Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
May 9, 2010 Mother’s Day
Luke 12:51-53
A college chaplain writes, “During a graduation weekend, I said to a young woman who was a graduating senior and who had been an active participant in our campus ministry, ‘I would like to meet your parents this weekend.’
“’Oh, I wouldn’t advise that,’ she said, ‘My mother is really angry with you.’
“’Angry with me? Why on earth would your mother be angry with me?’
“’She’s very upset that I am thinking about going to work with the poor. I think she liked the old me she once had better than the new me who now wants to work with Jesus.’”
Another minister writes, “I was visiting an active suburban congregation. The pastor told me that one of their most successful ministries was a large Wednesday night worship event – three hundred energetic, loud teenagers for two hours of worship in the middle of the week! ‘Over two-thirds of the kids are senior highs, the rest are mid-highs,’” commented the pastor.
“’Really?’ I asked in amazement. ‘Usually it’s easier to reach the younger teenagers than the older ones. Why is it you get so many of the older students out?’
“’Simple,’ said the pastor. ‘The older kids have driver’s licenses. They can drive themselves here. The younger kids are totally dependent on their parents. We pray that those kids will soon get the ability to drive themselves to church.’
“’Wow,’ I said. ‘That’s some commentary on the parents.’
“’Frankly,’ he answered, with more than a touch of cynicism in his voice, ‘we have lots of parents who appear to worship soccer, ballet, anything but Jesus.’”
Ouch! That sounds rather harsh, maybe both stories sound rather harsh, especially on Mother’s Day. But I share them because, quite honestly, when Jesus speaks about families, he often sounds more than a little harsh. “From now on, five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son…” and on and on. You heard the text. Not peace, but division, division in families! I cannot tell you how many times I’ve wished Jesus just wouldn’t have said that
But in all honesty, as you work your way through the Gospels, it seems that family was always kind of a problem for Jesus. So many preachers, particularly on this day, talk about Jesus as the great defender and supporter of traditional family values, whatever those are. But one could make a strong case that traditional family values really were not his thing. As a baby, his paternity was in question and his birth was an embarrassment for many. (Is it true that the Arizona legislature is going to cancel Christmas unless Jesus produces a valid birth certificate next year?) As a child, he left his parents when they took him to the temple, leaving his mother to ask, after a frantic search, “Why have you treated us so?”
As an adult, once his ministry was started, when a man asked to bury his father before leaving to follow Jesus, Jesus replied tersely, “Let the dead bury the dead. Follow me.” One day, when he was teaching a group of strangers, he was told, “Your mother and brothers are outside asking for you.” Did he jump up and run outside for a tearful family reunion? Not hardly. No, he answered, “Who are my mother and brothers?” And then there is today’s text about dividing families and bringing them more conflict than peace. Little wonder that Norman Rockwell never painted Jesus. He doesn’t seem to have been the Brady Bunch type. What was up with Jesus and family?
I want to show you a recent purchase of mine. I had attended a conference, and I was driving from Seattle to Portland, to visit our daughter Becky. I went into this large sporting goods store and what should appear to me but this great little fishing rod. I’m saying I really had no choice, it just jumped right into my hands. I bought this for our grandson, Ben, all of three years old. Now for all I know he’s going to hate camping and fishing. I don’t know. I bought it because we are going to be going on a family camping trip up to Burney Falls this summer. When our two girls were growing up, we went there ten, eleven or twelve years in a row. It became an important part of our family summer. We still talk about and those wonderful memories. It really helped shape their lives. Now, after all these years, we are returning this summer with our grandson and I am really looking forward to it. We had such good times and I hop to create new memories, whether or not Ben decides he likes to fish. But I’m excited to go. In so many ways, family camping trips for example, our families are a means of joy and grace for us. And if I asked you, I suppose most of us would say that we would do anything for our families.
But there is also no denying that our families, which can be such blessings, can also become a burden. As a pastor, I can tell you that some of the most tragic stuff that happens to us happens within our families. I have had more than one therapist tell me that most of their practice involves helping people try to recover from the damage inflicted on them within families. And I think it’s important on a day like this to acknowledge that fact; to recognize that not all of us are going to look upon our family experience with fondness. Indeed, for some, it is an experience dominated by pain. And I just have to wonder, could this, this ambivalence regarding families, help explain Jesus’ attitude – some of his hard teachings? Or could it be that he’s really trying to introduce us to something that’s brand new?
