How many of you remember or have every played the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game?
In the mid-90s this silly party game challenged players to find a way to link the actor Kevin Bacon with any other actor using no more than six connections. (For instance, Val Kilmer was in “Top Gun” with Tom Cruise who was in “A Few Good Men,” which also featured Kevin Bacon.) Eventually what was really just a movie trivia game became a way for us to see ourselves as somehow related to anyone else on the planet with just six simple steps.
Poking fun at himself and at this trend, Kevin Bacon starred in a Visa check card commercial. In the commercial a cashier won’t take Bacon’s check when the actor has no identification on him. Bacon leaves and returns with a group of people, explaining to the cashier, “Okay, I was in a movie with an extra, Eunice, whose hairdresser, Wayne, attended Sunday School with Father O’Neill, who plays racquetball with Dr. Sanjay, who recently removed the appendix of Kim, who dumped you sophomore year. So you see, we are practically brothers!”
By 2005 the quest for the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” took on a serious scientific status when The National Geographic Society, IBM, and the Witt Family Foundation launched “The Genographic Project.” Although originally designed to trace the migration patterns of certain indigenous peoples, anyone could participate in the Project. All that was required was to send a DNA sample — a simple cheek swab — and the scientists would analyze the sample’s mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosomes — the location for the genetic markers for specific populations. These genetic markers would allow the researcher to trace the long distant ancestry, the genetic history, of any individual.
What the researchers hadn’t figured into their analytic assignment, however, was the fact that anytime you try and put a big family together squabbles are going erupt. In the case of the Genographic Project, the very group the study had been specifically designed to analyze, the indigenous peoples of various regions, took extreme offense at the project. They were incensed at the possibility of being cataloged as just another immigrant wave. Many groups simply refused to participate in the project, both feeling that it insulted their cultural roots and fearing that the result would cause legal troubles and entanglements over land claims.
If the Genographic Project can cause family fights between “relatives” whose ancestral links goes back thousands of years, is it any wonder that when just two or three (or maybe four) generations of families gather together for a “picture perfect” Christmas, that there aren’t more merry-hairy-meltdowns? Less Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom from Want” or Thomas Kinkade’s “Hometown Christmas Memories -More Picasso’s “Guernica.”
Dealing with the stress of “relativity” is the subject of a U-Tube video put out for the holidays. The video both pokes fun, and pokes in the eye, the “blessing” that is family. Here it is in case you haven’t seen it. It offers a “Family Survival Kit” for the holidays.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9-ctuBFAUg
OK: Let’s be honest. That’s funny. But that’s wrong. You mean we can’t extend grace to those who are closest to us. You mean in order for us to survive we have to close ourselves inside ourselves and ignore those around us who we think are annoying?
In the history of Christian art, it’s as if artists had at their disposal this “Family Survival Kit” (my favorite? the brat darts) that cleared away all the annoyances so that we could get back to the main characters.
John Updike has a poem entitled “Relatives” that is about family holiday gatherings. Here he describes the interweavings of generations:
A spidering of chromosomes
webs even the infants in . . .
The cousins buzz,
the nephews crawl;
to love one’s self is to love them all.
John Updike, “Relatives,” Collected Poems 1964-94 (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 240.
Updike nails it, doesn’t he. “To love one’s self is to love them all.”
So why is the most perfect Christmas, the first Christmas, always represented as family free. Have you ever wondered about that? What’s up with that?
Set up your Christmas crèche and whom do you have? Describe for me the “holy family.” A nuclear family of Joseph, Mary, and the Baby Jesus. The only “family” members present are the immediate family. Besides them there is a conflated motley crew of shepherds, “wise men,” and an angel or two, and don’t forget some livestock—-sheep, cows, camels, and a donkey.
What’s missing? No mother-in-law for Mary to contend with. No funny-smelling Uncle Yehuda. No smarmy cousin trying to convince them to move to a new condo in Tiberius. No, our “perfect” Christmas scene suggests that the Holy Family was an isolated island of peace and quiet.
These Sundays in Advent, we are preparing for the Christmas season by trying to get the Christmas story right . . . by exploring each week an aspect of the story that needs some refurbishing or restoration.
Last week we suggested that it was far more likely Joseph and Mary stayed in the lower level of one of Joseph’s relatives’ homes when they finally arrived in Bethlehem.
If so, there would have been all sorts of family members hovering around. It would have been unheard of for Joseph to help Mary in the delivery of her baby. Attending to a woman in childbirth has always been a female domain. Any available female relative would have been with Mary. Joseph, an observant Jewish male, would not have been involved in the ritually unclean mess of childbirth. And since when don’t all the women in a close family huddle and hover around a new baby in their midst?
