Chosen Family: Mark 3:20-35
Ordinary Time
Then he went home, and the crowd came together again,
so that they could not even eat. 21 When his family
heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone
out of his mind.” 22 And the scribes who came down
from Jerusalem said, “He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts
out demons.” 23 And he called them to him and spoke
to them in parables, “How can Satan cast out Satan? 24 If
a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. 25 And if a house is divided against itself, that house will
not be able to stand. 26 And if Satan has risen
up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come. 27 But
no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first
tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered.
28 “Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter, 29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness but is guilty of an eternal sin”— 30 for they had said, “He has an unclean spirit.”
31 Then his mother and
his brothers came, and standing outside they sent to him and called him. 32 A
crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, “Your mother and your
brothers are outside asking for you.” 33 And
he replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” 34 And
looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my
brothers! 35 Whoever does
the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”
(NRSVue)
In
a delightful and unexpected twist of events, I was able yesterday to go to the
Canterbury Village Medieval Faire over in Lake Orion to see a few of my friends
perform in various troupes. I’m an old
hat at ren faires, having attended quite a few since my first one the summer
after I graduated high school. Any other
ren faire friends in today?
If
you’ve never attended a ren faire—which I highly recommend you do, for the
sheer experience of it—then know this: ren faires are weird. “Renaissance” and “medieval” are barely even
guidelines in terms of character and historicity. You’re as likely to see a Kingon as a king,
and the king may well be as much Edwardian as a Crusader. Vendors sell candles, crocheted spiders,
turkey legs, tabards with dragons or family crests, jewelry, flasks, and all
manner of other wonders. There was a
booth yesterday offering “energy readings and paintings” under the banner “Visions
of the Afterlife.”
The
entertainment is anything from a Viking drummer to comedic swordfighting, acrobats
dressed as pirates and belly dancers dressed in hip scarves covered with
jingling coins. A friend of mine plays
the lute, and another has routines with bullwhips and fire. It’s chaotic, ribald, dreadfully corny, and silly.
It’s
holy.
Because
ren faires are places of often radical acceptance. Like most communities made of misfit toys,
there is a recognition that the people who come to ren faires want
community. The performers often get to
know each other and look out for each other.
Fans return again and again to hang out with the acts they love, befriending
the real people underneath the stage personas.
People meet with each other in annual pilgrimages; some college friends
of mine and I only saw each other at a renaissance festival in Ohio for several
years. Queerness—both the kind that
means “odd” and the kind that means rainbow—is on display and celebrated, creating
wonders like a plague doctor in all black next to a fairy with giant wings in lesbian
flag colors. My friend the lutist always
wishes me happy birthday even though I haven’t seen him since he moved to Georgia
years ago. It’s family, in its own way, creating
and recreating itself every summer in deeply imperfect and beautifully holy
ways because everyone who wants to be there is welcome and no one is any
weirder than anyone else.
“When
his family heard it, they went out to restrain him.” As is usual with Mark the succinct gospeler,
we are dropped into a scene of Jesus and His friends being too popular without
much explanation. What we do know is
that some part of what He’s doing is embarrassing enough to worry His
family. They went out to restrain Him—Rev.
Dr. Meda Stamper points out that the verb of “restrain” is the same one Mark
uses to describe John the Baptist’s arrest in chapter 6 and Jesus’ in chapter
14.[1] People were saying that Jesus had lost His
mind and whether or not His family believed that, they needed to bring Him home
and make Him quiet.
This
isn’t surprising. Most if not all of us
are aware of familial embarrassment and that squirmy feeling of wanting someone
to stop talking so they don’t make you look so ridiculous by association. But this is amplified by the context of the Roman
Empire in which Mark writes. Between the
empire’s scrutiny of what it deemed troublemakers and how harshly it could punish
them—especially for an ethnic minority like the Jews who were already walking a
fine line—and the family-oriented nature of the Jewish people, being embarrassed
by one’s family carried intense consequences.
Rev. Dr. Bob Cornwall puts it as, “Nazareth wasn’t a big town. You can’t
hide when your child proves to be an embarrassment…The last thing that a family
needs is a religious fanatic who not only disturbs the peace but brings
unnecessary attention to the family. If
only they could get to him and drag him home, perhaps they could keep him safe
and keep the family out of trouble.”[2]
While
the family is making their way to Jesus, we get a nested story-within-the-story;
the scribes from Jerusalem (which means the really big scholars, the University
of Michigan level heavyweights—sorry, I work in Ann Arbor now, it’s rubbing off)
comes to berate Jesus about His teachings and how He clearly must be possessed
to be spouting off the things He does.
“And
if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand,”
Jesus replies to them, and that braids the triplicate of stories together in
one phrase. His family is divided
against itself as they seek to silence Jesus, to restrain Him; the scribes are
divided against themselves and Jesus as everyone figures out what to do with
this wild street preacher; the supernatural is divided against itself as God
moves against Satan’s evil—remember, “satan” is simply an official term for “adversary”—in
the person of Jesus, the Holy incarnate in the world. The house will not stand; things have to fall
apart from what they are now. Jesus’
family will not remain the same; the scribes will not remain the same; the
relationships of the divine with the created world will not remain the same.
No
wonder people were telling Jesus’ family to come shut Him down; this is a
massive statement of challenge, and the scribes and Jesus’ family both act
accordingly. There is no system that is
not designed to protect itself, and Jesus is a threat to decorum, order, sturdy
and expected houses.
