Family and Faith

In a very public Father's Day letter published in the New York Times Anna Quindlen once wrote, "We might as well have a universal support group: Adult Children of Parents." The gist of the letter was a bit of a commentary on the challenge every child faces: to wake up to the reality that they are individuals, not extensions of their parental units. Most of us do not have to hate our family to differentiate ourselves from them. But sometimes our families do hate us when we try.

Jesus knew this. In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus speaks of the gut-wrenching work of choosing for ourselves who we want to become. He compares and contrasts those who follow Jesus and those who don't - including a controversial passage that says that if we love our families more than Jesus we are unworthy. I suspect that Jesus and Anna Quindlen were making similar points. All families are complex webs of interconnection. From the smallest details (Duke's or Hellmann's?) to larger issues like politics, our family beliefs, customs and idiosyncratic ways are engrained in us. This is not a good versus bad thing; it is a complicated dance toward maturity and choosing for ourselves how we want to create the next generation of 'family.'

Following Jesus was a sure fire way to get you scratched from the holiday party back in the day. This idea of 'hating' your mother and father was not Jesus' idea; it was the reality for anyone who chose to follow Jesus at that time. Today, we understand this, right? How many families do you know that have survived unscathed their voting records in 2016 or their various positions on the Black Lives Matter movement?

Jesus is not trying to break people up. What he is saying is this: love me best. And, if that is true, then he promises us this: no matter the ups and downs of our relationships and life as a result of choosing him - whatever we lose for his sake, God will breathe new life into. We will lose if we love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength because it will require us to jettison old habitual ways of believing, thinking and being. People won't like that. But God will love us and continue to breathe on our dry, dead bones.

What's a Calling? What's Our Purpose?

The Rev. Dr. William Willimon is an accidental preacher. He's written over 80 books and he was on a recent podcast with Kate Bowler's podcast, Everything Happens Episode 23. How did he become a pastor? "It wasn't my idea."

"We have a God who doesn't take no for an answer..."

In a world that teaches us to follow our bliss, shoot for the stars, don't settle for anything less than your best, figure out what you love to do and do that and you'll never work a day in your life, etc., there is this ancient biblical perspective that has totally gotten lost in the shuffle of all those platitudes and calls for individuality as the gold standard.

We have a life that is not our own. We can find tons of examples in the scriptures but consider the first four that pop into my brain: Moses, Jonah, Jeremiah, and Abraham. Here's what I know. I did not set out to swim in the recovery world. THAT'S the world I vowed to escape as I lay in my bed as a ten year old listening to the crashing of thrown objects against the den wall. I swore I was going to get the 'dys' out of dysfunctional family and never look back. And yet here I am. I am an accidental pastor to a recovery church, a community where the disease of addiction has doubled down and practically required an added heaping of "dys" for the family. The disease does that. I can tell you the facts of how this came to be and how unlikely the events that resulted in this radically changed life experience but I cannot explain how it happened.

"If you cannot explain it some other way, then it might be God," reports Dr. Willimon.

If this is the way God works, then according to Willimon, discernment becomes a very big task. His experience mirrors my own. He says he has days when he is really sure his call is from God and other days when he needs a reminder. The call to be married or someone's friend or a parent or any other role worth having is the same - we go back and forth, wondering: is this my path?

The weird thing about vocation is that it is not our idea; it is God's idea before it was ours. Dr. Willimon's position on such matters is completely foreign to the average American floundering for a sense of purpose and validation for their life choices. An external sense of determination is not a normal way to think about it in North America. When was the last time you heard someone say, "God just tapped me on the shoulder..." Or "I just came to understand the Lord was in this thing." Now, that language has some problems of its own. Sometimes people use God as an excuse to do things that even God wouldn't approve of! But as Willimon points out, there needs to be a definite sense of direction. "I do wonder if for modern Western people like us it's been so long since we have expected address from anything other than our own interiority. Maybe we are a little less adept at saying, 'God's got his hand on me.'" Dr. Will Willimon

At this point, I'm starting to think that maybe we need to think about God's hand on us more often, maybe it would act as a deterrent for putting our hands on other people without their invitation to do so.

Jesus Has a Bad Day

I know we are not supposed to disagree with Jesus, so I won't. But this parable that I want to wrestle with is really not my favorite of his body of work. It is from Luke 17, and it goes like this: “Suppose one of you has a servant who comes in from plowing the field or tending the sheep. Would you take his coat, set the table, and say, ‘Sit down and eat’? Wouldn’t you be more likely to say, ‘Prepare dinner; change your clothes and wait table for me until I’ve finished my coffee; then go to the kitchen and have your supper’? Does the servant get special thanks for doing what’s expected of him? It’s the same with you. When you’ve done everything expected of you, be matter-of-fact and say, ‘The work is done. What we were told to do, we did.’”

I am not a fan of thinking about all the ways we have mistreated people by placing them in roles of slaves and servants. I'm a big fan of a world in which we all understand that "we are all bozos on the bus" - to quote my friend Dale Ryan. But Jesus did not use this parable to talk about inequality, he used it to show us the reality of the work set before us.

In Dr. Willimon's book Accidental Preacher, he makes it abundantly clear that much of what we think of as sacred calling is not glamorous. Nor should it be! I love this guy because he speaks what so many are afraid to say. In Kate Bowler's podcast Everything Happens she interviews Dr. Willimon (September 22, 2020 episode 23: Will Willimon: Your Work is a Calling). I am going to poorly paraphrase him so PLEASE go listen to the entire podcast! But here goes...

Dr. Willimon says, basically, that the deceit of modern life is believing that we can strip the roles from individuals for the sake of individuality. He continues to make his case by declaring that there is no YOU without the roles, assignments and relationships in your life.

In Jesus' parable, the servant knows his role and he fulfills it. Full stop end of sentence. This is so very unattractive to a culture who has hyped individuality and freedom to the detriment, I fear, of community care and service for service's sake. Tomorrow, I'll continue to unpack this, but for today - please do not skip the opportunity to ponder what this terrible, awful parable teaches.