First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
19 June 2005
A Family Affair
"Do not think that I have come bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword, for I have come to set a man against his father." Well...with these fine words of Jesus let me begin today by wishing you all a Happy Father's Day! If you think that's bad, Luke's version of this text offers even warmer wishes! In Luke, Jesus tells us "whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple." What can I say? For those of you may have some deep, lasting and irreconcilable quarrel with your dads, well, today is your day! And to think, this passage comes from the same Bible that the religious right holds up as the textbook of family values? What in God's name is going on here?
Since last Sunday was our humor service, I'll skip any further Father's Day or family values jokes and cut right to the chase of what I think Jesus is trying to say with all these seemingly harsh words about our family ties. Put simply, he's asking us to get our priorities straight. He is saying to us, "first things first!" God comes first, then, family. Plain and simple, right? If only. Christ's sword of truth cuts through one of our most common and deeply held assumptions, namely that our families are the most important thing in our lives. By families here, I mean our nuclear and even extended families which in most cases imply blood relations. Though Jesus wasn't much of a family guy himself, he surely knew that bonds of human families can be thick and complex, particularly between parents and their children. Upon hearing Jesus words, that he has come to set sons against fathers and daughter against mothers, we can rightfully wonder if he ever learned the fifth commandment, "Honor your father and mother." Of course he did, but he's not nearly as interested here in the fifth commandment as he is the second: "You shall have no other God's before me". His main concern here is with a subtle and powerful form of idolatry which most of us know all to well. He brings not peace but a sword to bear on our persistent idolatry of the family. He's reminding us that when our parents, or our kids, or brother and sisters even become matters of ultimate concern to us, we're heading for trouble.
Now I know what some of you are thinking. "But I have come to know God through my love for my family." Fair enough. Me too. In fact, I learned most of what I know about God not in Sunday School or in divinity school but from my parents. Indeed, our families and loved ones can and do help us to both mediate and deepen our relationship with God. What's more often the case though, and what Jesus knew, is that our families and loved ones can also distract us from our relationship God. We don't call them family ties for nothing. Our relationships, especially with our parents, can tie us up in all kinds of psychological knots. Our expectations of our family members are often misplaced though. We think our parents, for example, should love us with that unconditional love of God. As children, we depend on them for it and we put our parents on high pedestals only to spend the rest of our lives trying to knock them down. Some of us avoid these traps and even have our parents to thank for it. I take it Peter Gomes was one of the lucky ones in this regard. Here what he had to say about his mother in a sermon he preached last year across the common called "Growing Up." "Fond as I am of remembering what my mother said and did and taught—I owe her everything—I remember that the most important thing she taught me was to grow away from her, and into Christ. Growing up was a process not simply of remembering but of becoming; and to become what one is meant to be in Jesus Christ is the only true sign of growth, and the only true form of maturity which we can hope attain." Upon hearing these words, we might just consider Jesus' rebuke of our family relationships as his way of saying to us "Grow up, already." Jesus brings his sword of truth to pierce the inbred illusion that our parent's have some lasting hold over us. Only when we let our parents be human, and God be God, will we finally be on our way to honoring our mothers and fathers, even and most especially with all their faults. And the same holds true for our children. I have to wonder if this is what C.S. Lewis had in mind in writing these words: "When I love God more than I love my earthly nearest and dearest, I will then discover that I am loving my earthly nearest and dearest more than I did before!" According to Lewis then, it's not about choosing God and denying our families, its about choosing God and finding that our love for our family is made all the richer and more beautiful for it. Still I fear that most of us may have this backwards. Especially in our contemporary American culture, there's a tendency to put our families first, above all other matters. And, as some writers are beginning to discover, our idolatry of the family has consequences that extend far beyond our individual psyches or own family's dysfunction.
A Berkeley Professor of Linguistics named George Lakoff wrote a short book recently called "Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate." According to Lakoff, the deep divisions in our country right now, between liberals and conservatives, red states and blue states, between those who read the Herald and those who read the Globe, all come down to a fundamental difference in how we understand the family. He reminds us that 'family' has always been a common metaphor for our country. Think of the Founding Fathers, the Daughters of the American Revolution, or the fact that we send "our sons" into battle to brothers in arms. So, if our nation is a family, how should this family operate? Well...it turns out that conservatives and progressives have very different ideas of how families should be structured. Lakoff observes that conservatives generally subscribe to a "strict father model" of family while progressives tend to prefer a "nurturing parent" model. I'll give you a sense of what he means by this strict father model and let your draw your own sketch of the nurturing parent. Or you could just read the book. 1
The strict father model begins with the following set of assumptions. First assumption: "the world is a dangerous place, and it always will be, because there is evil out there in the world." Second assumption: "The world is also difficult place because its competitive. There will always be winners and losers". Another assumption: "Children are born bad, in the sense that they just want to do what feels good, not what is right." Therefore, they have to be made good. So, given these assumptions, what is a needed in this kind of a world is a strong, strict father; a strict father who can protect the family in the dangerous world, one who can support the family in the difficult world, and one who can teach his children right from wrong. The strict father is a moral authority who knows right from wrong; and what is required of the child is obedience. A good person then -a moral person—is someone who is disciplined enough to be obedient, to learn what is right, to do what is right and not what is wrong. If a person learns discipline, they will be able to pursues their self-interests in a competitive world and become prosperous and self-reliant. A bad person, then, is one who is without discipline, and who does not prosper, and remains dependent on the strict father who after a point would just as soon not meddle in their business. The school of hard knocks has to teach this person what they refused to learn in the strict family. I realize I'm trying to summarize a whole book in a paragraph here but I hope you can follow the logic, such as it is, at least enough to how this strict father model extends to the realm of our nations politics.
