Those seven words, which Lamin Sanneh referred to, correspond to another statement Paul made in Ephesians 2.

14 For Christ himself has brought peace to us. He united Jews and Gentiles into one people when, in his own body on the cross, he broke down the wall of hostility that separated us. 15 He did this by ending the system of law with its commandments and regulations. He made peace between Jews and Gentiles by creating in himself one new people from the two groups. 16 Together as one body, Christ reconciled both groups to God by means of his death on the cross, and our hostility toward each other was put to death.

There are clues here that promise an end to tribalism, that not only Jews and Gentiles can come together, but that any among us with long-held and even ancient hostilities can fall in love. Palestinians and Jews. Pakistanis and Indians. Koreans and Japanese. Africans and Europeans. Imperialists and the colonized.

In whatever ways we have not been family for one another: able and disabled, boomers and millennials…  

We are family.

The new family is what we are, already.

This new family begins where the “system of law with its commandments and regulations” ends. It’s hard to find common ground when we are afraid to let go of outdated rules and traditions. Our customs and rules may distinguish us from others but can sometimes divide us.

And if we are divided? Worst-case scenario is we FIGHT… maybe kill one another.

But the execution of Jesus helped expose the absurdity of human violence in thought, word, and deed. That Jesus received the death penalty remains a wake-up call.

So, if that is the mission, the mission of enlarging our family, then I am all in.

But for my whole life, I have had an increasingly strained relationship with terms like “Christian” and “Christianity,” “mission,” and “evangelism” and “discipleship,” “personal relationship with Jesus,” and such.

Christians don’t always interpret these the way that I now understand. So many of us express allegiance to a faith that represents a domination system.

So egregious is this, I might be filling out a registration form for conferences with people of various religions; when it asks for my religion, I have sometimes checked “other.” 

Around the world, scores of millions of people have familiarized themselves with made-in-the-USA Pop Christianity.

It may be that some people need to reclaim the word “Christian” and not surrender it to those who are not serious about the Gospel.

Ironically, one of the persons who has of late inspired me to look more closely at the word “Christian” is a Muslim. That would be Congresswoman Ilhan Omar from Minnesota.

In her book, “This Is What America Looks Like: My Journey from Refugee to Congresswoman,” she shares an experience from when she was in her early 20s. She left Minneapolis and visited some of her religiously conservative Somalian relatives in Sweden. She did not wear a hijab at the time.

“Before I even stepped off the train in Gothenburg, I had committed a host of cultural taboos. The very fact that I was traveling by myself, not with my husband, was frowned upon by orthodox Muslims like my local relatives. On top of that, I wore jeans and a T-shirt that was stretched tightly over my very pregnant belly, displaying a conspicuous lack of modesty considered disrespectful in a conservative community. However, traveling with a two-year-old, I was going to wear comfortable clothes no matter what anybody thought. The final devilish touch was my uncovered hair with its Beyoncé-inspired highlights. On the platform, I saw my mom’s cousin walking toward me.

“Although we had never met before, I recognized him immediately, as he was the spitting image of one of my mother’s younger brothers. Instinctively I rushed to give him the biggest hug in the world. He froze. He was the imam at the local mosque and probably thought, Somebody did not get the memo. He didn’t hug me back, but the earth didn’t open and swallow me up, either. Instead, he chatted with me and took us back to the house, where I ended up staying for a long period of time.

“I was reserved during all my interactions with my mother’s cousins, whom I found curious. Our conversations were vibrant and pleasant, but… no one asked me any questions about our family back home. They didn’t ask, ‘How’s your grandfather doing?’ Or inquire after my father or siblings. During the second week of my stay, extended family members arrived and we took chartered buses to a camp. Not a single one of the forty people wanted to know anything about relatives they had not seen since the war broke out. Did they even want to know if their family members in the United States were alive?  

“I pulled aside Aliyah, a cousin who had been really close with my mother, and asked her about this perceived indifference. ‘People misunderstand us,’ she said, ‘but we essentially have only two rules. The first is that we worship to the maximum of what we understand is required of us. That meant no gossip or complaining to the point where if they asked me about our family members they could be inviting me to say bad things about them. I was more than welcome to talk about Baba’s health or what my husband was studying. However, they weren’t going to take responsibility for soliciting the information and risk breaking their second rule: ‘You can’t truly be religious if you wrong others in your observance.’ So even if my cousin never talked about other people, if she asked me to, it was no better than her gossiping herself. ‘Anything that is a transgression against you takes away from the good deed we wanted to fulfill,’ she said, “including pushing our beliefs. That, too, is a transgression that minimizes our worship.”

“It was why, she explained, nobody woke me up for prayer in the morning—something I had also wondered about and been a bit annoyed by. “Imagine if we woke you up and the little one woke up, too,” she said. “You might become stressed and internally curse us. Now we are going to pray, ask God to forgive us and to reward us. Why would we give it away to cursing by entering a place that was not our concern?” She went on, “If God wanted you to wake up for prayer, he’d wake you up. And if you don’t, that’s your answer to God. Our letting you sleep is the good deed, because when God judges us, we’re not going to be asked about your prayer. We’re going to be asked about how we cared for you.” Shit! I thought. I’ve spent my life around fake people of faith. Up until that moment, my main experience with religious people was their trying to give me a hard time about why I wasn’t more religious. Aliyah opened my mind to a radically different concept of what it meant to be devout. I discovered a solidly internal definition that rested on the care of one’s own spiritual well-being and nothing else. Commenting that someone didn’t pray enough or was dressing immodestly was born out of insecurity. A healthy religious practice is for you and you alone.”

“The practice of wearing the hijab seemed like the epitome of an external religious practice. It’s why I had always struggled with it before I went to Sweden. I resented the fact that I had to cover myself for others. But after I returned to the States, I saw the hijab in a different context. It was no longer about what I’m supposed to be for them but what it does for me. I fully got it. The hijab wasn’t about a piece of cloth or the battle against objectification. Instead it was really a symbol of the purity of my presence in the world. It makes sense to me that I need to cover pieces of myself to preserve who I am and feel whole. I’m centered by the hijab, because it connects me to a whole set of internally held beliefs.” 

Ilhan Omar humbled me with those words. Many things happen in life to knock me down a peg while energizing me to keep on keeping on. She is one of the phenomena who has done that for me. If she could claim her Muslim identity, I can indeed find a way to embrace being called a Christian. 

Please notice her cousin’s words.

“Imagine if we woke you up and the little one woke up, too. You might become stressed and internally curse us. Now we are going to pray, ask God to forgive us and to reward us. Why would we give it away to cursing by entering a place that was not our concern? If God wanted you to wake up for prayer, he’d wake you up. And if you don’t, that’s your answer to God. Our letting you sleep is the good deed.” 

Take a look around. There are people in your world, your circle, and they are sleeping in, waking late. They will become your chosen family. Some of these folks you hardly expected to wake up, and others were always heavy on your heart as you prayed they would wake up.

Some of them are stirring, this very moment.

But your good deed was to let them sleep.