My Dad retired from full-time ministry 30 years ago, which meant that my parents could move into the home in Uniontown that they had purchased. A couple of months later, they had a “House Dedication” worship and celebration, and I wrote a song to sing at that service, called “A Home”. The words hang on the wall of my own home.
It begins: “Throughout our life’s journey, we seek to find our space; we look in many mirrors at the changing of our face; sometimes we wonder if we’ll ever find our place.” Although written for a house dedication, and mainly addressing that “place” as the house that was finally theirs, my song still considers that “place” isn’t only a location—in fact, the last stanza says “the places that we love are the people that we’ve known; location plus love equals a home.”
Finding our place isn’t just a concern for the child starting school wondering if they will be liked by the other kids. It’s not just a concern for the teen trying to decide on post-high school plans. It’s not just for the young adult starting the first job and wondering if it will be a “fit”. It’s not just the mid-life promotion and wondering how those who have to answer to the “new boss” will respond. It’s not just the adjustment to the new social reality of the marriage ended by divorce or death and no longer being a “couple” around the collection of couples that has been the social center of life. It’s not just moving to the retirement community in a new area after decades in that home, through the many changes in family over that time. It’s all of these, and many more.
So much of life seems to be about finding our place, at every stage of our lives.
The way that Jesus died and the way Jesus lived raises the question of one’s place. The society of Jesus’ day, in the country of Jesus’ life, was stratified, as ours is. Rome ruled, even though that wasn’t Rome, so therefore the Romans had an elite place. The Israelites, in their own land, were second-class citizens. Within each of their societies were stratifications—the religious leaders of the Israelites were higher on the social scale than the fishermen (many of Jesus’ disciples were fishermen) and the shepherds, and married women, with no rights of their own, were at least cared for in ways that widowed women often were not, despite the religious admonition to care for widows and orphans. Lepers and demon-possessed were outcast from all of this. Everyone had their “place”—and it seems that everyone “knew their place”—except Jesus. Jesus, even while dying, treated everyone around him with the same level of respect and, dare I say, love. This reflected how he lived his life, where a person’s “place” in the social hierarchy was of no concern to him. Everyone mattered, and the ones higher on the social ladder didn’t matter more than the ones who couldn’t even touch the social ladder.
This is what we need to embrace about our own “place”. Our place in our own eyes should reflect our place in Jesus’ eyes. We don’t matter less than anyone above us on the social ladder we live with, and we don’t matter more than anyone below us on the social ladder we live with. All are loved, cared for, given gifts and grace and forgiveness. We need to live that out in our own lives as followers of the One whose life demonstrated it! Because Easter changes things!
GOSPEL Matthew 10:34-38
34 ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have
not come to bring peace, but a sword.
35 For 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;
36 and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.
37 Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; 38and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.
NEW TESTAMENT 1 Corinthians 3:9-11
9 For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building.
10 According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building on it. Each builder must choose with care how to build on it. 11 For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ.
NEW TESTAMENT 1 Corinthians 12:12-14
12 For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 13 For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.
14 Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many.
NEW TESTAMENT Ephesians 4:15-16
15 But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, 16 from whom the whole body, joined and knitted together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.