Walking with Jesus through Family Conflict
Carolyn Seaton, Episcopal Chaplain
Kay Spiritual Life Center
February 17, 2008
Genesis 50:15-21; Ephesians 2:17-22; Luke 2:41-52
While it is way too trite to begin a sermon
or a paper with a dictionary definition or encyclopedia passage, I was
just too curious about what wikipedia would say about the word HOME. Here
it is:
"A home is a place where a person, family, or group of people
live together. A home usually acts as a place to sleep and store personal property, and contains sanitary facilities and
a means of preparing food. While a house (or other residential dwelling) is often referred to as a "home," the
concept of home is broader than a physical dwelling. Home is often a place
of refuge and safety, where worldly cares fade and the things and people
that one loves become the focus. Many people think of home in terms
of where they grew up, and "home" can even be a time rather than
a place. . . .There are cultures which lack fixed homes, with nomadic people often moving
their homes from place to place."
We
all have several—or many—homes
in our life journey toward our ultimate home in God. That's a good thing,
because we all want HOME. I don't know if you use the word "home" for
AU as well as, or instead of, the place you came from. Some
of the homes in our lifetime are those of our own choosing; some are
just given to us. The home we have with our families is ideally the most
unconditionally accepting and loving place we'll ever know. Many
in our world are not so fortunate. I hope and pray that you are.
Yet,
it's also the place some of us want to run away from. When we are angry
children, we pack up our lunch box and our toothbrush and leave. Or we
retreat into our rooms with our computers, sound systems, and TV's. Some
of us run away mentally. And
some of us can't wait to get back. Probably most of us, as we grow to "independence" develop
some ambivalence. Our feelings
about home are seldom uncomplicated.
We
are sometimes conflicted inside ourselves about home and family, and
we're often in conflict inside the home with our families. Ever since Cain
killed Abel, Jacob betrayed his brother Esau, and Joseph and his brothers
lived out their saga of jealousy,
revenge, and forgiveness, stories of family conflict have never stopped.
There would be far less great literature if there were no family conflict.
No Great Expectations, Fathers
and Sons, Anna Karenina, You
Can't Go Home Again, or Atonement. There certainly would be no country
music if families had no conflict--"All
I Want from You Is Away," "My Wife Ran Off with My Best Friend and I Sure
Do Miss Him," or "I'm So Miserable Without You, It's Almost Like Having
You Here." I know there are
as many stories out there among you as there are individuals in the
congregation. Each
of your families is a novel, a rich and engrossing movie, or I hope
not a bad country song.
Yes,
we do need to laugh about them sometimes, but the fact is family conflict
is painful. The conflicts within a family, whether they are healthy conflicts,
or especially, if they are unhealthy ones, hurt. John Bowlby, the
20th century British psychoanalyst who developed the concept
of "attachment theory," said that three characteristics distinguish family
conflict from other types: intensity, complexity,
and the duration of relationships. First, relationships between family
members are typically the closest, most emotionally intense of any in
the human experience; second, because they are just so complicated—we
are deeply attached to those people, but sometimes their actions infuriate
us. And because family relationships last a lifetime, whether we've tried
to run from them or not, the effects of any conflict can last just as
long. The émigré Russian poet,
Joseph Brodsky, said, "No matter under what circumstances you leave it,
home does not cease to be home. No matter how you lived there-well or
poorly."
Tonight
we ask what Jesus has to tell us about family conflict. We
know there is that puzzling passage in which Jesus asks, "Who are my mother
and brothers?" and answers his own question by saying, "Whoever does
the will of God is my brother and sister and mother." At another
time, he tells a crowd of followers that, "If anyone
comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children,
his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be
my disciple." Those harsh words have troubled followers ever since.
Among other things, these
passages seem to be emphasizing that our devotion to God is uppermost
and warning us that, sometimes, discipleship may cause family conflict;
following Jesus may be very costly indeed. In other, more soothing
stories, we find that Jesus, in his compassion, responded to requests
that family members be healed. We know that, from the cross, he asked
John to be his mother's son.
Let's
consider especially the gospel story read tonight of Jesus's visit to
the temple with his parents when he was twelve, the first "family conflict" we
know about in his life. The family had left home for the annual pilgrimage
to Jerusalem. On the first
evening of the return journey, traveling with friends and relatives,
his parents notice he's disappeared. After schlepping
all the way back to Jerusalem, on the third day, they find him sitting
among the teachers listening and asking questions. His erudition and
fervor "amaze" people.
