Mystic Congregational Church, UCC

Mystic, Connecticut

Sermon from July 30, 2006

“In God’s Family”

Rev. Patricia L. Liberty

Scriptures:

Psalm 14

Ephesians 3:14-21

When couples meet with me to ask about getting married, I often ask them, “How did you know that this person was the one you wanted to marry?”  Of the six billion people on the planet, how did this one become the one?  And whether you’ve been married for five minutes or fifty years, I think it’s a good question to reflect on from time to time.

When Reneé and I first started dating, she would call occasionally to ask if I was free to get a bite to eat after work.  It seemed more often than not that the answer was, “No, I need to work late.”  As a hospice chaplain, that was code language for “I have to go to a wake tonight”.  Sometimes, it’s more than one wake because as a chaplain it was my responsibility to attend the wakes of all the patients who died while receiving services from our agency.  She was pretty understanding about it, although it was clear she thought my line of work was a little weird.  On one occasion, she called and said, “So, how about we get a bite to eat.”  I said, “I’m sorry, I have to work late.”  She said, “I’ll drive.”  I knew then that anyone who considered wake-hopping acceptable dating behavior was probably the one person with whom I could spend the rest of my life.

Now, convincing our family was another matter entirely.  We both had selected someone who, from our family’s perspective, was completely wrong—the wrong religion (I’m Protestant; she’s Catholic), the wrong nationality (I’m German, she’s French) and, to not miss the obvious, the wrong gender.  The news of our engagement was not widely celebrated but I’m happy to say that, seventeen years later, they’re pretty much over it.  It’s taken about fifteen-and-a-half years for that to be true.  But for every parent who has ever buried their head in their hands upon meeting their child’s significant other and said, “Oh, please, no, not this one.  Anyone, but not this one”, this text perhaps provides a little bit of comfort.  It radically redraws the line of kin and clan in the life of the Christian community.  In short, it makes room for everybody.

I’ve always been a little bit uncomfortable with the image of family as a way of describing the church.  Think about it.  There are limited ways that you can get into a family, or out.  You can be born into it.  You can be adopted into it.  You can marry into it.  Pretty much the only way that you can get out of it is to get divorced because even if you die, you’re still a part of it.

I think we need a little bit different image to think about church.  If you to see a family circle the wagons, just bring home someone who doesn’t fit the bill.  In any family, accepting someone in is a really big deal.  There are actually some historically understandable reasons for that.  Land and livestock probably top the list, to be honest.  The Israelites were people of the land.  The Exodus Promise thousands of years ago still informs and shapes the struggles that are going on in that land even today.  Possessions and property in the ancient world were signs of God’s blessing and the lines of inheritance were drawn with blood.  Beyond that, in more modern sense, family is the way that we know, for better or for worse, something of who we are.

When we gather with people around the table at Thanksgiving and Christmas, we say, “These are my people.  These are the folk from whom I come and to whom I belong.”  Now, every family tree has its share of fruit and fruitcake, and the stories that we tell about our families are the stuff of our heartiest laughter and our deepest tears.

Frederick Buechner writes, “It’s not so much things happening in the family as it is the family is the things that happen in it.  The family is continually becoming what becomes of us—every christening, every commencement, every falling in love, every fight, every departure and return.  It is the moments at breakfast when, for no apparent reason, someone gets up and leaves the table.  It is the sound of the phone ringing in the middle of the night,   and the lying awake for hours and hours waiting for it to ring.  A family is a web so delicately woven that it takes almost nothing to set the whole thing shattering and even to tear it to pieces.  Yet the thread it’s woven of is as strong as anything on earth.”

Both of those things will always be true.  To have clan and kin, whether we claim them or not, is a bookmark that marks our place in the world.

So the message of Jesus and his followers not only up to this writing from Ephesians but even beyond that is a little troubling because it dismisses much of the notion of what we consider to be important about family.  All of the history, all of the fighting over the land, all of the celebrations that passed down livestock and possession, all of the decisions about who gets to marry who and for what reason, are pretty much gone, done, nullified.

