Love Makes a Family
Matthew 12:46-50; Ruth 1:1-21
May 10, 2009
One of the challenges I recall from seminary days was the invitation to sum up in a sentence what you think scripture is all about. Think about that for a moment. Is the entirety of scripture about eternal life? Is it about proper religion? Is it about justice? Is it a biography of God? Is it a single story about the people of God? Is it about liberation? Is it about the national identity of the people of Israel? Is it about law? Prophets? Love?
That long list of possibilities in and of itself suggests that scripture resists reduction to a single narrative thread or central theme, and I tend to believe that scripture is, indeed, about all of these and more. But, if compelled to say right now, in a sentence, what scripture is about I would say this:
Scripture is the story of the ever-expanding understanding of the limitless nature of God’s love.
Scripture is the story of the ever-expanding understanding of the limitless nature of God’s love.
Throughout the stories, we encounter people whose understanding of God and of divine love is pushed beyond initial limits. Abraham is called to leave behind the narrow and geographically fixed definition of his kind, his tribe, and go to a place that God will show him. Joseph, sold into slavery by his brothers, is compelled to expand his own self-understanding and his understanding of who is in and who is out of the covenant relationship with God. Moses, raised with a royal consciousness, is confronted by the cries of an oppressed people and he must choose. Paul, the oppressor of the early church, leaves the confines of the temple and spreads good news far beyond the tribal boundaries of his people.
And Jesus, even Jesus, is constantly recognizing that good news is not just for the people of Israel but also for the Gentiles, for women, for children, for the poor and the marginalized – so much so that he finally confronts that fundamental human question: who is my brother? Who is my sister?
In other words, who is in and who is out? Who constitutes the family if the parent is God?
Family … you can’t live with ‘em, and you can’t shoot ‘em! Well, then, what happens if everybody is in?
Isn’t that the question? We spend so much time trying to define who is in and who is out.
A group of us got together a few weeks back to watch For the Bible Tells Me So. The film tells the stories of several families coming to terms with a gay or lesbian child coming out – including that of Bishop Gene Robinson. The stories underscore the difficulties posed by narrow interpretations of scripture. In other words, the families come face to face with their own understandings and that of faith communities that read scripture is about law, scripture read as a strict and fixed code of morality.
Never mind that we pick and choose which parts of the law we will attend to at any given moment. As John Stewart said last week on The Daily Show after Maine legalized same-sex marriage, the move transformed “Maine’s annual lobster-fest into the state’s second biggest violation of Leviticus. … God hates gays, and scallops,” Stewart concludes.
When we take scripture as a narrowly defined rule book and understand the church as arbiter and enforcer of those rules we wind up with religion as a weapon and, too often, family as its target.
A couple of months ago I was at a conference at Stony Point, along the Hudson River in New York. I offered up for our morning prayers a Pat Humphries song for the gathered people that, I thought, expressed the sense of unity that was growing among the group. I’ll sing the chorus for you:
We are living ‘neath the great Big Dipper; we are washed by the very same rain.
We are swimming in the stream together, some in power and some in pain.
We can worship this ground we walk on, cherishing the beings that we live beside.
Loving spirits we’ll live forever; we’re all swimming to the other side.
Into the prayerful silence one young man – a senior in college – spoke up and declared that the song represented “rank idolatry.” The most interesting part of the moment was that no one responded to him. It was quite clear that no one agreed with him, but it was also clear that we wanted to be gentle with him. I took his youthful certainty as a byproduct of understanding scripture and orthodoxy as a strictly drawn circle around a narrowly defined set of rules.
Scripture was to be used as a way of defining who is in and who is out, and how we will permit ourselves to speak or sing of those lines and definitions. Family, understood in light of such a reading, is easily reduced to tribe and kin.
Yet the Bible is full of stories that challenge precisely that reduction.
Take the story of Ruth and Naomi. There are clear lines of tribe and kin at stake, but something far deeper comes to define family.
Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die — there will I be buried.