His mother, astonished, adds in the strikingly-familiar-sounding words
of the NRSV we just heard, "Child, why have you treated us like this?" His
response, quite frankly, would have made this mother more than a little
angry: "Why were you searching for me?" More than one preacher has joked
that his parents might have wanted to retort, "WHO do you think you ARE--GOD??" When
the twelve-year old Jesus says, "Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?" the story
says his parents "did not understand what he said to them." By the time
they returned to Nazareth, so much was different. Modern family
dynamics theory tells us that when one family member changes, no one
in the family is unaffected. Jesus's parents, I'm sure, were no exception.
When they left their cozy home, he had been theirs. Now, although he
does return to Nazareth, is obedient and increases "in wisdom and in years", and in "divine
and human favor," now he is God's. His mother grows in understanding,
too. She "treasured
all these things in her heart."
This
sermon series is about "walking with Jesus." How does what we know of
Jesus help us in our conflicts with family? He
puzzles us sometimes. It is often not so easy to discern, "What would Jesus
do?" in our messy, complex relationships. However, we must listen to what
he told us about the nature of his Father as he healed relationships as
well as bodies. The God he told us about is a "gathering" God, who wants
to gather us ALL together, who wants us to be in community, in close relationships
of love and care. One metaphor for our Christian community, given to us
by St. Paul, is the "household of God." In our families, when we can, and
in our Christian "household," Jesus, I believe,
wants us to sustain and nurture each other so that we can face the world
together and do his work in the world—together, We're not going
to reconcile the world until we reconcile our relationships.
As
Jesus's covenant people, we need to face the disagreements, the conflict,
the outright fights in our families, with respect for the dignity of
each other as God's children, with the empathy that we may have to dredge
up in prayer, and most certainly with truth. Our goal is always, as in
Jesus's Parable of the Prodigal Son, reconciliation. Not so easy, was it?
One sibling really behaved stupidly—ran away, got involved with alcohol
and bad women, maxed out dad's credit cards. The responsible one, the good,
hard-working kid who helped hold dad's business together, was really MAD
and really JEALOUS. Wouldn't you be? You just might beg dad not to take
him back. Well, you know the end of the story. You
and I know that we can be reasonable and responsible children, always
pleasant and always good, and our family still may be a mess—forgiveness
may be a long way off. Each of us is only one, after all. If
we're talking about serious problems--abuse, alcohol, mental illness or
outright cruelty, sometimes we may have to step back—or leave—but
with hope.
Now,
about the place you find yourselves in right now. You're here, away from
home, or at home here, or maybe
homesick. You may feel, like Bruce
Springsteen, and like we all do sometimes, that "We're a long, long way
from home. Home is a long, long way from us." Your
role in your family may be, in the language of family systems, the problem-solver,
the victim, the scapegoat, the peacemaker, or . . . You may be
relieved to be away from that; or you may miss it a lot. If there are
troubles at home, you may be guilty and worried about what happens when
you're not there. If everything is wonderful at home and you have the
ideal family, you may hate to miss it. I hope that you and your family
are in a good place, where independence and belonging are in balance,
just as it should be. If the balance is somehow off, you may be struggling
with parents you consider over-protective or the silly stereotype of "helicopter
parents." Now,
from my perspective as a parent of children in college, and reeling a
bit from the shock of their not being there every night to tuck in, your
parents are probably conflicted too. They want your growth and independence,
and they delight in your adventures, but they worry because it's a difficult
world, and they can't protect you everywhere, from everything. Perhaps they
never could as much as they thought they could, but while you were an
infant in that crib it felt like they could, while you still came home
for milk-and-cookies, it seemed as if they could fix most of what was
wrong with your world. So, all too quickly from their viewpoints, it's
different now. Those strong bonds of love which began the first time
they saw you or maybe before, are hard to shake. Impossible to shake.
And that's lucky for you.
I
hope that each of you is one of the fortunate ones who belongs to a family
where the only conflicts are healthy ones and not-too-difficult to resolve.
If it doesn't look like that for you right now, there is THIS family,
the Christian family that Jesus taught us is the strong, true home we need.
Yes, we have our conflicts here too, plenty of them, but we walk with
Jesus and we know that God's love is ever-present to help us, and our worship
and our prayers make us ready to behave as God's household.
No
matter what your feelings this night about home and family, the long view,
God's view, is that our brokenness will someday be healed in ways we cannot
imagine and that nothing can separate us from the love of God. Ultimately,
since God IS love, nothing can separate us either from the love we have
in each other. In God's HOME, as we know, the lion and the lamb are at
peace and so are we.
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Copyright © 2008. Carolyn Seaton.
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