Proper 7
You trace the sparrow’s flight,
And plumb the secret places of the heart:
Bring our fear and conflict
Into the light of your presence;
Help us to lose our hollow life
And find our way to you;
Through Jesus Christ, the master and the servant.
Amen.
Then on Monday I opened the lectionary.
And I realized, they had pulled the oldest trick in the liturgical book… give the seminarian the reading that says “one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” Little did they know that I spent an entire semester with the Old Testament reading from today and wrote my final paper on it so, jokes on them!
No matter what reading we focus on today it is clear that God
understands the complexity of families.
●
Happiness
is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city. -George Burns
●
I
think a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it. -Mary Karr
●
The
other night I ate at a real nice family restaurant. Every table had an argument
going. -George Carlin
●
Obviously,
if I was serious about having a relationship with someone long-term, the last
people I would introduce him to would be my family. -Chelsea Handler
●
Family
love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern… like bad
wallpaper. -Friedrich Nietzsche
When I was teaching middle school language arts in Hawaii one of our units was Greek Mythology. For our final project I had the students create a family tree of the Gods & Goddesses as well as one for their own family. I drew my family tree on the board as an example and as I added my father’s third wife a student raised his hand and said, “So Ms, it was like your dad ran a marry-a-thon” which was both true, topical, and hilarious.
Our families are the stuff that makes up our lives.
Both those we came from and those we have chosen.
You might not be familiar with the story of Sarah and Hagar. What you may know is that Sarah is the mother of all of Israel, God promised her and her husband Abraham that their descendants would be as innumerable as the stars. When Sarah was told this, she laughed at God, she was ninety, which feels like a very good reason to laugh at God. Sarah then had a son, Isaac.
Sarah had been barren and before God blessed her with Isaac, she had her maidservant Hagar bear a child for Abraham. That child’s name was Ishmael. In our reading today older brother Ishmael is playing with his little half brother Isaac. Ishmael laughed with Isaac as they celebrated Isaac’s weaning and it made Sarah so angry- maybe because Ishmael was Abraham’s first born or maybe because she mis-read the situation- but either way, Sarah was so angry she had Hagar and Ishmael cast out into the wilderness.
The same Hebrew word is used in both stories for this laugh- Sarah to God and Ishmael to Isaac. God responded with grace and a miracle and Sarah responded by sending Hagar and Ishmael into the desert to die.
But- plot twist, they did not die. God created a nation from Ishmael, a nation that our Muslim brothers and sisters trace their origins to.
God can do quite a lot with our brokenness. And families have been, since the beginning of time, complicated. Recently Scot Jonte said in a staff meeting that her mother used to tell them, save your best behavior for the people at home because they love you the most. My family most certainly did not follow that rule. There were times growing up that I lost my door because I slammed it so often in arguments with my mom.
If there is one thing I have learned in my almost thirteen years of ministry is that no family is perfect. Many of us feel alone in that, that we are the only ones. The only ones who can’t make the relationship work. The only ones that have to draw clear boundaries around holidays and who we see at them. The only ones who don’t have a close relationship with their sibling, or parent, or child. And I can tell you that you are absolutely wrong. You are not the only one.
Families are, universally, complicated. Hard. Exhausting.
And God’s mercy is always bending towards reconciliation.
God makes nations out of outcasts and nations out of outcasters. We are all within God’s reach, no matter how far we have strayed or been cast out. I spent a lot of time as a child of divorce feeling like my family was broken in a way that some others were not. If I just had two parents at home, if I had just not been raised by my grandmother, if I had just lived with my half brother longer… insert some magical belief about the perfect life I would have had. But God is a God of redemption not a God of perfection.
I wish I could stand here and give you a three point plan to create the family you imagine in your head or the one you think others have when you look at their Christmas Cards– but I can assure you, if you were to just scratch the surface, you would see that it’s all an illusion.
The old and the new testament are full of stories of families being families; people selling their brother off into servanthood, tricking a man into marrying his fiance's sister instead of her, siblings bickering about who does the work and who sits around enjoying the work that is done… the Bible is full of families just like ours. Messy, frustrating, and full of imperfections.
And thankfully, God is the same. God doesn’t pick sides, God picks love. God picks justice, inclusion, and compassion. Jesus tells us in the Gospel today that, “he has not come to bring peace but a sword.” He reminds us that it is not our job to stand on the side of our families but to stand on the side of Jesus, on the side of the hurting, the devalued, the marginalized, and the oppressed. No matter what else is going on, when we stand THERE, we stand in God’s light and mercy.
Amen.
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