The whole marriage thing in the ancient Near East, just in case you’re wondering, really had nothing to do with love.  That’s a rather modern construct.  In the ancient Near East, marriage was purely a business arrangement.  If there was a need to annex some great, big chunk of land, the best way to do it was to hope that the owner of the land had a child of marriageable age which was about thirteen.  In the ancient Near East, because marriage was a business deal, women were actually legal property.  They were traded just like goats and sheep.  They were used to broker deals.  You might think that Tina Turner wrote her song, “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”, for some ancient Near Eastern understanding of marriage.

Then along comes Jesus and his followers with a fairly simple message which is that love makes a family.  It’s not love in our romantic-notion sense of it because that’s a fairly modern construct.  When Jesus talks about love making a family and , it really is a new way of understanding kin and kindred.  It draws a line so wide that it includes all people in all time.  It re-draws the line so that everyone is in and no one is left out.

Jesus was way ahead of his time because his notion of family was the global family.  The head of the family was none other than God the Creator, the God of the universe, the one who called world into being.  It is hard for us to grasp just how subversive that notion was to those hearing it for the first time.  It is difficult to imagine how dramatically it changed the social order of the ancient Near East.  Even though we could not really sing the baptismal hymn all that well, that notion of God troubling the waters because everyone is welcome at the waters of baptism, it is hear that God’s embrace stretches out to all whole.  It troubles the waters in a very big way.

The ground of the prayer in this pericope from Ephesians rests on this very central truth that every family in heaven and on earth has its identity in God.  The English translation of that verse obscures this wonderful play on words that’s there in the Greek.  In Greek, the word for father is patra and family is patria from where we got our word patriarch.  These two words play off each other in the Greek and it’s completely lost in the English but there’s no missing the acknowledgment that every family owes its existence to the parenthood of God and that, beyond kin and clan, it is love that makes the family.

From that premise flow all of the other petitions that are a part of this prayer and, not surprising, on the heels of that comes a prayer for strength and insight because this newfangled notion is going to take some getting used to for the people of the ancient Near East.  If it sounds shocking to us, imagine how shocking it sounded to them.

If you follow along in the text, the next petition is for increased faith because if we’re really going to get this, God’s going to have to show us a few new things about our faith so that we can stretch those lines out and stretch our arms out wide enough to include everybody.  At some level, I think Paul knew that the best of what we human beings could muster was going to be needed for this new way of being family to work out.  But the clincher comes in verse 17 when he said it’s all about “being rooted and grounded in love” because the truth is that it’s love that makes the family.

When all is said and done, we’re all part of the same family because we have the same divine parent.  When all is sad and done, there are no insiders or outsiders.  When all is said and done, there is no us, no them; there is simply we.

If we take the word of Scripture as authoritative for our lives, the implications of this passage cannot be underestimated.  It can inform and challenge our understanding of marriage and family.  It can add to our understanding of the global conflict as people continue to fight over the same bit of land that people have been fighting over for thousands of years.  It can encourage a prophetic witness to the pain of our day with the message of reconciliation and healing that is at the heart of the Gospel message.

Amartya Sen is a professor at Harvard and winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics, an author of the book that was released earlier this year called Identity and Violence:  The Illusion of Destiny.  In it, he challenges people of all cultures and faith to a new understanding of human community that stretches us beyond our usual self-identification with people who look just like us to find a common denominator in the human family.  It’s not exactly light reading but it’s worth your time.

He reminds us of some ancient truth that are hidden in the Gospel—that in God’s family there is no us and them; in God’s family, there is no in crowd or out crowd; in God’s family, there is room for everyone; in God’s family, welcome is the benchmark and diversity is just a part of who we are.  In God’s family, being who I am does not threaten who you are because we are all created in God’s image.  In the richness of God, there’s room for everyone.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin says it best:  The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love and on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire.

It’s love that makes a family.  It’s love that holds us together.

Thanks be to God and amen.