I.  HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT FAMILY REUNIONS?

My son-in-law calls them “Family Rebellions.” Have you ever visited in a home where they have a photograph on the wall of a family reunion, where 30 or more people, from infants to the aged, are squeezed into an 8 x 10 photograph and frozen on film for all time?  The patriarch of the family is usually positioned smack dab in the middle of the first row and is easily identified by that “Gee-did-I-start-all-this” look on his face.  Family reunions are funny things.  You are thrown together with all sorts of strange looking people, many of whom have never met one another, many of whom you may never have met, and some of whom youUd rather not meet.  But there they are-relatives!  And when there are preachers in the family they are the ones who are usually called upon to bless the gathering and the grub.  Family reunions are not among many people’s favorite things to do.  There is usually an awkwardness about them.   People tend to break off into little separate groups, sitting and balancing plates on laps with people with whom they feel most comfortable.  They look at one another to see whether there are any family resemblances.  Mothers go around showing off children, and third and fourth cousins share a look of “I’ll be glad when this is over.” (Idea from a sermon by Wallace H.  Kirby, MASTER SERMON SERIES, 8/79, p.  395) Family reunions are not everybody’s cup of tea.  And yet... 

Family reunions remind us of our “roots.” And this is important.  We live in what appears to be a rootless generation.  One of the root causes of our rootlessness may well be television.  In a recent book called AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH, author Neil Postman says that entertainment has become the American way of life, and that religion, especially on television, has been transformed into just another form of personal amusement.  Television, he feels, encourages passivity, irrelevance, and impotence, because it is a “present-centered” medium.  Everything is shown without a past or a future.  (Quoted in a sermon by C.  Thomas Hilton, in THE CLERGY JOURNAL, April 1988, p.8)

Consider, he wrote, the sterile refrain of the television newscaster as he introduces the next advertisement.  “And now...this.” Regardless of the weight of the news story, the newscaster moves on quickly and erases our thoughts.  The average news story lasts forty-five seconds, and the average length of a camera shot on network television is 3.5 seconds.  Bill Moyers thinks that television is producing a generation of “Agitated Amnesiacs” who know everything about the past twenty-four hours, but nothing of our real history.  President Donald Shriver of Union Theological Seminary in New York in a recent address, said: “We are...a television saturated age.  We greet the news night unto night and Today show unto Today Show; but we are so battered by a splattering of facts that we view as odd anyone who pauses, at the end of Dan Rather, to ask, ‘Where did all of this start?  To what is it tending?  Does it mean anything that can be counted on to last from one evening news time to the next?’” (Ibid., p.  8)

The Church, as the family of God, acts as a counter to this rootlessness, by continually reminding us that we have roots.  Roots that go way back thousands of years into antiquity, when God first called a people to be God’s special people, God’s “family” on earth.  It reminds us that this family was here before we were, and will be here long after we have departed from the scene.  And, for a little while, we are privileged to be a part of it.  The family of God - the Church.  Presbyterian preacher Thomas Hilton writes, “Maybe it’s because I recently received into my family a new son-in-law and daughter-in law, but I’ve been thinking a lot about my family lately.  If Michael and Janet felt that our family started the day they entered it, they would be mistaken.  If they acknowledge the existence of our family only from the moment they said, ‘I do,’ they would be wrong.  When they entered into our family (and yes, we into theirs) they joined a history already in progress.” Ibid., p.  9) And so have we, when we joined God’s Church.  We became a part of God’s ongoing family. 

II.  AMONG THE MOST SHOCKING THINGS JESUS EVER SAID are his words in Mark, chapter three.  Here, it almost sounds as though Jesus was disavowing His family.  How can that be?  According to the Gospels, Jesus had, in addition to His mother Mary, (Joseph, by tradition, was dead when Jesus came to His maturity,) four brothers (who are named) and at least two sisters (who are not named) - probably because of the ancient prejudice against women.  “Sexism,” we would call it today.  But the Gospel accounts are pretty clear on this point.  You probably know that some churches - Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Armenian, etc.  regard these as “relatives” of Jesus - not brothers and sisters - for they hold to the notion of the “perpetual virginity” of Mary.  They say that what the Gospels call “brothers and sisters” were really Jesus’ half-brothers and sisters, children of Joseph by a previous marriage, or “cousins”....  although there is not a shred of Biblical evidence for either.  Most Protestants are perfectly comfortable believing that they were really blood brothers and sisters of Jesus - and that one of them: James was the first bishop of the Church in Jerusalem.  We believe that the notion of Mary’s “perpetual virginity” is a late addition to the faith, coming during the Byzantine period when the church began to develop its anti-sexual bias. 

