If you’ve ridden the ride, the tune is indelibly, maddeningly tattooed on your brain: “It’s a small world after all,” et cetera, ad nauseum.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, it’s true.
The sociologists figure, or so I’ve read, that any person is no more that 13th cousin to any other person who has ever lived, any time, any race, anywhere, including now.
When the Campbell side of my family was thrown out of Scotland (technically it was called the Highland Clearances), my fourth-great grandparents and their sons landed in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Third-great grandfather, Andrew, kept coming west and set up shop as a carpenter in Clarksville, Clinton County.
My second-great grandfather, Americus, was born in Wilmington in 1842. My great grandfather, Charles, in Sabina in 1862. After that the Campbells went west again – as far away as Indiana!
But, I am probably related to some of you – maybe too closely for comfort.
I’ve accidentally run into friends in a crowd of 80,000, been identified as a Lutheran pastor from Ohio in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, encountered parishioners and friends of parishioners in far-flung states.
A model railroading friend, living here now, recognized a model I had built and we discovered we were born 19 days apart on opposite sides of the Ohio River and knew lots of the same people. I could go on, ad nauseum. You get the picture.
The world is really small, after all.
God, (Jesus said to call Him “Dad”) Dad, I am sure, intends this; this small world, closely related to everyone thing. Home and family: Like Robert Frost said: Home – the place where you go and they have to take you in.
Just think what would happen if God hadn’t knit us into one, big, human family: We could ignore each other’s needs. Instead of feuding like proper siblings, we’d make war on each other! The straying sibling would repent and come home to be welcomed by a father and rejected by a brother.
If God hadn’t knit us into one, big family, it might be possible for us to ignore or ridicule others because of their politics, their nationality, their ethnicity, their religious persuasion, their disability, or any of a million other characteristics that make them less worthy, even less human than we. We could leave them lying in the road, not worth our time or attention.
You might be my goofy sixth cousin twice removed, but you’re my cousin. Dad says I must attend to you, and I love Him too much to not take you in.
As that great theologian, Red Green, says: I’m pulling for you. We’re all in this together.
Pastor Doug Campbell is retired from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and is a member of Faith, Wilmington. He retired from Peace, Hillsboro and has served interim pastorates in Cincinnati, Lebanon and Beavercreek as well as supplying pulpits in the Southern Ohio Synod, ELCA.
