Rules of Thanks (Thanksgiving Day C)

 

 

Rules of Thanks
U.S. Thanksgiving Day (Year C)
Anticipated Evening Service, 27 November 2013--5:00 p.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Readings: Deut. 26:1-11, Psalm 100, Phil. 4:4-9, John 6:25-35

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone

 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

I think that gratitude is the emotion that best connects us with God.  Trust is a close second.  Both of these are in fact expressions of love.  And God is, in fact, Love Itself. Love, trust, and gratitude give us eyes to see God. At the very least they allow us to perceive the works of the hand of God.  

There are, I think, some basic rules of the road to feeling gratitude and expressing thanksgiving, to keep these profound feelings from leading us astray.   There are some too for feeling or expressing gratitude’s opposites, like resentment, disappointment, anger and regret.  Here are a few:

1)    When good happens, when beauty occurs, when grace arrives, feel gratitude.  Let yourself feel it fully.  Direct it to the giver, and know that when all is said and done, all good comes from God. 

2)    When good happens, do not feel that you deserved it, earned it, or were entitled to it.  Especially do not feel this if in fact you contributed in some part, large or small, to the arrival of the good.   Even if you made the good, recognize that whatever skills, attributes, and abilities you used in doing this were also gifts.  Admit that all good gifts come from God, because of God’s goodness, not the goodness of the gift’s recipient. 

3)    When good happens to other people, be sure to tell them how much they contributed to it or made the good possible.  Be lavish in praise.  But be careful not to suggest that somehow your good estimation of that person is based merely on their performance. 

4)    When bad stuff happens to you, do not blame God, or feel that it is punishment.  It you are responsible in whole or in part, accept the responsibility, but do not mistake the natural results of your actions as malevolent or willed harm from an angry deity. 

5)    When bad stuff happens to other people, do not attribute it to some punishment by an avenging or even just God.  Do not try to explain it away, or even say you understand.  Just say how badly it makes you feel. 

6)    Use gratitude and thanksgiving as a means of driving away negative feelings. Alienation, anger, hatred, jealousy, envy, fear, disgust—all of these feelings have a difficult time remaining in our hearts when our hearts are full of gratitude and thanks.   Make use of a gratitude list and be sure that your prayers have at least as many as many thanksgivings as petitions. 

7)    Know that joys and thanks shared with others are multiplied, just as sorrows and burdens shared are lightened. 

Trappist monk and mystic Thomas Merton once said this to a group of monastic novices:

“Life is this simple: We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God shows [God’s] self everywhere, in everything - in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that He is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without [God].  It's impossible. It's simply impossible. The only thing is that we don't see it.”

Being open hearted, open handed, and open-minded all depend on a sense of gratitude and thanks.   When all is said and done, so does any true faith in God.   

I am so thankful for so many things.  I am grateful for my family, especially my life’s companion Elena, and my children.  I am thankful for having been given the privilege of serving my country overseas for most of my adult life, and for the blessing of a late-in-life call to the priesthood in Christ’s One, Holy, and Apostolic Church.  I am thankful, so very, very thankful, to be serving this gifted and faith-filled group of friends at this time, here, in the Rogue Valley.    I am thankful for the wonderful music here, and for our commitment to service and justice.  I am thankful for the opportunities for education and personal development my family and I have had, and for the abundance and liberties we enjoy here in the United States.  I am thankful for health and for the natural beauty around me here.  I am thankful for so many, many things. 

I hope that you take time during the holiday to sit back a few minutes in quiet and reflect on what you are thankful for, what makes you bless God and love the world.    

In the name of Christ, Amen.

A Kvetcher's Itchy Nose (Mid-week Message)

 

 

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

A Kvetcher’s Itchy Nose

November 27, 2013

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day.  We won’t have our usual noon Thursday Healing Eucharist; instead, we have a 5 p.m. Thanksgiving Eucharist this evening. 

Having Rabbi David Zaslow here at Trinity last week to roll out his new book, Jesus: First Century Rabbi, was a great pleasure.   During the program, his wife Devorah told a great Hassidic tale about becoming what you believe.    Thanksgiving this year also happens to be Hanukah, the Festival of Light commemorating the Dedication of the Temple under the Maccabbees. 

All this reminded me of another Hasidic tale I heard in graduate school:

There once was a woman named Anna.   She was a complainer, a kvetcher.   All day long she would whine, “I am so poor, my clothes are like rags.  I am so old, my back is as stiff as the walls of Jericho.  I have to walk so far to draw water, my feet swell up like watermelons.  My house is so tiny, I can barely move.  My children visit me so rarely that they barely recognize me.”   

