The Gift of Belonging

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people who are God’s own possession. You have become this people so that you may speak of the wonderful acts of the one who called you out of darkness into his amazing light. Once you weren’t a people, but now you are God’s people. Once you hadn’t received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

~1 Peter 2:9-10

This past Sunday we had a conversation on belonging as part of our ongoing series tackling “big” concepts for people of faith. Generally what happens on a given Sunday is I go in prepared with a message, or some ideas that might add up to a message, but I start by asking you all questions. As you respond to those questions I try to weave these ideas into the discussion. Naturally it doesn’t always look like that. Sometimes I am a bit more talk-y than others. And sometimes less. This past week was the latter.

I had a message prepared but, in the context of our conversation in that moment, it wasn’t going to do justice to the moment. I began by asking everyone, “What does belonging mean to you?”

There were a whole host of answers. I’ll try to remember them.

-Belonging is, in part, about feeling accepted.

-Feeling accepted means you can live as you are, without having to hide things or live in shame.

-When you don’t have to live in shame you can show up as your “full self” wherever you go, even in places where you don’t feel like you belong.

-We have to both learn and unlearn what it means to belong. We grow up in families where belonging is conditional, or where we only belong if we follow a very strict set of rules, and this kind of belonging doesn’t translate into other areas of life. And, even worse, that kind of belonging can contribute to a whole host of character defects. Hence, we need to relearn how to belong in ways that are beneficial to ourselves and others.

-Belonging is about support, and people holding us accountable, in positive ways, to how we want to live.

-Belonging is risky. Showing up as your full self does mean living with nothing hidden (or, you know, less hidden than we otherwise would if we were living in shame) and that can be scary. We wrestle with the question, “If I show people who I really am…what will they think?”

-Several people said they felt that all sense of belonging begins with God’s acceptance. When we discover we are loved and accepted by God and that we “belong” to His community we gradually become open to the idea that we might be able to belong in a more general sense. In other words, many of us wrestle with (or have in the past) the belief that we simply don’t belong anywhere, and God changes that and allows us to see ourselves for who we really are.

So, as you can see, what could I possibly add to all that? Quite probably nothing.

In direct response to the passage, someone shared how important it was that we are chosen, not merely accepted. Chosen implies that we are sought out and desired for who we are, and that our character defects or misdeeds, whatever they may be, are not a problem for God and do not decrease His desire to choose us to be a part of His people and to serve as His representatives.

So often the gospel is presented in such a way that makes it sound like God reluctantly agrees to accept people. It seems quite clear to me that this is not the case, at least according to the way I read scripture.

God loves the world so much that He chooses people and does whatever He needs to do so that people and God can live in harmony with one another. We are chosen.

And, according to you all, and I agree, this is foundational. It creates the sense that belonging is possible. We feel freed from the burden that we are too defective to be accepted and loved. Perhaps it allows us to feel like we already belong- even if we’re not sure exactly what that means.

Whatever the case may be, we all agree that belonging is a gift and that there are benefits to belonging and benefits to risking vulnerability in order to belong. And, we believe that God initiates this by choosing us to be a part of His people.

Like I said before, these are your thoughts. They are wise and profound. I have nothing to add.