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Foundry United Rev. |
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Let’s Do Focus on the
Family Sunday, May 8, 2005 |
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Mark 3: 31-35
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Several
weeks ago I got a note from one of our Sunday school teachers. The children
in the Sunday school class had been studying the story in the Gospel of John
of the wedding at Cana of Galilee. In the story, Jesus and his disciples and his
mother, Mary, attend the wedding. They run out of wine and Mary mentions to
Jesus the fact that they have run out of wine at the wedding. Jesus answers
Mary by saying: “Woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come.”
(John 2:4 RSV) The Sunday school teacher’s note said that the children in the
Sunday school class wanted to ask me how it was that Jesus would speak this
way to his mother, saying: “Woman, what have you to do with me?” Uh oh. I
cleared off my desk. I piled up all the commentaries about the Gospel of John
that I could find and started reading. The commentaries had many theories and
rationalizations for what Jesus said to his mother. I passed a few of them on
to the Sunday school teacher, but I was left, in my heart of hearts, with the
conviction that our precocious Sunday school children were not all wrong.
There was something of an edge, or at least a limit-setting boundary, in the
way Jesus responded to his mother. In
fact, if you read the Gospel with fresh eyes, it seems pretty clear that
Jesus’ relationship to his family was not always cozy. It began already very
early in the second chapter of Luke when Jesus was 12 years old. Jesus and
his mother and father went to Every
time I read that story I think: what if I had disappeared from my home for
three days, when I was 12? When my parents found me and asked me what I was
up to, if I had said to them: “Well, I was where God wanted me to be.” I suspect
my mother would have had an opinion where she thought God had wanted me to
be. Jesus,
if you read the Gospels with new and fresh eyes, Jesus had some pretty amazing
things to say about families:
Then
there is our lesson for the morning from Mark 3, but the same story also
appears in Matthew 12 and Luke 8, meaning that it is a very important story
in the minds of the early Church because it is a story repeated in all three
of the synoptic gospels, the three first gospels. Jesus had begun his
teaching, preaching and healing ministry when his family, his mother and
brothers and sisters, came to get him. Jesus was teaching in a crowded room.
They couldn’t get physically to him, so they sent a message across the room.
Someone interrupts Jesus’ teaching to tell him: “Your mother and your
brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.” Jesus points to those who
are in the room listening to him teach and says:
“Here are my mothers and my brothers and sisters. Whoever does the will of
God is my brother and sister and mother.” We live
in a time when “family values” and “pro-family” have become partisan
political terms. By talking about family values and being pro-family, some
folk obviously are suggesting that there are others of us who are somehow in
favor of non-family values or who are anti-family. Those who talk about family
values and being pro-family often promote their agenda on the basis of their
Christian faith. So, if we
as Christians are going to talk about family values and to use it as a
political slogan, it might be good to know what Jesus had to say about
families. This is what I think is clear about what Jesus had to say about
families. For Jesus, family was not primarily a matter of biological relationship,
but of missional commitment. For Jesus, family is about shared mission rather
than about blood ties.
This
understanding of family on Jesus’ part is made clear from another example
from the Gospel of Luke, in addition to the others I have already mentioned. In Luke
18, a rich young ruler comes to Jesus to ask how he might inherit eternal
life. Jesus makes some suggestions, but that’s not enough for the rich ruler.
He keeps pushing. Jesus said to him: “If you truly want eternal life, sell
everything you have, give the money to the poor, and come follow me.” This
was not the final answer that the ruler wanted to hear because he was very rich
and could not stand the idea of giving up his possessions. So, he went away
sad. After
he went away, Peter turns to Jesus and says: “What about us? We have done it.
We have given up our homes and our families and everything we have to follow
you.” Jesus says to Peter: “Truly I tell you, no one who has left house or
wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God,
who will not get back very much more in this age, and in the age to come,
eternal life.” (Luke 29-30) When
that same saying of Jesus appears in the 10th Chapter of Mark,
Jesus is even more specific. He says: "There is no one who has left
house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for
my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundred
times more now in this age – houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and
children, and fields with persecutions – and in the age to come, eternal
life.” (Mark 10-29-30) Family
is shaped around shared community, committed to shared mission rather than
biology or genes or blood. For Jesus, it is not biological ties that make us
family but the Gospel and the In
Christian terms, it would seem to me, if we listen to Jesus, those who say
that they want to protect the family, the biological family, the traditional
family, would seem to be the ones who are anti-Jesus’ understanding of family
and Jesus’ family values. What makes our biological and adopted families
significant is that we are units of the mission of God. It is less about
blood and biology than it is about that this, too, is a way we serve God by
the way we love and care for our families. The
most poignant expression of this, I think, is Jesus on the cross. When Jesus is
on the cross, he looks down and he sees his biological mother, Mary, standing
there. And he sees his beloved disciple, John. And he says to Mary: “Mary,
behold John over here. He is now your son.”
Then he says to the disciple, "John, take a look at Mary over
here. She is now your mother.” From that day on, Mary moved into John’s home.
They cared for one another. They became a family, not because they were
related by blood, but because they had shared need and could meet one
another’s need as part of their missional service to God. (John 19: 26-27) I know
this is true. When I lost my mother, there was a time in my life, in my
grief, that I needed mothering. The Jesus
expands our understanding of family. Our children are not just the children
born to us biologically or adopted by us. Our children are all children who need
our love. The children who are born to us or adopted by us we love and care
for not merely because they are part of us, but because they are part of God
and because it is part of our mission to serve Christ by loving and caring
for them and by doing everything we can to raise them to be well and healthy.
If blood
and biological ties are turned into the most important thing, it is very
dangerous. Blut und Boden – blood and soil – was a Nazi
theme: the idea that what gives us a sense of community and belonging to one
another is physiological and biological relationships and nationality. This
is far from the teachings of Jesus, who taught that we are brothers and
sisters, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters of one another. Today
we honor every mother. What I want to say is that we honor everyone who has
cared for us like a mother, some of whom may not necessarily even be women. There
are people who have cared for us like a mother who are not necessarily been
women. We honor every father, sister, brother – not just those with whom we
have blood ties, but everyone who has truly been a father, sister, brother to
us. “Who
are my mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers?” Jesus asks. Well, they are people
of every race and nationality and continent and religion and gender and
sexual orientation. They are people who need me and whom I need. They are people
who share a common vision of a human family feasting together at God’s
heavenly table – God who is our heavenly parent and therefore makes us all
brothers and sisters with one another. These are my mothers, fathers,
sisters, and brothers. And it
is those, I think, who manage to love both the families given to us by birth
or adoption and the families given to us by the grace of God, it is those of
us who manage to love beyond the limits of biology and blood who are truly
pro-family, living out Jesus’ family values. |
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