Today is Aboriginal Sunday and Father's Day. The family is central to First Nations, valued in many world cultures and was central to the first "Christ-Followers". Like First Nations, the Christian family included the blood relatives, those adopted into the family and in the years following Jesus all the economic unit including the slaves, the land and the animals. In Christian homes, when the householder was Baptized, the whole household followed suit. Early Christians were people of the land. There were no churches as we understand them until 200 years later.
We about 1000 years ago in the West lost this understanding and made the family unit very small . This was intentional to allow for easy manipulation of family units and the rise of nationalism and armies for a nation-state. This led to exploration and the development of the Doctrine of Discovery which we Anglicans recently disavowed. The clash between First Nations Culture and European Culture is that Aboriginal People's have retained their vision of family being inclusive of all and we have lost our similar vision.
Today, we must reclaim our roots and reconcile our history. Climate change reminds us that there is only one planet and one family from all the 4 directions of the earth.
