A Place to Belong

The first movie that I ever saw (or at least remember seeing) in movie theaters was The Little Mermaid. I went with my dad while we were visiting my Grandparents for Christmas… in fact we may have actually gone on Christmas night.

Of course I have probably seen the movie 600 more times over the course of my life, but in case you’ve forgotten the main plot… a young mermaid princess is wholly dissatisfied with her life under the sea. She doesn’t feel like she belongs there. She wants to be a part of something different, she wants to be part of the place where she feels like she truly belongs. That place is on land, amongst humans.

The famous song that she sings, which launches the plot of the movie, is aptly titled “A Part of Your World.” And so is this sermon series.

For the next 6 weeks we are going to be looking at the deep human desire to be connected to meaningful relationships throughout the many areas of society that we live out our days occupying.

This desire is hardwired into our humanity because it is God’s will for us to live in relationship with one another. At the very beginning of the human story God says these words:

Genesis 2:18 NRSV

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.”

This is right after God realizes that the human that he created and placed in the Garden of Eden was not able to live up to the full potential of human existence — to be the image of God in this world who has eternally existed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in a community of Love — alone. Humans were created to be a reflection of God in this world, to be a community of love. And it’s really not possible to be a community of love on your own.

So we see that God creates another human. And they create more humans. And so on and so forth until we have like 8 billion humans and probably at some point in your life you’ve been in a situation where you are like “there are simply too many humans here.” I get it. But back to basics here.

We are deeply driven by a desire to belong to these communities no matter how big or how small.

For years sociologists, psychologists, and theologians have studies the ways and places that humans find belonging. What has been realized is that we exist in layers of communities that help shape our identities in this world. These layers of communities are what are called Concentric Circles of Belonging. (Show Graphic, leave up for a while).

So looking at this graphic we can see how the movement from the inner smaller circles outward towards the larger circles signify the intimacy of our relationships. And the truth is that we all need all of these types of relationships, in fact our world is really ordered around these types of relationships. The inner most and most intimate of these relationships is the divine relationship. Though many in our world may not want to admit a divine relationship — all people have an innermost and deeply intimate relationship with some form of God. For us in the church this is our relationship with the Triune God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Other religious beliefs place someone or something else there. Non-religious or atheistic folks may place themselves here in this space. Regardless — there is a relationship that is so intimate and personal that we are the only ones who truly experience how it manifests in our hearts and minds.

Then we move outward and start to involve other human beings. The most intimate interpersonal relationships are family relationships — both chosen and unchosen right? We have our partners and spouses, but also lumped in here are parents, children, siblings, etc. And this circle changes over time as we get older and have families of our own. But no one knows you quite like the people who live with you and see you at your very best and very worst.

Then we move outward to the circle of friendship. These are our chosen family. The people that we choose to bring into our lives, and who choose us in return. There are varying levels of intimacy in these relationships, usually based on how healthy the relationships in the circles below it are.

And then after friendships we move outward into much less intimate relationships. We have the broader community. These are people that we might know well enough to call them acquaintances to the people that we just see on a daily basis at the gym or coffee shop or at wawa or something. We live and do life in the same general sphere as one another, but we don’t hang out. We don’t share our feelings with them.

The final and least intimate, yet still meaningful circle is the circle of shared allegiance. This is where we find our belonging based on shared interests, shared ideology, even shared career. This is the type of belonging that manifests in whether or not we honk at the people on the side of the road that are holding up a sign that says “honk if you support whatever or whomever.” We typically don’t know these people’s names. But something about how they identify themselves resonates with how we identify ourselves and so we feel a kinship to these strangers.

What I need you to understand is that every one of these circles of belonging is important to our human existence, and that every single one of them relies on the health of one below it in order for us to exist in a healthy system of relationships in our lives and in our world.

If one of these circles of belonging is suffering — which they tend to do over the course of our lives because human beings are difficult and tragedy happens and we experience trauma — then all of the other areas where we have relationships is going to suffer. And when our ability to have healthy relationships at any level suffers, then so does our Christian witness.

If you’re not quite buying this thing yet, journey with me back to the beginning of your Bible:

After God say’s it’s not good for the human to be alone this is the scene:

Genesis 2:19–23 NRSV

So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken.”

Do you see the intimacy that is created here? We often immediately attribute this deep relationship to the spousal relationship which clearly it is, but remember that according to the creation narrative this is the foundational human relationship. Humans are created as interconnected beings. And I don’t know when we lost this way of seeing one another… bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh… but for all intents and purposes I think that this is really how God intends us to see one another.

But the world really is not this way any more. Over the course of all of these years we have seen human relationships drift away from this deeply interconnected understanding of our identity — particularly in our western individualistic framework which has been deeply magnified by — ironically — the acceleration of digital connection.

The numbers speak for themselves. 30% of Americans feel lonely at least once a week. 10% feel lonely all of the time. I don’t know when it happened, but somehow over the course of my lifetime I have watched the core and organic ways that people find connection within these more intimate circles of belonging slip away. When our default status was digital disconnection we were more socially connected to the people who lived next door, to the people we worked with, went to school with, and worshipped with. And this is a big accusation, but I don’t think I’m off base. And what I know is true is that one of the most central places for finding belonging in this world — the church — has moved away from the intimate circles of belonging all the way to the outermost circle or out of orbit completely.

Which is really a shame, but it’s not the way that it should be or the way that it has to be. The church began with the innermost and most intimate circles of belonging. Jesus’s community of followers was an intimate group — a chosen family unit. And this was the model that the early church adopted. They gathered in homes and shared their faith and their resources as they tried to figure out how they were supposed to live in the world as people who had experienced the deeply transformational grace found in the divine relationship with Jesus Christ.

This is the type of community that we were created to live in. A community that is a family, a community that is deep and abiding friendship. A community of love that draws on the deep well of belonging that we have individually found in our core circle of belonging with God.

When the church is this — that’s where real belonging happens. That’s where we are able to live out our purpose and the live out the mission of God in our world, even when we have disagreements about things. These relationships fill the voids that are missing in our lives in this current world.

Each week for then next 5 weeks we are going to look at a different circle of belonging and see how it teaches us to be more deeply connected people as both a church and citizens in our world. We will find that to be a part of this world, we simply need to lean more deeply into the relationships that God has given to us — and in doing so we will become the people that God created us to be.