answer for rather than remember for experiencing.  How do we manage the reality that people see us as the enemy? How do we reckon with the fact that many of the public facing aspects of Christianity are based in persecuting entire communities: Queer, immigrant, and in some extreme (and odd) cases, communities of color?

Jesus provocatively proclaimed that “I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law,and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” And this might sound confusing to us, but it makes me think of at least one of the communities agressively persecuted by Christianity, and how they cope with that persecution: the Queer community (It IS Pride month!).

Because, for a number of reasons (Christianity primarily among them), the queer community often has to find a chosen family when they are rejected or abandoned by the family they were born into. So in a very literal sense, there are many people who, in choosing to be who God made them to be, have been set against their father, mother, sister, or brother. 

Queer youth are 120% more likely to experience homelessness than their non-LGBTQ+ peers. And so much of this comes from the persecution driven by the Christian church and how that can result in families who set themselves against the queer child expressing who they are.

The church is at the root of this humanitarian disaster!

And the church could do something different. I wonder how the Church might be chosen family for those who have been estranged from the one they were born into. What if one way we can repent from our historic sin of homophobia and transphobia is to be a place that proclaims good news, specifically for them, instead of just tolerance? What if we can be a community where people who have lost so much can find life? 

I think that is how we might interpret Jesus’ challenge to us in a world where families and communities find themselves ruptured due to the forces of culture dominating fundamental human compassion and dignity. The church can be a part of a new normal where the definition of family is not bound up by cultural categories of birth and blood.

May our worthiness in Jesus’ sight be confirmed in how we become chosen family for communites who are persectuted and bullied today.