“Your
mother and your brothers are outside asking for you,” says someone in the
crowd, and Jesus answers, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and
sister and mother.”
Church,
I need us all to understand how huge it is for Jesus to step away from the
blood definition of family like that. The
family was the unit in His culture; the Bible is stocked to the brim
with families. Most of them are
dysfunctional, but the very first relationship in the Bible beyond God is
family—Adam and Eve are partners, then parents, and God as parent is right behind
as we move into Abraham’s lineage and the notion of belonging to the tribes of Israel. Mark doesn’t begin his gospel with Jesus’ family
graveyard but Matthew and Luke sure do; where you came from, who your people
were, mattered to the very bones because that was how you could situate
yourself in the world. The idea of
family was so ingrained that Paul uses it all over the place when he talks
about us as adopted children of God, siblings of Christ.
And
Jesus says My mother and brothers are the ones doing the will of God. More than that, Jesus adds in sisters; Dr. C.
Clifton Black writes, “To the relatives identified by the crowd—'your mother
and your brothers’ (Mark 3:32)—Jesus conspicuously adds ‘my sister[s]’ (3:35),
which women in Mark’s own community would surely have heard as referring to
them. The identification of family with church would also have consoled early
Christians whose confession had ripped apart their own families (10:28–30;
13:12–13).”[3]
Do
you hear it? Do you hear how Jesus
understood the sheer amount of people who wanted Him to fit in and said no, not
only can I not stay inside your box but I will build something entirely new, I
will be a family with the people who won’t try to stop me from doing God’s work
on earth as it is in heaven?
It’s
incredibly easy for me, a queer pastor in a denomination that only recently
deemed me legal but still hasn’t deemed me welcome, to say in Pride month that
the concept of family built on bond rather than blood is a beautiful, holy,
amazing gift. But it isn’t only queer
folk who are reaching for family who won’t restrain them, for people who won’t
tell them having different ideas makes them dangerous. It’s the fairy with the lesbian flag wings at
the faire who creates and chooses family, sure, but it’s also the guy dressed
as a plague doctor; it’s the young black woman with a butterfly painted on her
face who felt safe enough to be silly; it’s the pasty white dude who’s a nerd
everywhere else but a master craftsman at the faire. The ren faire at its best feels like family
because we are all seeking people who love us enough not only to let us belong but
to pull with us, to follow each other’s paths and geek out about the things
that bring each other joy. Family is the
people doing the will of God together.
And
what is the will of God? To love the
Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul, and to love your neighbor as
yourself.
There
are two things that nearly every church says about itself: that it’s friendly, and that it’s family. I can tell you confidently that most churches
are only friendly to the folks who are already friends and that many
congregations are indeed family but mostly in the toxic sense of having
secrets, allegiances, and long-held grudges.
Dr. Black writes, “[A]ny household—including the church—can become so
riven that it caves in. Jesus’ own circle harbored his betrayal from the
beginning (3:19)…The trap ever before us is to define the kingdom’s boundaries
and expect God to abide by our beliefs.”[4] When Jesus tells the crowd that His family is
whoever does God’s will, it’s not because Jesus is having some sort of
adolescent rebellion phase. He loves His
family, but His family does not love Who He’s becoming and how His life is too
big for the gossip trains of Nazareth or the closed power tracks of the
Jerusalem scribes. When we tell people
they must fit in this box and only this box, we are not being family; when we
tell God that we’ll accept these people but never those, we are not being
family. Whoever does the will of God—whoever
loves the neighbor as much as themself, whoever loves the God Who calls us to
grow and change and protect and learn, whoever recognizes the image of the
Divine in the other, they’re family. Is
that the man in the kilt, or the woman in the jingling hip skirt, or the irksomely
loud person in the plate armor? Sure, and
we don’t get to choose which one.
Is
that the homeless man who wants to sleep on the church benches, or the Republican
who never seems to take a hint, or the Democrat who is obnoxiously arrogant, or
the sex worker under the bridge? Sure, and
we don’t get to choose which one. Do we,
as the Church, ever get to say “you can’t be in the family” and accept only the
family with which we’re comfortable or familiar? Not if they’re doing the will of God. Dr. Black continues, “As a child I sang, ‘Lord,
I want to be like Jesus in my heart.’…I meant it then. I mean it now. And yet I
know, perhaps knew even then, that in my heart there’s a hardness that really
wants Jesus to be like me.”[5]
“Then
he went home,” Mark tells us before showing us how it wasn’t home at all anymore
for Jesus. “Whoever does the will of God
is my brother and sister and mother.” The
concept of chosen family means the people who become yours when your biological
family can’t or won’t be, but the absolutely awful and marvelous thing about
this faith is that “chosen” is a very relative term. God chooses us, every day, every minute, but
sometimes God also chooses people we absolutely would not and says welcome
to the family reunion, there will be hot dogs and awkward conversations and
possibly Jello salad. We are God’s
chosen family, and the family into which we’re brought is every bit as chaotic
as a ren faire, as the Church, as a packed room in Nazareth where the disciples
just wanted to eat.
So how is
the family reunion going, church? How
are you folding into, fighting with, and loving the family that chooses God
with you? Would it help if you were
wearing a plague doctor mask?
May
God’s love help you deal with the sibling squabbles, and may all of us
recognize the gift of family being so wide and diverse that none of us restrain
the others from being all that God calls us to be. Amen.
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