Unlike the Old Testament which is steeped in the concept of family and the ultimate importance of lineage, the New Testament, at least according to my concordance, uses the word "family' only once: "For this reason, " we read in Ephesians,. I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and earth is named. - - - The Greek word is patria, meaning lineage, clan, tribe, nation. Then, if you turn to look up the appearance of "parent" in the New Testament, you find a few more references, but few of them turn out to be very flattering when connected to the family: "Brother will deliver up brother to death," says Jesus in Mark's gospel, and the father his child, and children will rise up against parents and have them put to death. It is what we call today a "dysfunctional family," I believe!In Luke, a somewhat positive spin is put on the dissolution of family for faith's sake as Jesus proclaims, "Truly, I say to you, there is no man who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the Kingdom of God, who will not receive manifold more in this time and in the age to come eternal life. " Matthew makes of such leave-taking more than mere human action--it is a divine intention: 'Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword, For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughterI against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in- law; and a man's foes will be those of his own household. He who loves f ather or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. .. . " It is not the sort of text a preacher should choose for that Sunday of great liturgical significance called Fathers' Day.
Fortunately in the epistles, we return from the edges of radical disipleship to the more familiar comfort of ordered family life: "Children obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. 'Honor your father and mother, that it may be well with you and that you may live long on the earth. Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.' This, of course, is preceeded by Wives obey your husbands," and followed by "Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters".--this also is from the pen of the same man who said it is better to remain single. So given all these unsavory verses, what has this ancient book to say postively about the ordering of our lives into families ... about the high vocation of parenthood ... about the intention of God for our lives together as kinfolk? To be sure, we could spend our time delving into passages which would seem to uphold the preciousness of our family life, which would grant divine sanction to our current state of affairs. Yet the Bible, if it is an authoritative Word f rom beyond us and not just a human word writ large, is forever upsetting and calling into question every human order and institution we hold dear--even the family-- until God's word of judgment is heard forever as a word of grace. So back to the harder words of Jesus! I think it was in an attempt to find the grace within Jesus' harsh words about our f amily ties that I turned to the words of Paul, and read not what he had to say directly about the order of our family life, but rather stopped upon his metaphor for our human condition: we are groaning inwardly, he writes to the Romans, as we wait for adoption. The implication is that no matter what our particular life situation, no matter how faithful our parents were, no matter how wonderf ul or awf ul our f amily manages to be, we are waiting for adoption. We are those who were born into some human family, but still we await adoption. We are those who may even have been adopted by a family other than the family of our birth, but still we await adoption. We are those who have been joined in marriage to create a family, but still we await adoption. We are those who may have no one to claim as our own or who would claim us: so we await adoption. Or, to turn the metaphor around, we are each one orphans. Why such a metaphor? If we consider what must have been the case during the lifetime of Jesus and Paul, we might conclude that the reason for such a metaphor was in reaction to a culture and a religion in which blood was all, especially when it came to inheriting God's promise. "We are descendents of Abraham," the pious would cry out. Said John the Baptist to their cry, "Do not presume to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our father’, for I tell you God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abrahan." For Paul, we became those stones, Gentiles who were in Christ brought near and made members of the household of God. We are the children of God," he wrote to Christians in Rome, "and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. " Adoption in Christ, not human lineage became the key to the Kingdom. But the metaphor goes far deeper than that, I believe. For I think it speaks not only to the situation between Jews and Gentiles in the first century. It speaks to the human condition in every time and place. We are orphans, you and I: strangers sojourners said the author of the Letter to the Hebrews. We are those who would make a reliable home on this planet if we could-- but we cannot. Let every one who is, in some sense, not a member of a dysfunctional family please stand! Why is it that all human efforts to secure for ourselves the love we so desperately need result so often in sadness and disappointment and grief? Why is it that, inspite of all our efforts to be forever taken in, we know ourselves finally as alone? The most obvious reason for this is death itself. We were made to hold on to one another for dear life. But that is all.. and it is never