Scripture: Mark 3:31-35; Acts 2:43-47
For those of you who weren’t here last week, it was a good day last Sunday. For those of us who were here, it was a good day. And of course what I meant to say was that for those of you who weren’t here, you missed a good day. And we missed you. It was a day that is a bit hard to follow. But on the other hand, we have some important things to do today as well, and although we won’t do them with quite as much fanfare, they very much have their own importance, and in a way they do follow up on some of the themes from last week.
I had a conversation with someone last weekend, several different conversations actually, where we were commenting that what was going on was not just a party or a celebration of having a building so much but a kind of family reunion, an ingathering of the extended family of Sojourners—UCC people in other places, friends and neighbors around Charlottesville, people we consider, or would like to consider, part of our extended family and who we hope see us as part of theirs in some way. As Lee pointed out, it wasn’t really about the building (although we used that language some), it was about the people. And so I see last week as having had a kind of underlying theme of family about it.
This week, well today of course is Mothers’ Day. Again kind of a family theme. Well, more than kind of. In fact when members of the worship committee discussed some ideas for worship in connection with Mothers’ Day, we were tending toward wanting to treat the day as a time to celebrate families in general as a way of lifting up all the kinds of family relationships that are so important to us and as a way of acknowledging the many kinds of families we are part of, as a way of celebrating the day with an inclusive spirit as it were. Mothers Day can have a kind of feel to it that assumes that everyone lives in families with a mother and father and children, and that women have certain roles in such a family that should be recognized and honored. That’s the way I grew up thinking about Mothers’ Day, and it was still the way I guess I largely thought about it in the early years of my ministry as we celebrated Mothers Day in the churches I served, which by and large also seemed to look on Mothers Day that way. Except that I was also becoming aware that fewer and fewer people lived in that kind of a Hallmark Card reality. And wanting to be inclusive, I decided that the way to observe Mothers’ Day in church would be to acknowledge everyone who was a mother and then to wish a happy Mothers’ Day as well to everyone who was a daughter or son, which pretty much covers everyone. I figured if I phrased things that way in greetings, litanies, prayers, or sermons I could count myself as having been sufficiently sensitive to issues of inclusivity.
I have since decided, however, that that wasn’t really being inclusive and that that’s not what inclusivity is all about. Being inclusive is not about making broad, sweeping statements that refer, rather vaguely, to everyone. It is about recognizing the different specific concrete realities of people’s lives. And so I of course do want to wish everyone a good Mothers Day, to mothers in more or less traditional settings and to all mothers among us. And I want to specifically recognize today the reality of the family that consists of Desiree and Sheron and Jeanine and Karen and Krissy and Pam and everyone here who is or may become part of Desiree’s family and Lynn Litchfield, who by bringing a prayer request from her prison family to her Sojourners family sort of midwifed a new family into being, and whoever else may be part of Sheron’s family at Fluvanna. All of that is certainly part of our Mothers Day reality here this year.
And when I think of Mothers Day I cannot help but think of foster mothers, official and unofficial, and adoptive parents, and I hold them in prayer. And I cannot help but think of children who have lost parents, and parents who have lost children, and I hold them in prayer. I cannot help but think of mothers who are mothers but don’t want to be, and women who are not mothers but do want to be, and I hold them in prayer. I think of people who are mothers and who do want to be but who also need to be recognized for something other than their mothering, and I hold them in prayer. I cannot help but think of relationships where there has been abuse, and I hold those people in prayer. I cannot help but think of single moms and single dads, and families parented by two dads and those parented by two moms, and I hold them all in prayer. I think of people in all sorts of situations. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate Mothers’ Day. It doesn’t mean we have to acknowledge everybody all the time and take account of every situation. But for me it means, when you bring Mothers’ Day into church, where we recognize everyone as a child of God, that the way we celebrate Mothers’ Day or think of Mothers’ Day needs to be large. It means that I am grateful for the hymn that is in our hymnal that recognizes, as much as a hymn can do in a few verses, the various textures of our family life. It means that my prayers for people on Mothers’ Day will be as varied as the people they are meant for.
We didn’t get around, the worship committee folks who were talking about this, didn’t get around to finalizing plans for actually incorporating the diversity of our family life into worship today, other than these few words of mine. We’ll do that another year. But I did want to give at least lip service to this broader idea of Mothers Day and ask us all in our minds and spirits to use the occasion of Mothers Day to lift up and acknowledge and celebrate mothers of many kinds, and families of many kinds, and to be clear in our minds that what the state of Virginia recognizes as a family and who the state of Virginia recognizes as a mother does not determine who really is a family and who is to be considered a mother. That is one kind of thought I have for this morning, thoughts having to do with Mothers Day and families and acknowledging and praying for our families in all their enormous variety and complexity.
