Dear Friends,
My apology for this delayed podcast. “Busyness” has intervened this Holy Week, and I hope that you received the note I sent out yesterday informing our subscribers of a day delay in the podcast.
A blessed Passover to our many Jewish friends and a joyous Easter celebration this Sunday to our Christian listeners in nineteen countries around the world. Thanks for spreading the good word!
Without further delay, let’s move into today’s podcast, Brothers & Sisters in Christ.
Thanking God for You!
D. Paul
The Church’s One Foundation!
BROTHERS & SISTERS IN CHRIST
I received an email this past week from a friend of mine who chose “Your Sibling in Christ” as his complimentary close. Hardly complimentary in intention, it was a provocative closing by design, as my friend from CA, a “fellow of infinite jest” and a subscriber to this podcast, used to attend the same Episcopal Church I did and knew of my “displeasure” for this phrase when first adopted by the now retired rector who informed the congregation that he could no longer use the closing “Your Brother in Christ” out of a respectful inclusiveness for the nonbinary among us who identify as neither male nor female.
“Your Friend in Christ,” I believe, became the good rector’s default closing, but the progressive “language police” in the Church and academia have adopted “sibling” as its substitute du jour for the more traditional, familial identifiers—brother and sister— effectively eliminating millennia of literary works and Biblical language. So much for Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov”—welcome to The Siblings Karamazov—and bye-bye to the 354 verses in the Bible that use the word “brother,” and sincere condolences to the fans of the miniseries, “Band of Brothers,” it’s now Band of Siblings.” Crazy, no? But when you live in an age where a sitting judge of the U.S. Supreme Court can’t define what a “woman” is, you know everything is up for grabs. When the opened floodgates of moral relativism wipe out all sanity of thought, the inanity of language is sure to follow.
But the fact that I’m writing about this after having referred to it several times in previous podcasts bears witness to the success of my friend’s provocative intention. He “got my goat,” as they say. Fortunately, millions of Spirit-filled Christians around the world are not buying into this scriptural revisionism. If it weren’t so dangerous in its implications, one could simply dismiss it as being silly, but when Jesus points to his disciples and says, “For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Mat 12:50 NIV), Christ understands well what the distinctiveness and intimacy of a brother or sister or mother means, and that they indicate a uniqueness that can never be expressed with the general descriptor “sibling.” A sibling can be either a brother or a sister—a sibling-in-law—and while Christ may have been cryptic on occasion, he was never confusing, and here, in the 12th chapter of Matthew, he is intentionally turning the traditional family paradigm upside down, creating a new family in specificity (not just a generic litter of sibling puppy dogs), welcoming all of us as brothers and sisters, male and female, into the new family of God. Before the moniker of “Christian” was even used, the Apostle Paul was calling believers “brothers and sisters,” the word appearing eighteen times alone in his short, 1st letter to the Thessalonians. For Paul, it was a standard form of address, elevated in Romans by Paul calling Christ himself “…the firstborn among many brothers” (Romans 8:29 NIV). It is a word to be honored, not substituted in Scripture and literature by the nonspecific, generic word “sibling.”
Frequently, culture takes its cues from the Church, so we shouldn’t be surprised that in 2021 the U.S. House Majority proposed to eliminate “father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister” and other language “deemed insufficiently ‘gender-inclusive’ from the texts of the House rules,” replacing them with gender-neutral terms like “parent, child, sibling, parent’s siblings” etc., and, in so doing, “honoring all gender identities.” Sound familiar to the rector’s thinking? Thank God that a measure of sanity prevailed in the US House of Representatives and the proposal never saw the light of day. But, like the disguised Trojan Horse, this gender insanity has snuck into the Church behind a mask of inclusiveness and tolerance, and once that exterior mask is ripped away and the true “belly of the beast” is exposed with all of it its rebellion, wantonness, and pent-up chaos, it will take the Church “the full armor of God” to defend against it.
I was encouraged this past Palm Sunday to hear a young, guest preacher speak on Romans 8, beginning with those glorious, first two verses: “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death” (Romans 1:1-2 NIV). There, in a nutshell, is the endgame of Holy Week, which leads us through the cross to the empty tomb—guaranteeing us that in His dying and being raised from the dead, Jesus Christ has indeed “set us free.” The good preacher then, through the words of Paul in that magnificent 8th chapter of Romans, reminded us of our promised adoption and inheritance: “Therefore, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation.…” (v.12), “…those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God” (v14), and “…the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship”(v.15), “…then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ (v.17), the anointed sermon climaxing with, “For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.” (Romans 8:28-30 NIV). Let no one, my dear brothers and sisters in Christ, steal from you your birthright! You are more than a sibling. You a brother and a sister in the Kingdom of our Father!
A NEWS FLASH just crossed my computer screen: “In a landmark ruling, the United Kingdom Supreme Court rules that males who identify as women do not qualify as women under British equality law” (London, April 16, 2025). The implications of this ruling from across the pond are extraordinary. Thanks be to God! Gender is gender, not a personal preference. Perhaps here’s a case where the Church ought to follow culture, or at least the cultural wisdom of the UK Supreme Court. Might it be that the tide is shifting? Let us pray so.
And I’ll be praying for each of you, dear subscriber to The Church’s One Foundation, that you will be blessed this Easter by the very power of the resurrected Christ, granting you His forgiveness and providing you with His peace, provision, healing and restoration, and all of the rich, spiritual resources you need to live a life pleasing to God.
Amen!
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