Jesus had a family.  But let’s face it; Jesus didn’t get along with his family very well.  We have a hint of it in the third chapter of Mark where his family and friends come to get him and take him home, believing that He is “beside himself.” We can imagine the pain it must have caused Him - to have to make a choice between the tug of his family and the tug of His extended family, the kingdom of God.  “Whoever does the will of my father is my mother and sister and brother,” He said.  Jesus is not repudiating family ties, He was rather declaring that His mission was, above all, to declare and extend the great family of God - which takes precedence over all other human ties, and includes every single human being, without regard for their status, their age, their sex, their color.  All are invited into the family that receives the welcome of a God who is Parent of us all. 

There is much more going on here than might be noticed by the casual reader.  Behind this incident there is a revolution.  In Jewish circles, a person’s primary obligation was to one’s family “after the flesh.” “Honor your father and your mother” said the ancient Commandment.  Why, then, did Jesus do as He did?  Because the dawning of God’s new kingdom had brought into being a new set of relationships.  Those who entered the kingdom became Jesus’ sisters and brothers, and Jesus became their brother.  One can imagine that these words of Jesus fell upon ready ears in Mark’s audience.  Many of those early Christians suffered broken family relationships, ostracism, and persecution, because they had gone off to follow the Rabbi from Nazareth.  But Mark reminds them that Jesus has welcomed them into a new, even larger family circle: “those who hear the Word of God and do it!”

So: the true Church is nothing less than the family of God on earth into which every human being is invited.  The same Jesus who called into His family all sorts of people: little children, women, rulers, servants, tax-collectors, the outgoing, the lonely, the extroverts and the introverts.  Jesus says: God wants you all - prodigals all, who have wandered far away.  As Paul put it: “Once you were no people; now you are God’s people.” Jesus stretches out His arms to the least the last, and the lost, and says: “Here are my mother and my brothers.  This is my family.  And the only folks who are outside it are those who choose to be.  For I invite all.” As Charles Wesley put it in a famous hymn: “Come, sinners, to the Gospel feast; Let every soul be Jesus’ guest; Ye need not one be left behind, For God hath bidden all mankind.” (Number 102)

III.  JESUS WIDENED THE FAMILY CIRCLE.  In the Church we are thrown together with all sorts of people, many of whom we would never come in contact with were it not for the Church.  As Methodist evangelist E.  Stanley Jones never tired of saying: “Everyone who belongs to Christ belongs to everyone who belongs to Christ.” Frederick Buechner uses the analogy of a wedding to describe the Church: where all sorts of different people are thrown together willy-nilly because they are friends of either the bride or groom.  (The Hungering Dark, New York: Seabury Press, 1969, p.  42) They are all different, but their love for the bride or groom unites them.  Well, the Church is the bride of Christ, and Christ is the groom, and we are here this morning because of our love for the bride and groom.  The Church is analogous to friends of the bride or bridegroom thrown together at a wedding.  We are all different kinds of people, but God has drawn us together in God’s great family, the Church. 

Gerald Priestland, a British writer in a recent article in the International Christian Digest talks about “The False Church of the Air”—and rejoices that the BBC does not allow individuals to set up radio or television “churches.” He says: “One real Father Murphy or Reverend Smith, who knows and serves his congregation, is worth a half-dozen plastic media messiahs.  He may be ugly, short-tempered, and inclined to booze, but he is flesh and blood - and he grapples with a flesh-and-blood community, which is what the Church is about.  Jesus commanded his followers to love one another - to care for and serve their neighbour - and he made it clear that the neighbour we had to love was not necessarily someone we liked.  In the living Church we may have to exchange the Kiss of Peace with someone who has bad breath, unwashed clothes.  But in the Church of the Air we are safe at home with nobody we don’t choose  to consort with.” (INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIAN DIGEST, June 1988, p.  35)

Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said: “Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.” This is something that we sometimes forget.  The Great commandment of Jesus has two parts: love God AND your neighbor.  We are called to love - and unless there is another object of that love beside ourselves, then even love becomes selfish.  As Shelly reminded us a few weeks ago, we are commanded to love our neighbors AS ourselves, and if we do not love ourselves, our neighbors are in real trouble!  But the love must go beyond self to be true love...and not merely selfish self-interest. 

