FAMILY
Scriptures:
Ruth 1:15-18, 2:8-13
Ephesians 3:7, 14-19, 6:1-4
“M is for the million things she gave me.” Ah, you can already feel a tear start to well up as that familiar refrain begins. It’s a heart-string-tugger, all right, but it is also, by-and-large, a song whose sentiment reflects a different, simpler time when the role of mother in society was less complicated and more rewarded. Since that era much has happened. We’ve had it pointed out to us, for example, how commercialized Mother’s Day and even Father’s Day have become – they were actually initially suggested by businesses in order to beef up sales at slack times of the year. Currently, Mother’s Day is second perhaps only to Valentine’s Day in the sale of cards and flowers. Moreover, role changes in the past 30-40 years have meant that sharply increasing numbers of working mothers and women choosing not to become mothers impact our image of who “mother” is. That image is definitely undergoing radical change.
Out of all this ferment – much of which results in some very positive new understandings both for and about women – I believe we are given an opportunity – an opportunity to look again at the total family. Many churches observe this day not so much as Mother’s Day but as the Festival of the Christian Home. The United Church of Christ as a denomination certainly encourages this approach, even taking it a step further to look at all of the differing forms that “family” can take – single parents, extended families, gay couples with or without children, grandparents caring for grandchildren, an individual alone – to name just a few of the forms that family can take today.
Change, of course, brings controversy. Back in the 70s that controversy was represented by the fight for and against the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution – an effort that failed, even though many groups across the political spectrum put forth the argument that the ERA really strengthened the family unit. Today, the controversy that change brings usually centers on same sex marriage. I am constantly astonished that opponents of same sex marriage don’t see that to legalize such marriages strengthens the institution of marriage and thus strengthens the solidity of the family unit, however that is defined. I recently had some e-mail correspondence with a young woman in Philadelphia who was asking about her and her partner getting married in Las Vegas, and when I responded that this would not be possible legally, her response was interesting. Obviously coming from a strong Christian background, she said, “In the eyes of God, I feel we are sinning not because we are Lesbians, but because we are having pre-marital sex. I do not want to
know that I am sinning but yet I keep doing it. I know she is the person that I
want to spend the rest of my life with so why not get married?!”
What the Christian church celebrates is the value of home life. Now, maybe it seems that there is little here to celebrate when you look at divorce statistics, domestic abuse and violence, problems with bringing up children, lack of real communication, and the technologies that tend to alienate us from one another: the omnipresent television set, on-line computer communications that tend to isolate domestic partners from one another, new technologies like iPods and video cell phones that cause rifts between parents and children. (As a sidebar, though, maybe this perceived generation gap really isn’t so significant when you take it through three generations; in a cartoon this past week the teenage boy, Jeremy in Zits, says to his mother, “The reason people your age don’t blog is because you’re technophobic.” And his mother responds, “That’s ridiculous. My generation has always embraced technology. It’s my parents’ generation that can’t keep up.” And Jeremy rather innocently notes, “That’s not what grandma said in her podcast.”)
The fact that there are problems in many homes leads to an important insight: there really is no such thing as a Christian home or a Christian family! There are Christians who marry and who make homes, but the concept of a Christian family has caused us to overly sentimentalize the meaning of family in a Christian context. There are some marriage manuals, for example, that leave the impression that if you have a Christian family your problems will not be as great as others. Well, now. I’ll bet every one of us in this room would dispute that particular assertion. This sentimental notion leaves the individuals in a family, when they consider themselves to be Christian, poorly prepared to deal with the very real problems that do arise.
What is a cause for celebration, though, is that when Christians marry or enter into any other kind of domestic situation they may bring spiritual insights into their family relationships that will be of great help. Now, this is not an automatic process, of course; it takes work and patience and the ability to actively listen. Here, again, is where the idea of a Christian family has done us a disservice, I’m afraid, by leaving the impression that there is something automatically better about a Christian home. If you will forgive me a personal example, I was really bothered as a teenager to see contrasted the joy and love that was there in my parents’ relationship, who were not Christians, with the rather complete lack of joy and love in the relationship between my minister and his wife.
So, the insights that we may bring as Christians into a home need to be worked at and constantly used. Such insights as the necessity of compromise, the willingness to seek and offer forgiveness, the ability to communicate by listening carefully and sharing what you are truly feeling – both between generations and between husband and wife (or whomever is making up the family unit), Now, obviously, these are not exclusively Christian goals, but they are heightened and intensified by our knowledge of how Christ worked toward these kinds of goals in his relationships with people. As Christians what we have to offer our husband or wife or partner or children or grandchildren or ourselves is the fruit of our encounter with Christ’s ideals for this frail humanity, and how we respond in the living out of those ideals.
