Wahkotowin – We Are All Related

Wahkotowin – We Are All Related

Wahkotowin – We Are All Related

Jubilee Preaching Aid for August 17, 2025

This week’s Gospel, Luke 12:49-56, is always a challenging one. At first glance, a Jesus that is talking about bringing fire and division does not seem consistent with the one who we are used to seeing as speaking peace and offering mercy. “I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze!” “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division… [T]hey will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.” Why does this Jesus sound so harsh?

When Jesus speaks this way, as he is recorded to have done in several other places (Matthew 10:34-36 being another example), it seems highly unlikely to me that his real message was that he wanted to torch the bonds of families and cause raging fights between parents and their children. Jesus is almost certainly not against the idea of people enjoying the blessings of positive familial connections. But I do think he wanted to question the way that the established lines of relationship and accountability in his culture had a limiting hold on our notions of who we needed to care about. Jesus wanted us to have a far more expansive and inclusive view of who our relatives could be than the traditional social and political boundaries of the day tried to minimise and narrow.

As I have been learning recently from Elders in the Nehiyaw/Cree tradition, in this world there is a fundamental natural law that can be summarized as a principle called “wahkotowin”. Wahkotowin translates literally as “kinship”, and refers to an understanding that all people, all creatures, and indeed all that is, are related, because of our common source in the Creator and Mother Earth. Our relations, therefore, stretch far beyond the nuclear family, the extended family, the tribe, or even the nation; in fact, they can be understood to include everyone and everything with which we share an interconnected web of existence. And if that’s true, then we have a responsibility to live and share together with so many more.

I hear in this wisdom a similar and deep awareness of something I think Jesus was also trying to teach his disciples when he spoke about dividing and overturning the so-called established stability of families and society. We do not need to have our friends, nor our enemies, decided for us by the standards of the powers and principalities of this world. Rather, the Way of Jesus invites and enables us to reach out across all those fabricated lines we so often create for ourselves to keep different peoples apart and instead to share with one another as kin. Jesus has come to proclaim a new kind of kinship – a kin-dom of God.

Of course, living this way – counter to the prevailing forces that would have us do otherwise – is not usually very popular, and can lead to a life of opposition and even martyrdom, as this week’s epistle readings tells us (Hebrews 11:29-12:2). Even when we try, we very often fail, and, to reference our reading from the Old Testament (Isaiah 5:1-7), God makes use of ways that will act to fundamentally reorient us to who we are truly called to be. Nevertheless, I think it remains one of the central callings of the Way of the Gospel, and a powerful invitation to live as people who do not relate to land and wealth as things we can possess for ourselves, but rather as things we share with everyone else. In other words, to be People of the Jubilee.

Scott Sharman is a Treaty Person from Amiskwaciy Waskahikan/Edmonton AB. He serves the Jesus Movement as a priest in the Anglican tradition, and as the national staff person for Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations in the Anglican Church of Canada.