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Monday, June 25, 2012

We Are Family

Below is the message given in the Wheatland Parish Sunday, June 24, 2012.  The scriptures are Mark 3:20-34 and Galatians 6:1-10.

           Wanda loves to watch the movies they have on the Hallmark Movie Channel.  Once in a while, if I’m home and I can’t find a ball game to watch, I’ll watch one with her.          

The thing about those movies is that, when you decide to watch one, you pretty much know what you’re getting.  You know, at the end of a Hallmark Channel movie, that the right woman will fall in love with the right man, whatever problems the kids are having will be worked out, and the people living in the town will all get along with each other.  In other words, these movies are pretty predictable.  When Wanda sits down to watch one of them, she knows there’s going to be a happy ending.
           
That’s not meant as a criticism.  As they say, this is a feature, not a bug.  When Wanda watches one of these shows, a happy ending is exactly what she wants.  Really, that’s what most of us want.  Not from a movie, necessarily, but from our lives.  The reason these shows appeal to us is that they show us a life that may or may not be realistic, but it’s a life we wish we had.  If we’re single, we want to fall in love with the right woman or the right man.  If we have kids, we want to believe that whatever problems they’re having will work out.  We want to live in families where we love each other and we all get along.  We want to live in communities where people care about each other and help each other and are there for each other.
           
As we continue our sermon series, Stone Tablets in a Wireless World, this is one of the biggest changes we see in society.  Loving families and loving communities used to be accepted as the normal thing in this country.  I mean, I know that the world was never really like Andy Griffith’s Mayberry or Leave It to Beaver’s Springfield, but there was a time when it was close enough that those towns and the people in them were recognizable to us.  We saw something of ourselves in those people.  We may not have all cared about each other the way the people in those families and in those towns did, but it was something we wanted.  It was an ideal we were trying to move toward, and it did not seem impossible that we could have it.
           
It’s not that way any more.  Mom and Dad getting married and raising children and staying together all their lives is not nearly as common as it used to be.  People knowing all their neighbors and visiting with each other and caring for each other is not nearly as common as it used to be.
           
Maybe you think this is not a problem in our little town, but think about it.  Think of all the families you know who’ve been touched by divorce.  I’m not saying this as a criticism or to pass judgment on anyone, but just think about them. 

Also, maybe you think you know everybody in town, but do you really?  Next time you go to a community event, look around.  How many people there do you really know?  Maybe you know their names, but how many do you know well enough that you’d invite them over for dinner?  How many do you know well enough that you’d know if they were going through a serious problem?  How many do you know well enough that, if you were the one going through a serious problem, you could call them up and you know they’d be there to help?
           
Even in a town like this, it can be easy for us to feel alone.  Even when we know people’s names, we have a lot more acquaintances than we have real friends.  Even when our families get along, a lot of us live a long way from a lot of our family.  There are a lot of us, even in this little town, who don’t really know who they’d call if they were in trouble and needed help.
           
That brings us to our reading from Mark.  Jesus is with a crowd of people, and his mother and his brothers come.  They cannot get through the crowd, so they send a message up to Jesus that they want to see him.  Jesus does not get up and go to them, at least not right away.  Instead, Jesus says my mother and my brothers are right here.  Anyone who does God’s will is my mother or my brother or my sister.
           
Sometimes, we read that and think Jesus was being really disrespectful to his family.  That might very well be how some of the people who heard his statement took it.  I don’t think that was Jesus’ intent, though.  I think what Jesus was doing was making a point.
           
Jesus was trying to get us to look at family in a different way.  Jesus was telling us that family is more than blood relatives.  Those people are important, certainly, but they’re not the only ones we should consider family.  We should consider all Christians to be family.  Everyone who loves God is part of our family.
           
That was quite a change in attitude in Jesus’ time.  It’s still quite a change for us, today.  Think about how our attitudes would change if we truly looked at all Christians as family.  Think about how differently we’d treat people if, instead of looking at them as acquaintances, we looked at them as brothers and sisters. 

We’d show a lot more love to people, don’t you think?  We’d take more time to get to know people.  We’d take more of an interest in their lives.  We’d try a lot harder to find out what was going on with them.  We’d want to know when they were going through a bad time, so we could help them out.  We’d want to know when they were going through a good time, so we could celebrate with them.  We’d do what Paul writes in our reading from Galatians.  We’d carry each other’s burdens and do good to all people.  We’d be a lot closer to the people around us if we looked at them as brothers and sisters, rather than as acquaintances.

Now, at this point, maybe you’re thinking, if Jesus wanted to expand the definition of family, why did he limit it to just people who do God’s will?  Is Jesus saying that people who are not Christian, who do not believe in God, are not are brothers and sisters?  Are we not supposed to care about those people?

It’s a legitimate question.  After all, Jesus could’ve said, “all people are my brother and sister and mother.”  He did not.  He said, “Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”  Why would Jesus have said that, if not to limit the people we’re supposed to treat as family?

Well, I think there’s another explanation.  I think what Jesus was telling us is that we’re supposed to try to make our family grow.  After all, what do we do when our families grow, whether by birth or by adoption or by marriage?  We celebrate, right?  We throw a party.  We want our families to grow.  We’re happy when they grow.

That’s how we need to look at our Christian family.  We need to try to make it grow.  We need to reach out to people in love and make them want to be part of our family.  We need to invite them into our family.  We need to let them know we have a place for them.  We need to know they are not just welcome in our family, but that we want them to be a part of our family.

In fact, we need to treat them like family even before they actually are.  That’s what we do in families, right?  If someone in our family is serious about someone, even before they get married, even before they get engaged, we start treating them like family.  We start getting to know them personally.  We start getting involved in their lives.  We invite them to family gatherings.  We include them in family pictures.  We’re letting them know that we’ve started to think of them as family, whether they’re actually family or not.

When we’re reaching out to people, that’s what we need to do.  We need to start treating them like family even before they actually are.  We need to get to know them personally.  We need to start getting involved in their lives.  We need to start inviting them to the stuff we have going on.  We need to let them know we think of them as family, whether they’re actually family or not.

Life may not be a Hallmark Channel movie, and we may not live in Mayberry.  We can still work toward that, though.  We can care for each other.  We can love each other.  By doing that, we can make all the people around us our brother and sister and mother, just like Jesus did.  Then, we can all have the happy ending we all want.

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