One day Anna woke up with an itch on her nose. She went to visit the rabbi and he asked her,  “How are you, Anna?”

Anna gave her regular litany of woes, and the added, “And now my nose itches.  It is driving me mad!  What does it mean, Rabbi?”

The rabbi said, “Anna, your itch is a ‘complainer's itch.’ You are dissatisfied with life, and it’s like an itch that no amount of scratching can help.  However you feel about yourself and the world, that’s how you and your world will be!”

The next morning, Anna woke up.  Her nose still itched.  But her back had turned to stone! Her house had shrunk and she was so tightly squeezed in it that she could barely breathe, let alone move! On the end of her legs were two huge watermelons!  Real rags, not old clothes hung on her body!  Her son and daughter walked by, but they just looked at her suspiciously as at a stranger. They really did not know her!

In despair, Anna remembered the kvetcher itch on her nose and what the Rabbi had said.

So Anna began to think ‘I do have enough money to live on and a little more. There are people who are worse off than I, and I should help them with the extra I have.  For someone my age, I am pretty healthy, and feel pretty good.  My house may not be large, but it’s comfortable and easy to clean.  The walk to draw water is good exercise and gives me a chance to relax and look at the beautiful scenery.  I'm so proud that my children are independent and able to care for themselves.”  

Suddenly, as if by magic as Anna was saying these things, her body, house, clothes, and children returned to normal.  Her outlook on life changed forever.

The moral of the story is this: think positively and thankfully, because it brings more blessing and abundance.  The rabbis who tell the story end it by saying, “May your noses itch forever.”

Gratitude begets gratitude, complaining begets more complaining.  May we learn to be

grateful for the good we enjoy in our life, and not resent its nasty bits.

Grace and Peace,  Fr. Tony+

Our Hope and our Fear (Christ the King C)

Our Hope and Our Fear

Last Sunday before Advent, the Solemnity of Christ the King (Year C)
24 November 2013--8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Jeremiah 23:1-6; Psalm 46; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:33-43

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone

 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Today is Christ the King Sunday, a festival introduced only in 1925 by Pope Pius XI and now observed by most denominations.  It was a reaction to sweeping social changes: the American revolution and then the French had started a century and a half of upheaval that brought an end to “Christian” kings like those of France and the Russian Tsars.  The few monarchs remaining, including the pope, had lost much of their political power.  The European Church’s craven failure to prevent World War I had, in the words of historian Diarmaid McCollough, “tolled the final death-knell for ‘Christendom.”

Pius asserted that despite such changes, order still stood amid the growing chaos, a holy city among the ruins, a kingdom ruled by one true King, Jesus Christ. 

But the image of Christ as King does not really speak to us Americans. We live in a republic that gave up on kings 250 years ago. We have little or no experience with kings as such.  We tend to belittle the very idea, except perhaps as a tourism-boosting ploy for countries like Britain who had the good sense of stripping kings of their powers even as they preserved the institution.

  The Oba of Kétou

I once met a king.  When I was living in Africa, I was honored for my work with villages and traditional leaders.  Together with Roman Catholic priest and sustainable farming advocate Father Godfrey Nzamujo, I was named an honorary prince of the Yoruba Kingdom of Kétou.  Within the larger context of the Beninese and Nigerian states, the kingdom is ruled by a hereditary ruler, a King called the Oba.  I have to confess—I was nervous, since the ceremony was partly religious and the closest thing to a state church there is what we in the West dismissively and ignorantly call “Voodoo.”  My staff at the American Cultural Center was excited to have their boss thus honored, and told me to obey exactly any instructions from the King or his ministers.  They assured me that we would not be asked to do anything dangerous, immoral, or compromising our Christian faith.   

Fr. Nzamujo and I were received at the palace of the Oba unceremoniously ushered into the basement while dancers and singers performed for the assembled crowds in the palace courtyard.  Three elderly women looked us carefully up and down, and left.  Then the King’s chamberlain evenly commanded, “Mettez-vous à poil (strip naked).”  We proceeded to do so under the watchful eyes of the king’s security guards.

