Who God has Made Most Beautiful

(Mark 3.13-21, 31-35)
A sermon preached by Dave Shull
Spirit of Peace United Church of Christ
Sammamish, Washington
May 10, 2009

Every Friday at staff meeting at the Recovery Café, we do a check in. This past Friday I said the Bible passage I was preaching on this Sunday had some challenging things to say about family. On Mother's Day! I wasn't prepared for what came next. One staff member said she always hated going to church on Mother's Day. Because the pastor always preached about Christian motherhood. She said the kind of mother the pastor preached about wasn't anything like her mother or any other mother she knew. She said Mother's Day sermons just made her angry. Because they had no basis in reality. And only served to remind her of the kind of parent she didn't have growing up. She said, "I wish Mother's Day had never been invented." Another staff member shared that, for the first time in ten years, she'd made a card to send her mom. She said, "Most Mother's Days we just talk on the phone for about 30 seconds."

Growing up, I wanted my family to be like The Waltons. I wanted that kind of parent who is always patient and always available. That kind of sibling who always stands up for me. I wanted live-in grandparents whose stories always give me the wisdom and comfort I'm looking for.

Why do we set ourselves up like this? Why does Hollywood, why do novelists and poet wannabes employed by greeting card companies, set us up like that? Why do we believe that somewhere out there, there are such perfect mothers and fathers and families?

For once, I'd love to see a Mother's or Father's Day card with the words we sang in our opening hymn:
Through families we've tasted the value of trust
and felt what it means to be loving and just,
yet families have also betrayed their best goals,
mistreating their members and bruising their souls
(Thomas Troeger, "God Made from One Blood," The New Century Hymnal, Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1994, Hymn #427).

Isn't that what all our families are like? All of our families are a mixture of the broken and the beautiful, a mixture of loving souls and bruising those same souls. What would it be like if Hallmark cards put out a series of Mother's Day and Father's Day and In Memory of cards that talked about how all of us really are? Instead of painting a picture of the perfect parent we know will never exist because human perfection is not possible.

In this morning's Bible reading from Mark, we do not find the picture of the perfect family. To us, what Jesus says about his family may sound pretty harsh. To the people in first century Palestine, what Jesus says would have been scandalous and horrifying.

Listen for the Word of God.
Jesus went up the mountain and summoned those followers he wanted, who came and joined him. He named twelve as his companions whom he would send to preach and to have authority to expel the demons. He appointed the twelve as follows: Simon to whom he gave the name Peter, James and John, begot of Zebedee, whom he renamed Boanerges, which means "Children of Thunder"; Andrew, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James begot of Alphaeus, Thaddaeus, Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus.
Then Jesus went home, and again such a crowd gathered that he and the disciples were unable even to eat a meal. When Jesus' relatives heard of this, they went out to take charge of him, thinking that he had lost his mind.
Jesus' mother and his brothers arrived and, standing outside, sent in a message asking for him. A crowd was sitting around Jesus, and they said to him, "Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you." Jesus replied, "Who is my mother? Who is my family?" And looking at those sitting in a circle around him, he said, "This is my family! Anyone who does the will of God, that person is my sister, my brother, my mother" (adapted from The Inclusive New Testament, © 1994 by Priests for Equality).

Describing this passage, a British Bible scholar says, "Unless you [hear these verses] as deeply shocking, you haven't got the message (Tom Wright, Mark for Everyone, SPCK, 2001, p. 39). These days in the United States, most of us do not stay in the homes and town where we grew up, and our children don't either. We're told to follow our bliss, follow our star, go where our hearts lead us. We talk a lot about families of choice. Because most of us don't live around the families who raised us, we form networks of friends who become like family for us. We do for each other what our relatives did when we lived close to them: childcare, bringing meals when we're sick, sharing chores and helping each other in all kinds of ways. Or we pay someone to do what relatives used to do for each other before we started living so far away from them. We are used to seeing as family people we're not related to.

In Jesus' day, the biological family was everything. Everything. Who you were related to by blood "was the axis of the social wheel in antiquity. "The extended family structure determined personality and identity, controlled [job] prospects, and most importantly [was the means by which people built relationships and arranged marriages]" (Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man, Orbis, 1988, p. 164). If you brought shame on yourself, you brought shame upon your whole family. And that could never be lived down. So no loyalty was greater than loyalty to family. Loyalty to family was how you were loyal to your god. And family was only people like you. People of your tribe, your clan, your ancestry.

It had always been like this. And with a few words Jesus turns it on its head. He calls 12 people he's totally unrelated to to be his special community. Others had called disciples. But look what Jesus does: he changes the names of Simon, James, and John. Changing the name someone's family has given them means he's changing their relationship with their relatives. Changing their names means Jesus is creating a new family for them.

