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Hillside Street, Bennington, Vermont (802) 442-2559
"resolutely inclusive, spiritually alive, and empowered for ministry in the world." |
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“Family–Deep and wide” -- May 9, 2010 Acts 16:9-15, John 14:18-19
Posted: May 11th, 2010 @ 8:20am
The phrase “Mother’s Day” is like a Rorschach test–it means lots of different things to different people. For some, the Hallmark vision of hearts and flowers comes to mind...a vision of sainted women who gave selflessly of themselves to us...women who were “domestic goddesses” or “earth mothers”...the women we wanted to be like or wanted to marry, to get a little Freudian. We may call to mind mothers who were freeing, encouraging, our best cheerleaders, or mothers who smothered us, made us feel always judged or guilty. At the very least, our relationships with our mothers are complicated.
For some, Mother’s Day is a painful reminder of loss, of mothers who have died [though I did have a friend who said she had never had a such a good relationship with her mother than after her mother died. “Now she gets its it,” my friend said]. Or for women who never became mothers, either childless by choice or biological or marital limitations, Mother’s Day is a painful reminder of inadequacy or limitation or even failure.
So while we celebrate all those women or mothering figures in our lives who gave us birth or birth to our true selves and nurtured us along the way, we also need to keep in our awareness some sensitivity to the many meanings this day has for all of us.
Perhaps one of the universal associations with the word “mother” is “home,” for better or worse, and the United Church of Christ has for years now been calling this Sunday “The Festival of the Christian Home.” While that may at first conjure up images of a Norman Rockwell painting, with mother, father, 2.3 children and dog, living in a well-tended house, we as a denomination have done more than many to recognize and affirm different models of family– not only the mom and dad and kids, but also the single mom or dad raising the children, 2 moms or 2 dads, with or without children; intergenerational households, perhaps people not biologically related sharing a house; perhaps a single individual with or without pets, but connected in significant ways to other people. These are all “Christian Homes” if there is a conscious awareness of and intention about their connection to Christ and thus to one another.
The readings from the Book of Acts and the Gospel of John this morning point to this expanded vision of family. In Acts, Paul and Silas and Timothy are led by a vision to go to Macedonia, Europe instead of Asia. They spend several days in Philippi, and on the Sabbath go down to the river, outside the gates, “where we supposed there was a place of prayer.” And there they find a group of women who had gathered there, and begin to speak to them about the good news about God they have learned in and through Jesus. A woman from a nearby town named Lydia is among them. Lydia is “a worshiper of God,” which means she is a Gentile who is drawn to the God of the Jews, and she is a seller of purple cloth, which only the wealthy could afford. She recognizes the God she worships in the story that Paul and his companions are telling and eagerly listens, finally having herself and her whole household baptized into this community of faith. Afterwards she says to them, “If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home.” Thus the house church in Thyatira is born.
In fact, all the early churches were house churches, gathering in homes nightly or weekly for a meal and worship together. Today, in the People’s Republic of China, one source says that “the most explosive growth of Christianity in our time” is the illegal, underground network of house churches. In fact, the Chinese symbol for “house church” translates “underground heaven.” The house church movement in our country is also growing and alive, made up of folks turned off by the institutional church or simply introduced for the first time to church through these gatherings of not many more than a dozen people, meeting in homes for meals and worship. They find in these house churches a supportive community in which to resist our dominant culture of consumerism and violence, a community in which all can participate actively and together find ways of serving the wider community. There are networks and websites with resources and information for house churches–just Google “house churches,”-- and in fact, even larger, institutional churches find that connecting as many members as possible to smaller groups, like house churches, is essential for keeping their members connected and engaged. They have staff persons in charge of Small Group Ministries, making sure that anyone who wants to connect can find a place “where everybody knows their name,” and that the groups have both the freedom to develop as they choose while still staying connected to the wider church. That is a model that we heard some longings for in our world café discussion on our future.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his followers as he prepares them for his death, “I will not leave you orphaned.” It is a recognition of the power and need for connection, even though Jesus himself is not a biological parent. Clearly his sense of family goes beyond biology, as he makes clear throughout his ministry. When his biological mother and brothers and sisters come at one point to try to urge him to come home, to stop teaching such dangerous things and to come back into the protection and security of their family unit, Jesus looks around at those gathered and says, “Who is my mother and my brothers and sisters? They are all those who do the will of God”–a shocking, scandalous thing to say in a culture where survival depended upon the family.
In John’s account of the crucifixion, Jesus’ final act is forming a new family, when he turns to his mother and nods to “the disciple whom he loved,” and said, “Woman, behold your son,” and to the disciple, he said, “Here is your mother.” “And from that hour [John writes] the disciple took her into his own home.”
“I will not leave you orphaned,” Jesus says. “I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.” In the best-selling book The Shack, the Holy Spirit is depicted as a small Asian woman in constant motion who is never quite in focus for all her radiance and energy. “I will not leave you orphaned...the Holy Spirit will come...”
Clearly Jesus’ notions of “family” and “home” are much deeper and wider than the cultural stereotypes of either his or our time. Biology and DNA, while a gift and a given, are never our complete story. Even the most healthy and life-giving families are inadequate to describe and sustain–or contain-- who we are. The Source of our life is God, whom Jesus called by the Aramaic name “Abba,” or Papa or Source of the Radiance or Creative Breath, and our brothers and sisters and elders and children are all those who come from that same source, whether or not they have different names for that Source.
Biological and genetic research is confirming this truth. Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has opened up the search for genetic roots for many people, using DNA searches of famous and not-so-famous people, to discover ancestors of surprising range and variety. What is being learned is that our human family tree has “many branches and few roots”. We really are “all connected.”
This emerging sense of family, while not without its difficulties, challenges, and complexity, still speaks to the deeper truth of who we are, about our need for connection, as well as for nurture and protection. “The church” began in homes, with a new sense of brother, sister, parent, child. At our best, the church is still that kind of home.
Chris Glaser, a gay minister and an activist in the Presbyterian Church for inclusion of gay and lesbian Christians, wrote in his book, Come Home!,
First and foremost, I felt a sense of being home, a place where ‘they have to take you in,” but also, a place where they want to take you in. In the ideal experience of it, home is a place for healing wounds and celebrating fulfillment. It’s an environment which welcomes you to kick off your shoes, sink into an armchair, and put your feet up. You can be yourself. The masks are down, and you become as comfortable and vulnerable as a sleepy puppy. How I wished the church could be such a place for me! [cited in Imaging the Word, vol. 1, p. 205]
That is our challenge and our calling–to make the church, at least in this place, a place where all can experience a welcome and a home, a place not only to be oneself, but also to be challenged to be who we are intended by God to be, a place where all are known and loved, as we are all known and loved by the One who is the Source of our very lives. And in finding here our Source and home, becoming more deeply connected to all the other members of the family. That is a “Christian Home” worth celebrating. May it be so.
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