The Ultimate Value of Family

Lenten Sermon Series: God in the 21st Century
March 17, 2002
© The Reverend Doctor Brent A. Smith

Readings:

Here are a series of readings from Gospel sources (translation from The Five Gospels) concerning the roles of men, women, and children in the context of the family:

Luke 18: 16 Jesus called for the infants and said, "Let the children come up to me, and don’t try to stop them. After all, God’s domain is peopled with such as these."

Luke 14: 26 If any come to me and do not hate their own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters – yes, even their own life – they cannot be my disciples.

Mark 3:31-34 Then his mother and his brothers arrive. While still outside, they send in and ask for him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they say to him, "Look, your mother and your brothers [and sisters] are outside looking for you." In response he says to them: "My mother and brothers – who ever are they?"

And looking right at those seated around him in a circle, he says, "Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does God’s will, that’s my brother and sister and mother!"

Luke 12:2 There is nothing veiled that won’t be unveiled, or hidden that won’t be made known.

Luke 10:38-42 Now as they went along, he came to this village where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. And she had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his words. But Martha kept getting distracted because she was doing all the serving. So she went up and said, "Lord, doesn’t it matter to you that my sister has left me with all the serving? Tell her to give me a hand."

But the Lord answered her, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about a lot of things. But only one thing is necessary. Mary has made the better choice and it is something she will never lose."

PRAYER

The prayer this morning is a familiar one, although you may have heard a longer version of the Lord’s Prayer. This version this morning is what scholars surmise is the version found in the Q document. The gospels of Matthew and Luke have portions of them that recount the same events, but with differences that indicate the two books were written by two different authors living in two different and distinct places. But the portions of the books that are common to both are almost assuredly from a source that both authors had with them when they composed their gospels, around 90 AD. That source scholars call Q. And even though we do not have a written text called Q, nevertheless scholars are convinced it once existed. Taking the version of the Lord’s Prayer in Luke and the version in Matthew, and taking from them what is common to both, scholars have come with this version as probably the version in the Q document. In addition, most scholars do not think Jesus taught the prayer to his disciples, but that whomever compiled the Q document took sayings that Jesus consistently used, probably in petitionary prayer, and compiled them into one prayer, this prayer, the Lord’s Prayer:

Father,
Your name be revered.
Impose your imperial rule.
Provide us with the bread we need for the day.
Forgive our debts to the extent we have forgiven those in debt to us.
And please don’t subject us to test after test.

SERMON

"We read the world wrong," wrote Hindu poet Rabindranath Tagore, "and say it deceives us." Maybe, though, lying beneath the veneer of the world is an unseen order of justice and mercy, and reading the world wrong is simply not reading it deeply enough to see the unseen.

Did you read in the paper this last week the article about the author of the "Anyway Commandments," a series of 10 maxims the author penned in 1968 as a 19 year-old. "They’re just fundamental about the human condition," Kent Keith said, and are written in a way to transcend, in a subversive way, what a person experiences, as in the 2nd of the commandments: "If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway." But what is a revelation about these commandments is not their content, but the human propensities they reveal. The author heard them delivered a few years ago by a speaker who attributed them to Mother Teresa. When the author confronted the speaker and told him he had written them over thirty years before, the speaker looked at Keith as if he was crazy. Over the years they have been attributed to Mother Teresa, Ann Landers, Wally Amos the chocolate chip cookie guy, but never the real author! Likewise, in a sermon we read in the ROOTS class for newcomers, colleague the Reverend Suzanne Meyer points out:

Whether they go to church or not, most people know at least a hand full of the most common quotations from the Bible. For example most people know: cleanliness is next to Godliness, fools rush in where angels fear to tread, the Lord helps those who help themselves, spare the rod and spoil the child, pride goeth before a fall. Who has not heard someone (usually a grandmother or great aunt) pronounce in a solemn voice: As it is written in the Good Book: fools rush in where angels fear to tread. There is only one problem. All of those so-called common Biblical quotations are nowhere to be found in the Bible---people just seem to think that they are.

- What a Piece of Work, Rev. Suzanne Meyer

Not only do we read the world wrong and say it deceives us, attributing the "Anyway Commandments" to people who did not author them and finding sayings in the Bible that are not there, but we believe in our wrong readings!

The same could be said of both our understandings of family and our understandings of the bonds of authentic religious community.

