He Is Not Ashamed to Call Them Brethren

A man told me he can walk into any room in his city except one.

He is not a shy man. He does business with people who know what he did. He has been to a school event, a funeral, a wedding and a hospital, in that order, in the last two years, and he has coped with all four.

The one room is a church, and he has made about six attempts and got in once, and sat at the back, and left before the end.

I asked him why that room specifically. He said something that has stayed with me: because everywhere else, people might not know, and there, they are supposed to care.

That is exact. In a shop, indifference protects him. In a church, he expects to be assessed by people who believe assessing is the point, and his own history is the exhibit.

I want to say what Hebrews says about this, and it is a sentence so strange that most people read past it without noticing what is being ruled out.

Why does that sentence need to exist at all

Here is the verse.

For both he that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one: for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren. (Hebrews 2:11, King James Version)

He is not ashamed to call them brethren.

Stop on the shape of that. It is a negative. Somebody thought it necessary to write down that Jesus is not embarrassed to use a family word about these people.

You only rule out what somebody might have assumed. Nobody writes a sentence like that unless the readers were carrying the opposite idea, which means the first century church was full of people who assumed they were the kind of person He would keep at a distance.

And the reason given is not their improvement. They are all of one. It is a statement about shared origin rather than about qualification.

You are called by a family word by Somebody who is not embarrassed to use it. Hebrews 2:11 says he is not ashamed to call them brethren and gives their shared origin as the reason. It is His Spirit, Romans 8:16 bearing witness that we are the children of God, who does the confirming that a doorway cannot supply.

The complaint against Jesus was about who was in the room

If a person wants to know what kind of company He kept, the fastest route is to read the complaints.

And the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them. (Luke 15:2)

This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them. That is not praise. It is the charge sheet, and it is the reason Luke 15 exists at all: the three parables about lost things are His answer to that accusation.

So the room He built was accused, by religious people, of being full of exactly the person who assumes he would not be welcome.

And His own summary of it is a line about doctors:

But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. (Matthew 9:12)

He is not being kind about that. He is describing an entry requirement, and the entry requirement is need.

You are the category the room was assembled for. Matthew 9:12 makes need the qualification rather than health. It is the Holy Spirit, John 16:8 who convicts of sin and of righteousness, who brings people to a door in the first place.

What Paul says about who is sitting there

There is a passage where Paul lists what people had been, to their faces, and then changes tense.

And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God. (1 Corinthians 6:11)

And such were some of you. He is writing to a church. He names categories that his readers had been in, plainly, in a letter that was read out loud in the meeting.

Which tells you what the room actually contained. Not people with clean histories. People with histories, sitting there, listening to a letter that named the categories out loud, and staying.

That is the room the man in the car is afraid of. It has always been that room. The version he pictures, where everybody has a tidy record and he would be the exception, has never existed anywhere.

You are walking toward a room that has always been full of people with histories. 1 Corinthians 6:11 says such were some of you in a letter read aloud in the meeting, and it is the same Spirit, named in that verse in the words by the Spirit of our God, who is credited with what changed for every one of them.

And if the doorway has become part of something heavier, say it out loud to a person: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, or the 988 crisis line, which answers every hour there is. Six attempts at a door is not a small thing and it should not be attempted alone every time.

The instruction assumes people will stop coming

There is one instruction about gathering and the interesting part is the reason it exists.

Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another. (Hebrews 10:25)

As the manner of some is. People were already dropping out when that was written. It is not addressed to a theoretical problem; it is addressed to a known pattern in a real group.

And what is prescribed against it is not attendance enforcement. It is exhorting one another, which is people speaking to each other.

Which means the loss of somebody from a room was understood, from the beginning, as a thing that happens for reasons, and the remedy given was other people, rather than a rule.

If nobody has come after you, that is a failure on the room's side and not a verdict on yours, and I would say that to any congregation from any stage.

You are described as a loss to a room rather than an intruder in it. Hebrews 10:25 addresses people already dropping away and prescribes exhorting one another rather than a rule. It is the Spirit of God, 1 Corinthians 12:13 by whom we are all baptized into one body, who did the assembling that a person's absence subtracts from.