What else is that but a declaration of undying love? Where you go, I will follow. Where you live I will live.
I am alone and I am searching, hungering for answers in my time
I am balanced at the brink of wisdom, I’m impatient to receive a sign
I move forward with my senses open; imperfection, it be my crime
In humility I will listen. We’re all swimming to the other side.
We’re all living ‘neath …
On this journey through thoughts and feelings; binding intuition, my head, my heart
I am gathering the tools together. I’m preparing to do my part.
All of those who have come before me, band together and be my guide
Loving lessons that I will follow; we’re all swimming to the other side.
Jesus clearly understood that tribe and kin were not enough to make a family. “Who is my brother?” he asks. It’s not blood or biology. It’s not tribe, religion, culture. It is, he declares, doing the will of God.
And what is that? This will of God that Jesus’ own life translates for us? Love God and love the neighbor – the law and the prophets hang on this. Love one another, by this they will know you are my followers. Love also the enemy – be makers of peace and, therefore, be called the children of God. Be part of my family.
If, as the Bible tells us, God is love, then we are all children of love, bound together by that common identity. There is no in or out from that circle. We are all children of a loving God.
The trick, of course, is to live as if that were true in every aspect of our lives, in our every interaction with others, in the way that we shape our lives and our churches, and in the ways that we try to make our smaller families reflect that truth as well.
God is love. Love makes a family. There is an inescapable logic at work in the relationship between those two statements. No abuse of scripture, of creed, confession or institution will ever make it otherwise.
Beloved, let us love one another, for God is love and we are created in that image.
Carry the spark of the divine in your life and let it seek out that same spark in every one you encounter. By this you will be able to answer in your own life the question Jesus posed, “who is my brother, my sister, my mother, my father?”
You are that one, my beloved sisters and brothers.
When we get there we’ll discover all of the gifts we’ve been given to share
Have been with us since life’s beginning and we never noticed they were there
We can balance at the brink of wisdom never recognizing that we’ve arrived
Loving spirits will live together. We’re all swimming to the other side.
May 10, 2009
One of the challenges I recall from seminary days was the invitation to sum up in a sentence what you think scripture is all about. Think about that for a moment. Is the entirety of scripture about eternal life? Is it about proper religion? Is it about justice? Is it a biography of God? Is it a single story about the people of God? Is it about liberation? Is it about the national identity of the people of Israel? Is it about law? Prophets? Love?
That long list of possibilities in and of itself suggests that scripture resists reduction to a single narrative thread or central theme, and I tend to believe that scripture is, indeed, about all of these and more. But, if compelled to say right now, in a sentence, what scripture is about I would say this:
Scripture is the story of the ever-expanding understanding of the limitless nature of God’s love.
Scripture is the story of the ever-expanding understanding of the limitless nature of God’s love.
Throughout the stories, we encounter people whose understanding of God and of divine love is pushed beyond initial limits. Abraham is called to leave behind the narrow and geographically fixed definition of his kind, his tribe, and go to a place that God will show him. Joseph, sold into slavery by his brothers, is compelled to expand his own self-understanding and his understanding of who is in and who is out of the covenant relationship with God. Moses, raised with a royal consciousness, is confronted by the cries of an oppressed people and he must choose. Paul, the oppressor of the early church, leaves the confines of the temple and spreads good news far beyond the tribal boundaries of his people.
And Jesus, even Jesus, is constantly recognizing that good news is not just for the people of Israel but also for the Gentiles, for women, for children, for the poor and the marginalized – so much so that he finally confronts that fundamental human question: who is my brother? Who is my sister?
In other words, who is in and who is out? Who constitutes the family if the parent is God?
Family … you can’t live with ‘em, and you can’t shoot ‘em! Well, then, what happens if everybody is in?
Isn’t that the question? We spend so much time trying to define who is in and who is out.