We then waited together in the dark naked for a few minutes, feeling vulnerable and a little silly, until the chamberlain returned.   He looked harshly at us, and had his assistants produce three items in sequence. “This is water from the Oba’s well.  Let him quench your thirst if you are to become his sons.”  We drank deeply from the gourd.  “This is manioc from the Oba’s table.  Let him satisfy your hunger if you are to become his sons.”  We ate the gray paste.  And finally, “These are ashes from the King’s pipe.  Enjoy his leftovers and taste bitterness with him if you are to be his sons.”    We tasted the ashes.  Then, producing a small bowl of palm oil, he had a vodun priest anoint us as he translated the Yoruba chanting into French for us: “I anoint your brow that you may think as the King thinks, your eyes that you may see with his eyes, your arms that you may defend him and his people, your legs that you may always hurry to heed his call.”  Then he clothed us with exquisite royal robes and hats, hemmed to our exact bodily dimensions in the minutes while we waited in the darkness.  The elderly women who had scanned us were expert tailors.  We then were ushered up a stairway into the bright light of the tropical courtyard.  We were told to approach the Oba, who then took a full mouthful of gin and sprayed it over us as the priest said, “You are my sons, princes of Kétou.” 

After a lengthy public ceremony, we were handed plastic bags containing our original clothes and escorted back to our car.   I didn’t really realize how much all of this meant to the Yoruba until what happened next:  On the long drive back to the city, we stopped to have a late lunch at a roadside restaurant.  Not having the chance to change back into our western clothes, we were both in the royal robes as we walked from our car. A group of 20 or so market women came around a corner and, when the saw us in our robes marking us as royalty, they all, in a second, fell prostrate before us, faces in the dirt.  They remained motionless until we had passed and entered the restaurant. 

This experience taught me that a king is the object of love, awe and fear.  He embodies the well-being or woes of his people, and is responsible for them.  The “divine right of Kings” is not simply an effective propaganda tool to enforce hierarchy on possibly restive subjects.  It expresses a faith of an earlier age: a king reflects in some way—however dim—God’s relationship to us, just as a parent, a shepherd, or a trusted teacher.

God in the Bible is often described as a King, and even the “King of Kings.”  The Royal Psalms describe the King of Israel “Son of God.”

The core idea here is not hierarchy, authority from top down, or rule for the sake of the ruler.  Rather, it is the responsibility that comes from being chosen: the King is first in battle to defend his people, and last in retreat from an attack on them.

The fact that human kings so often fall far from this ideal is the reason that the Deuteronomistic History in the Hebrew Bible also includes an anti-royal tradition.  In it, God, the only true king of Israel, reluctantly allows the people to set up kings like Saul, David, and Solomon.  This is a defection from God’s true plan, a concession to God’s people, who want to “be like the nations round about us.”   

These very passages were used by the Puritans during the English Civil War to argue against Charles I, and later, by the American Revolutionaries against George III. 

Col. John Hutchinson

One of my ancestors, Colonel John Hutchinson, Governor of Nottingham Castle, was a puritan who so believed these anti-royal verses that he was one of those who signed the death warrant of King Charles I.    Hutchinson later realized that the Puritan Commonwealth leadership could be every bit as tyrannical and “unbiblical” as Charles and kings like him.  Hutchinson fell afoul of Oliver Cromwell when he disobeyed orders to massacre Cavalier prisoners of war in retaliation to Charles’ summary executions of Roundhead prisoners.  In part due to this, Hutchinson in the end escaped execution as a regicide after the restoration of the monarchy. 

So what does this have to say for us, good citizens of a Republic that we are?  Why celebrate Christ as King?

If we change the question slightly, a reason appears. Why we do not celebrate Christ the President, Christ the CEO, or Christ the Celebrity?  Leaders chosen because of popularity or achievement may make sense, but most certainly might not be leaders who give us what we need rather than what we want or merely find attractive. 

The heart of the matter is found in the very story in John’s Gospel where Jesus empowers his followers, and calls them friends rather than slaves.  In that most anti-hierarchical of passages, Jesus puts it plainly:  “It was I who chose you, not you who chose me.” 

In our marketplace of goods and ideas, we tend to have a consumer’s approach to things. But being attracted to an idea does not make it true.  Choosing leaders because they or their program strike our fancy is no guarantee that they will lead us where we need to go.  In fact, the very individualistic egotism and partisanship of such an approach almost guarantee the opposite. 

