Sermon, 2021.6.6: “The Family of Jesus is the Family of God”

 Ben Miller

“The Family of Jesus is the Family of God”

A Sermon for Christ Church (Lead, SD)

II Sunday After Pentecost, 2021.6.6

Season After Pentecost: Proper V (Track 1), Year B

I Sam 8.4–20 / Ps 138 / II Cor 4.13–5.1 / Mk 3.20–25 

So many expectations about how families should act and what a family looks like is determined by culture and setting. This is one reason why it can be so nerve-wracking to visit your partner’s parents for dinner, or to visit your friend’s family on Thanksgiving, or to stay with a host family in a foreign country. 

The question of who is family, who will be the people one trusts to protect them and nurture them into fullness of life, is not an abstract one. It is a matter of life and death for certain people. I recall how it’s now June. June is Pride Month for the LGBTQ community. I understand that LGBTQ rights and activism in the political sphere remains a controversial issue for some of us. But it should be no controversy for any Christian to recognize the God-given and God-honored dignity of any human being, including people of different sexualities. 

And it is the issue of how people’s dignity is hurt that is why I’m using Pride Month and the LGBTQ community as an example of this question of who counts as family. Consider this bone-chilling statistic: Out of all the homeless youth in New York City, 40% are LGBTQ.

It is no stretch to recognize that most of these homeless youth once had homes before being kicked out of their homes. And who was it doing the kicking out? Their family. In those cases, their family failed to protect them. In fact, their family even failed to recognize them as family anymore. 

Now consider the inverse: the power of chosen family for LGBTQ people. People who may keep them safe in material needs while providing the intangible treasures of friendship and affection. Such nurturing, the material and intangible working together, coagulates into a kind of blood, in the sense that it is a life force that gives these vulnerable people the power and maybe even the will to live. 

Your own family can kill you. Your chosen family can save you. These are facts borne out by the hardships of this world. 

So, I ask again: who counts as family? 

Who counts as family when your own family refuses to be family? 

This is the question posed in the Gospel reading today from Mark 3.

This is key to today’s reading: the fact that Jesus Christ’s own family says, He has gone out of his mind. (3.21) And then what does Jesus do? A sensible person would have tried to reconcile this division, to make peace so that the family unit can be preserved. But thank God that our Savior is not sensible, not even a little. The Gospel of Mark does not bother witnessing even a single attempt from Jesus to calm his family’s distress. Instead the guy jumps straight into a discourse with the religious elites about demons! 

Now this is the part where we get uncomfortable and hope that the Meek and Mild Jesus comes back to give us some chicken noodle soup for the soul. But no… sorry. This week all he talks about is demons and Satan and blasphemy and unforgivable sin and saying that his family doesn’t really matter. And to be honest I kinda want to go back to something more Chicken Soup for the Soul, like the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke, or maybe the verses “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy-laden” (11.28–30) from Matthew that is sweetly quoted in the Book of Common Prayer’s Compline service.  

But it is these rough edges that are actually the gift of the Gospel of Mark. I’ve been back in this area for a week. One day I out on a day trip with my new community at Thunderhead and was gazing out at the Hills, warmed by that South Dakota sun, and realized Mark, the Second Gospel, has the same landscape I encounter in the Black Hills: 

Wild, blazing hot, jagged edges. 

Inelegant, but uncompromising. 

In fact, beautiful in such inelegance. 

It’s not safe, but it’s majestic, and so it demands your awe just by existing. That is the Gospel of Mark. That is the Jesus we see today: a mighty crag of the Black Hills that doesn’t mind scratching up our expectations with rough edges.

And so we can see by the way Jesus’ own family describes him, “He is out of his mind” (3.21) and the way the scribes describe him, “By the ruler of demons he casts out demons” (3.22), that the kinds of people one would think would be closest to Jesus—blood relatives and the most devout of his religious family, Israel—are not pleased. They need Jesus to be less wild, more domesticated, because they need Jesus to live according to expectations. And Jesus just doesn’t allow that today.

We have to remember one of the most basic facts of being a Christian: the goal of our lives is to encounter Jesus, God in the flesh, in all times and in all places. And an encounter with God will always mean some sort of confrontation, because God does not just communicate with us to make us feel good, but to unveil parts about ourselves that we would rather hide. We sometimes need Jesus the Strong Man to “plunder” our stubbornness and refusal to see beyond comfortable expectations.

So what is Jesus unveiling to us as we squirm in our pews and in our hearts? 

It is that our God, the Lord of Israel, the One who raised the crucified Christ from the dead, is a God who subverts our comfort and our expectations. And this includes our comfortable expectations about family. 

The meaning of family for Christians is not ultimately centered on blood or even our personal choice. 

It is centered on Jesus’ choice of us. 

It is centered on Jesus’ blood… 

that “blood relation” of him to us by death and resurrection. 

How often we in the Church forget this simple fact of relating to God! 

How often do we neglect Paul’s words in today’s New Testament reading, that 

“what is seen is temporary… 

what is unseen is eternal”! (II Cor 4.18) 

We see the threat of staking your entire being on what is seen in today’s Old Testament reading. It forms a sort of mirror image to Mark 3 today. In I Samuel 8, Israel demands a king from the prophet Samuel. They want what is comfortable. They’re not even hiding it, because they even say they want to be like the other nations! “But the people refused to listen… they said, “No! but we are determined to have a king over us, that we also may be like other nations.” (8.19, 20) 

So Israel, that stiff-necked people who we emulate today, make their choice of family more important than God’s choice. Their “chosen family,” that of a dynasty, will be their own destruction. That is Samuel’s warning to them in I Samuel 8: like a satanic Strong Man plundering the house in Jesus’ parable today, the King will plunder what he wants in the house of Israel, plundering the servants, plundering the harvest, plundering the wealth.  

It is a mirror to Mark 3 today because the family Jesus chooses, though it is deemed foolish, is our salvation. It is not like the house of Israel’s dynasty, built by human hands and human schemes, and thus destined to failure. It is a stronger household than this. It is more like what Paul says today: a house not built with hands. (II Cor 5.1)

Because who is the family that Jesus chooses? 

And looking around on those who sat about him, he said, 

Here are my mother and my brothers!

Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother. (3.34–35)

And praise the Lord! By Christ Jesus’ own initiative, we the Church are empowered do the same thing today, in every age. We look around us, no matter our place and situation in life. We gesture to the people around us. And we invite them into the will of God, that perfect will to love neighbor, do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with Him. And in this invitation we stretch out our arms in embrace and say, “My family! My kin! My brother, and sister, and mother.”

Remember how I said earlier that the meaning of family is centered on Jesus’ choice of us, and centered on Jesus’ blood… the blood shed for our redemption and that of the whole world.

In the blood of Jesus, in that choice of Jesus, God makes the human race our family, because Jesus’ blood covers everyone, including the people you reject. Jesus’ outstretched hand chooses everyone, including the people we are willing to dismiss as “complicated issues” rather than people deserving the grace and peace of our heavenly Father, “from whom every family on earth and in heaven is named” (Eph 3.15).

And this loving embrace of Jesus, that rugged-edge love that subverts our comfortable expectations, is, as Paul says today, 

“all for your sake.” 

It is, as Paul says today, 

the “grace” 

that will “extend to more and more people” 

to “increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.” (II Cor 4.15) 

Amen.

Word count: 1546