I remember one colleague told me she liked to tell her congregation how much they were her family. I responded with an audible gasp. I don’t want my congregation to act or be anything like my family, as much as I love my family! I told her of the story of my great Aunts Edith and Alma, God rest their souls. At the funeral home, at the end of the service commemorating the life of their sister, I watched one sister stare the other one down in the lobby, come towards her, confront her about the fox stole she was wearing, inquiring if that was what she thought it was, the deceased’s stole. When it was confirmed, my little boy eyes stared at a sight I had never seen before or since. Each sister grabbed an end of the poor fox, and there in the funeral home, before God and all the mourners, the two sisters yanked and pulled in a tug-of-war over the fox stole until the poor beast was naked and half of Winchester, Indiana, stunned to silence. There is no way I want my religious community to be like my family!

Yet, too often we ascribe certain values to families, certain kinds of configurations to families, and hear that these values and configurations are somehow blessed by the God of Christianity, or at the very least, the Bible as the Word of God. But, again, we read the world wrong and its scriptures wrong, and religion often supports this by encouraging belief in wrong readings!

Over 20 years ago one of my professors at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago said something that has stuck with me all these years: How you read the Bible is how you read the world. That doesn’t make the Bible a magic text, but one that so easily receives impressions from our bias and narrownesses, our hopes and our fears, that if we could see how we see the Bible, we would know how we view the world. The Free Church tradition invites a particular way to read the Bible; as a document that unveils the unseen order of the world to have freedom at its center and liberation as its aim.

It is not the most natural way to read the Bible or the world and, thus, it is the product of a spiritual discipline; what scholars call the hermeneutic of suspicion. Hermeneutic refers to the manner of interpretation, so this kind of interpretation begins with suspicion, because of the knowledge, mostly through experience, of the human propensity to believe too much. We often allow ourselves to be fooled, to give over interpretation of the world and our lives to some authority outside our own experience. So, it is good to suspect the prevailing views of life and events; to be the ones in class who raise a hand and ask, "But what if it’s not true?" And, sometimes, to bear the consequences of being kicked out of class or church. In the hermeneutic of suspicion, to doubt is the beginning of faith, not its betrayal. It is to understand more than most the maxim, "When someone demands blind obedience, you’d be a fool not to peek." To begin interpreting the Bible and the world with a hermeneutic of suspicion.

And so to have suspicion about the culture’s view and religion’s conventional view of family and the roles within the family is to know the human urge to take these views and project them into the Bible, and find them there as justification! People look to the Bible like they look to the world, to find what is transient and passing, and what is permanent and lasting. And one can certainly look to the Bible to find the permanence of certain family roles and family configurations divinely created and affirmed; that the male is the head of the household, that the female and children are to obey the male, that the characteristic most Godly in children is obedience to parents, that the only household configuration divinely ordained is like our fathers and mothers, a household with two parents, one of each gender. One can certainly look there for what are called "traditional family values," but I doubt one will find much affirmation there. The Bible is a collection of books that include family dysfunction, betrayal, and animosities. Another way to read the Bible and the world is to begin with a suspicion. "What if our conventional readings aren’t true?" That somehow there is in the Bible like there is in the world an unseen order that transcends, in a subversive way, the convention wisdom of things. We know the human propensity to read into the Bible phrases that aren’t there and values that aren’t there, cultural assumptions as divine truth, and, thus, to find the spirit even more fettered than free by virtue of a wrong reading of the book and the world. But, I suspect there is more.

To find that more requires a deep remembering and a courageous proclaiming.

Take the story of Mary and Martha. A conventional cultural reading tells how Jesus confirms the busyness of women and their mental propensity to choose the busyness and insignificance of household chores over receiving revelation. A conventional religious reading pits Martha’s nearly obsessive concern for how the household looks and whether people’s needs are met, against Mary’s passive reception of the truth; all recognized and affirmed by Jesus. To remember, though, is to explore the possibilities that the text contains an unseen order larger than our conventional religious and cultural readings. This is not a text about Jesus, because the title given Jesus is Kyrie, Lord; so it is a story composed by the communities formed after Jesus’ death; after he has become, to his adherents, the Lord. This story never happened to Jesus. During this time in history, upper class women were expected to be passive receivers of the words of their husbands, who ran the households with absolute authority and power. But, the early followers of Jesus were predominantly lower class, where women spent their entire days consumed with household chores, in servitude to their husbands and homes. We can read the story as one that pits women against women, or two facets of a single woman in conflict, with a divine blessing upon this inner turmoil. Or, we can read this text as one that liberates and cultivates the enormous potential unfolding of the human spirit. This is not a text for women. It is a text for men. It is a warning and proclamation to husbands and fathers, and all those who would proclaim others need serve them as the natural order, the conventional religious and cultural reading of things. Martha, you needn’t serve other human beings as if they are your masters. Mary, continue to serve the liberation and cultivation of the spirit, as a respite from the worries of the world because it is what is most real, and is the source of all things. It is the unseen order that lies beneath the surface of all of the days’ chores!