enough. We are on loan to one another--how often I have heard that phrase, especially as it pertains to the death of a child. Small comfort! Yet it is so for every human relationship. Thus are our parents on loan to us. We are always the child of our parent, no matter how many grey hairs we have, so that a parent’s death leaves us strangely alone in the world-- orphaned. Thus are our spouces on loan to us. We take vows "til death do us part," though we could not bear such union if we could really friends, imagine such parting, such separation. Thus are our extended families, on loan to us. Nephews and cousins, neighbors and colleagues. But long before death, there is this thing called sin which makes of us orphans every day of our lives. We tend to think of sin as things we do wrong, eternal laws we break by what we do or fail to do. That is one understanding. But the more devastating definition of sin has to do with this state of separation in which we live and move and lose our being. To be human is to be creatures living at a distance f rom all we were made to be one with. God, of course, would appear top on the list of those from whom we are estranged. But the sin that makes of families a collection of strangers, that mutilates friendships, that destroys marriages is in us all. Why could I not will my marriage to work? Why did I grow up convinced that my little brother, a child of God, had koodies and was best avoided? Why are we forever blaming our parents for all in us that is wrong? Why do we, over and over again, orphan ourselves? Sin says the biblical tradition: the human condition which sets us always apart from those we were given to love. But sin has another dimension. And here I think we begin to take the turn in our time that Jesus intended to effect when he said we must love him more than brother and sister, parent and child, husband and wife, if we are to be his disciples. Sin can drive us toward one another in a subtle kind of desperation. There is an anxiety at work in us--not only about death but about this distance between ourselves and all others--that makes us expect ultimate things from merely human beings, that leads us to seek from one another what only God can give. If only I could find somebody with whom to share my life, if only my parents could love me without condition, if only my child would let me in. There is this holding on to one another as if, says Henri Nouwen, "we are called to take each other's loneliness away...," as though we could adopt one another out of sin, as though another human being could erase this separation. It is a burden too great for any parent to bear. It is an expection too heavy for any child to meet. "When our loneliness drives us away from ourselves into the arms of our companions in life," says Nouwen, “we are, in fact, driving ourselves into excruciating relationships, tiring friendships and suffocating embraces .... No f riend or lover, no husband or wife, (no family), no community or commune will be able to put to rest our deepest cravings for unity and wholeness, " our inward groaning for adoption. If that is so, then Jesus word's of judgment: whoever does not love me more than father and mother, son and daughter...become a strange sort of grace.. words that would deliver us from the futility of our seeking salvation from one another--parent from child, child from parent. That will only end in destruction, says Jesus: parent against child, child against parent. So he uses the hardest words he can--the hyperbole of the Middle East--to turn us toward him. In effect, he calls us first to be orphans, to let go of the stranglehold we have on one another. Then he calls us to himself, that we might know in him our waiting for adoption is over. He is the good shepherd who seeks us until we are found; he is the faithful parent who demands justice for us far into the night; he is the householder who chooses to be gracious to all who are taken in last; he is the father who welcomes us home f rom a f ar country. By his grace alone--by this undeserved, unexpected, unimaginable love toward us--he saves us from ourselves, from our separate ways, from our deaths, from the futility of our life and for a love so deep, so broad, so high that it knows no bounds. Now were that the end of the gospel--some communion with God in Christ wherein we are adopted and carried away from this veil of tears--we would not be gathered here this day. But it is only the beginning, for our adoption in Christ has radical implications for our relation one to another. From his cross wherein our separation is ended, Christ transforms who we are to be, one to another and sets us in a family that knows no bounds: the family of Christ's church. Says Jesus to Mary, "Woman, behold thy son, " and to John, the beloved disciple, "Behold thy mother." He gives us to one another not by blood but by promise, not by law but by grace. As dysfunctional as it is, the earthly family that God in Christ intends for us is somehow the church: in the meantime--across blood lines, beyond legal documents--until the Kingdom come. Says Christ to us gathered here, behold thy son, thy daughter, behold thy mother, thy father, behold thy brother, thy sister. Says he of those beyond these doors, behold thy neighbor. His love stretches our love to the limits. His love deepens our love toward each one by our side. His love lends perspective to the love within every household. His love binds us by grace and gratitude, rather than emptiness and need, to the ones we have called our own. His love sssends us to all who wait for adoption, that they might know their waiting to be forever over in Him.