My mothers family has a list serve that I set up on the internet a few
years ago.  We get to send emails to a large group of Aunts, Uncles,
and cousins who have internet access. Last week on this list one of my
cousins complained of being a nobody.  Several uncles and another
cousin quickly responded by saying that she was indeed somebody, a
cherished and beloved child of God.  But a very poetic cousin and my
somewhat poetic sister contradicted this deluge of comfort by
discussing a famous Emily Dickenson poem that is unknowingly
reflective of the philosophy of Buddism:

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog

Ironically, this declaration of nobodyness reveals the archetypal need
for something even more basic than our wish to be somebody:  our wish
to belong.  Emily Dickenson and her readers of low self esteem bond
together in the belonging of insignificance.  Yes.  I'm nobody too.
How much better we are to be nobody than those others who think they
are somebody.  It is a classic case of belonging by excluding somebody
else.  Are you nobody, too? That makes two of us.  Don't tell … they
would banish us, you know.

Each of this mornings scriptures is in part a reflections of this core
human value, a basic human need --- the need to belong.  In part they
reflect the idea of belonging by excluding others, but, I believe in
sum they reflect an openness to the understanding that we all belong
to something bigger and greater than ourselves.

In the Old Testament lesson we see the root of the Judaic tradition –
the Hebrew people belonged to God and to each other because they were
all of the family of Abraham.  This is such a powerful legacy.
Abraham, father if Isaac, father of Jacob and if we read the boring
parts of the Bible that Marissa is going to skip in her Sunday morning
discussion – the parts I dutifully waded through as a High School
student when I decided that I was going to read the whole Bible from
start to finish, and in the course of six months actually did so -- if
you read those boring parts you will find that there are a long series
of begats which mark the connection of the Jews of various periods of
time to these founding fathers of faith.  All were children of
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  The Jews belonged.  They were a part of
something great "and I will make of you a great nation".

This archetypal need to belong is also reflected in the Psalm that we
read this morning.  It comes from a different perspective – we belong
to God in this Psalm because God is always with us.  God walks with
us.  This imagery is also evocative, as it says:

The Lord himself watches over you;
The Lord shall preserve you from all evil;
The Lord shall watch over your going out and
your coming in

How much more could we belong to God?  The comfort of these images is
powerful indeed.  We belong to God because God is right here with us
at all times.

And then, of course, we get to the gospel.  The Gospel lesson this
morning tells the story of the Pharisee who challenges Jesus
formulation of spiritual truth.  This is a story told in the Gospel of
John, the book that most clearly represents Christianities departure
from the mother faith of Judiasm and its move towards some of the
other traditions contemporary to John's writing.  Perhaps this
reflects the forces of assimilation, particularly the non-Judaic
Gnostic influences on the evolving early Church, or perhaps it
reflects the realization, through Jesus, of just exactly how broad
God's invitation is to join God's universal Kingdom.

In the Gospel according to John we don't belong because we were
physically born of the line of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  Rather we
belong because we were cosmically reborn through the act of baptism
and our joining with Jesus, as was said last week, as his little
sisters and brothers.  This passage concludes with the powerful saying
of Jesus, so often waved disrespectfully in football stadiums and
placed on bumper stickers.  I memorized it as a child from the King
James Version of the Bible.  John 3:16 For God so loved the world,
that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him
should not perish, but have everlasting life. Everlasting life with
God.  We belong, not just now, but into eternity. We will belong
forever.

In each of these passages of scripture we can see how the human
longing to belong is a central aspect of our experience.

And how appropriate it is to think about this idea of belonging in
this time in history, in our American culture.  Epidemiologists,
sociologists and psychologists have been raising the issue of how
dangerous it is not to belong.  They have observed the danger of the
steadily increasing amount of isolation in this culture.  Some of you
have read the book Bowling Alone, by a man named Robert D. Putnam.
Putnam points out that there has been a deterioration of the formal
and informal places to belong in the last hundred years of our
society.  He decries the reduction in Church attendance, the
diminishing membership of civic clubs like the Lions club and the
Masons.  He laments the loss of bridge clubs and bowling leagues.
People, he demonstrates quite effectively, have fewer places to
connect.  Instead we have used television and pseudo identifications
with pseudo-groups to replace real relationships with all their
annoying requirements to tolerate the idiosyncracies of others. We
can't belong to a real group, but we can belong to the group of
Friends, to Seinfeld's inner circle, to the CSI team, or to the
gigantic communities of fans of sports teams or other shallow
approximations of human community.  We worship at the alter of the
ever larger and clearer HD televisions that take up increasing
percentages of space in our increasingly spacious homes.  I can't
condemn this.  I can only regret it.  I am guilty of it myself.

We want to belong, but we don't belong to other people, we don't
belong with other individuals.  Instead we belong to these dim
reflections of human community.   And these are dim reflections, no
matter how high their definition.  Putnam points out the danger to
society that this trend reflects.  Falling voter participation,
reduced volunteer activity, a damaged social safety net, increased
rates of suicide.  Susan and I see one of the consequences of this
trend in our work – elders left in their homes, often alone, too often
at risk.  In Putnam's world, people no longer belong to things larger
than themselves.  They are isolated and in this isolation they are in
danger, and society is in danger with them.

