Kinship

From the book Barking to the Choir: the power of radical kinship, Gregory Boyle writes, “Now, we can be astonished at the authority of Jesus, who calls us to love our enemies. Or we can just love our enemies and so astonished the world as to jostle it from its regular course” (p. 194).

“Jesus is always inviting folks to move beyond the limitations of the blood family. The early Christians would greet one another with a kiss on the lips, which in those days only the members of the same family would do. Jesus is high hopes that we will move from separation to Solidarity to kinship. God knows that we just keep waiting for the Kingdom to show up just around the bend. Turns out, it is the bend Just around the corner. The kingdom is the corner...where we can kiss each other on the lips” (p.192).

Sometimes we are pushed and stretched and broken for no other reason than to come together to pull, reshape, and heal each other in a community where the first are last and the last are first. Jesus invites us into a new family, in him we find a newer you and a newer me.