[sermon] sometimes a family is...

Sermon for the people of St. Mark Hope and Peace Lutheran Church preached 2018-06-10

Preaching text: Mark 3:19b-35

Family values are not Kingdom values.

For us as progressive Christians, “family values” is kind of low-hanging fruit. It’s really easy to poke holes in the family values of those folks who most frequently claim them. It turns out that the families that they care about are uniform in appearance and structure. They value families that have one mother, one father, and some children. Families that look different are in fact valueless, are not protected.

So, it would be really easy for me to talk about say, the racist “war on drugs” and the mass incarceration of black men that tears apart families. Or the situation at our southern border where children are being ripped away from their parents. These actions don’t strengthen families – they destroy them.

But like I said, that’s low hanging fruit.

When we talk about family values we have to talk in layers, as Jesus does. Figuring out a coherent ethic of family requires us to look not just at this passage, but at multiple passages where Jesus talks about family. Because this passage gives us only one side of Jesus’ stance on family.

but then we look at passages where Jesus Jesus casts out a demon from a Canaanite girl at her mother’s behest (Matthew 15:21-28//Mark 7:24-30), when Jesus raises a widow’s son from the dead (Luke 7:11-17), when Jesus raises Jairus’s daughter from the dead (Matthew 9:18-26//Mark 2:21-43//Luke 8:40-56). Or when Jesus commends to his beloved disciple his mother Mary, “Woman, here is your son,” and says to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” (John 19:26-27) And it’s clear from these passages that Jesus has a strong sense of the importance of family.

The reason that family values are not Christian values is that the structure and nature of family, the meaning of family, is entirely culturally dependent.

It’s not going to be possible for us to just wholesale import something called family values from scripture because we’re talking about a society that’s different from ours, where family functions differently from ours.

So what do we mean when we say family values.

And yeah, there are people who mean no divorce, no same gender marriage, no women working outside the home, strict gender roles, father knows best. People who claim the importance of family who are actually sanctioning abuse. Family values can also be used to minimize the role of the state in say educating children about sex, or evolution, or, say, history.

So that’s not what we mean when we say family values. But we do as progressives talk about the importance of family – so what might WE mean by that?

We mean the importance of children. We know instinctively it’s wrong to separate parents from children because it’s especially harmful to children, who usually thrive better in the care of those people who’ve been caring for them for their whole lives. And we mean the things that are valuable to our children – making neighborhoods that our safe for our children, providing education for our children.

We talk about “our children” as if we collectively as a society have a stake in how our children do and the world we leave for our children – which we do.

We might also think about what the LGBTQ movement has done for the protection of our families. The ability to marry legally, and the host of rights that comes with that, including the ability to have legal custody of our children, to be with our partners at their deathbeds, to inherit from our partners, to make medical decisions in proxy for our partners. To protect our partners from deportation. I’ve said the word “partners” about sixteen times now, because the LGBTQ movement decided, strategically, to focus on certain kinds of families, families with two adults unrelated by blood bound together by love and attraction to create a family where they might among other things raise children.

Notice how when we dig a little bit the progressive version of family values also looks like it’s protecting families that are shaped in a particular way, that look a certain way, that have a certain number of people.

There’s a running joke on the internet that celebrates diverse relationships with the phrase: “sometimes a family is....” A quick search turns up, “sometimes a family is nine unrelated superheroes and an adopted teenage boy,” “Sometimes a family is 1500 moms living on an island with their daughter made of clay,” and “sometimes a family is four nerds who change into animals.”

We don’t have to go to the internet to fill in the blank, though –

sometimes a family is be two sisters and a brother keeping house (like Mary, Martha, and Lazarus) (John 11, John 12:1-3, Luke 10:38-42)

Sometimes a family is a king and his one thousand favorite women (King Solomon) (2 Kings 11:1-3)

Sometimes a family is a widow and her daughter-in-law (Ruth and Naomi) (Ruth)

All those examples are families that are connected by bonds of blood or marriage. (Those are, by the way, just the PG examples)

Of course also sometimes a family is – the church – is the punchline and where you knew I was going because you read the gospel text and know that Jesus said whoever does the will of the one who sent me is my sibling, my mother.