But let me also return to the idea of the church as family, which is also an important theme for us today since we are both receiving new members into the family and needing to say good-bye to a member of the family who is leaving us. Of course the church family is not made up just of those who are officially members, but the occasion of receiving new members and of saying good-bye does serve to put the church family kind of center stage, and maybe should give us cause to consider a little whether it’s good or helpful to think of the church as family.
I recall a conference I once went to where one of the speakers, a respected conference minister known for his liberal stands, gave a talk where he compared the church to a family gathering around the table, breaking bread together and trying to love each other as best they can and take care of each other in spite of their differences. It was a positive, upbeat message, said much better than I am able to repeat today, trying to portray the church as an inclusive community where we did not all have to be alike, did not have to agree with each other, didn’t have to hang out together in our spare time, but where there was this tie that brought us together and that transcended everything else. Comparing the church to family he was drawing admittedly on many of the good characteristics of what family is all about and so making some positive comparisons.
The next speaker was a woman who I think was there just to bring her own perspective, not necessary to offer rebuttal to the previous speaker, but who having heard the previous speaker couldn’t contain herself. She reacted very strongly against the idea of the church as family. Her own family, she said, had been abusive verbally and physically, and she had found the church often to be abusive, and so while there were some comparisons to be made, they weren’t positive ones, and so she didn’t want to think of the church as family. She talked about all the ways families could be destructive and said essentially that we shouldn’t use the family as a model for the church because of that and because it didn’t recognize the reality of people whose families had been anything but models of love and acceptance. I remember thinking that her words were pretty harsh, but then her reality had been pretty harsh, and sometimes messages that seem harsh are also messages that we need to pay attention to—so I did pay attention and have held what she said in my mind over a number of years.
She didn’t convince me to stop thinking of the church as a kind of family. I did then, and I still do. She did remind me, as have many other people in various ways, that it can be appropriate to think of the church as family not only for all the positive associations there may be in the comparison, but because of the negative associations as well. The church does well to act like a family in the best sense of what families are about. It can also go wrong in many of the same ways that families go wrong.
The church is about being family, for instance, when it is about nurturing. If we were focusing just on mothers today, it might be sexist to talk about nurturing, as though all mothers do is nurture and as though all the nurturing is to be done by mothers. But if we’re talking about families, surely one of the functions of family is to nurture people, to nurture each other, all of us—children need nurturing but so do the rest of us.
Last week Joe Malayang spoke in part on a theme that he probably knew without being briefed was appropriate at Sojourners: creating safe spaces. That, as I sense it, has been one of the important things that Sojourners has been about from the outset, way before we had a space of our own, way before we could even think about having a space of our own. We are about safe spaces. We are about being a safe place to begin and a safe place to begin again. Nurturing one another like a family is partly about teaching and modeling and offering care and affection. Nurturance is also about providing space for each other, safe space, space to be who we are, an environment is which there is room for all sorts of people, an environment in which people can be who they are and can be where they are spiritually. In a nurturing family people have room to be themselves, to experiment, to change, to grow but within a caring supportive community. The church can well aspire to be like family in that sense, and I hope we will be like family in that way for the people who will be joining us later, and I hope they will be like family to us in that way.
But the church is also not quite like family, not just because it can become troubled or dysfunctional like families can, but because there is a purpose to the church beyond nurturance and mutual caring. We are about discerning and doing the will of God. That’s one way of putting it anyway, the way Jesus put it in the scripture this morning when he said those seemingly harsh things about family. Conceivably, of course, families could be about discerning and doing the will of God. When they do, not to quibble too much, it is not so much that the church is like a family but that the family is learning to be like church—church at its best anyway.
And so we welcome people into a safe place, we hope, where people will be free to be themselves and have room to grow, but where we also covenant together to try to discern and do the will of God. Or maybe that phrase doesn’t quite sound right to you. Probably the phrase in the other scripture from Acts also doesn’t sound right, where it says that the young church added to their number “those who were being saved”. That’s ok if that phrase doesn’t fit. This is a safe space for those who don’t think they are being saved…and for those who do. But we don’t have to use the language of scripture. In different language we could refer to ourselves, instead of a people trying to discern and do the will of God or those who were being saved, we could say we are people who are trying to become more fully human, or that we are pilgriming along toward a greater wholeness. All the phrases I think are pointing toward the same thing. We need the nurturing along the way, that’s for sure, but we also desire something more. We desire to move together toward justice, toward love, toward wholeness. May we support one another along that joyful journey. Amen.
Jim Bundy
May 14, 2006