Called, And Then Actually That

The hall is rented by the hour and smells faintly of floor polish and coffee, and somebody has run two strings of lights along the beam because the overhead fixtures are the color of a dentist's office.

It is the grandmother's ninetieth. There is one long table made of three shorter tables pushed together and covered with paper, and there are pitchers of iced tea sweating rings into it, and a boy of about nine going up and down the length of it with a camera nobody gave him permission to use. At the far end the grandmother is holding court in a cardigan the color of a plum, being told she does not look it, and agreeing.

The woman comes in with a foil pan and a cardigan of her own, and she is looking for the folding chairs at the edge where the neighbors go. And she finds instead, halfway down the long table, in among the cousins, a folded card with her name on it in a grandson's handwriting.

She sits. She keeps her coat on the back of the chair for the whole first hour, arranged so that it could be picked up quickly. She is waiting, in a way she could not explain to anybody there, for someone to come along with the seating chart and say oh, sorry, that is meant to be my aunt, would you mind. Nobody comes. The salad bowl goes past her twice. She is handed the baby. At nine o'clock the grandmother's daughter puts a hand on her shoulder in passing and says, without stopping, you know you are family.

And she smiles, and she means it, and underneath it she thinks: I must have misunderstood something.

You have read the verse about being called the children of God in exactly that posture. Coat on the back of the chair. Reading it and not eating it. Half expecting, somewhere in you, that a person with better information is going to come along and explain kindly that you took it more personally than it was meant.

Called is not a nickname

There is a way of hearing the word called that turns it into a compliment.

Called is what a fond aunt does. She calls you her little scholar, and it is warm, and it is generous, and it is not a legal fact. Nothing follows from it. Nobody files it anywhere. And if a person hears the phrase called the children of God in that register, they will get a lovely feeling out of it and no ground to stand on, because a term of endearment can be withdrawn by whoever offered it, and a person who has half expected withdrawal their whole life will hear the withdrawal already coded into the kindness.

That is not what the verse is doing. Look at how it is built.

Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God: therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not.1 John 3:1

Behold is a word you use when you are pointing at something that is there. Bestowed is a word for something handed over and not something loaned. And called, in that sentence, is not what someone thinks about you. It is what you are named, by the only one whose naming settles anything.

You are called a child of God, and the name was given to you, not lent to you. 1 John 3:1 has it in writing, and the Holy Spirit says it back to you in your own kitchen at exactly the hours you are least braced for it.

Notice also who bestowed it. Not a congregation. Not a household that agrees with you. Not a person who could be persuaded to take it back on further review. The Father did it, and He did it as an act of love and not as an act of tolerance, and the difference between those two words is the difference between a chair with your name on it and a chair somebody is letting you use.

You have the family name in your hands right now, and there is nobody coming down the table to collect it. It is written that He bestowed it, the Holy Spirit sealed it, and what God hands over He does not lease out by the year.

Why nobody at your table recognizes it

And then the verse does something that most people skip, and it is the half you need most.

Therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not.

John is not being bitter there. He is explaining a mechanism, and the mechanism is the reason for the strange look you get at home. Recognition of the family runs through recognition of the Father. Where He is not known, the family resemblance simply does not register. It is not that your people looked at you and made a ruling. It is that they do not have the category, and a person cannot see a resemblance to a face they have never met.

This matters enormously for how you read your own house.

Your family are good to you. You have said so yourself, and it is true, and nothing here needs them to be villains in order for you to be a daughter. Nobody in that kitchen is opposing you. They are simply doing the thing a person does with an unfamiliar word, which is to smile and move on to the next subject, and you have spent years reading that smile as a verdict when it was never a verdict at all.

You were kin to God's people long before you had met a single one of them face to face. That is written into the word as a household rather than a club, and the same Spirit who is in them is in you, which is precisely what makes it kin and not acquaintance.

Hold that word household for a second, because it does something to the size of the room.

A household is not the people currently in the building. A household has a name, and a table, and members who are elsewhere, and members who were at the table long before you and are not at it now. The believer who copied out psalms by candle in a language you cannot read is of your household. The woman who prayed for a city three hundred years before your street existed is of your household. The old man in a country you will never visit, awake right now, saying more or less what you said this morning in more or less the same tone, is of your household.

You have relatives you did not grow up with. That is not a consolation prize handed out to people whose own house is quiet on the subject. It is the actual shape of the family, and it always was.

It is already settled, this name of yours, and no polite change of subject has ever unsettled it. 1 John 3:1 says plainly that the world does not know us because it did not know Him, and His Spirit is not confused by a room with no category for you in it.