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-
 Reflections
on faith and life by Rev. Kathryn Timpany
Senior Pastor
First Congregational UCC, Sioux Falls, SD
5.30.07
- Family. The Human Family. The Family of
God.
- Family is where we have come from and
where we live and maybe even where we are all going in the end.
Family is what we have in common with one another, whether it is our
genes or our guiding principles or our gods. Family reminds us we
are related in some way. We belong to each other. We are
bound to each other. There are things we share, even if there are
many things we do not share.
- Family. It’s a word we use without
thinking. When we say family, a host of faces comes to mind,
an anthology of stories. Memories gush forth. Scenes come stealing
back to us. We feel our identity in our bones. We sense the shape of
ourselves in the reactions on each others’ faces.
- I love words, and the history of words,
and so I looked up the word family. In the beginning, which
was about 1400 years after the death of Jesus, when the word
family first came into widespread use, it was all about the
"servants of the household". The root word, famulus, means
"servant". A familia was a household that included not just
your relatives but your servants as well. It took another 250 years
for it to evolve into a term for "those connected by blood", and it
wasn’t until 1966 that the term family values emerged into
the culture. In between, we used the phrase in a family way
to talk about pregnancy, and family circle to talk about
close kin. Family man, meaning "one devoted to wife and
children", once meant ‘thief".
- I’ve just returned from a gathering of
family celebrating itself. We were in that place together at
that time because of a couple of specific events – high school
graduation and a 60th wedding anniversary – but the real reason we
all made the effort to be there was because if you don’t go hang
around with all the people you are family with once in a
while, you tend to forget that you are not the center of the
universe, and that your preferences and passions, your aches and
hopes, your accomplishments and worldview are not the only ones that
matter. In fact, they may not matter very much at all in the larger
scheme of things.
- I frequently share my mornings with the
writer Frederick Buechner. Here is what he has to say about family:
- "It is not so much that things
happen in a family as it is that the family is the things that
happen in it. The family is continually becoming what becomes of
it. It is every christening and every commencement, every
falling in love, every fight, every departure and return. It is
the moment at breakfast when for no apparent reason somebody
gets up and leaves the table. It is the sound of the phone
ringing in the middle of the night and of the lying awake hours
waiting for
it to ring. It is the waves that pound the boardwalk to pieces and the
undercurrents so deep beneath the surface that you’re hardly aware of
them."
- Jesus only had a couple of things to
say about family the way most of us think of family. When people
asked him to weigh in on moral conundrums, like whether divorce was
permissible and whether there would be marriage in heaven, he
consistently steered them away from the letter of the Law in hopes
they could find the spirit of it. And when his mother and brothers
came looking for him one day while he was teaching, and someone told
him they were there just outside the door, he used the occasion to
broaden their view.
- "Anyone who does the will of God is my
mother and my brother," he said.
- I think he was dead serious when he
used that word anyone.
- Especially when you think about how he
kept talking about God as a father, and when he prayed he did so in
intimacy and with great, nurturing affection, addressing the Creator
of the Universe with the equivalent of the word "daddy".
- We’re so used to calling God "Father"
that we forget how remarkable a metaphor that is. If we mean what we
say when we use it, it means we have to say we are related to
everyone God has created, every single, solitary soul, no matter how
different from us they are, no matter how uncomfortable they might
make us feel. And if we are to claim the surname "Christian", claim
Jesus as our brother, we have to accept the fact that anyone doing
the will of God is our kin as well. And according to Jesus, doing
the will of God is primarily about showing mercy, working for
justice, and cultivating a generosity of spirit and intent that has
the power to change everything that is wrong with the world.
According to Jesus, just about anyone can do the will of God, if
they have a mind to, and celebrating their presence in our family of
faith has nothing at all to do with what earthly family they were
born into or what personal characteristics they exhibit.
- Jesus was fond of saying things like
"the first shall be last, and the last shall be first" and, pulling
a child onto his lap to drive the point home, "whoever wants to be
first must be last of all and servant of all". As in most things, he
was way ahead of his time when it came to understanding that the
children and the servants of the household were as important as the
heirs.
- Welcome to the Family of God, where the
children and the old folks and the lost and the last matter most of
all.
- Don’t let us miss your face among us
too often.
- May you see a reflection of yourself
in the most unlikely face today.
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