Redefining Family ~ The Ven. Rose Bogal-Allbritten
Text: Matthew 10: 24-39
A number of years ago, when my father was in the throes of dementia and living in a nursing home, I received the following email: “I was wondering if you are originally from Chicago and if your father Ed used to work for Ashland Wholesale Hardware and then Atlas South.” My first instinct was to hit the delete key; even with a spam filter, I receive a number of letters that begin: “Dearest One. I am Mary Gomon from Botswana. I am married to Chief John Gomon who worked with the Botswana Embassy in Leshoto for nine years before he died in the year 2005. When my late husband was alive, he deposited the sum of 9.1 million U.S. dollars in a bank in Abidjan-Cote D’Ivoire. I want a person that will use this money to fund orphanages and widows.” I am sure that you know how the rest of this goes.
But instead of deleting the email that came from this person asking if I was “Ed’s daughter,” I answered it, for after thinking about the sender, I realized that his was a familiar name. So I replied: “Yes, I am Ed’s daughter.” His response was one of memories that he had of my father—things that I hadn’t thought of in awhile, and in many ways, his email was a gift to me.
So yes, I am Ed’s daughter, Bill’s wife, Elizabeth’s mother. Even though I am an individual, I am defined, to a great extent, by these significant and positive relationships.
Most of us are. So it is perhaps shocking to read in today’s passage from Matthew’s Gospel: “I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.”
Is Jesus saying that these relationships which define us, are to be sacrificed? After all, these relationships defined a part of who Jesus was: he was Mary’s child, the son of Joseph, the carpenter, the brother of James. So what was Jesus saying?
In order to make sense of this passage, we must place it in context. It is the middle piece of a three-part discourse on discipleship. In last week’s reading, the disciples were called by name and commissioned. They were to proclaim the good news, cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. And they were told that theirs was not an easy lot: They were being sent out like sheep into the midst of wolves; there would be rejection, betrayal, and death. But they are also told to have no fear. They would live in danger, but they would not be abandoned; God would be with them always.
Matthew’s Gospel was written at a time when it was costly to be a follower of Jesus. It would be decades before Christians would be persecuted solely because they called themselves Christians, but followers of Jesus in Matthew’s time were getting in trouble for the same reasons that Jesus got in trouble. They believed that only God, not the emperor nor the family patriarch nor any sort of earthly ruler, could claim power over others. They believed that God was calling all human beings—male and female, slave and free of every nation—to build a new community—the Kingdom of heaven on earth.
They lived a radical new life that looked more like chaos to many onlookers and that threatened to undermine the order of the Empire. And as a result, their neighbors and friends and even members of their family turned them in, to be punished and imprisoned, and sometimes even to be put to death. So Matthew’s Gospel was not encouraging its listeners to break away from their families. It was trying to give encouragement to those individuals whose families had already broken away from them because they had chosen to follow the teachings of Jesus.
Matthew does not tell them what they are supposed to say, some particularly compelling case they should make to their accusers or to the authorities. Instead, he tells them that they should not worry: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.” Discipleship comes at a cost—sometimes it means the alienation from family, friends, and those material things that society values—but it comes with the reassurance that even their hardships fall under God’s providence.
Many of you are familiar with the name Jonathan Myrick Daniels. Jonathan is the person whose life we celebrate on August 14 th and a short biography is included in Lesser Feasts and Fasts. He was born in Keene, New Hampshire in 1939; we went to college and then on to graduate school at Harvard. He spent his college years wrestling with the meaning of life and death and vocation. He was attracted to law, medicine and the ordained ministry and found himself close to a loss of faith until, on Easter Day 1962, he experienced a profound sense of conversion—of call—at the Church of the Advent in Boston. A few years later, he entered the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Jonathan felt called to be a priest—perhaps not as lucrative as law or medicine, but an honorable and safe profession.