Again, in John’s Gospel, Jesus meets initial success.  Large crowds follow him, intrigued by his signs of power and his teaching.  But when he gives the bread of life discourse. Immediately, large numbers desert him.  Not liking his message, they vote with their feet, withhold their pledges, and find another teacher more to their liking.  Jesus asks the Twelve if they are going to leave too, and Peter replies, “Lord, and just where would we go?  You are the one who has the words of eternal life.   We have come to trust and know that you are God’s Holy One.” (John 6:60-69) 

One traditional catechism defines faith as “trusting and believing in what God reveals because of the authority of the revealing God.”   Submission to a higher power, to an authority, is a key part of faith.  Simply agreeing with God’s word because it pleases us is not faith.  It is consumer choice.  It cannot transform us because it can take us only as far as we already have gone.  It may at times demand support, but this is simply an appeal for funds based on the logic that you may want to continue to have your ears pleased and your fancy tickled.   In such an approach, it is we who choose Jesus, not Jesus who chooses us.   This is boutique religion, not living Christian faith. 

Christ as king means we have a personal loyalty and devotion to him.  As the personal embodiment of God’s love, responsibility, awe- or fear-inspiring power, we admit he has chosen us, and not we him.  Dostoyevsky famously said something that used to trouble me: “If I were faced with truth on the one hand and Jesus Christ on the other, I would throw myself into the arms of Christ and abandon truth.”  Dostoyevsky here is not calling for self-delusion and deceit, but rather a confession of Christ bearing the very stamp of God in all his person just like in today’s epistle reading.  He is admitting how flawed our own perceptions of the truth may be at times. 

 

On this Christ the King Sunday, this last Sunday of the Church year when we will be gathering in our offerings and pledges of offerings to Christ and the Kingdom for the next year, let us remember that Christ is King.  In the words of George Herbert, let us say in our hearts:

King of glory, King of peace,
I will love thee;
and that love may never cease,
I will move thee.
Thou hast granted my request,
thou hast heard me;
thou didst note my working breast,
thou hast spared me.

Wherefore with my utmost art
I will sing thee,
and the cream of all my heart
I will bring thee.
Though my sins against me cried,
thou didst clear me;
and alone, when they replied,
thou didst hear me.

Seven whole days, not one in seven,
I will praise thee;
in my heart, though not in heaven,
I can raise thee.
Small it is, in this poor sort
to enroll thee:
e'en eternity's too short
to extol thee. 

In the name of Christ the King, Amen.  

Compassion of the Christ (Mid-week Message)

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

Compassion of the Christ

As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.
- Colossians 3:12-14 (NRSV)

In the Diocesan Convention last week, we talked a lot about the scene in John’s Gospel where Jesus before he is betrayed tells his disciples that they are his friends: “Love each other as I love you.  Friends lay down their lives for each other and there is no greater love than this!  You know you are my friends if you follow my teaching here to love each other.  I no longer call you my servants.  I call you my friends.  Servants do not have any clue what their masters are up to; but friends tell each other everything.  I’ve tried to share with you everything I have learned from my Father.  It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you.   Bear fruit, fruit that will last.  I am telling you all this so that you will love each other” (John 15:12-17, paraphrased).   The main presenter, Margaret Babcock, suggested that through this declaration of equitable friendship, Jesus empowered his disciples—and can empower us—to “bear much fruit,” “fruit that will last.”   

Jesus’ call to us is one of cordial and intimate relationship with him and with each other.   Jesus says that the hallmark of this is the “love” (phileo) enjoyed by an intimate friend (philos).    That means sharing our goals, fears, and intentions.  It means no hidden agendas.  It means helping one another with an awareness of shared intimacy and common hopes.    Whether in the privacy of small groups, or in the public life we conduct in the larger community, it calls for basic boundaries in our behaviors.  Friends are patient with each other, and forgive each other when they give offense. 
Honesty, kindness and courtesy all reflect this. 

In our common life, let us try to remember to be present for each other above all as friends, as ones who love. 

Grace and peace, 

Father Tony+

Three Prayers for Bible Study (Mid-week Message)

 

Three Prayers for Scripture Study

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

BCP Proper 28

Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever

hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

Prayer Before Scripture Study

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, without your help labor is useless and without your light search is vain.  Invigorate our studies and direct our inquiries, that we may by due diligence and right discernment establish ourselves and others in your Holy Faith.  Take not, Lord, your spirit from us, let not evil thoughts or prideful contention have dominion in our minds.  Let us not linger in ignorance and fear, but enlighten and support us  so that we be true hearers of your word, and not hearers only, but doers also, for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen   (Adapted from Samuel Johnson by AAH)

Prayer for Reading the Bible

Keep these words that I command you today in your heart. (Deuteronomy 6:6) 

God, whose Word has broken into the world,

            you are always with me

            to hear what I have to say.