Heidi Neumark is a Lutheran pastor. She has spent her career in the New York City area, working with congregations in the South Bronx and in Manhattan. Her congregation is multi-lingual. They have a service in Spanish and a service in English. She leads both services and multi-cultural folks from all over attend. Her church looks a lot like New York City. Her church also has a shelter for young gay and lesbian teenagers. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of these kids in the New York area. She said she read an article about these kids, many of whom had been kicked out of their homes, in the New York Times. She and some church members started to say “What can we do about this?” And this idea of starting a shelter developed. But it was not without controversy. Particularly in the Latino community, where they just did not want to deal with or talk about issues of homosexuality. They were not supportive of this idea and the more they talked about it the more divided the church became. Finally, Heidi decided, “We’ve got to talk about this.” So a large congregational meeting was planned and a whole lot of people came. Heidi invited some of these kids to come and share their stories.
One boy, one teenager, who spoke had an interesting pattern of scars on his arms. And he told this story. He decided to come out one night during the family dinner. When he announced that he was gay, his mother flew into a rage. She picked up a fork and began stabbing him in the arm and then kicked him out of the house. The members of the Latino community couldn’t believe this. For in that community, family is everything. You don’t close the door to family members. There’s always a place to come, and it’s your family. They could not understand how this boy would be booted out like that. And the more they talked the more they began to see that maybe these kids needed a family. Maybe we can provide that. Maybe we, this church, can be their new family. And that was the end of the controversy. A new shelter for these teenagers was begun.
It reminds me of a missionary who was speaking in a church about the suffering of so many of the children in Haiti. When she was finished, a collection was received and they counted it right there. The missionary looked out on the congregation and said, “This isn’t enough.” (I’ve got to try that some time! I don’t know her, but I love her already.) “I’m going to pass this plate one more time, and when I do, I want you to pray that Jesus will help you recognize in the faces of these suffering children, the faces of your own children.”
Well, can that be where Jesus is taking us when he speaks his admittedly hard words about family? Could he be calling us to a vision of family that is deeper, wider than simply a group of people who happen to have the same genetic endowment? He doesn’t attack family as much as he expands the concept of family to include, well, all of us – we who thought we were so different because of race, gender, clan, religion, economic level or politics. Barbara Brown Taylor says it like this: “Jesus did not despise the family, but he did redefine it. For him, family was not a matter of whose chromosomes you carry around inside of you but whose image you are created in. It was not a matter of who has the same last name or lives at the same address but who serves the same God, which means that his family became huge beyond counting, with lepers and tax collectors and Roman centurions in it, with scruffy looking men who smelled of fish and ladies in robes made of gold brocade and hordes of squealing children. Relatives collected from all over the place – some from one family, some from another – all of them gathered in one place because of their allegiance to one father.”
I think here is where we find the key to Jesus and family values. A family – as we just affirmed in the baptism today – is where water is thicker than blood. I think of the pastor who said to parents after the baptism of their daughter, “You brought her here today as your child. You take her home as your sister in Christ.” Esmé today has joined a new family, an expanded family, a family, brought together by Jesus’ loving solidarity.
I once read some words of a seminary student, words reflecting on her life, her conversion, her sense of call to Christian ministry. Her parents had never had any interest in church. She had not attended a single church service until she went on her own as a teenager. She said that although her parents had remained loving and supportive, they could not comprehend why she would seek ordination. She said, “The waters of baptism have to run deeper than the blood of family ties or it just doesn’t make sense for me to be in seminary.”
I think that is precisely what Jesus is talking about. Says one pastor, “Look around you just now at the people you hardly know, much less have anything in common with. Pray to God for the grace to be able to see these strangers as your siblings. Pray to God that they will be given the grace to see you as a close relative. All of the inadequacies and problems that you had growing up in your family are being healed. He who had no conventional family, he who sired no children, is busy forming the largest family the world has ever known…So welcome home!”