Belonging

Belonging

The Rev’d Devin McLachlan

Exodus 32.7–14 (The Golden Calf);

Luke 15.1–10 (The Parable of the Lost Sheep)

The 13th Sunday after Trinity; 14 September, 2025

Belonging is one of the great hungers of the human condition, a deep and abiding need.

That craving to belong haunts our human hearts from a very early age.

You see it on the playground, the little, shifting tribes of children, the castes and cliques which form, break, and recombine, sometimes over the course of a single day.

Even the playground games express our anxiety over belonging —  games of teams, games of capturing or expelling, being tagged ‘it’, being tagged ‘out’.

For some of us, just remembering what it was like to walk into the lunchroom on a Wednesday in middle school is enough to still break out into a cold sweat.

 Perhaps it is most visible when we are teenagers, simultaneously differentiating ourselves from our family, while leaping towards the shadowed shore of adulthood, not certain if anyone will meet us there.

 The hunger to belong remains with us all our lives.

With maturity, we may learn to temper it.

With the blessing, we find ourselves in communities or households which daily feed our hearts with welcome.

Yet for every one of us there will still be days when we know ourselves to be strangers in a strange land, longing for a home we struggle to define.

Belonging is the anxiety that is at the heart of our first reading, from Exodus:

Forty years wandering across the desert, from the Red Sea to the Jordan, was a fierce lesson in loneliness and belonging.

No sooner had Moses climbed the mount to speak with God, than his brother Aaron and the people panicked, panicked with loneliness and fear, knowing themselves to be outcasts, refugees and emigrants, unable to return home to Egypt. 

 Having been slaves, in their fear they cried out: ‘We have to belong to somebody,’ and cast themselves a golden calf from their stolen gold, enslaving themselves anew, debasing their salvation in exchange for idolatry, in order to belong — and to belong to something they could control, patrol, bound and own, a mere god of gold. It seems almost silly, the first time you read Exodus.

Moses is gone to the mountain 40 days and 40 nights,

“When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, ‘Come, make us gods.’ like bored children on a long drive.

 But we know what it is to worship gods of gold. Our world is full of them, parasitic, glittering gods of human construction, gods of preying on, not for praying to.

Gods of nation and race, preying on our need to belong. A hundred thousand people in the streets of London, worshiping an idol of belonging cast in the caste of race and nation.

Gods of false power and strength, ableism and toxic masculinity, rifles and drones, political violence, assassination, rioting and warmongering.

The list can go on; such gods have been cast in the country of my birth, and in this country where I live as an immigrant.

 But I’ve known my own false gods too.

I’ve built them when I have been afraid, when I have been lonely beyond words, when I have wanted desperately to belong to something, anything

 Belonging is one of the great hungers of the human condition, and the powers and principalities of this world know it.

We who are assaulted by many temptations, casting false belonging by casting out:

 And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’   (Luke 15.2)

 What kind of belonging is it, if everyone belongs?

 So Jesus told them this parable: 

‘Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?  (Luke 15.3-4)

 And the Scribes and Pharisees answered: None of us!

Do we look like scruffy shepherds?

And even if we were, of course we wouldn’t abandon 99 sheep in the wilderness just for one ewe too stupid to stay with the flock? Nobody does that, Jesus!

But thanks be to God for the good shepherd, who does go after the lost one until he finds it.

 Daniel Boone was famous for saying: “I have never been lost — but I was bewildered once for three days.”

 And I think he has a point. Not knowing quite where you are at the moment isn’t the same as being lost.

 You don’t have to travel far — or at all — to be lost. You just need to be overwhelmed by the fear that you are where you do not belong.

 It’s an overwhelming childhood fear. All you need to be lost is to realise the hand you’ve reached up to hold isn’t your father’s hand at all.

 The scribes and pharisees — of Jesus’ day, and today — live in unholy terror of not belonging. So they pick out the tax-collectors and the sinners, refugees and immigrants, transgender and gender-queer folk, someone, anyone to be ‘other’, that they might be not-other, which is the false idol of belonging.

 When the extremist Charlie Kirk was murdered this week, the Governor of Utah said “ I was praying that if this had to happen here, it wouldn’t be one of us. That somebody drove from another state, somebody came from another country.”

 I’ll be honest, I’m not sure I can reconcile such a prayer with the Jesus who goes into the wilderness to welcome the one lost sheep, with Jesus whose radical welcome was as wide as the arms of the cross, meeting us in our brokenness and estrangement.

And it’s at that very cross where I find hope:

I don’t want to be lost. I’d rather be comfortable and surrounded by like-minded folk.

But lost is where Jesus finds us. Lost, there at the foot of the cross, is where Jesus gathers us in his loving arms and holds us in his wounded hands.

Perhaps that’s today’s Gospel message in this broken world: Get lost.

Get lost, and find yourself with tax-collectors, sinners, and outcasts where there is joy in the presence of the angels of God at our repentance.

Get lost, that you might know—  not the golden idol of not-other, but the true God of the generous heart —

As bell hooks writes,

 “A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming.

In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment.

 This is the most precious gift true love offers - the experience of knowing we always belong.”[1]

 This is how we belong. Not by idols of not-other, not by waving flags or casting out,             but with open hearts, always ready to receive, lost not in fear, lost not in hatred, but lost in wonder, love, and praise.

[1] bell hooks, All About Love ( Harper, 1999)