Family (un)ties
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
September 4, 2022—Proper 18C
Jeremiah 18:1-11; Philemon 1-21; Luke 14:25-33
Reflecting on that gospel I just read, Preacher Joy J Moore told of a young man she’d once loved enough to want to spend the rest of her life with him, but he did not believe in God. As it turned out, it was he who had the strength to call it off. She admits, “If I’d been asked to choose, I would have chosen him.”[i]
Clearly, she now knows that he made the right decision; she wouldn’t have wanted to be married to a non-believer. And though I myself made a different choice and never regretted it, I understand how that interpretation of today’s gospel rings true. Jesus is speaking into a world in which families were ripped apart because some members chose to follow “the Way” of Jesus, and some remained within Judaism (and later, within Roman religious practices). And in those days, following this new Way could lead to your family disowning you, your community casting you out, and in the case of Rome, vicious persecution.
So there is quite definitely something here, in this passage, that’s about the price that might be required, if your adherence to Christ brings you into conflict with members of your family who follow a different religion.
Still, very little of the teaching of Jesus is about just one thing. His parables almost always function on both a personal and a societal level. And they also speak across time and cultures. Which means that here and now, where those of different faiths can often exist side by side without great comment, this passage invites us to imagine other ways in which the life Jesus calls us into could challenge the primacy of family ties.
Unimaginable and scandalous then. Unimaginable and scandalous now, to suggest that family could be anything but the highest loyalty, the first priority, and the safest place to be.
But if we’re being truthful, and brave … we know that this isn’t always the case.
Even when there’s nothing particularly wrong with our family structure, it still might not be what encourages us to a faithful life, to our truest following of the way of Jesus. The patterns of family life don’t always leave much space to question the way we do things, or the way things are, don’t always encourage us to look beyond the well-being of the clan, or reach across the kinds of boundaries that Jesus so constantly traversed. Our families might well urge us to remain the person they expect us to be, implore us to leave the world around them in its familiar and comfortable form.
But those who take a good-sized helping of Jesus will find it starts to push against all that. As the Light of the World sharpens our vision, and our awareness grows, we become less comfortable with ourselves and the world, less interested in leaving them the way they are. And these words of Jesus just might start to ring true:
You have to be willing to leave your old self behind, if that’s where the Way leads you. And that might require, to one degree or another, leaving your family (or your family’s expectations of you) behind.
Which was and is a scandalous thing to say. And to be honest, it’s a little bit frightening, even as it points toward the promise of a more abundant life. Still, all of that is a mere fragment of the scandal, the fear, and the astonishing promise that come about when we read this passage into a family system that is actively unhealthy.
The other day I was listening to a conversation between religious historian Kate Bowler and author Tara Westover. Some of you probably read Westover’s memoir, Educated, which took the world by storm a few years ago, with its gripping account of growing up in a family led by her wildly unbalanced, religious fanatic, survivalist father. He kept their family radically isolated from most of society, especially anything he considered to be run by the government (which was, unsurprisingly, just about everything). This meant that they not only didn’t go to school, they also avoided hospitals. Cut off from all but a few like-minded families, there was no-one to intervene when her father’s recklessness and her brother’s abuse threatened to destroy them all.
It's an extreme story that nonetheless echoes the way that all abusive family systems close in on themselves. Communication with the outside is limited, and family unity is emphasized. Such repetition that (for instance) “family is everything, and we are all that we need” acts to reinforce loyalty, somehow normalizing a situation that is anything but normal. It also, not incidentally, protects the abusers.
As the title of the book foreshadows, the hardest part of all of this for Westover was being denied any education beyond the survivalist skills that were all her father deemed necessary. This, along with the abuse at the hands of her brother, were what eventually pushed her out of the family system that had formed and warped her so powerfully.
As she describes it: those who live through childhoods like mine accrue more defenses than we need. Over-defended against the things they fear will hurt them in some way, they need to find a way of being and a space to inhabit that is safe enough to dismantle those defenses.[ii] Her journey began by getting away from her family entirely, and going to college. And then she broke the silence. Began talking and writing about her past, gaining perspective and putting distance between herself and that horribly unhealthy system.
Because sometimes we need to break away from the people closest to us, people we are tied to in ways that we can hardly even describe or understand, in order to enter the fulness of life that Jesus promises us. Which is awful and painful, and even those whose relationships with their families are harmful and utterly dysfunctional will resist this truth until they can no longer deny it. Because we WANT to be in relationship with our family. We want that relationship to be good, so much that we convince ourselves that it IS good. Until we can’t any more.
And on that day, this message from Jesus will come with its terrible and beautiful promise of freedom. Unafraid to utter the scandalous truth that your family might be an obstacle to your thriving. Might stand between you and the life Jesus is calling you into.
And on that day, you will begin to understand a new and larger definition of family. A family that is defined not by blood kinship, but by the kind of love that Jesus commanded us to have for one another. A family whose very nature is fulness of life. A family that is a safe place to bring all of the ways your past has warped you, and allow yourself to be re-formed by the God of whom Jeremiah wrote.
This is the family Jesus wants for us, in which the kingdom can thrive. This is the future he wants for us. It will almost certainly require leaving things behind. But it is the way of life and health and peace, if we are willing to pay that price. My friends, may it be so. Amen.
[i] Joy J. Moore, in podcast, “Sermon Brainwave 860: Ord, 23C (Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost-- Sept 4, 2022”
[ii] Tara Westover, in podcast “Everything Happens, with Kate Bowler” S8 E11, April 12, 2022