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1/6/2021 Letter to Oakwood                                                                       View this email in your browser

Pastor Dan Kiehl's Weekly Letter to the Congregation

                                                                                                January 6, 2021

Dear Oakwood Church family,
If you've been receiving these weekly letters since they started near the beginning of the pandemic last year, I hope you've noticed that I intentionally address you as my spiritual family - my brothers and sisters in Christ.  I hope that doesn't sound sappy or trite to you.  I would understand that it might for many of you if you've not had the opportunity to get to know me personally, since we expect family members to know each other well and to have intimate relationships that develop over many years of shared experiences.  It's not possible for me to have that kind of relationship with several hundred people.  So I understand if calling me your spiritual brother feels awkward and somehow inappropriate.

But our relationship as brothers and sisters in Christ is not based upon how well we know each other, how many meals we share together, or how many family conflicts we endure together.  God's Word teaches that our family connection is established at the cross, where Jesus died in our place to redeem us so that we could be pardoned for all our sins and adopted by grace into the family of God.  Then we began to experience this connection the moment we were born again by the Spirit.  As the Apostle Paul says,  "...remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.  But now in Christ Jesus, you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ...  For through Him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.  So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God..."  (Ephesians 2:12,13; 18,19).

This "relationship by atoning blood" that we have with one another supersedes every other earthly relationship that we may have - parent/child, boss/employee, citizen/foreigner, rich/poor, etc.  Paul wrote the letter to Philemon to accompany a runaway slave named Onesimus that was being sent back to Philemon's household.  Onesimus had become a Christian and a spiritual brother to Paul, and so Paul expected Philemon to receive his slave back as a new spiritual relative, in a new relationship that would transform how they saw and treated each other:  Paul tells Philemon, "For this perhaps is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back forever, no longer as a bondservant but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother - especially to me, but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord." (Philemon 16,17) 

Go to your favorite online Bible concordance and do a search for the word "brother" in the New Testament epistles.  You will see that Paul and the other Apostles continuously refer to all other believers in the churches as "brothers" (in the gender-inclusive sense, meaning "brothers & sisters").  In many cases, the believers to whom they are referring are people who they have only known for a short period of time, as well as many whom they had not yet met.  Many years ago I heard a Christian comedian say to a large crowd, "You may not like me.  That's okay; especially if you're a Christian because to you I'm family - you have to love me.  You can pick your friends, but you're stuck with your relatives!"

I'm guessing that many of us have at least one family member that we wouldn't have chosen if the Lord has allowed us to pick our team.  And most of us are better at listing the flaws and mistakes of our parents, children, and siblings than we are at identifying their gifts and strengths.  But we stick with them because they are family.  The great philosopher Drax once said (in the movie, "Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2"), "When you're ugly, and someone loves you, you know they love you for who you are... beautiful people never know who to trust."  Families see much of our ugliness and love us anyway.  Later, when Nebula complains about Drax's companions, "All any of you do is yell at each other.  You're not friends", Drax replies, "You're right... we're family."  In our church family, we expect to have conflicts, because we don't all think, talk, look, and act alike.  But we stick with each other through the conflicts, because the deeper bond and love comes on the other side.  That's what we learned in our physical families.

The beautiful thing about a family is that the negative experiences of life - tragedies, trials, conflicts - actually deepen the love and commitment of a healthy family.  When my immediate family shared a deeply traumatic experience about a dozen years ago, it seemed as though the trauma and grief might tear us apart.  But as we persevered through it together, connected by our common faith in Christ and unconditional commitment to our family, we came out the other side of the trial with a much stronger and intimate bond with each other and with Christ.

As we close the books on the bizarre and difficult year of 2020, we're all hoping that things will get easier for us as individuals, families, and a church.  But we have no guarantee of that - the only guarantee we have about the future is that the Lord loves us, He will be with us always, and He will work all things together for good.  And, oh yeah... we will be stuck with each other for eternity.  Praise the Lord!

In Christ,
Pastor Dan

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Oakwood Presbyterian Church, All rights reserved.

Our mailing address is: 
1865 Waddle Rd., State College, PA 16803

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Oakwood Presbyterian Church · 1865 Waddle Rd · State College, PA 16803 · USA

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