This
summer I’ve been reading a lot of eclectic stuff: fiction, poetry, police procedurals, even
theology. One of the books I’m reading is a biography of a singer/songwriter I
have long admired who self-destructed early and died relatively young. As you can imagine, this man’s children bear
many of the scars left by their father’s behavior. As one of his children says, “As a father he
had a lot of unforgivable shortcomings that can’t be excused by his music.”
I’m always faintly
amused when I hear Christian preachers waxing eloquent about the virtues of the
nuclear family. While it’s true that
images of the Holy Family (Jesus, Mary, and Joseph) tend to dominate our
celebrations of Christmas, the rest of the biblical tradition is fairly
skeptical about the pleasures of family life.
Think of the Old Testament: Cain
kills his brother Abel, Jacob steals the birthright from his brother Esau,
Joseph’s eleven brothers sell him into slavery.
And that’s just the book of Genesis.
As the Hebrew Bible unfolds we read tales of consistent squabbling both
within and between generations. Taken as
a whole, reading the Bible is like attending a really dysfunctional
Thanksgiving dinner, one where the kids at that separate table are fighting
over more than who gets the cranberry sauce.
I
used to teach English for a living, and as a life-long reader of both serious
and light literature, I can attest that most of the world’s fiction, drama, and
poetry also depict the nuclear family as the setting as much for conflict and
enmity as for support and love. If you’re tempted to counter the Bible with
examples from literature, just think of Oedipus
Rex or Hamlet or King Lear or any Jane Austen novel or
Tennessee Williams play before you get all gooey about the joys of nuclear
family life. The world’s authors, like
the Bible’s writers, see the family for what it is: a complex arena in which human desires and
drives get acted out.
Granted,
the family is a complex arena. It’s also
the structure we have developed for nurture, mutual support, and the sharing of
love and resources. It can be a
transforming place. But like all systems
involving real people, the family contains all the contradictions of what it
means to be human.
Now
this is an important issue for Christians, because one of the default metaphors
we use for the church is to call it a family.
But just as our cultural celebrations of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day
can be painful for those whose parents were abusive or absent or self-involved,
so the church consistently calling itself a family can present an image more
scary than welcoming to those who come toward us. I don’t want the church to be my family. I’ve got a family. I want the church to be a community. We enter
our family of origin without being consulted.
We enter a community of our own free will.
While
the family is not a good metaphor to describe the church, it is a very apt
comparison for the nation. You are born
into your country, just as you are born into your family. Like members of a
family, citizens of a nation help each other in times of crisis; and like
relatives, compatriots can squabble with each other over silly, pointless
things.
As
the news of the week has developed, all of us have been shocked and saddened by
the unfolding events in Egypt. Violence
in that country seems to be omni-directional:
the military against the Islamists, the Islamists against the
Christians, the liberal secularists running for cover. As I have watched the Egypt story unfold I
have been reminded of times in our own history—the Trail of Tears, the Civil
War, Jim Crow laws, the various Red Scares—when we have turned on each other
with equal enmity and vitriol. There are
times when a nation comes together in mutual support and encouragement. There are times when a nation turns on itself
in fear and rage. Both things can be
true at once. Again: just like a family.
As
much as we like to portray Jesus as a cozy kind of nuclear family guy, the
scriptural evidence suggests otherwise.
Though we know the adult Jesus gathered a community around himself, we
have no suggestion in the Bible that he had any kind of family life after his
childhood with Mary and Joseph. And he really wasn’t much of a patriot
either: he gave his allegiance neither
to Caesar nor to Herod but to the one he called his Father. Since Jesus used
neither the family nor the nation as his primary identification, we should not
be surprised when, in today’s Gospel from Luke, Jesus tells us that he has come
to bring not peace but division:
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 son against father,
mother against daughter
and daughter against mother,
mother-in-law
against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law."
In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus goes on to add, “one’s
foes will be members of his own household.” [Matthew 10: 36] Not, to my mind, something you’ll ever see on
a greeting card or a party platform.
In
Robert Frost’s poem “The Death of the Hired Man”, the husband and wife Warren
and Mary argue about the definition of “home”.
Warren famously defines home as
‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.’
Mary counters with
this less well-known response:
‘I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’
The
idea of home—family home, national home—brings with it both obligations and
rights. As family members, as citizens,
we need the sharpness of Jesus’s vision to help us see our families and our
nations clearly. Where and to whom do we
finally belong? We ask our families and
our country to carry burdens of meaning that are finally too much for them to
bear. If we make our household or our
nation into our ultimate good, we will be disappointed when people act the way
people always do—out of a variety of motivations and needs. In his critique of the family, Jesus is
directing our allegiance further, beyond the love and security we experience at
home onward to their ultimate source. In
calling God his Father, Jesus brings both those roles into a creative tension,
a relationship that clarifies our misperceptions of both “Father” and “God”.
Home
is both the place that, when you have to go there, they have to take you
in. It is also something you haven’t to
deserve. You may have grown up in a
loving and mutual nuclear family. You
may have grown up in a dangerous household.
Today you may be in a marriage or relationship that grounds your life
and gives it meaning. Or you may be
oppressed and abused. But here’s the
point: for Christians the household,
like the nation, is not the source of our final value. Even as good as it can be, the love you
experience at home points beyond itself to something more. And as bad as it can be, family tension is
not all there is.
I
love my family. I love my country. But neither my family nor my country can bear
the weight of signifying life’s ultimate meaning. They are vehicles of that meaning, but they
are not the thing itself. Neither, for that matter, is the church. I experience
God in them, but they are not God. And the longer I live into the distinction,
the more deeply I love them for what they actually are.
Family and nation
are givens in human life, but Jesus offers us one thing more: a community like the one he gathered with his
companions. In Jesus’s terms, you get
through life by making common cause with others as you gather around a table
where all are both welcome and equal.
Families and nations can pull together, just as they can fight over
scarce resources. At Jesus’s table there is always enough to go around.
There
may be violence in Egypt, strife in our households, and bickering in Congress, but
God is up to something that will heal, renew, bless, and forgive us. It all starts at this table, the meal at
which we belong together as equals. As you center yourself at this table, you
will come to see and accept yourself, your household, your nation as God means
you to see and accept them: as vehicles of God’s meaning and purpose and grace.
There is someone behind and before all this whose love and care will always
surprise but will never disappoint us.
It is in that one’s name we gather, in that one’s cause we go forth to
love and serve our households, our nation, and the world. Amen.
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