In March of 1965, Jonathan experienced another call. The televised call of Martin Luther King, Jr., to come to Selma, Alabama to secure for all citizens the right to vote, drew Jonathan away from the safety of seminary. He asked for and received a leave of absence from seminary and went to Selma to work for justice. He was sponsored by the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity. A priest by the name of Francis Walter, a man who had been forced out of the Diocese of Alabama for his involvement with this organization, had founded the Selma Inter-Religious Project, an attempt to maintain a clergy presence in Selma.
One of Francis Walter’s duties was to bail out the individuals who had been jailed for protesting. On August 14 th , Jonathan was jailed for joining a picket line, and Francis went to the jail in Hayneville to bail him out. Apparently, Francis’ first impression of Jonathan was anything but positive, until he saw Jonathan’s reaction when he found out that there was only enough money to bail him and a few of the others out—the rest would have to remain in jail. Instead of jumping at the opportunity to be released from what had to be brutal conditions, Jonathan responded: “Unless we all get out, none of us is going to get out.”
A few days later, Jonathan and his companions were unexpectedly released. They walked into the center of the town in order to use a telephone. The streets were deserted even though it was the middle of the day. As they walked up the stairs to the store with the telephone, a man with a gun appeared, cursing them and pointing the gun at sixteen-year-old Ruby Sales. Jonathan pulled her to one side to protect her and he was killed by a blast from the shotgun.
We never hear about Jonathan’s family: Did they approve of his call to seminary? Did they support his decision to go to Selma? Or did these choices lead to disappointment and alienation? What we do know is that his death had a profound effect on a number of individuals. Ruby Sales, the young African American woman saved by Jonathan’s actions, and Libby Wade, a white teenager from Alabama, who some of you know as the former rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Paducah, both became Episcopal priests. And Francis Walter gained an entirely new perspective on the meaning of Christian discipleship. To be a Christian is to live in solidarity with all whom Jesus loves, to see each person as worthy of the profound love and respect owed to each child of God. It is to expand the definition of family from those to whom we are biologically related to all humankind, to the entire family of God.
So where do we fit into this picture? I am on a deacon’s listserve that sends out a daily historical entry about deacons who have died—sort of like a deacon’s version of Lesser Feasts and Fasts—and almost every person on the list was martyred. Now I don’t know about you, but I really do not aspire to be on that list, and quite honestly, if following Jesus meant being tortured and killed, I don’t think that would be brave enough to make the cut.
However, while we see death as the ultimate sacrifice, it is not the only road to discipleship. We are surrounded by a world filled with the hungry, the poor, the naked, the imprisoned. In many ways, we face the same problems that Jesus saw when he walked on earth and called the disciples. And just as the twelve and those who followed them were called to preach the Good News to those in need, we too are called.
A number of years ago, the Anglican Church began teaching what it called the Five Marks of Mission: To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom; To teach, baptize and nurture new believers; To respond to human need by loving service; To seek to transform unjust structures of society; To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth. These Marks of Mission parallel the promises that we make when we are baptized and when we renew our baptismal promises. It is a natural instinct, upon reading this list or thinking about these promises, to be overwhelmed. What is one individual, one family, one church to do?
Perhaps the answer is to do one thing at a time: To put an item in the Blessing Box basket each week; to provide a child with a malaria-preventing insecticide-treated bed net by donating to Episcopal Relief and Development; to volunteer an hour or two each week at a food pantry or a Habitat house; to visit a nursing home resident; and to pray for all of those individuals who have in one way or another been marginalized by society. Each of these actions is an acknowledgment that each and every one of us, each person who we reach out to and every person who has lived, lives now or will be born in the future is a member of the family of God.
Jesus did not despise the family, but he did redefine it. Family is not a matter of whose chromosomes you carry inside of you or whose surname you claim, but whose image you are created in. Yes, I am Ed’s daughter, Bill’s spouse, Elizabeth’s mother, but I am first and foremost a child of God, called to serve God’s family and rejoice in God’s love. And so is each and every one of you.