Lakoff contends that conservatives have come to use this particular set of family values to frame political issues and debates. Social programs are often considered immoral because they are framed as giving undisciplined people something they don't deserve. Big government encourages dependency except for when it exists to protect our citizens in a dangerous world. Same sex marriages are a no-no because lesbians and even gay men do not fit the prototype of a "strong, strict father." Who will teach the children? Its all about who's your daddy? In foreign affairs, the same holds true. Daddy, in this case, the U.S., knows best when it comes to free trade and the war on terror. Given our current governments behavior, we might as well be asking the rest of the world "Who's Your Daddy?" You get the drift. It's a compelling argument, even in this admittedly truncated form. And, if you've ever wondered why God and politics mix so well for the religious right, we need only ask "who's their daddy?" That's right: the original strict father himself, G-O-D whose ideas of right and wrong happen to square perfectly with those of the big daddy's in Washington. No matter what you think of the politics or theology of the religious right, it's a relatively consistent and coherent worldview and one that continues to be refined in conservative think tanks across the country. Seen in this light, I'm especially grateful for the strong words of Jesus' against strict allegiance to family, a rebuke of this kind idolatry of family where our father, our families, our tribe, and our nation comes first.
As Christians of a decidedly different stripe, we have a different and far less confining set of family values. We need to get clear about what are our family values and to begin arguing from them and for them, on our own terms. You may have noticed how here at First Church, our language of God is not one of a strict father but of a nurturing parent, a mother and father God who knows with us that that our children are not born bad. On the contrary, we are called to recognize that we are all children of God, inherently good because God ever within us, shaping us each to be nurturers of others. We are asked to overcome whatever guilt and shame that may have taken shape in our families of origin, and instead fall in love with ourselves as God is in love with each of us. From this place of love, we are free to turn to others, not to teach them a lesson, but to see the reflection of God within them—whether they are an individual or a nation. We know that our deepest self-interests will not be met until we find solidarity with the self interests of our brothers and sisters. To quote Martin Luther King, "we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be."2 We can teach our children about that this garment of destiny should be the primary basis of our family ties.
Friends, we just witnessed a baptism. By declaring Avery and Oliver to be our brothers in Christ, we have created a new family arrangement, one in which God is ever the nurturing father and mother, and we are, each and every one of us, a child of God. Our values are not founded in the hostile waters of a think tank but in the deeply loving and affirming waters of our baptismal font. We acknowledge here, at the font, that we are God's beloved, born good with a striving to be made better as we follow the ways not of our own parents, but of Jesus Christ. Here we remember that the family of God is not limited by the bonds of blood or class or nationality. Here we are reminded that there is no taking care of our own, because we all belong to God. Here we lose even our own lives, that we can be transformed by and reborn into one family of faith whose loving parent God will nurture us to live and to walk in the way of Christ, the way of hospitality, the way of compassion, the way of justice. When we put God and the Body of Christ, our beloved community first, we will learn to treat Oliver and Avery as members of our own family. When we remember that we are all children of God we will come to know idolatry of thinking that our fathers or our mothers know best. Through baptism, we learn to love our neighbors as we love our parents as we love our sons and our daughters and brothers and sisters, our earthly nearest and dearest; only then we will learn that we can love our own more than we ever could before. Don't begrudge Jesus his harsh words about family or his sword of truth. Let it pierce our hearts that we may know God made us from one blood, all the families of the earth! Amen.
The hymn that followed this sermon was "God Made from One Blood".
Words: Thomas H. Troeger. 1988 Music: Welsh melody from john Robert's Caniadau y Cyssegr, 1839. The lyrics are as follows:
God made from one
blood all the families of earth,
the circles of
nurture that raise us from birth,
companions who join
us to work through each stage
of childhood and
youth and adulthood and age.
We turn to you, God,
with our thanks and our tears,
for all of the
families we've known through the years,
the intimate
networks on whom we depend
of parents and
partners and children and friends.
We learn through our
families how closeness and trust
increase when our
actions are loving and just.
Yet families have
also distorted their roles,
Mistreating their
members and bruising their souls.
Now give to each
family in conflict and storm
a sense of your
wisdom and grace that transform
sharp anger to
insight which strengthens the heart
and makes clear the
place where rebuilding can start.
Then widen that
wisdom and grace to include
the races and
viewpoints our families exclude
till peace in each
home bears and nurtures the bud
of peace shared by
all you have made from one blood.
1 George Lakoff, Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Farm the Debate, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004, pp. 7-8.
2 Martin Luther King, "I Have A Dream: The Quotation of Martin Luther King, Jr."New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1968, p. 145. King used a similar expression in his last Sunday morning sermon, Remaining Awake Through A Great Revolution, delivered on March 31st, 1968 at the National Cathedral.
© 2005, Daniel Smith