Love Makes a Family

Love makes a family.  I hear that saying to describe nontraditional families created by same-gender-loving people, and I enjoy hearing it.  Sadly, the family that love made has often had to stand in for the family a gay person grew up in.  The good news is that gay marriage is legal, and more and more of the time, love is winning over prejudice, and families are accepting their children the way God made them.

Love makes a family.  When I grew up, this saying was used to affirm adoption: that adopted children truly belong.  This might seem a given to you, but in many times and places adopted children never quite belonged. 

Love makes a family. Jesus said something very like this.  Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother. And the will of God?  The details will be specific to your life, but the short form is to love and be loved, and to figure out how to put that love into action.  We will do it far from perfectly, but as we seek to receive fully the love God gives us, to step into its flow and to share it generously and wisely, we find kinship with others who seek the same thing, a kind of family beyond traditional family.  With a little word play, we can transform the Kingdom of God, a rather archaic concept to us, into the Kin-dom of God, because we are all kin, all connected by God’s love. 

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Brea Congregational United Church of Christ

May 13, 2018

Love Makes a Family

Mark 3:20-35 and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat.  21 When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.”  22 And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.”  23 And he called them to him, and spoke to them in parables, “How can Satan cast out Satan?  24 If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.  25 And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.  26 And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come.  27 But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered.

            28“Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter;  29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”—  30 for they had said, “He has an unclean spirit.”

            31   Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him.  32 A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.”  33 And he replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers?”  34 And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers!  35 Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”

Love makes a family.  I hear that saying to describe nontraditional families created by same-gender-loving people, and I enjoy hearing it.  Sadly, the family that love made has often had to stand in for the family a gay person grew up in.  The good news is that gay marriage is legal, and more and more of the time, love is winning over prejudice, and families are accepting their children the way God made them.

Love makes a family.  When I grew up, this saying was used to affirm adoption: that adopted children truly belong.  This might seem a given to you, but in many times and places adopted children never quite belonged.

Love makes a family. Jesus said something very like this.  Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother. And the will of God?  The details will be specific to your life, but the short form is to love and be loved, and to figure out how to put that love into action.  We will do it far from perfectly, but as we seek to receive fully the love God gives us, to step into its flow and to share it generously and wisely, we find kinship with others who seek the same thing, a kind of family beyond traditional family.  With a little word play, we can transform the Kingdom of God, a rather archaic concept to us, into the Kin-dom of God, because we are all kin, all connected by God’s love. 

I am the oldest of four children.  I have a sister and two brothers, and my two brothers are adopted.  I don’t remember the details of Joe’s arrival as a small baby, but I have a picture of big sister Terry, beaming from under a mop of bangs, sitting on a sofa in my blue plaid school uniform, with my bobby socks and Mary Janes sticking straight out because my knees weren’t long enough to reach the end of the sofa. My arms were holding a little skinny bundle of blankets with a red face.  Joe is over six feet tall now. I remember my mother’s fierce love for this baby, and the ways she sought to assure Joe that he was truly part of our family.  “My other children just showed up in the usual way,” she would tell us “But we chose Joe special.”  She so wanted him to trust that he belonged.

Later, I got another brother.  Rich was my cousin by birth, and he needed a home; my grandmother couldn’t keep up with him.  My mom hadn’t expected that addition to the family, and she couldn’t frame it the same way, but I saw how she longed to help Rick belong, and how hard it was for a child faced with a new caregiver to trust that this family, his third, was a keeper, and to find his place, to belong.  I could take belonging in my family for granted, but maybe because of witnessing my brothers’ journeys, I do not. 

There is a rhythm to belonging and separating that most of us know, reaching inward to the people who defined us for nurture and familiar roles, and reaching outward to find and express our unique path in the world, and possibly recover from some early wounds.  That rhythm is not always easy for those we love.  We all have roles and expectations around family, and in some situations those roles don’t fit.  In his public ministry, Jesus dashed the expectations of his family. He was no longer the family breadwinner and the reliable presence; he never did start a family of his own.  Instead he went on the road and stirred up trouble.  And so we are blessed, because he had something much bigger to create: this Kin-dom of God, this wider form of belonging. 

The Gospel of Mark does not shy away from showing us conflict in Jesus’ ministry. Power, good and evil, and family are in today’s reading.  All reliable sources of conflict.

Simple peasant that he was, Mark could tell a good story, and he often told it in the form of a sandwich.  Chiastic is the technical term.  The bread for the sandwich is about his family.  The top slice of bread:  “Jesus, your family is coming to town, and they’re upset.  They think you’re crazy.”  (And this is only chapter three; he’s barely started causing trouble.) The bottom slice of bread: “Jesus, your family are pounding on the door, they want to talk to you right now,” but instead he names those gathered around him listening and learning as his family.

A spicy strange filling lurks in the middle of this sandwich.  We might need a little help digesting that filling, that talk of Satan and unforgivable sins.  Here’s the short form: How do you make Jesus really angry? Call his healing and liberating power evil.  Take someone filled with the power of God, and say they are possessed by evil.

