Who's In Your Family Plan?

A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC, March 15, 2015, the fourth Sunday in Lent.

Text:  Mark 3:31-35                                                               

 The photograph haunts me.  It’s a recent picture, taken by my mother, of my dad awkwardly reclining on the sofa and me leaning over to embrace him.  If you didn’t know any better, it would look like nothing more than a not terribly flattering shot of me and my dad in an otherwise pleasant moment.  But that picture breaks my heart.  Because the moment captured in the photo was at the end of several days when me and my siblings were faced with the reality of what dad’s Parkinson’s disease—and its attending dementia—has done to him.  In that moment as I leaned in for a hug, I don’t know if he knew I was there.  Perhaps you have photos like that in your family albums, in and among the other pictures, pictures of birthday parties and graduations, summer cookouts and Christmas gatherings and all kinds of other occasions for connection.  For the lucky ones among us, there are pictures that capture moments of joy, love, and support.  There are images of family members—a grandparent or a sister or brother or uncle—who inspire us and whose picture makes us laugh or cry with love.  There are pictures that point to a story—remember that time when…?   And scattered throughout, perhaps there are pictures like that one of me and my dad…  Every family has its challenges and griefs, and even the most healthy and functional of families have their dysfunction. 

 

As I was thinking about family dynamics, the 2006 film, “Little Miss Sunshine” came to mind.  The family depicted in the movie is complicated and messy—including a foul-mouthed drug-snorting grandpa, a nihilistic teenaged son who’s taken a vow of silence, a suicidal gay uncle, a dad who’s trying to sell his motivational success program (with no success), and a mother who’s just trying to hold the family together.  They end up in a broken down VW bus on a road trip to California to get the youngest family member, Olive, to the “Little Miss Sunshine” beauty pageant.  At one point on their journey, sirens and lights approach and the dad says to the family, “Oh my God, I’m getting pulled over.  Everyone, just…pretend to be normal.”

 

Pretend… How often do we pretend that everything is OK when the reality is that we are struggling to just get through the day?  Just pretend to be normal.  Smile for the camera.  How many of our family photos reflect us trying to be “normal”—whatever that is?  What is hidden behind the family portrait in the LifeTouch church directory? 

 

No photograph can capture the disconnection and brokenness in and between members of a family.  No photograph can capture the lost hope in a couple’s struggle with infertility, or the deep loneliness and isolation that invade a family dealing with mental illness, or the heartbreak of seeing a parent or child suffer.  No picture can show the scarring effects of addiction, abuse, neglect, resentment, and rage.  No photograph will reveal the weight of guilt that steals freedom and hope.  A photo won’t show the confusion and self-destructive thinking and behavior of a daughter or son or parent who is coming to terms with their sexual orientation.  A snapshot won’t show the broken trust and broken heart that results from infidelity or the ulcers and anxiety caused by another’s controlling expectations.  No picture will capture a child’s desperate striving for attention or approval, the painful longing of a child for a mother or father who is never home because of work or incarceration.  An image will never reveal the nagging insecurity and defensiveness that result from being abandoned or rejected.

 

Pain and love, struggle and support, anger and laughter, are the complicated, interwoven background to all our pictures, the very light and shadow that give texture to any image and to our lives.  And it is within this complex reality of family that we learn to connect.  Sometimes, we learn to connect in healthy ways and sometimes, because of circumstance, we learn pretty unhealthy ways.  For most of us, it’s a mixed bag.  But learning to connect is critical; it is central to what it means to be human.  Author Johann Hari suggests that we are in a crisis of connection, linking the loneliness and disconnection of our culture with the rise of addiction in all its forms.  He writes, “The wisest sentence of the twentieth century was E.M. Forster's—‘only connect.’  But we have created an environment and a culture that cut us off from connection, or offer only the parody of it offered by the Internet. The rise of addiction is a symptom of a deeper sickness in the way we live—constantly directing our gaze towards the next shiny object we should buy, rather than the human beings all around us.”  He goes on to share that “human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It's how we get our satisfaction. If we can't connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find—the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe.”[i] 

 

With whom or what do you connect?  Who is in your family plan?  The answers to these questions are critical to your health and wholeness.  We are bonding animals, craving connection and touch and intimacy and friendship.  We long to be known and to share life with others in ways that are mutually affirming and life-giving.  For many of us there is disconnection, lost connection, broken connection within our families, with our partner, with those persons who hold the most primal places in our lives.  And in our loneliness, we may connect with things or with people that do more harm or cause even further isolation.  We can, however, choose to connect with people who offer us opportunities to receive and to give and to learn what we need most of all.  Often, these people become our “chosen” family.  //  Richard Rohr says that “All spiritual growth takes place in the context of the healing, the restoring and the recreating of the family relationships in their original ideal sense.”[ii]  This work is the work of a lifetime—the work of healing, restoring, recreating ways to connect to other people in healthy, life-giving ways.   It is the work of becoming truly human and being truly human depends upon cultivating life-affirming “family plan” connections.

