August 19, 2007
12 Pentecost, Luke 12:49-56
So, Jesus is going to turn family members against each other. Once again the family values folks are having trouble getting Jesus to cooperate. Mothers will turn against daughters, fathers against sons. Sounds kind of anti-family to me.
To Luke's audience these words would have addressed a problem that was already troubling the christian community. The choice to follow the way, as the christian life was called, sometimes brought with it persecution and mistrust. It was becoming costly to follow Jesus by the end of the first century. Rome was becoming wary of the Christian movement's zeal, especially their hope for that great day when Jesus would return and make all things right. Such people could be difficult to rule, and so the Romans had begun to suppress the Christian movement. That made life difficult not only for the Christians, but for the Jews who therefore wanted to distance themselves from the Christians.
The choice of whether to stay with this new sect was dividing families and friends. Luke's audience might have heard these words and said, well of course.....Jesus said there would be times like these in which brothers choose different lives and different directions. They might have heard that their family trials about whether to follow the way were part of some grand scenario that must unfold as had been predicted. Jesus' words about divided families might have helped them accept the divisions they were experiencing.
Luke, more maybe than any other gospel writer, saw the events surrounding Jesus as the beginning of a new era in the history of God's interaction with humanity. Jesus' followers, the church, would carry forward the message and the presence and the work of God in the world. When luke told his readers that they would sometimes have to choose between God and family and that Jesus had expected that , he was trying to help them find courage to choose the way.
Luke's readers believed in family. Family lineage established their identity. Family told them who they were.
Sometimes we must choose to separate from those closest to us. Sometimes we have to make our own way. Sometimes the call of God, the call to health, growth, sanity is a call for us to claim our lives. We Christians talk a lot about offering our lives to God....committing our lives to God's work in the world, but we can only offer what we own. Jesus says that if we want to follow him we will sometimes have to choose a different path from the people around us.....sometimes from those closest to us, even the ones we call family.
Most of you know that for the last year, Mary's 15 year-old niece, Saranta lived with us. Her mother is Thai and Saranta has lived in Thailand since she was a baby. She spent the year with us going to an American high school and working on her English while learning about American culture. It was a great year for our family, and it was a year of filled with challenge for all of us.
Having been empty nesters for seven years (our daughter is 26, self sufficient, and lives just far enough away that we can't take care of her dogs when she travels)--having been empty nesters for so long, Mary and I had forgotten a few things about teenagers. Like the sleeping thing. How can anyone sleep till 3 in the afternoon? And the all night chat with friends on-line thing. That wasn't even an option when our kid was 15. Over the last year, Mary and I often noted with wonder, amazement or simple confusion some new--or maybe long forgotten--manifestation of teenhood being played out right in front of us. One of the most challenging things was something best described as the push-back. Those of you who have raised kids know it well, I'm sure. After not having a teenager around for seven years, Mary and I had forgotten how often and how easily the word "why" can be inserted into any conversation.
It was beginning to look like it would be a long year, until with a forehead slapping, "how could we have forgotten" kind of recognition we remembered that Saranta wasn't out to give us gray hair. She was simply doing what she was supposed to be doing. She was faithfully fulfilling the mission of every 15 year old, busy at a task that some of us struggle with our whole lives. She was, though I would never have mentioned it to her at 15, involved in deeply spiritual work. The kind of work to which Jesus calls his followers again and again. She was busily and often single-mindedly involved in the task of becoming her own person. Not the person her parents, or her aunt and uncle thought she should be--though some of that will always be there. She was becoming the person she could claim and present to the world as Saranta. Once these old folks figured that out, it was sometimes even fun to watch as she worked to separate herself from her family in order to become who she might be.
When Jesus spoke of family members being set against each other, he was quoting the prophet Micah, and he seems to have been talking about a time of sorting and choosing loyalties. That work isn't just for first century Christians and teenagers. We all have times when we have to choose between the voice of God’s Spirit speaking inside us and the voices of those around us, and yes, for many of us that may involve having to choose the way of that inner voice even over family.
In our day, those who study families and human behavior have come to speak of the family as a system. The family system is one that tries to remain stable. Whether the family life is good or troubled, the system tends to want to keep the family working in ways that are familiar, predictable. Interactions between family members end up reinforcing the family's values. Even in families where there is serious conflict or problems such as alcoholism the family as a system tends to reinforce even problem behavior because it is what the family knows. Families want to remain stable, sometimes even when individuals in the family know things need to change. The only way, say the experts, that such change can ever come about is for one person to choose to change the way they interact within the family. That is to say that the only way anyone can change his world is by changing himself....by becoming his own person.
One of the originators of family systems theory, Murray Bowen calls the choosing of one's own life "self differentiation." He says differentiation means the capacity of a family member to define his or her own life goals and values apart from surrounding togetherness pressures, to say "I" when others are demanding "you" and "we."
I marvel at people who break out of destructive family systems. I sometimes hear people speak rather matter of factly about the troubled family that they belong to or that raised them. They speak in a way that conveys that their family story is a part of their story but not the whole story. They convey a sense of ease even in the midst of trouble and a sense of grounding which is much deeper than the turbulent family life around them.
You meet these people all the time. They are people in recovery, people who have had to choose new friends, maybe even new family. They are people who have had to find a faith expression different from that of their parents, or in opposition to parents' skepticism or maybe a sibling's certainty that they are damned. They are people who don't tell the sorts of jokes their parents tell because they've thought about it and they just don't want to support that kind of thinking. They are children of business types who become artists and children of hippies who become Republicans.
They are people who like Jesus, find deep within themselves a grounding that frees them to become the people they can become.
Jesus was grounded in the Spirit of God. The people around him could see it in his actions and hear it in his teaching. But mostly I think they came to believe Jesus was special because of the way he remained true to his call and mission even when others wanted him to be something else....a king, a magician, a mother's son.
I realize I'm preaching to the choir. We bring our children here hoping they will find that kind of grounding for their lives. We come ourselves for the same reason. Our hope is that in the end, the family relationship that gives us our identity, that defines who we are and what we are about, will be our relationship with God as children of God. That is the one familial relationship Jesus never questioned.
Amen.
JMB