A group of us got together a few weeks back to watch For the Bible Tells Me So. The film tells the stories of several families coming to terms with a gay or lesbian child coming out – including that of Bishop Gene Robinson. The stories underscore the difficulties posed by narrow interpretations of scripture. In other words, the families come face to face with their own understandings and that of faith communities that read scripture is about law, scripture read as a strict and fixed code of morality.
Never mind that we pick and choose which parts of the law we will attend to at any given moment. As John Stewart said last week on The Daily Show after Maine legalized same-sex marriage, the move transformed “Maine’s annual lobster-fest into the state’s second biggest violation of Leviticus. … God hates gays, and scallops,” Stewart concludes.
When we take scripture as a narrowly defined rule book and understand the church as arbiter and enforcer of those rules we wind up with religion as a weapon and, too often, family as its target.
A couple of months ago I was at a conference at Stony Point, along the Hudson River in New York. I offered up for our morning prayers a Pat Humphries song for the gathered people that, I thought, expressed the sense of unity that was growing among the group. I’ll sing the chorus for you:
We are living ‘neath the great Big Dipper; we are washed by the very same rain.
We are swimming in the stream together, some in power and some in pain.
We can worship this ground we walk on, cherishing the beings that we live beside.
Loving spirits we’ll live forever; we’re all swimming to the other side.
Into the prayerful silence one young man – a senior in college – spoke up and declared that the song represented “rank idolatry.” The most interesting part of the moment was that no one responded to him. It was quite clear that no one agreed with him, but it was also clear that we wanted to be gentle with him. I took his youthful certainty as a byproduct of understanding scripture and orthodoxy as a strictly drawn circle around a narrowly defined set of rules.
Scripture was to be used as a way of defining who is in and who is out, and how we will permit ourselves to speak or sing of those lines and definitions. Family, understood in light of such a reading, is easily reduced to tribe and kin.
Yet the Bible is full of stories that challenge precisely that reduction.
Take the story of Ruth and Naomi. There are clear lines of tribe and kin at stake, but something far deeper comes to define family.
Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die — there will I be buried.
What else is that but a declaration of undying love? Where you go, I will follow. Where you live I will live.
I am alone and I am searching, hungering for answers in my time
I am balanced at the brink of wisdom, I’m impatient to receive a sign
I move forward with my senses open; imperfection, it be my crime
In humility I will listen. We’re all swimming to the other side.
We’re all living ‘neath …
On this journey through thoughts and feelings; binding intuition, my head, my heart
I am gathering the tools together. I’m preparing to do my part.
All of those who have come before me, band together and be my guide
Loving lessons that I will follow; we’re all swimming to the other side.
Jesus clearly understood that tribe and kin were not enough to make a family. “Who is my brother?” he asks. It’s not blood or biology. It’s not tribe, religion, culture. It is, he declares, doing the will of God.
And what is that? This will of God that Jesus’ own life translates for us? Love God and love the neighbor – the law and the prophets hang on this. Love one another, by this they will know you are my followers. Love also the enemy – be makers of peace and, therefore, be called the children of God. Be part of my family.
If, as the Bible tells us, God is love, then we are all children of love, bound together by that common identity. There is no in or out from that circle. We are all children of a loving God.
The trick, of course, is to live as if that were true in every aspect of our lives, in our every interaction with others, in the way that we shape our lives and our churches, and in the ways that we try to make our smaller families reflect that truth as well.
God is love. Love makes a family. There is an inescapable logic at work in the relationship between those two statements. No abuse of scripture, of creed, confession or institution will ever make it otherwise.
Beloved, let us love one another, for God is love and we are created in that image.
Carry the spark of the divine in your life and let it seek out that same spark in every one you encounter. By this you will be able to answer in your own life the question Jesus posed, “who is my brother, my sister, my mother, my father?”
You are that one, my beloved sisters and brothers.
When we get there we’ll discover all of the gifts we’ve been given to share
Have been with us since life’s beginning and we never noticed they were there
We can balance at the brink of wisdom never recognizing that we’ve arrived
Loving spirits will live together. We’re all swimming to the other side.
posted by David Ensign at
7:40 AM
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