Quiet my mind so that I can

            hear your Holy Word.

Prepare my heart to hear our stories

            of call and return,

            failure and mercy,

            hurt and healing,

            peril and safety.

Stories of when we have turned away.

Stories of your steadfast love.

And more than hearing your Word,

Write them on my heart.

Give me the grace to know and live them.

      (Jenifer C. Gamber and Sharon Ely Pearson, Call on Me:

      A Prayer Book for Young People [Morehouse: 2012,] p. 34.)

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+ 

Jesus' Focus on the Family (Proper 27C)

Jesus’ Focus on the Family

Twentieth-fifth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 27 Year C RCL)
10 November 2013--8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Job 19:23-27a; Psalm 17:1-9; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone

 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

In the hallway of our home there’s a gallery of family photographs:  Elena and me and our four children in group poses over the years, our parents, siblings, our children’s cousins, our grandchildren.    On occasion guests comment “What a lovely family!”  Elena and I smile politely in return.  For thankful as we are for our family and all the happy memories, we realize the photographs tell only part of a complicated story.  

We don’t hang some pictures because they are just too painful: those taken at funerals or during episodes of mental illness of some family member, during estranged feelings, or after suicides, divorces, tragic accidents and illnesses.  

I understand about idealizing the family.  I was raised in a religious tradition that celebrated an idealized, romanticized family, patriarchal and conservative.   As in our hallway, often the ideal image was but a sanitized caricature of real families.  When women wanted equal say, or their own careers, the idealized family was a club with which patriarchs and church leaders could beat them down.  The brutality was disguised by gentle, earnest “loving” voices, and gentle hymns extolling family harmony and conformity to gender and sexual norms.

Idealizing the family is big business.   Witness over the years the success of American television programs “Little House on the Prairies,” “the Waltons,” and “Leave it to Beaver.”   The Rev. James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family” ministry attracts millions of people struggling for happier, better lives by seeking direction from what Dobson claims to be the teachings of the Bible. 

Unfortunately, the Bible is not a particularly good place to find idealized families.  You only have to read it to realize how messy and twisted human families can be, and have always been.   If you think a patriarchal family is an ideal, just look at the horror stories in the families of the patriarchs themselves.  Hatred, deceit, disloyalty, rape, and murder all appear in those hallowed chapters. 

Rarely do people who claim to promote the “Biblical teaching on the family” refer to today’s Gospel reading.  But it is a key text in seeing what Jesus’ actual view of the matter was. 

Theological opponents approach Jesus.  They are Sadducees, members of the priestly class.  They are conservatives—they accept only the Torah as scripture—and are suspicious of the later prophetic and wisdom writings and such new-fangled ideas as life after death.  

They pose Jesus a trick question: seven brothers die in sequence, each marrying the deceased brother’s wife in accordance with an obscure provision in the Torah.  “If there is such a thing as a resurrection from the dead,” they ask Jesus, “to whom does the woman belong when they all come forth in this resurrection?”   For them marriage is a bond relationship, where wives and children have the status of property.  In their patriarchal society, a woman can ‘belong’ to only one man at a time, though men can ‘own’ several wives.  Thus she clearly can’t belong to all seven.  The resurrection is therefore an impossibility, something akin to a dirty joke. 

Jesus replies by simply denying the underlying premise of the question:  “She belongs to none of them, for in the resurrection no one owns anyone else. They all belong to God.” 

The three great branches of Judaism at this time had three completely different takes on the messiness of life, the prospects for a future life after death, and the relationship between these. 

The Essenes or the Dead Sea Scrolls community hated the messiness of life and saw it as something to be defeated.  They believed in a form of the immortality of the soul and thought that those purified through strict obedience to the Torah and the Community’s ascetic practices would after death continue to live apart from their bodies and join with the purified living in the great army of the Sons of Light that would defeat the evil world and its Sons of Darkness.  They were this-life denying but future-life affirming. 

The Saduccees, the ones in today’s reading, believed that the Law controlled the messiness associated with life.  But they rejected both immortality of the soul and a resurrection of the body.   Thoreau, when asked about the afterlife, famously said, “Please, one life at a time!”   The Sadducees would have agreed.  They were this-life affirming but future-life denying. 

