In the UK, Credo Care has just celebrated its twentieth birthday.
It is a foster care agency that seeks to place disabled children with families who will care for them and meet their special needs. Although they are not an adoption agency, they allow for little ones who struggle with the basics of living to find a place to be and to grow.
And St Paul would say that this is exactly what the Church is like, for he says that God has "predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will."
But often, we forget what this means.
[PAUSE]
There are those Christians who say that God did not want to form the Church, and that all we need to do is accept Jesus as our personal Lord and Saviour in order to be saved.
We do need to accept that Our Lord Jesus Christ is our Saviour but we need to do more than just say that He is. St Paul is clear: God intended that we should be adopted in Him through Jesus Christ. We are to belong to Him. This is what "church" means: that which belongs to the Lord. If we belong to the Lord, then we are part of the Church. We are meant to be adopted to God in Christ. That is God's will for us. It means that we are supposed to be part of a family of God.
What we often get wrong is that we so get too focussed on Christ being in us that we forget to be in Christ. This means that we get obsessed with our personal salvation. We become a group of individuals, each with our own individual lives and individual relationships with Our Lord Jesus Christ. This is not what God wants.
A family is not just a collection of people with the same surname. It is a group of people who are related by blood and who love each other because of that relationship even if they don't like each other very much at times.
The Church is a family because we are all related by the Blood of Christ. We are related by His Name. We are related because we are commanded to love each other and it is that love that holds us together.
We are not saved as individuals we are saved as a Church, as a family. That means working at those relationships, demonstrating our love for one another, not just for show but for creating a habit of love. We need to work at a clear change of heart from the selfishness of our individualism to seeing ourselves as part of one family.
[PAUSE]
But we are not part of that family by nature. While we are infected by sin, we are separated from God. This is why we need to be adopted, just as someone from outside the family becomes part of that family. This is the importance of Baptism because it is the means of God's grace whereby we become part of God's family.
This isn't just by a change of name but a true change in who we are whereby we live the life of Christ.
Of course, we all require special needs according to our weaknesses and frailties but that's what the Church is for. We are here to be together, receive God's promised grace together through His sacraments, heal together, live together, love together and be saved together.
[PAUSE]
We must give thanks to God for adoption agencies and foster care agencies, especially Credo Care which seeks to ensure that those who struggle with living find somewhere in which those struggles are met with love, warmth, tenderness and support.
And then we must remember that we are part of the Church and must seek to do exactly the same for our brothers and sisters.
No comments:
Post a Comment