There used to be a popular bumper sticker that proclaimed “I found it.” The individual behind the wheel, it seems, intended for us to believe that he or she had “found Jesus.” Beside the fact that Jesus isn’t lost, and that Jesus is not an “it,” there is the fact that the sticker reflected what Tom Hilton calls “theological amnesia.” What it implies is that “I found Jesus.  I did it all.  I am free to do whatever I want to, and I found Jesus all by myself.  I had no help from the church, from the Bible, through prayer, from the Holy Spirit, from Christian friends and religious literature.  I found Jesus alone.  How great I am.” (Ibid., p.  9) But this is precisely the opposite of Biblical faith.  Wesley said that the New Testament knows of no “unattached Christians.” Jesus said again and again that we cannot come to Him alone.  We come to Him with the rest of God’s children: we are called to be a part of God’s family, which is perhaps a better image than the “Kingdom of God.” The word “Kingdom,” beside its sexist overtones, assumes an absolute ruler at its head.  And while I have no wish to limit God in any way, the Scriptures do teach that God has limited Himself in that God has given us free will to respond or not, to choose to be a part of God’s great family or not.  We can return home where the party is (as did the chap we call the “Prodigal Son,” or we can choose to stand outside (as did the elder brother,) but we are invited into the family.  “Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother.” (Mark 3:31)

Jesus asks “Who is my brother?” Then, by way of answering his own question, he stretches forth his hand toward his disciples - the Twelve - and says, “These are my mother - and my brothers - and my sisters.” In asking the question of brotherhood, Jesus was asking after and inviting us toward a universal relationship, a category that transcends gender or class or nation.  “For anyone who obeys the will of my Father, that person is my brother and sister and mother.” “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal.  3:28) The question of brotherhood is simultaneously the question of sisterhood, and a question of family. 

A few of years back there was a book published in Great Britain which proposed to prove that (1.) “the Jesus Family were wealthy people”; (2.) “the disciples were rich and/or influential...none were simple fishermen”; (3.) “Mary was not a simple, innocent, unaware small town Jewish girl - she was in fact used to rubbing shoulders with the wealthy, attending parties, singing, dancing and drinking wine”; (4) “a member of the British Royal Family was the first Bishop of Rome”; and (5) “Jesus was of English descent - his grandmother came from Cornwall...and the grave of the Virgin Mary’s uncle was found at Glastonbury.” (LONDON TIMES MAGAZINE, December 1, 1985, quoted in Conrad Hyers, And God Created Laughter, Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1987, page 57) What’s more...the author claimed to be a member of Jesus’ Family!!  His claims have never been taken seriously.  But you and I can be members of Jesus’ Family, if we will.  In fact, that is precisely what we are called to be.  “All in the family”...with Christ. 

I will never forget a picture which I saw a few years back.  It showed two little ladies; one sitting in a rocking chair, the other standing behind the chair.  Both were dressed in black with little lace collars around their necks.  Their distinction was this: They are the only two remaining members of a religious group called the “Shakers.” Shakers do not believe in marriage and families, and groups which do not marry and have families (like the first-century Essenes) tend to die out!  When these two little ladies die, the group will no longer exist.There is no family to carry on their work.  Their movement ends with them. 

As I said in my recent letter to the congregation regarding “Miracle Sunday,” the Church is always within one generation of extinction.  If we, who are trustees of the faith today, do not care enough to keep the faith alive and to pass it on, there will be no Church for succeeding generations.  That is why we need the family of God called the church.  And why we need to be faithful to our commitments to it.  At the conclusion of our service this morning, we are being asked to give out of our “accumulated love,” and to the best of our ability, so that the Church might continue its ministry and be a beacon of light to those who come after us, just as it has been for us.  So I invite you to give generously, and give “as unto the Lord.” You know, whenever there is a real “family crisis,” most of us are willing to do anything, to give anything, to help out...because it is “for the family.” Well, here we are this morning: God’s family. 

A month ago at the 9:30 service the little children from Sunday School stood before us and sang: “I am the Church; You are the Church; We are the Church together.  All who follow Jesus, all around the world; Yes, we’re the Church together!” They were right.  Let’s not let them down.  Let us receive the morning offering.  Amen.