I have been told by some that family is everything, and I believe that. But, what if there is something more? What if the bonds of blood, of family; the bonds of soil, of nation; the bonds of tribe, of race; what if these bonds claim our ultimate loyalty, yet are not themselves ultimate? In other words, what if as we move among these bonds, there are deeper bonds still, something more, something deeper, an unseen order that, when we aim our allegiances towards, unfolds life in a deeper, more meaningful, more generous, more noble, more fulfilling way? What if the religious life was to transcend the bonds that we establish in our conventional readings of things, in a subversive way, so as to liberate the spirit. What if we have to hate those bonds, turn our backs on those bonds in such a radical way so as to see this unseen order and ally ourselves with the liberation of the spirit? What if the Lord’s Prayer was not a prayer of supplication and servitude, but a liberating proclamation for all those who see themselves as in servitude to others or would seek to be masters over them? Jesus tells people who live in a culture and time where the father is master and lord of the family, to be obeyed without question, completely and absolutely in control; and everyone who hears this prayer are profoundly bound to their father in this way, and all men who hear this prayer fully expect, when they have families, that their families will give them this power; and every women who hears this prayer reluctantly expects to be in servitude to a man, and even to her own son in due time; everyone hears Jesus tell them to pray God as their "Father" and not any earthly man, and all to be liberated as children of God. What if children, the most helpless and dependent of all creatures, who rely more than any other living thing on the mercy of others, what if how we treat them were the measurement of justice, and mercy, and compassion? What if it is as though God’s domain is populated by none of us, but only children, so that what we do and not do relative to them is the only direct and relevant analogy to how we treat God?

We can read the Bible as confirming our conventional readings of the world, religious and otherwise, where a man rules over the family, women are confined to certain roles, children are servants who are spoiled when the rod is spared, and families are constituted only by a man and a woman together. Or, we can read the Bible as evidence that there is an unseen order in this existence that liberates the spirit and cultivates it towards love. And that this order is not about "oughts" and "shoulds" and the punishments that accrue when we do not do what we are supposed to do; but an unseen order whose center is like unto a heart, which expands its love until all our local and narrow allegiances are liberated and humanity becomes the human family.
I once met a man who was sick and dying. His mother and father had disowned him because he had stopped living a lie and been liberated to unfold as God had created him. This man was gay and he had AIDS. He and his partner had created a loving home, and all were welcomed unto it. But his mother and father had never come, and now did not come. As his sickness progressed, he discovered new friends, from the church I served, who came to him with mercy as their only provision. One day one of these new friends contacted the man’s mother to tell her of her son’s condition. The mother cried because she knew what she had not done, and she knew that her religion said she ought not because he ought not. A few days’ later she appeared at her son’s side. They said nothing to each other, but she stayed for an hour and cleaned up the house and her son. The next week she came for half a day. The next week, for several days. The next week the father came. And within a month and a half the son, who had waited for his parents all his life, had his wait fulfilled. Somehow, the parents had been freed to love their son as a human being, created in the image of a God their religion knew nothing about. And when I officiated at the memorial service, the mother and father stood next to the man their son had loved and made a home with, and greeted everyone who came into the sanctuary. They listened as many told of their son and the manner in which he, taught in part by them, brought love into the world. And the mother told me that she was so grateful to have found a family that tried to stretch itself towards all souls.

While we begin interpreting the Bible and the world with a hermeneutic of suspicion, we, like every religious person, must end our reading aimed towards hope. And the hope with which we aim is "the new." What is the new configuration of love, in the family-like embrace of committed bonds, which give safety and security enough for the child to become a fully functioning, free adult? What is the new hope? How can we take the deep bonds of family and broaden them to the family of all souls? To do this will transcend what is conventional, and subverted it towards something new and larger. What is the new form of family the 21st century will bring, that will further us towards a human family?

There is nothing veiled that won’t be unveiled, or hidden that won’t be made known. AMEN