Christ Welcomes All to God's Family
Pentecost + 2, June 10, 2012
The classic children's book, Are You My Mother? tells the story of a just-hatched baby bird, in search of his mother, who left the nest in search of food for her baby just before he popped out of the egg. If you remember this book (I've read it a lot lately), you'll know that the baby bird leaves the nest – falling down, down – it was a long way down – and then sets out to look for the mama bird. As it happens, he walks right past her first thing; he doesn't see her. So then he encounters a kitten, and a hen, and a dog, and a cow, asking each one along the way, “Are you my mother?” only to have each one indicate, either with their words or in silence, they they are NOT his mother.
So the baby bird goes on, getting more and more anxious to find his mother with each passing moment. He passes an old broken down car, looks down at a steam boat in the river and way up in the sky at a plane, and finally, at the end of all his options, he comes to a Snort (which is a big ol' digging machine, with the big claw shovel on the front). And deciding this must be his mother, he races up to it, crying out, “Mother, Mother, here I am, Mother!”, only to realize – too late!- that this thing awful, strange, foreign thing is not his mother either. Too late, because the bird has hopped up on the shovel part and the Snort has lifted him up and is carrying him away somewhere, and there seems to be no escape. But never fear – this is a children's book, after all – and it turns out the Snort, as big and scary and loud as it appears, is really acting in the bird's best interest, taking him back to the tree, and gently depositing him safely back in his nest, just in time to greet his returning mother, who asks, “Do you know who I am?”
“Yes,” says the baby bird, going through the litany of things she is not, before finally concluding, “You are a bird, and you are my mother.” No doubt in his mind, or anyone else's, about who his family is, and who his family is not in this story. His mother is the one who looks and acts like him.
How often we act this way too! Not in terms of our biological families – in most circumstances we are only too aware of who they are – but in terms of who we welcome and accept into our lives – even and sometimes especially into our churches. Congregations often refer to themselves and their relationships that way – as a family. And there's definitely some good in that, but there is a tendency for us to develop church families that look like us and think like us and act like us, at least for the most part. It's hard for us to imagine, in a world where we are increasingly polarized in our beliefs, where we listen to and read and watch people who espouse the views we already agree with... and so it's hard to imagine that the whole wide family of God might just not be made up solely of people who think and act and believe the way we do. We isolate ourselves into homogenous communities, becoming ever more divided from those who seem different, instead of remembering and recognizing the strange ways that God works, and the strange people God works through! We can be like the baby bird, who sees the Snort, this strange, threatening-looking “other”, and want to run away in a panic, instead of seeing the heart underneath the appearance, instead of seeing what we have in common aside from what makes us different.
We see some of this playing out in the gospel this morning. We have this story that begins and ends with Jesus' family seeking him out as he is surrounded and swamped by the crowds, and sandwiched in between are the scribes who have come down from Jerusalem to check out the stories they have been hearing. Jesus has been busy in these first 3 chapters of Mark. Ever since he announced that the kingdom of God has come near, Jesus has been showing everyone what that kingdom looks like. He's healed a leper by touching him; he forgave a paralyzed man his sins, healing him in the process; he's eaten with tax collectors and sinners; and most recently, he healed a man's withered hand – on the sabbath! He's not behaving like a good devout religious Jew was expected to behave, and people have begun to talk. “He's out of his mind!” some say. Others, the scribes, think he's possessed, that he came by the power to do these miraculous things by going in cahoots with Satan himself. Jesus has upended everything they think they know about who God is and how God acts and who and what God values.
And so along comes his family, finally getting word through the thick crowd that they are waiting to talk with him, and unlike the baby bird, who responds with joy when his true mother finally shows up, Jesus throws even the established notions about family into question. “Who are my mother and brothers?” he asks. And looking around, he declares that all of those around him, those everyone else sees as Snorts – these are his true family. These are his mother and brothers and sisters – anyone and everyone who does the will of God.
It's quite an expansive family tree Jesus has, not limited to blood relatives or marriage relationships or looking and acting just exactly like everyone else. No, Jesus flings the doors of family wide open and invites everyone in, anyone who wants to follow him, anyone who wants to live out God's will in their lives and in the world. Jesus welcomes whoever is willing to move beyond self-importance and self-interest and self-security to risk seeking God's will before their own. Jesus' love, Jesus' acceptance is inclusive beyond our ability to see and understand much of the time – and he offers us a place at the table. Birds or Snorts, kittens, hens, dogs, cows – whatever we may be – he invites us to join his family, to live into our identity as children of God! And as crazy as it sounds, he calls us to treat one another as family and to work together in doing the will of God wherever we might be.
Amen.
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