How different this is from where I came from – My maternal grandfather
grew up in one of the most exclusive communities that exists in recent
American history – he was a Team Mennonite.  This group, smaller than
the Amish, still drive only horses and buggies, make their living from
farming or simple crafts and don't go to school beyond eighth grade –
in his day it was sixth grade.  They belong to their community in a
way that few of us can fathom.  They experience an embeddedness among
the few others like them, sometimes with little money and using
primarily what they make for themselves and grow from the land.  They
have to take care of each other exclusively because the other people
in this small community are really the only resource they have.  From
our perspective they may look like they are suffering, but they really
belong.

My grandfather found that many of the practices of this small
community were not in keeping with his reading of the Bible and in a
nascent act of ecumenicism he went liberal and joined the
conservatives – in particular the conservative Mennonite Church that
offered Sunday School for his children and a somewhat less restrictive
set of conditions by which he could belong.  My parents expanded their
definition of belonging, as many of you and your parents did within
your own traditions, to the point of accepting that other Christians
might also be God's children, indeed, they even considered the idea
that you didn't have to be a Christian to be a child of God.  But they
never could transcend the deeply and viscerally held belief that to
truly belong meant to be accepted in the Mennonite Church.  I'm sure
many of you have felt similar kinds of things in your own religious
pilgrimage:  Each group requires certain acts of conformity in order
to accept its members and each member, in order to belong, needs to
accept a certain order of status, marked by both formal and informal
behaviors.  Our world is filled with groups that gain their sense of
belonging by acts of exclusion and the rejection of others who in one
way or another do not conform, aren't good enough.  Are nobody to
them.

Symbols of belonging are highly meaningful regardless of what group or
culture you come from.  I will not go into the social psychology of
how groups work.  What I will do, instead, is tell you that Jesus
transcends this kind of hierarchy, this exclusiveness, this arrogant
self-righteousness, particularly the Jesus that we meet in the
inclusive acts of belonging that we perform every Sunday morning here
at St. Paul's.

In Buddhism one detaches oneself from the things of the earth in order
to more fully become aware that one belongs to the great circle of
life.  Self is minimized and followers of the Buddhist tradition focus
on being nobody.  There is a certain wisdom to this approach and I
admire it, though I don't follow it.  Perhaps I am too attached to the
world.  But as a follower of Jesus, I believe that we should be
attached.  We should be moved by human pain, angry at injustice, hurt
by the indifference of those who believe themselves to be somebody to
those they believe to be nobody.   We should care about what happens
to our families, our cities, our countries and our world.  And we
should look for some way to make a positive contribution, an impact,
some way to act as Christ's hands and feet on earth, to be part of the
human community.  In Christianity we all become somebody, symbolic
children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, members of God's family, through
the inclusive metaphysical act of the sacrifice of Jesus and his
divine vindication in the resurrection.  We are more than just members
of one exclusive little group, we are children of God, little sisters
and brothers of Christ.  We are each somebody, known and loved by God
with a unique and blessed set of gifts that God calls us to use in
God's service.

In our worship here at St. Paul's we symbolize that status with the
remembrance of Jesus in the ritual of the Eucharist each week.  Here
the table of Christ's archetypal supper stands in the center of our
worship.  And those crucial, cosmically powerful words are said out
loud in the beginning of each celebration of the feast of Jesus:   All
Are Welcome at the Lord's Table.  We belong.  We belong because Jesus
has invited us into God's Kingdom.  We belong because we infuse
ourselves with the world view, the values, the substance of Jesus in
the partaking of the bread, the body of Christ.  We belong because we
participate in his life energy, the power of his blood, his sacrifice
given freely to save us from the broken sinfulness of existence
separate from God.  We belong because Jesus has asked us to remember
Him in this way, and in remembering Him we join with Him in his
ministry of healing and reconciliation.  We belong, not just to a
small group of people with unspoken rites of status and special
entrance requirements, but to the universal body of Christ, equal
sisters and brothers standing at the feet of the cross.  We belong
because we are loved by God and we know God's love through the ever
shining light of Jesus, a light that shines over thousands of years
and is undimmed.  We belong to something greater than ourselves and we
are not diminished by it, but are transformed to live in the image and
serve in the ministry of Christ Jesus.  We belong.

For me this is the reason I am here almost every Sunday morning.  It
is not just because I love singing with the choir, or that I enjoy
Marissa's Homilies or that I find it symbolically and personally
meaningful to go around and try to greet everyone, offering and
receiving the blessing of God's Peace.  I like being here because when
I am here I feel like I belong to something far greater than me or
even than the community that is gathered here.  I feel connected to
the whole of the body of Christ, to the whole of God's ecumenical
community, indeed, as each tradition engages in its own rituals of
belonging, I feel like participating in this community is an act of
affirmation that I belong to the whole human community regardless of
the forms and rituals of their acts of belonging.  God makes us one,
united despite differences of race, politics, personal idiosyncracies,
national boundaries, religions or any of the many other things that
threaten to make us a divided humanity.  Our individual problems melt
away as we submit ourselves to the great cosmic circle of life, to the
will of God, and we are raised up to be somebody – we are raised up to
heights that can go no higher.  We are children of God, basking in
God's eternal light, filled with the Glory of God and empowered by
God's very spirit.  There is no more potent experience in life than to
belong to this eternal reality.

As we say it here, at St. Paul's on so many Sunday's: Through Christ,
In Christ, With Christ, in the Unity of the Holy Spirit ...... we
belong to God and to one another.