Jesus' family is sure he's lost his mind. So they do what families are supposed to do. They know the religious and political leaders see him as a threat. So they want him to shut up and come home and let them take care of him until he can regain his senses.

Jesus responds by saying his true family has nothing to do with blood. Instead, he says his true family is the people who are committed to making real the kingdom whose God Jesus preaches, teaches and lives. He says, I'm obeying God's call. And if my blood relations can't support me in this, I need to create another family. My true family is the people who are doing what I'm trying: trying to obey God.

He doesn't say his blood relations can't be his family again. If they decide to support his calling, if they commit themselves to obey God, Jesus will count them as family. And we know by the end of Jesus' life several members of his family did this. Mary, his mother was at the cross when Jesus is executed. And Jesus' brother, James, became a leader in the Jesus movement after Jesus' death.

His words sound so harsh and cold. Which is always how it sounds and feels when someone is trying to change how things have always been done. Throughout his public ministry, Jesus has been tearing down the walls that religion and culture built to tell people they were unclean, impure, unwanted, and unwelcome. To these people treated as shameful nobodies, Jesus said, "If you love God, you are my family!" Can you imagine how that would sound to people who'd always been treated as shameful, as nobodies? It would have been like rain on waterless ground. And what about the relatives? They'd always had reserved seats for this show. Now Jesus makes them feel angry, hurt, and left out. Now they need to re-imagine what it means to be family

If Jesus were preaching to us today about how we need to re-imagine family, I wonder what he'd say. We are in a very different place today than when he spoke these words 1980 years ago. Many of our families include people of different races, ethnicities, and religions. I don't think Jesus is saying we should turn away from them if their understanding of God and how to follow God is different than ours. Many of us include those we're not related to within our circle of family. So what would Jesus say to us today about our expanding our understanding of families? What could he say that was as scandalous and upsetting as his words about family sounded to first-century Palestinians?

The only way I can answer this question is through a story. It's a story I told the first time I preached here in June 2006. When I think about what Jesus would say to us today about who we need to see as our family, I think of Father Elias Chacour and a mirror.

Elias Chacour is a Palestinian Christian. When Israel became a country in 1948, his family was forced off the land they'd had for centuries. He experienced first-hand the brokenness among the children of Abraham. He saw and felt the hatred and lies that spread among Muslims, Jews, and Christians. Pained by the divisions among the children of Abraham, Fr. Chacour started a school. It's the only school in Israel where students and teachers of these three faiths come together every day to be a community that declares the children of Abraham can truly be one family. The Israeli government has fought him all the way. But Chacour knows he is doing God's will. He will not be stopped.

In 2002, a group from University Congregational United Church of Christ and from Temple
B'nai Torah in Bellevue visited Chacour's school. It's near the place Jesus scandalized his listeners by saying what he did about family. Father Chacour told us about a Muslim student from his school who had been shot and killed by an Israeli soldier during a non-violent protest in Nazareth. And he told us about a mirror.

Dear friends of mine from Arizona sent me a mirror, Father Chacour said. Around the frame are
the words, "Come and see who God has made most beautiful." Sometimes when I'm disappointed with myself for not doing enough to help my people, I look at my reflection in the mirror. And I read the words around the frame. The past couple of weeks, I've been holding up the picture of my student who was killed at the protest in Nazareth, and say those words. And sometimes when I'm so angry at what is happening in this land I let hate take control of my heart, I hold up to the mirror a picture of an Israeli soldier. He might be the soldier who ordered the destruction of my village. He might be the soldier who killed my beloved student. I hold that picture up to the mirror, and read the words around the frame. "Come and see who God has made most beautiful."

Chacour knows religions and governments ask people sometimes teach people to hate. They
teach people that it's okay to kill certain people they define as enemy. Blinding them to the fact that all of us are mother, father, sister, brother to each other. So a soldier kills an unarmed high school student. And the story of bloodshed done in God's name continues.

If Jesus were here preaching to us about who's part of our family, what would he say? I think he'd ask you and me, "Whose picture would you have trouble holding up to this mirror, and say, 'Come and see who God has made most beautiful'? Who do you find it hard to treat with civility, let alone love? In whose face are you rarely able to see the face of God? What would it mean for you to take one step toward healing that relationship?" And then I think Jesus would say, "Remember, I called 12 special people to walk beside me as I tried to live in love. So don't do this work alone. If you believe God is calling you to reach out to this one person, who can walk beside you? Is there a community whose support, love, and strength you can call on, so you take one step toward inviting that person to be part of your family?"

May we be such a community for one another. Amen.