Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
May 11, 2003
Matthew 12: 46-50
Today is Mother’s Day, a day celebrated in many churches as the Festival of the Christian Home. In many churches today a popular Mother’s Day sermon theme is the need for us to return to Biblically based family values. As families are under increasing pressure, as we seem to have less and less time for each other, as divorce rates continue to rise, as children are increasingly babysat by television and video games, as any number of addictions tear at family life, we need to return to the Bible. Here is the answer for what ails us, for what ails our families, for what ails our Christian homes. And that sounds fine. I’m certainly not going to stand here this morning and preach against the Bible.
However, when it comes to family values, when it comes to Jesus and family values, the Bible can in fact, be quite challenging. It does not always say what we might want it to say. For several years now we have gathered on the Saturday night before Easter and participated in the Great Vigil of Easter, an ancient and wonderful service. Part of that service is a reading of salvation history, Biblical readings which tell the story of the people of God. And every year one of those readings is the story of God telling Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac. This year, I confess, I chose a different reading. People just find the story of Abraham preparing to kill his only child too unpleasant. They find the idea of a God demanding such a sacrifice way too unpleasant. Child sacrifice? What kind of a family value is that? Although there was that time the kids were fighting in the backseat of the car…
I once read an account of what happened when a Sunday morning adult class at a church watched a video that told this troubling story. There on the video was old Abraham struggling up the wind-swept, dusty mountain with a knife under his coat and his son trudging silently behind him. Finally the bronze blade is raised, the boy’s black eyes flash with horror, then a voice from heaven stays the knife. A ram cries from the thicket and it is over.
The minister who was leading the class that morning asked, “What does this old story mean to us? I dare say we moderns are a bit put off by the primitive notion that God would ask anyone to sacrifice his child like this. Can this ancient story have any significance for us today?” A middle-aged man responded, “I’ll tell you the meaning this story has for me. I’ve decided that I and my family are going to look for another church.”
“What?” said the minister, “why?”
“Because,” said the man, “when I look at that God, the God of Abraham, I feel I’m near a real God. Not the sort of dignified, business-like, Rotary club God we chatter about here on Sunday mornings. Abraham’s God could blow a man to bits, give, and then take a child. Ask for everything from a person and then want more. I want to know that God, a God who demands everything and stops at nothing. A wild and restless God who’s determined to have his way with us, no matter what the cost. I’ve had enough of plain, middle of the road, reasonable religion.”
On this Mother’s Day, or indeed on any day, do we really want to know that God? A God who might equally bless and challenge our family values, who is always capable of turning even our most cherished values and priorities upside-down? Who just might have a quarrel with the way we order our world and live our lives? Even in our families? Do we really want to know that God?
Well, let’s leave God and Abraham and Isaac up on that mountain for a moment and turn to the Gospel of Matthew. Surely we can turn to Jesus for a more upbeat, more comfortable, more affirming view of family values, can’t we?
Someone told him, “Look, your mother and your brothers are standing outside wanting to speak to you.” But to the one who told him this, Jesus replied, “Who is my mother and who are my brothers?” And pointing to his disciples he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers, for whoever does the will of my Father in Heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”
Well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I will ask Jesus to pick out a Mother’s Day card for me this year. “Jesus, your mom is here.” And her first born son replies, “You don’t say… who is my mother, anyway?” Not what you might expect to hear from a loving son. How can we explain this rather callous remark? Was Jesus just having a bad day?
Duke University’s Stanly Hauerwas begins one of his ethics classes by reading a letter from a parent to a government official. The parent complains that his once obedient and well-motivated child has become involved in some weird religious group. The group has completely taken over his life, forced him to forsake all his friends and has even turned him against his own family. The parent pleads with the official to intervene and take action against this obviously disruptive group that is causing so many difficulties for families. Hauerwas then asks the class, “What is this letter all about?” The class is convinced the letter concerns a young person who has gotten mixed up with the Moonies, or Jim Jones or some other far-out, controversial sect. To their surprise, they learn they are listening to a letter which is a compilation of a number of letters from third century Roman parents complaining about a far-out, weird religious group called ‘Christians’.
It seems that one of the chief Roman criticisms of Christianity was it ‘disrupted families. “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?”
A pastor writes: “I know a young woman who grew up in a caring, loving home. She was sent to the university to be trained in business to join her father and her older brother in the very successful family investment firm. But she did not graduate and return to the investment firm. Her junior year of college, she left school and now works in a program with Native American children in Arizona. Her parents hardly speak to her any more. They took her decision to follow Jesus to Arizona as a repudiation of them and their values. I wonder if Mary and her sons might not identify with that young woman’s parents?
“Who is my mother?”
I don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to think that Jesus in Matthew is not much easier on family and family values than is God up on Mount Moriah with Abraham and Isaac. What’s going on? In both Old and New Testaments, Biblical texts that address family, family life and family values can be tough on our traditional concepts of family and family life.
Well on this Mother’s Day, this Festival of the Christian Home, I certainly want to affirm our families. We cherish our families; we’d do anything we could for them. I’m sure that most of us here today would readily say we would sacrifice our life in order to spare the lives of family members. I’m aware that many people, when asked why they are joining this church, point to our youth and education programs, our camping program and other activities, saying; “ This is a good church for families.” And I hope that continues to be true. I want this to be a church that affirms all of our families and all of their many configurations. But having said that, I’m left wondering, what do we do with today’s gospel text? What do we do with Abraham and Isaac? What to do with a God and a Lord who demand our love, faithfulness and allegiance, even as our families demand our love, faithfulness and allegiance.
I once heard a preacher say this, “In the church, we don’t believe in the family” (Happy Mother’s Day everyone.) He went on to say, “Here we do not believe in single-parent families. We don’t believe in two-parent families. Here we believe in something called ‘baptism’ whereby we adopt people of all different ages and put them in a family much richer, more diverse and interesting than the family they would have had if they had not been baptized.”
In the community of faith, family is more than marital status. The work of the Christian church is to weave every believer into bonds of mutual commitment and love, bonds as real and as legal as biological bonds recognized by society. What we might have in the often-difficult language of both the Old and New Testaments, is not so much an attack on family or a critique on family, as it is an invitation to a wider view of family. It just might be that Jesus is telling us, “You know, your human family is fine, but for all its strengths, it isn’t enough.” And so He calls us into the Church. He calls us through baptism into a much more expansive experience of family, where we now call people who were once strangers ‘brother’ and ‘sister.’ where our ties to each other know no social, economic, racial or political boundaries, where water becomes stronger than blood.
I think of that young woman who so disappointed her family, her biological family, by going off to serve her wider family, her brothers and sisters in the family of God. They felt repudiated. She felt called. Better get ready, because this is precisely what can happen in this new family of ours, a family bound together by the water of baptism. A family of disciples.
Years ago, basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski gave a talk to a university’s retirees association. He told them about a friend of his in Southern California who was coaching a basketball team, where out of 15 young men, 10 had never known a father. He noted how he and his fellow coaches were spending more time trying to be “daddies” to the players than coaches. Said Krzyzewski, “Things are in too big a mess in the American family for you people to be sitting around playing bridge or moving to some retirement community in Florida. We need you. We need your wisdom, your patience, your free time. We need you to be adopting kids, stepping up and taking responsibility for kids that, while they may not be your own, they are all of our responsibility. Well folks, that is precisely the family affirmed by Jesus. A family where everyone is a member, where everyone has a part to play and no one is excluded. And where family members are even allowed to follow Jesus in unexpected directions. Call this family what you will, I like to call it Church.