There is in the core of every human being a desire to belong. We know from the earliest days of our lives that we belong to a family. We also claim belonging to the cities we live in or were born in, the sports teams we play on or support, the clubs and organizations in which we have membership and the sororities and fraternities we pledged allegiance to in college. As Americans we felt this same since of belonging recently during the Olympics, as the medal count rose and our national anthem was played again and again.

Belonging and connection are an integral part of how we make our way in the world around us.

This question of belonging extends to our faith belief as well. We profess that we are Christians, Muslims, Jewish or Hindu, etc. Then within each faith we divide again, thus as Christians we claim to be Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant, but then we Protestants have continued to divide into now some 36,000 distinct denominations world-wide.

So the question arises, if we Christians are only 33% of the entire world population, what happens to the other 67% of the population who do not either believe in Jesus or know Him?

I think the answer lies in God’s desire to be in intimate union with the human beings that God created. The book of Genesis reminds us that God created human beings in God’s image so that the Holy One might be in covenant relationship with humans. Through the story of Adam and Eve, we see how that relationship was damaged and then we see God’s subsequent effort throughout history to restore us to union with the Divine. The story moves through the choice of a people through whom God might reveal a better way of living with one another and with God. It is a journey that takes us through thousands of years of success and failure, mountain experiences and desert lows, kings and prophets and ultimately a virgin birth in an obscure village in the Middle East.

In an extraordinary example of “self-emptying” God chooses to become one of us, taking on our human existence. (Philippians 2:6-11) God becomes one with all humanity, experiencing all the same things that each of us experience from birth, through life and even death. As the writer of John’s Gospel says: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God …and the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”

We who are Christian know and believe the Word to be Jesus the Christ, the one we profess to be the Lord. When we say that Jesus is Lord, we are claiming that He is the “template” for all human beings to live in right relationship with God and with one another. There is no other example of mercy, justice, love and obedience that is better. There are certainly other examples of persons who live out of those qualities and who seek to live lives pleasing before God, but none as perfectly and completely as Jesus. He is Lord!

In God’s desire to belong with us, every human is swept up in this incarnational movement of God becoming one of us. God is now in union with every human being and every one of us is in union with God. As Christians, we know, believe and profess this to be true. Persons of other faith traditions, or no such tradition, may or may not know, believe or profess this truth but are nonetheless caught up in it. For this is the activity of God and not us!

When people live in such a way as to extend mercy and forgiveness to one who has hurt or offended them, they are living out the template of Jesus. When we place ourselves in the position of seeking justice for those who are on the margins of our society, we are living out of the template of Jesus. When we extend ourselves in love of another person in any of the countless ways we do that, we are mirroring the self-giving love of Jesus exemplified for us in his life and death. And when we seek to be obedient to what we know and believe God would have us do to make the world a better place for everyone, we are responding in obedience as did Jesus to the will of God to bring God’s reign of the kingdom to completion among us.

Every faith belief holds that in order for us to be in intimate union with a Supreme Being, whether we call that being God or Allah or Jehovah or add your own title, we must be willing to allow our will to surrender and bend to the WILL of the Holy One. It is in just such a surrender of ourselves that our belonging to God is lived out, and we are aware that every human being is held in the warm embrace of God’s love and life.

The great responsibility we have as Christians is to express this truth by how we live our lives!

We, after the example of our Jewish brothers and sisters of the Old Testament, have a call from God to be light to the other 67% of the world’s population; a light, reflecting the truth that God found a way to belong to all human beings so all human beings would know that they belong to God.