We Are Family

Mark 3:31-35

June 7, 2015

This passage always comes with a soundtrack for me: as I read it, it’s 1979 all over again and I’ve got Sister Sledge singing “we are family” running through my mind and it’s Disco Jesus joining in on the chorus.

You’re welcome for that image.

Seriously, though, I take this brief passage as central to the proclamation of Mark’s gospel. Consider the setting: in the typical urgency of Mark’s gospel, Jesus has been preaching, teaching, and healing throughout Galilee, and ever-increasing crowds are gathering to listen, to seek healing, or just to see the next big thing. And, in the case of the authorities, to check out this guy who is threatening the status quo.

Sensing a threat to their own power and position, the religious authorities begin to spread stories about Jesus: “he’s dangerous; he’s crazy; he’s possessed by demons.”

The crowds press in on him such that it’s impossible for him to move around freely, and rare for him to find time alone and apart. Perhaps his family is concerned for his well-being. Perhaps they fear for his safety. Maybe they worry that the rumors about his sanity are grounded in fact, after all, some people are calling him “the son of God,” and though he’s told them to keep quiet he hasn’t denied what they said.

Whatever their motivation, Mark tells us that Jesus’ mother and his brother came to see him in the midst of the teaming throng, and Jesus offers the enigmatic reply: “who are my mother and my brothers? Who is my family? Who belongs to my tribe?”

This is the central question of the gospel, and on the answer rests the entirety of scripture – at least as I understand it. For me, the central thread binding together the quilt of texts gathered into the canon of scripture is this: these are the stories of the Creator seeking to be reconciled with creation, and, of the human creature’s struggle to live into reconciliation with the Creator and with fellow creatures.

From the call of Abraham to the stories from the early church, over and over and over again we read variations on God’s promise to be God for the people, and the struggle of the people of God to be faithful to the covenant that defines them. Moreover, we see throughout, the widening circle in which this call and response plays out.

It begins with a single family, spreads to include the nation of Israel, and grows out toward “all nations” through the words of the prophets and the work of the disciples.

Now this is not just Biblical interpretation, it is ethical imperative with the fierce urgency of now. Look at the news of the day: so much of our brokenness cleaves over disputes between who is in and who is out, who is a child of God and who is not, who is part of our tribe and who is on the outside.

Consider the various responses to Caitlyn Jenner’s story. For some, during this season of Pride, she is a hero and role model. For some, she is a “teachable moment.” For still others, she is a punchline. For one conservative blogger, she is “a mentally disordered man who is being manipulated by disingenuous liberals and self-obsessed gay activists.”

Of course, that blogger would never use a female pronoun in this case, so I’ve just “outed” myself in claiming Caitlyn as a sister in the family of humankind.

I’ll further “out” myself as ignorant in confessing that I find most aspects of transgender experience strange and hard to understand. But, as with so much else that I find difficult to understand, it’s only hard to understand it because it’s completely outside of my experience.

The flight of the robin outside my window as I wrote this is strange to me because it is – and always will be – outside of my experience. That some people don’t like the taste of good chocolate is strange to me because tasting it as anything other than delicious is totally outside of my experience. The fear of water so palpable in non-swimmers is strange to me because it is outside of my experience – or, at least, outside of my remembered experience as one who learned to swim at the same time I learned to walk and have no memory of a time when I couldn’t do those things.

I may not understand the fear of water that non-swimmers experience, but I do know what fear feels like. Fear is key here because of the costs and consequences of radical difference. It costs me nothing that I cannot fly. It costs others nothing that they do not like chocolate – as tough as it may be for me to fathom it. But to differ from the prevailing normative or dominant experience of such central social constructs as gender, gender identify, sexual orientation, racial identification – differences there carry costs. The first cost extracted is exclusion from the inner circle, exclusion from the tribe.

Recognizing that cost as he ministered to lepers, those possessed by demons, women, tax collectors, and others marked by condition, identity, or circumstance as outsiders, Jesus lives into ever deeper understanding of his calling to transgress and erase the lines the mark some as insiders and others as permanent outsiders. At the same time, in story after story in the gospels, those previously considered outside the tribe begin to experience their full, authentic humanity as Jesus touches their lives and welcomes them into his tribe.

The gospels launched what should have been a movement to scatter the tribal gods and end violent tribalism. Alas, Christians have all too often simply reinscribed the patterns of tribalism and reinforced the boundaries with our own violence. But if the will of God is captured most clearly in Jesus’ commandment that we love one another, then our own acts of exclusion – however large or small they may be – work first on ourselves for they mark us as outsiders to the family we most want to claim.

“Who is my family?” Jesus asked. “Whoever does the will of God is my family.”

To love one another – that is how the family of followers of Jesus is known. And that is something to be proud of. Amen.

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I’m always at least mildly amused when we celebrate Pride in worship. After all, “pride” is one of the seven deadly sins, and it’s that thing that “goeth before the fall.” But that is, as it were, pride understood from above or from the center, pride understood from positions of power and privilege. Pride understood from the margins, on the other hand, is a source of empowerment and a way of finding voice for peoples long silenced.

When they sang, “I’m gonna sit at the welcome table,” African-American civil rights activists – following the lead of their enslaved forebears – expressed pride as insistence. Pride is an expression of insistence from those long excluded that, indeed, they have place at the table.

Jesus understood this, and surely that fact was central to his own practice of opening the table and welcoming everyone to break bread together.

Pride, thus understood, is first a simple expression of humanity. “I am a man,” read the signs carried by sanitation workers at the Memphis marches at the time of Martin Luther King’s assassination. I am somebody. I am a child of God. These are fundamentally expressions of pride when articulated by anyone whose full humanity has ever been denied.

At this table, your full humanity and fundamental worth will always be recognized. There is a place at this table for every child of God, thus this table is a place of pride.

As we come to the table this morning, we come, as always, prayerfully. This morning, as we center ourselves in silence, I invite you to think about your own life. As the anthem we sang a bit ago asks, “what have you done … to make you feel proud?” Think about that, and then, consider this question: what does your pride prompt you to do in the world? If, for example, you are proud of your children, does that pride prompt you to work in the world for conditions under which all children can prosper? In other words, what does your pride prompt you to do for the family of humankind?

“What have you done … to make you feel proud?” If you feel so called, jot a few words on the sticky note, as a prayer of dedication of your own actions – on whatever individual scale you get to engage – and then, in a few moments, when we come to the table of grace, attach the sticky note to the cross as an expression of gratitude and commitment for the gifts you have been given that enable you to act in the world and to take authentic pride in those actions.

Let us pray.