Who Are My Mother and My Brothers?

Christianity is not a collection of ideas we can "tack" onto a fully formed person whose identity markers are found elsewhere.  Instead, all those other identity markers -- nation, race, culture -- have to be transformed by being in Jesus Christ (dying and rising with him) or else left on the scrap heap.  And when that conversion happens we find ourselves in a new family, one marked by grace.  Life in this new family is marked by the cross (with which we are signed in baptism); we expect the cross in our lives as individuals and as the one Body of Christ.  But we also expect resurrection.