What does the Bible tell us about applying these general insights into our specific situations? In the short book of Ruth a simple, pastoral story is told about the Israelite couple Elimelech and Naomi, their sons who go from Bethlehem to Moab, and their daughters-in-law who are Moabites. Elimelech and his sons die, leaving Naomi with her daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth. Naomi tells them to go back to their own country, and Orpah, reluctantly, does. We should not fault her for this; the ties of birth are strong. But Ruth goes an additional step; she says to her mother-in-law these beautiful words which have been passed on in song and phrase: “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” The important note being struck here is that of commitment; a commitment which stems from the act of marriage. Now, Ruth makes this pledge not to her husband, who has died, but to her mother-in-law. But for me this fact adds to the pledge; the act of marriage has committed Ruth not just to her husband but to all of who he was. This includes his people; the commitment is complete. This story has special significance for our day when mobility and pluralism mean that families are being formed across all kinds of national, religious, racial lines – even generational gaps: did you read the recent story about the 33-year-old man in northern Malaysia who married a 104-year-old woman, saying mutual respect and friendship had turned to love? High levels of commitment are necessary when such disparate elements are brought together. The Israelite, Boaz, recognizes this quality of commitment in a woman who, although a foreigner to him, has used her sense of commitment to break down nationalistic lines. Eventually, Boaz marries Ruth.
The New Testament book of Ephesians contains much practical advice about relationships within a family. What this tells us is that this book was probably written later at a time when the hope for Christ’s immediate second coming had faded, and there was a need for practical ground rules about the nature of Christian living. Now, admittedly, this letter comes from a period of obvious inequality between the sexes, and such familiar passages as “Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord,” need to be read with the understanding that the author is reflecting a particular cultural viewpoint. Nevertheless, the passage about children and fathers, at the end of the passage we read today, has practical meaning then and now. That injunction to children to obey their parents (highlighting one of the Ten Commandments) together with the caution to fathers not to provoke their children to anger leads to an important insight: no one member can take over and be the center. In order to be a truly creative family unit, all members of a family need to recognize, search out, and act upon the desires, hopes, and needs of the other members. As Ruth’s story demonstrates commitment, so this passage demonstrates compromise.
The image that the author of Ephesians has of God is that of a Father, and while (as I said a couple of weeks ago) we also want to lift up other images of God today that affirm the total inclusivity of the Divine, in this particular context the image of a Father-God is indeed powerful and meaningful. Here is a Father whose purpose for God’s family was realized in Jesus the Christ, and “from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.” This naming does not just have a symbolic significance. To be named, for the Hebrew mind, involved taking on some of the reality of that for whom we are named – so that being named a family means living within the image of the Father/Mother God. How is this image expressed within a family? To stay with our “c” alliteration: by caring and concern (which go along with commitment and compromise). To paraphrase that so familiar John 3:16 text: “For God cared enough about the world to give God’s only Son….” A family begins to know what it means to live in the image of God when its members express commitment, compromise, caring, and concern.
But before we feel that the Bible just expresses a completely positive view of the family, recall for a moment some rather harsh words from Jesus. Matthew reports him as saying: “For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother…and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me…..” (Matthew 10:35-37) Or again, when his mother and brothers come to see him Jesus rebukes them and tells the crowd, “For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” (Matthew 12:50) Imagine the pain this must have caused a mother’s heart. Strange actions from a man who is supposed to have brought love into the world.
Although Jesus was concerned for the family, his primary concern went beyond this, embracing the whole human family. Here he was saying, in effect: while the needs and joys and demands of the family are great, the needs and joys and demands of the whole world are greater, and where there is conflict these latter take precedent. A hard doctrine to follow? Yes, the path to Christ’s cross has never involved taking easy steps. Christ thought in global terms, and he did not want the comfort of a small family group to blind his followers to needs that exist outside the family. Yet, once again, there’s a great paradox at work here, for Jesus is not condemning the family. One of Christ’s last acts from the cross, as we talked about at length during Lent, was to give his mother and his beloved disciple into each other’s keeping, as he says to her, “Woman, here is your son,” and to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” “And from that hour,” the gospel of John reports, “the disciple took her into his own home.” (John 19:26-27)
What Christ seeks in those who would follow him is a total commitment to God. Commitment within a family can be one way of demonstrating this, but if it stays only within the family it does not express the whole of God’s will. Compromise within the family can help us in conquering our own pride, and it can thus help lead us to a humble kneeling before the Lord of us all. Concern and caring within the family can teach us how to have concern for all others. As is true with all human activities and endeavors, the family exists to serve God, not the other way around. But, again marvelously paradoxically, those who realize this are the ones who have the fullest and most rewarding family lives. We who exist in and try to provide love for our families – our mothers, our fathers, our children, our grandchildren, our partners, ourselves – can find in our families a unique way to serve God, and in this way come to know the Father/Mother God “from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.”
Amen
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
May 14, 2006