Jesus was not born into any kind of splendid isolation. Jesus was born into a big, extended family — with all the closeness and all the clashes those relationships can bring. The gospels tell us quite a bit about Jesus’ family later in his life, and not all of it is flattering. According to Luke, Elizabeth the mother of John the Baptist was Mary’s “kinswoman,” an undefined degree of “relative” (Luke 1:36). When the pregnant Mary visits Elizabeth, the unborn John heard Mary’s voice and “leaped in her womb” (Luke 1:40). Yet in John’s gospel the adult John the Baptist claims, “I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit’” (John 1:33). John, Jesus’ forerunner, his Elijah, needed his shirt-tail cousin Jesus to be pointed out to him.
After being born in some relative’s back room, Jesus didn’t grow up a spoiled single child either. Mark’s gospel gives a partial listing of Jesus’ big family. Astounded at the words and deeds Jesus is performing, his hometown crowd wonders, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” (Mark 6:1-4).
Jesus’ own family was less than supportive of his public ministry early on. Surrounded by a hometown crowd “his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, ‘He has gone out of his mind’” (Mark 3:21). And in John’s gospel Jesus’ own brothers taunt him, as only brothers can do so well, daring him to flaunt his powers and announce himself to the world.
So his brothers said to him, “Leave here and go to Judea so that your disciples also may see the works you are doing, for no one who wants to be widely known acts in secret. If you do these things, show yourself to the world.’ [For not even his brothers believed in him.] (John 7:3-5)
Family is always hard to impress. They know us too well. The huge, scary, professional linebacker who now packs a mean wallop and earns a hefty paycheck, is remembered by his mother as the toddler who couldn’t get to sleep without his special stuffed bunny. The surgeon who makes a dozen life-and-death decisions a day will always be the annoying little sister who tagged along and got in the way. The sharp-witted, sharp-tongued litigator is forever the little boy who was too shy to go sit on Santa’s lap. We may work all of our lives to hone a certain image, to master certain skills. But in our relatives’ eyes, we will never entirely lose the clunkiness of our childhood beginnings.
So why do we come together for the holidays? Why do we intentionally invite into our best days some of those who ignite some of our worst memories?
If there is no one who can destroy us like family, it is also true that there are no other people who will stand by us like family.
As Jesus hung on the cross, his disciples all hidden away in fear of reprisals and persecution, three women stayed. They watched and waited and prayed under the very shadow of that cross. The gospels vary slightly in their naming of these women, but the variations are just different ways of referring to the same individuals. Matthew had “the mother of the sons of Zebedee” while Mark has “Salome,” and John records “his mother’s sister,” all of which may well be the same person. If so this would make the apostles James and John Jesus’ cousins.
But on that most horrible scene of Golgatha, when everyone else deserted him when he needed them the most, Jesus had the presence of three Marys: two of them relatives, his mother and his aunt (the wife of Joseph’s brother Cleopas), the two matriarchs in his life, the ones who would never abandon him, no matter what.
The oh-so-slender “six degrees of separation” that divides the human family bares the truth of the Advent story: that we are brothers and sisters, that we are all “relatives,” and that there is no sacrifice beyond considering for the sake of our “relatives.” In today’s gospel text Jesus’ Elijah and cousin John the Baptist even expands “relative” to include creation itself, as he cries out for the earth to prepare for the arrival of the long awaited Messiah.
Not Palestine, not Israel, not Bethlehem, but “all flesh” is to make its preparations for his coming. John calls for geographic upheavals and major reconstruction in order to prepare the way of the Lord. The earth and all who inhabit it are to work as one creation, one family in relationship, to invite the Messiah into our midst.
Will we use the Family Survival Kit to keep away our relatives this Advent season? Or will we do everything we can to bring our whole families, and the families of the Earth, to the table? The Whole Family Survival Kit.
A few years ago there was a cartoon in The New Yorker illustrating a large meeting hall with a sign at the entrance that read, “Convention for Functional Families.” There was one lone person standing at the registration desk looking around to see if anyone else was coming. Anyone here be found at that convention? I know I wouldn’t. No family in the Bible would either . . . .
The real “Family Survival Kit” is a Whole Family Survival Kit, to have everyone at the table, and to show grace to all. In the Disney feature film, Lilo & Stitch (2002), Nani reminds her younger sister Lilo that “‘family’ means no one gets left behind.”