Year A Proper 13
Deacon Richard Buhrer

The gospel today begins: “When Jesus heard these things….” Just to remind us, the things that Jesus is just hearing about is the murder of his cousin John the Baptist at the hands of Herod. Now Herod’s family would have merited a whole series on Jerry Springer. Talk about putting the “fun” back in dysfunctional? He had married his sister-in-law after he had divorced his own first wife and she had divorced her husband, Herod’s brother Phillip. His step-daughter, Salome, did what in our terms would be called a strip tease—deliberately trying to seduce her step-father—and in reply to his enthusiastic response, asked him to murder an innocent prisoner in his dungeons to satisfy her mother’s vindictive hatred of criticism.

I think we get numbed as well to the “disorder” that is present in the stories about the patriarchs and matriarchs that we have been reading over the past couple of months. Abraham leaves his established home in a city to take up the life of a vagabond. At his wife’s insistence he takes a mistress and has a child with her. Then (again at his wife’s insistence) he kicks the woman out into the desert with only some bread and water. She thought she was going to die. Then after his wife has a child of her own, he takes his son (in response to a religious vision, is this a cult or what?) ties him up and begins to cut out his heart. The son, Isaac (who never really recovers from the trauma of nearly being murdered by his father) in turn, marries his first cousin (that’s incest by our standards) and has twin sons. He and his wife each express a preference for one child over the other and horrible sibling rivalry ensues.

After his father dies, the younger son, Jacob flees from his brother in fear of his life. He goes and stays with his maternal uncle and again marries his first cousin and her sister. In the scene we read today, Jacob was fleeing from his father-in-law toward his estranged brother. He left his wives and children on one side of the river and goes to the other to try and shield them from violence. And the story will go on from here with more and more sibling rivalry; brother deceiving and betraying brother.

Scripture scholars believe that scholars in the court of King David wrote many of these stories we are reading. David’s family was also a hotbed of domestic strife: adultery, murder, betrayal, rebellion—all of these were present in David’s family. We will have to wait until next year to hear more about that.

So are these the family values we have heard so much about from the Christian right during the last decade or so? It would seen that this isw not the case, but what can our Anglican heritage of Scripture, Tradition and Reason tell us about family values?

First of all, there is a sense in which we are all called to leave our families of origin behind. Abraham did, Jesus did, St. Paul did. The story of Jacob wrestling with the Angel today is a good symbol of this. Jacob leaves his wives and children on one side of the river and crosses over alone. There on the other side, separated from his family, he encounters God and receives his new name: Israel. We, too are called to leave the familiar behind us, to encounter God and Christ in solitude and quietness, to wrestle with our angels and discover our deepest identity, our mission and call, our vocation and ministry, apart from the influence of our parents, siblings, partners, children and friends. Then changed, transformed, clearer about who we are and where we are going, we can rejoin them and invite them to support us in our journeying toward God.

St. Paul also struggles with this in today’s epistle—mourning over his family, the community of Judaism, who could not make with him the transition to Christianity. “I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. 3For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh.”

We generally presume that our families are a given, chosen for us, sometimes inimical to us. But the truth is that all of us actually choose our families. To begin with, in our culture we have a rather constipated notion of family. We think of a family as the atomic unit of mother, father and children.  This is not the case for ancient people or for indigenous people: a family is a much larger unit—intergenerational and diverse. An example of this from our history is the (so called) First Thanksgiving: the anglos invited the Indian chief and asked him to bring his family. To the chief that mean a group of people about 80 or 90 in number. When the native guests arrived for the feast it was clear that the settlers had not expected such a large group of guests. The Indians sent out hunters to kill more food to spare their hosts further embarrassment.  Such large cohesive groups are not encouraged by our culture—it is too important to be mobile, to go where you can find work, to follow the needs of the corporations. Consequently, the groups we expect familial support from, tend to be too small and don’t have the emotional or spiritual resources to keep us flourishing. The alternative is to form fluid families of conscious choice, a term coined by the Gay liberation pioneer, Harry Hay. The circle that formed around Jesus would be a good symbol of such a family. We need to work around the sexist lens that the writers of the Gospels tended to use—the circle around Jesus include a fairly large group of women and men who supported his ministry financially and physically and followed him in his wandering life. This group ultimately included his mother and his brothers but only later toward the end of his ministry. Initially there was some degree of alienation between Jesus and his birth family that was healed with time. And such is often the case with us, it seems to me.

But there is more: We are in fact called into a family without boundaries, the great assembly of believers we call the Church. He calls us from every tribe and people and language and nation and through the gift of His Spirit, empowers us to live in love with one another. This is God’s commandment: that we have love one for another. That love does not allow distinctions or hierarchies or excuses. It is absolute. The passage from the Gospel today of the meal in the wilderness is a symbol of the all embracing hospitality that is our duty in Christ. “Jesus said to them, ‘They need not go away; you give them something to eat.’ 17 They replied, ‘We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.’ 18 And he said, ‘Bring them here to me.’ 19Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds.” There is a cycle implied here that we would do well to ponder: The disciples give what they have to Jesus, Jesus gives it back to them and they distribute it to others. That is what we are to do with our lives, our substance, our selves: surrender them to God, receive them back and spend them on behalf of the world.

One final issue that is imbedded in the conversations about family values that has plagued (you should pardon the expression) our political discourse over the recent past is the issue of the nurture and education of children. We tend not to have the stable nuclear families that form the mythology of the what the past was like. We have divided and blended families and an amazing number of single parent families. Children are not the sole responsibility of the people who conceived them, they are the gift and the challenge of the entire community. We are a good example of what that means in that with so few children among us, we treasure and feel responsible for their life in our midst. The overused African proverb that it takes an entire village to raise a child though now tired is nonetheless true. The Congressional Budget Resolution for Fiscal Year 2006 passed in May requires the House and Senate Agriculture Committees to cut $3 billion from programs under their jurisdiction by September 16, EPPN reports. Food Stamps is one of those programs. more than half of U.S. Food Stamp recipients are children. Is this the kind of nation to which we want to belong?  One that finances war by depriving its own children of food? The Episcopal Public Policy Network identifies the Food Stamp program as "the nation's single most effective  federal effort to reduce and prevent hunger in the United States. They also cites a recent federal measurement showing "that 11.2 percent of all U.S. households, including 13.3 million children, do not have enough to eat. Here is a way in which we can become concrete in our support of families and children.

I know that in my own life the issue of family has been the source of much struggle and pain and I am fairly sure I’m not alone. Let us pray that God would give us light to understand how to live with and build families that nuture and sustain us. Let us also pray that we can faithfully acquit our duties to one another in the family of the Church. “9 …You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light. 10 Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.