The Pharisees too believed that the Law brought order to the messiness of life, but were more optimistic about life than the Saduccees while rejecting the asceticism of the Essenes.  They accepted both the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body.  They were this-life affirming and future-life affirming. 

Jesus is close to the Pharisees here: he affirms this world as well as the world to come.  You might think his language about “being as the angels in heaven, neither marrying or being given in marriage” is some kind of Essene contempt for the body and marriage per se.  But this is a misunderstanding.  

 

Remember—Jesus was a wedding guest at Cana.  His first miracle was helping make the party a success by turning water into wine.    In the words of the Prayer Book, he thus “adorned” marriage as a “manner of life.”   He also showed he was no alcohol-eschewing ascetic.   He loves this world, this life, particularly the bits that give us joy, including love, marriage, family, work, and simple pleasures like wine and food. 

The Sadducees are assuming here that marriage as they know it, affirmed in scripture and tradition, cannot change:  How can a resurrection exist when it might mean that a woman belongs to several men at once? 

Jesus corrects their error head-on by noting the differences between this life and life in the age to come.  This age is messed up, but the age to come is ordered in accordance with the creator’s will.  This age is riddled with injustice and wrong; the age to come has justice flowing like a river.   

In this age we make exploitative contracts and establish unfair relationships of subordination, even endorsed by scripture.  Men take wives as chattel (that’s what the word “marry” means in this context) and women are taken as chattel (“are given in marriage”).  But in the age to come, in the resurrection, there will be a radical equality.  There will be no exploitative contracts or relationships.  Only one subordination will exist, the one that binds each person to God: “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection.” 

“In the resurrection all will have God as father,” he says, and this implies that in the resurrection, unjust parent-child relationships will cease along with unjust marriage. 

Elsewhere, Jesus says, “call no one your father on earth since you have one father, your one in heaven” (Matt 23:9).  Contrary to later radical Protestant claims, this is not a prohibition about calling a priest “father” or “mother.”  It is not about titles.  It is about real life fathers. It is Jesus’ teaching on family, and all relationships:  even families aren’t absolute, even fathers are in some ways defective when contrasted with the True Father.   God and the life to come are the true pattern of relationships.

In Mark 3, Jesus’ Mother and brothers think Jesus has gone mad.  They ask him to abandon his mission and return home.  His reply is biting:  “Who are my mother and my brothers?  Not you, but those who follow God along with me—they are my true family!” 

In all of this, Jesus suggests that our earthly relationships—no matter how good and sweet—are dim reflections of the true human relationships God created us for, and has in store for us.   Jesus’ teaching here is not that in the afterlife people are celibate or neutered, or human relationships cease. His point is that all of life that we know will be changed for the better as God’s kingdom comes.   Life will then match what it was created for, and not be mixed with the painful distortions we see here. 

His point is that if our relationship with God is right, all the other ones will take care of themselves.  If it is wrong, the other relationships are in question.

Jesus says we must reexamine our assumptions about society, including scripture, marriage and family.  In opening our hearts to God, in emptying ourselves to God’s fullness, we need God to lead us to more just relationships.   

Jesus affirms both this life and the life to come because he believes that life—this messy, boisterous, and glorious life—is redeemable and transformable. This is part and parcel of his faith in a God who acts to save his creatures.  And it’s not just his teaching.  It is what his birth, life, death, and resurrection are all about.   Incarnation as a doctrine teaches us that all human life is redeemable.   

So what part of family life and relationships will endure?  I personally think that hope for such on our part is demanded by Jesus’ affirmation of this life.   But I also think we will be very, very surprised by what God actually has in store for us.  Whatever it is exactly, we can be sure it will make our sweetest joys here pale by comparison. 

The fact is, there is no family that is “normal,” no family that is ideal.  We try to do our best, and must hope for God’s saving act.  On occasion in our moments of mutual support and love, of cozy familiarity and even intimacy, we see glimpses of God’s ultimate good intentions for us. 

This week in our prayers, I hope that we can all reflect in silence about eternity and the life to come, about the true image of humanity and human relations yet to be revealed.  May this image be a balm to the images of the sick humanity we see in the mirror and lock away in unseen photo albums.  I pray that the hope generated by such a vision enlivens our faith, makes us strive harder for justice now in how we treat others, especially those most dear to us, and keeps our eyes fixed on the real family that Jesus invites us to focus on.   

In the name of Christ, Amen.