Sometimes a family is God and all of God’s children.

Let’s look at some of the images in the Gospel text in front of us:

Sometimes a family is a strong man who can guard his household right up until he gets tied up by bandits. Which is both a lesson for housebreakers and also for householders – maybe “don’t let the strong man get tied up,” or maybe “don’t rely on one strong man to protect your house, because if he gets bound, the whole system is shot.”

Sometimes a family is an army of demons, and the lesson for Satan’s family is, stick together, because you have no chance if you’re separate.

Sometimes a family is Jesus’ folks coming to chastise him – to try to restrain him, thinking he’s the strong man in some new, terrifying, possibly satanic family, and if they can just tie him up, that will be the end of that.

But Jesus is protected by the crowds of people surrounding him.

And sometimes, a family can be a crowd.

Jesus says, “My family is made up of those who do the will of God.” But Jesus also says, “Y’all are my family, sitting here.” This isn’t directed at the twelve disciples, but at a crowd of people so thick they make it impossible to eat. This is the crowd sitting around him, maybe even still including the scribes – whom Jesus calls to himself in verse 23 to chastise.

This is not a carefully selected family made up of the people Jesus likes best, but a group made up of all those people who happen to be around him in that moment.

We need to think about family in layers.

It’s the nature of humans to have packs, to protect those whom we love, to love some more than others. I could try to argue otherwise or argue that that’s unChristian, and maybe it is, but it’s also human nature. In John’s Gospel a Mystery Disciple is referred to over and over as The Disciple Jesus Loved. For the important moments of Jesus’ ministry Jesus drags Peter, James, and John with him – to the mountaintop where he’s Transfigured [Matthew 17:1-8//Mark 9:2-8//Luke 9:28-36], to the hilltop where he sweats blood [Matthew 26:37//Mark 14:33 – and I suppose it could be because they’re the most holy, obedient, righteous people he could find in all of Judea but we’re talking Simon “Surely I’ll Never Betray you Lord” Peter [Matthew 26:33,35//Mark 14:29, 31//Luke 22:31//John 13:37] and James “shall we rain down fire on the Samaritans?” [Luke 9:54] and John “can I sit at your right hand?” [Matthew 20:20-28] sons of Zebedee, so whatever Jesus loved about them I don’t think it was their saintly demeanor.

So yeah. We love people. We love people who are annoying and infuriating and with whom we have nothing in common, and we call that love family, and so did Jesus.

And if we’re lucky, we find people with whom we have everything in common, and we form families with them. And so did Jesus.

But at its problematic worst those kinds of family are exclusionary, and insular, and leave those without families uncared for.

Think about Jesus raising the widow’s son – for a widow, having a son was not just about hanging out with someone she loved, but a necessity for her protection and livelihood. It’s the same reason Jesus, hanging on the cross, found someone to care for his own mother like she was family.

Over and over in scripture God demands that we care for widows and orphans – vulnerable people without family to protect them.

I started by saying that family values aren’t kingdom values. The Kingdom of God is the world we’re working toward, and while I can’t name exactly what it will look like I know it can’t look like this world, where some people have families to care for them and others don’t, where some people are lucky enough to marry or be born into families that can provide them with the kind of care and support they need, and others are lucky enough to find kindred spirits with whom to form families that aren’t legally sanctioned… and some people are just alone.

So when we work towards the Kingdom of God, we have to radically expand our understanding of who’s worthy of our love.

Family looks out for each other, protects each other.

So who will look out for widows and orphans?

Who will look out for children when their parents are deported or incarcerated?

Who will look out for queer children whose parents throw them out?

Who will look out for our queer elders, whose families have been lost to AIDS?

Who will look out for homeless people, wandering alone?

Who will look out for prisoners and former prisoners, for drug addicts, for people whose families have turned their back on them?

Who will look out for those who can’t look out for themselves – for people with incapacitating disabilities, for people with severe mental illness?

And who will look out for people who can support themselves okay in material ways but are desperately lonely?

Who will look out for the crowd?

It is our responsibility as Christians to care for the vulnerable like our own family, and it is our gift as Christians to be part of the crowd around Jesus, those whom Jesus names as his own siblings, his own mother – his own family.