Jesus tells a strange parable about binding a strong man, that’s Satan, and setting the captives free, that’s us.  What does that mean?  It’s what Jesus does for us, according to the gospel of Mark, but it’s in Mark’s strange language and worldview.  I don’t like personifying evil, but evil is real. Does anybody feel oppressed by events in the news? By the carbon-generating lifestyle in which we are trapped?  By economic systems that use people like they’re disposable, that make accumulation of obscene wealth a virtue, and structural poverty a vice? It’s easy to go to fear and hopelessness and helplessness, or to try to come out on top in a sick system, or to just put our fingers in our ears and hum.  That’s how we live in the strong man’s house, in a system that treats people like tools and the earth like a garbage dump.  And when it is all we know it feels normal and we accept it as normal.  Getting freed is disruptive, even scary.

Jesus, and Mark, knew better than to demonize people.  Yes, people do evil things.  Yet people are not the evil.  The strong man is not a man at all.  People are just accustomed to living in the strong man’s house, to be part of a system that does evil.  Labeling people evil and making them the problem is called scapegoating, and it only makes things worse.  When the system is sick, you can trade out all the people and most likely the new ones will behave just like the old ones.

Does this sound like tricky stuff?  I think it is.  It’s horrifying to admit that we are trapped in systems that suck the life out of us.  It’s easy to pretend that we’re fine.  Everything’s fine. This is normal. No. What is happening in our country, in our name, is not OK.

With the power of Jesus Christ, we lose our fear of naming oppression and evil for what they are, because we can trust that oppression and evil will not have the last word.  We are not helpless, and we are not hopeless.  Our freedom upsets people who do not understand why we do not just keep quiet and pretend everything’s OK.  And sometimes we confuse the people we love, and sometimes we discover new people to love, and who love us.  The Kin-dom of God. Our love is too small, I know. So limited.  But not God’s.

And then there’s that unforgivable sin.  Raise your hand if you’ve spent time wondering about what the heck is that unforgivable sin anyway.  “Blaspheming against the Holy Spirit.”  What does that mean? People extract that verse from its context and puzzle over it.  Place it back where it belongs and it’s pretty simple.  First, Jesus is angry. He might not have been making a theological statement for all time. He might have exaggerated a little in his frustration.  I’m sure none of us have ever done that.  Set in context, he is simply saying, “Can you believe what ridiculous lies they’re saying about me?  Being called crazy is one thing.  But publicly labeling God’s work evil?  That’s the worst. Just the bleeping worst.” God’s work of transformation can be disruptive.  You don’t have to like it.  But publicly labeling it evil… means God’s not getting through to you anytime soon.

For the scrupulous among us, how do we avoid labeling God’s work evil and relieve any worries about the unforgivable sin?  How about “Do not judge”?  Withholding judgment doesn’t mean putting up with everything.  It means expressing concerns respectfully, not scapegoating, treating people respectfully, and admitting that we may not see the whole picture.

So in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is busy setting people free from what binds them, and messing with the corrupt established order, and angering the Powers that Be, and creating new kinships of shared values, and it’s a wonderful adventure, but it scared his family. And they had reason to worry– it got him killed!  The reason Mark was still talking about it a generation later is because families were still getting scared by people following Jesus and getting freed from oppression and evil. Who knows, that might still be happening.

The kin-dom of God is life-giving relationships.  Where do we find it today?

Anna’s father was a trucker. Her mother was long gone, and she spent long hours and even overnights at the babysitter’s.  That babysitter raised her.  That babysitter loved her.  And at some point in her teens that babysitter insisted on legally adopting her, an event that filled Anna with amazement and joy.  True belonging.  Anna has a married child of her own now, and I never would have known her story, except she wanted to brag about her mom to her pastor. 

Essie Parrish and Mabel McKay were sisters.  They shared a passion, around which they built their lives, to preserve and practice Native American cultural arts and spirituality in northern California in the mid-twentieth century.  Essie and Mabel them kept Pomo culture alive through much of the last century.  They were not sisters by blood.  They had just discovered each other, discovered their common gifts and passion, and declared themselves sisters.  And so they were to the end of their lives.

My youngest brother Rich had a lot of challenges growing up, and one bad marriage early in his adult life.  We sort of expected him to give up trying and stay single.  But he found Sandra when he was around forty, and I got to officiate at the wedding.  Sandra understands Rich, and brings out the best in him.  Now he is the wise and gentle patriarch of Sandra’s clan, all in a big house together: a son and daughter and son-in-law, and three grandchildren.  Rich is not yet fifty years old. And Rich belongs.

I was talking to a friend who’s been through a lot of health challenges about my plans at the church for Mother’s Day, I told her this theme, “Love makes a family.” “Oh, like you and me,” she said.  After a moment of reflection, I said, “Yes, like that.”

May Jesus Christ free you to risk the love that makes us part of God’s family, that widens and deepens your family. In God’s family, we are free to become who God is inviting us to be. In God’s family, you belong.  Amen.