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Jesus and Family Values
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| 8/15/2004 |
I am surprised that Christian preachers, usually on the “religious right,” always claim that Jesus upholds the traditional nuclear family when the scripture above reflects Jesus’ usual stance on families. He is not holding them together as much as splitting them apart.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for the nuclear family, especially mine, holding together. I believe helping families to hold together to be holy work, but I don’t think Jesus thought about it much, and to claim that he wants you straight, married with two kids in voucher-funded Christian schools praying each morning is a stretch.
Jesus calls us not to PTA meetings, but over the tumult to a radical discipleship to bring the Kingdom of God that, if accepted, will disrupt family life, not secure it. In today’s scripture reading, Jesus is giving fair warning.
Let’s remind ourselves of the historical account of one of the early martyrs of the Christian Church, for she, Perpetua, shows how disruptive the Christian life can be in a family.
In the summer of 202, in African city of Carthage, the young, recently married, recently a mother, Perpetua decided to be baptized. She was an aristocrat, from Carthage’s finest family, and apparently the slave she held converted her. Her decision to be baptized with four slaves resulted in her arrest and appearance before the magistrate who asked her if she was a follower of Christ, and she said, “Yes,” so he sentenced her to be torn apart by beasts in the public arena, the death sentence for slaves. By pronouncing herself a Christian, she had lowered her status, not increased it. In being Christian, she left her family of origin, and chose a new family in the Kingdom of God.
So, according to her diary, her gray haired patrician father came to her prison cell. “My father, out of love, came to me, and tried to persuade me and shake my resolution. I told him, ‘I cannot be called anything other that what I am, Christian.’” Because Perpetua repudiating her family name would hurt her father, he took another tack. “Have pity on me, your father. Do not abandon me to people’s scorn. Think of your brothers; think of your mother and your aunt; think of your child who will not be able to live without you. Give up your pride! You will destroy all of us!”
Indeed, her father was beaten because his daughter had become Christian.
Perpetua wrote, “My father spoke this way out of love for me, kissing my hands and throwing himself down before me. With tears in his eyes he left me in great sorrow.” But Perpetua believed she now belonged to God’s family. When in the arena she died by a bull and sword, she died with her new sister, Felicitas, who had been her slave. On that day, they all died as slaves, for the entertainment of others.
Not only was Perpetua rejecting her family, she was rejecting the social customs that governed society, placing her trust in the justice-values of the chosen Kingdom of God. “We out of every tribe of people,” Justin Martyr wrote in the year 140, “used to revel in promiscuity, and now we find pleasure in chastity. We used to do as our father’s taught and valued above everything acquiring wealth and possessions, and now we bring what we have into a common fund, and share with everyone in need; we used to hate and kill other people because they were of a different tribe and custom, and now we live intimately with them.”
Such radical service to the sick and desperate is not reserved to the early Church. Remember the Yellow Fever epidemic of Philadelphia in 1793. In that hot summer, 4,000 citizens in a city of 20,000 died—that’s 20% of the population. Think of that in modern terms. When the fever struck, George Washington fled, Thomas Jefferson fled, as did most of the Federal Government.
Yet some significant Christians remained to relieve the suffering of those who could not leave. One was Rector of this church, William White. The other was a member of Christ Church and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Dr. Benjamin Rush. When the mayor asked for volunteers to help Dr. Rush care for people and bury the dead during the epidemic, only Richard Allen and Absalom Jones stepped forward. Both emancipated slaves, Allen and White had founded the Free African Society in 1787, and organized the small but faithful black community in Philadelphia. Jones, who would eventually be the first priest of African descent in the Episcopal Church, had founded the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas just the year before the epidemic. Allen founded Mother Bethel Church. From these congregations came the help Dr. Rush needed. These African Americans, barely out from under the shackles, deep in the faith, hopeful for the nation, nursed the sick residents, drove the ambulances, removed and buried the dead.
Dr. Rush thought being black protected them from Yellow Fever. For Absalom Jones, and his followers, I suspect they believed being Christian protected them.
As I said, 4,000 Philadelphians died—240 African Americans from these churches. It was a level of heroic service like that of the firefighters and police on 9/11 in the Twin Towers. Imagine the death-toll in Philadelphia in 1793 if these black Christians had not responded? But their heroic story is mostly forgotten.
Why do Christians—real Christians, not Christians-lite—act in such extraordinary ways? The ethic is simple, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and soul, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” A Christian is called to sacrifice his life and well-being to the simple yet radical ethic of those words; most of us though, are not seriously put to the test.
Nevertheless, the ethic is stark, embodied in Jesus final words to his followers, “For I was hungry, and you gave me food, I was thirsty, and you gave me drink. I was strange and different, a minority and one shunned, and you loved me and welcomed me, I was naked and full of shame, and not only did you clothe me, you honored me. I was sick and you cared for me like I was your own. When you have done these things for the least among you, have done them to me and to the glory of God.”
Such an ethic or radical love and service can disrupt a family and create a huge conflict when one family member ventures out, and the others do not, and then the ones who remain in the family feel that the resources that belong to the family are now going to others (isn’t this dynamic at work in the reaction of older brother in the “Parable of the Prodigal Son?”). Jesus words that we hear today seem so harsh, yet they only make a certain sense: “I have come to bring dissension [in families],” Jesus warns. “From now on, a family of five will be divided, three against two, and two against three. Father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter and law against mother in law (nothing new here).” In families, Jesus was telling them, the decision to follow him would create a crisis, a moment of judgment, for it meant choosing following Christ over following the common needs of family. Whereas in our introspective self-indulgent desire to make Christianity all about family values and holding together the family, Jesus said following him could rent the family asunder.
Now, I think to follow Christ is to be devoted to reconciliation and forgiveness. The irony and pain of that mission, we are reminded by Jesus’ words this day, is that we may be unreconciled with the ones who love us the most.
Few of us, certainly not me, can make family less important than the radical demands of following Jesus. Few of us can be like Perpetua, or like the blacks who served the whites in the Yellow Fever epidemic in 1793.
But we should always remember that the Christian life is one of choice, sacrifice and service that may, or will, alienate us from those who want us to be tribal, nationalistic, ethnic and familial.
Amen.
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