They registered themselves in their clans by their ancestral houses, according to the number of names from twenty years old and upward, individually, as the Lord commanded Moses.
So that’s why it’s called Numbers! The beginning of this book of the Bible is a census of all of the descendants of Jacob, his twelve sons and all of their sons. Each son’s lineage is counted and there’s a very precise number for each clan. The tribe of Gad – 45,650. The descendants of Asher – 41,500. And so on. All, excluding the clan of Levi, totaled 603,550. Levi’s descendants were held apart to be priests, and counted separately.
As I was reading this, I was struck by the fact that from one person, the descendants would number in the tens of thousands. Of course mathematically that’s true, but how far would I have to go back to find the ancestor that created 43,000 male descendants? And what of all of 43,000 relatives that we could all trace to our predecessor? Would I feel like they were my clan? Would I feel any kinship to them?
I’ve dabbled with some genealogy, and even as recent as my grandparents and their siblings, I have distant cousins I didn’t know I had, never met, and wouldn’t necessarily know what to talk about even if we did all gather. How much further back would this have to go to number 43,000? How many countries, languages, people and nations would that include?
And what if this genealogy is about more than biology? What about my clan of Christians? Do I feel any sense of ownership with the community of Christ followers? Should I?
There is such a great diversity in the Christian family? Liturgical, evangelical, conservative, liberal. And that’s just within my faith tradition of The Episcopal Church! Different denominations, nondenominational, Sunday sabbath worshippers, Saturday sabbath worshippers. The differences are seemingly endless. And they really matter to the people following that tradition. Paraphrasing a quote from John Spong, God is not Episcopalian, conservative, liberal. God is God. All of those are human systems which we’ve created to help us walk into the mystery of God. I honor my tradition, but I don’t think my tradition defines God. It only points me to God.
Perhaps all of the denominations and different ways of worshipping and understanding God are constructs we need because we – the human family - are so vastly different. Our differing ways of understanding God help us by playing to our differing strengths, bolstering our differing weaknesses. But they shouldn’t be seen as divisions. Maybe they’re more like different languages.
This morning, I’m thinking about the vast differences between the human family, and the resulting differences between the different ways people worship and understand God. Today, I want to remember it’s the same God, and we are, in fact, a part of the same family
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