Blood Tells

by Rev. Jim HollandBack in August, my oldest daughter, Bethan, decided that she would begin cooking on the grill. We texted back and forth as she was making her maiden voyage at cooking food over a real charcoal fire, and the questions were many: questions about fire, meat temperatures, how long to cook, whether to leave the lid on or off, etc.  After all the questions, a little while later I received this text from her: “I get it now Dad, the fascination with grilling. This is so relaxing. I’m taking it over in this family.” After a few more texts from the proud father watching a family tradition being taken up and secured for another couple of generations, she wrote this: “It was inevitable it would come to this; I am your child.” I replied two words: “Blood tells.”Will, my third child who just moved to Collierville, and now has a back yard and thus far in his life has resisted the siren call of the grill, called me just last week, and exactly like Bethan, I spent a long time on the phone and texts mentoring him through his first steak. As a father, it doesn’t matter that he has missed hours of his life around the grill not learning this fine art—even scorning the grill at times. When a child takes up something you love, you don’t move to judgment, you move to instruction. A few hours later (I was in Denver and had lost contact), I texted him back to see how everything turned out. He texted this: “Perfection. My family’s life just dramatically improved.” One comment: “Blood tells.” When his son, Gavin, saw the meat on the counter awaiting its purification by fire, he said, “That’s Pa’s meat. Pa cooks meat and I love it. It’s yummy.” Yes, family trade secrets and a deeply hallowed tradition are secured for a couple of generations.I am fascinated by what happens in families, the power of the family, and how deeply things run in the blood. Sometimes, things in our families lie dormant for years, as was my case with gardening. As a young lad, I worked on a farm with my grandfather, came from people who worked the soil time out of mind, worked in my family garden with my parents (very reluctantly), and didn’t plant a thing until I was about 33 years old. I was in an agrarian community and was not moved to till the soil until one day, like a Damascus Road revelation, I knew I had to have a garden. Blood tells. Something that held my family together for generations, that was latent in me, suddenly came forward. It is a mystery, I know, but it was in the very bones of my existence—in the blood of my people.In preaching through I Peter, I have been struck by one of the ways Peter describes the church: we are a “holy nation.” That is, of course, a reference from the Old Testament and the way God described Israel as they came out of Egypt. They are a people bound to God and each other by covenant and by blood. Out of all the nations of the world, God said, “You will be my people.” What is interesting is that Peter would use this image of blood, of being the same ethnicity, to describe the group of people to whom he writes. How can this be? His audience is comprised of Greeks, Romans, Jews and whatever other ethnicity that was part of the church in Asia Minor.  This is a powerful image of solidarity, of family, of being part of a tribe.I am reading Tom Wolfe’s new book, Back to Blood. It is set in Miami, Florida, a place Wolfe chooses to dissect in his latest iconoclastic knife. Miami is a place with ethic strife, “…the only city in the world where half the population are recent immigrants, meaning within the last fifty years.” The theme of the book is that racial tension is not getting better in our country. He is saying that with the loss of transcendent faith, people seek identity in their ethnicity—their blood. At the beginning of the book Ed Topper, a transplanted Anglo-SaxonWASP from New England (now a racial minority) and the editor of the Miami Herald, has a revelation as he watches the racial tensions play out and he says this:A phrase from out of nowhere. “Everybody… all of them… it’s back to blood! Religion is dying… but everybody still has to believe in something. It would be intolerable—you couldn’t stand it—to finally have to say to yourself, ‘Why keep pretending? I’m nothing but a random atom inside a supercollider known as the universe.’ But believing in by definition means blindly, irrationally, doesn’t it. So, my people, that leaves only our blood, the bloodlines that course through our very bodies, to unite us. ‘La Raza!’ as the Puerto Ricans cry out. ‘The Race!’ cries the whole world. All people, all people everywhere, have but one last thing on their minds—Back to blood!” All people, everywhere, you have no choice but—Back to blood!In Wolf’s context, he is terrified at this, because “back to blood” leads to violence and power plays by whichever ethnic group has the numbers, the money and the vote. Blood tells!Now imagine what Peter is saying when he calls the church a “holy nation.” He is saying that we are bound by blood. Whose blood? Jesus’ blood! Because of the cross, Jesus is building a “holy nation” bound to him and each other by blood—his blood. His DNA is in them, and yet the mystery of this community is that it is the exact opposite of all the various ethnic groups in the world. Rather than existing to behave like ethnic groups usually do—having attitudes of ethnic superiority, keeping others at a distance—it exists to invite others in! Rather than existing to lord it over others, it exists in weakness to serve the world and manifest the grace of the savior who died for them when they opposed him.Blood tells. In believers who are united into one people by Jesus’ blood, it ought to tell as well. Let us pray that what it tells and shows the world is what is mirrored in the life of Jesus. It is a lot to think about.