 

The “family plan” was much more intense and rigid in Jesus’ time.  Clans and tribes—the social and political structures of society—were all based on blood ties and family connections.  In light of this, Jesus’ words in our Gospel today are revolutionary.  Jesus is not rejecting his mother and siblings here; rather, he is expanding the notion of what family truly is.  He is drawing the circle much wider, allowing those who had been outcast or rejected or denied by the rules and regulations of the tribe or by accidents of fate, the opportunity to take their place in the family of God.   To make room for those whose family and life experience was painful, complicated, or socially questionable is not just an abstract concept for Jesus but something he embodied himself.  Just look at his family history:  Jesus’ ancestors were slaves, he is the son of an unwed mother, spent his young life as a refugee and most of his adult life homeless and wanted by the authorities for breaking the law; Jesus’ father had high expectations for his son—no less than to save the whole world, and when Jesus came out and revealed his true identity he was rejected by his church (Luke 4:28-29) and despised and misunderstood by almost everyone else.  Jesus, in what would have been a startling moment for those present, announces that true family is not based on blood or history or social expectations and rules, but rather on love.  He says that “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” (vs. 35)  And the will of God is for us to love God and love one another. (Mt. 22:36-40) Family is about love.

 

Again I’m reminded of “Little Miss Sunshine.”  Having reached the pageant, young Olive takes the stage to perform the dance number choreographed by her grandpa.  As the music to “Super Freak”—the highly inappropriate and sexually provocative song by Rick James—begins to play, Olive proceeds to do a dance equally inappropriate for a child her age.  But she does it with absolute innocence, with such joy and determination.  The pageant crowd is stunned and appalled.  Then, one by one—in a show of support and love—the members of Olive’s family take the stage and begin to dance with her.  The dad who had been working so hard to pretend, to hide his despair and failure, is the first to put himself out there.  And this complicated, super freaky mess of a family has a moment of healing love and joy. // While this scene is of a blood-kin family unit, it is a scene in which the family members are breaking all the rules of expectation, of propriety, and of their own cynical, desperate habits to join the dance; and they do it out of love for Olive.  I have often thought of that scene as a vision of God’s Kin-dom…an inbreaking of love and joy and hope into what is otherwise a dull, aching, painful despair.

 

Today, as people of Christian faith, let’s not pretend.  Let’s acknowledge that there are lost connections within our families.  Let’s acknowledge that our family plans may not be as life-giving as they could be.  Let’s acknowledge that we are all on the journey toward healing, restoring, or recreating healthy human connections.  Let’s acknowledge that we all stand in need of the grace extended by Jesus in our Gospel today, the grace that draws a circle wide enough to include even you and even me in the family of God; to embrace us even in all our messiness and woundedness.  Friends, the grace extended by Jesus Christ announces that you are not limited by your family of origin or by the relationships or connections that may have defined you in the past.  The grace extended by Jesus Christ announces that it is not cultural norms but love that makes a family.  And we learn the quality and nature of that love through God’s love for us in Jesus.  Jesus’ love affirms that no matter what your relationship with your earthly parents, you have a heavenly parent who loves you and longs for closer relationship.  No matter the distance between you and your family, you are connected in the love of God across miles and moments.  No matter what you have done to fracture relationships with loved ones, you are offered mercy and a chance to seek reconciliation through repentance and forgiveness.  No matter how deep the hurt you have received at the hands of people in your life, God’s healing power reaches even deeper to nurture and restore you.  No matter the weight of sadness and grief and loneliness that you bear, God’s love is strong enough to lift and hold you.  No matter the seeming hopelessness of the situation you face, the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ reminds you that there is nothing—not even death itself—that is more powerful than God’s life-renewing power at work in you (Eph. 1:19-21).

 

We are all desperate for connection and for the blessing of true family.  If you glance around today, you see members of God’s family plan.  You and I are part of that family.  All that is asked of us is to love each other.  Support each other. Forgive each other.  Find ways to connect with each other.  Even dance and make a fool of ourselves with each other for the sake of love.  Because when you do, God’s Kin-dom comes on earth as in heaven and you take your place in the picture of healing grace.

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[i] Johann Hari, “The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered and It Is Not What You Think,” found at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html, accessed 3/14/2015.

[ii] Richard Rohr, Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, Franciscan Media: Cincinnati, 1995, p. 54.