Christmas is a special time to reconnect and recommit as a
family. Three Saturdays before Christmas, all five of my brothers and sisters
got together for lunch instead of dinner last year. As we have aged, driving after dark has become problematic for some of us. Happily, we stopped the stressful
gift-giving years ago. We have been getting together like that for many years.
As a single person with no family of my own, it is one of my ways of connecting to a
sense of family. Like always, we have a great time laughing and talking and
telling the same old stories from growing up years. We do have one very
strict rule - absolutely no mention of politics! That would be like striking a match over a gas tank!
Several of my siblings pointed out how lucky we are just to
be able to get together. Some families we know cannot even gather together
because of divorces, hard feelings and old grudges. If they do get
together, the getting together atmosphere is tense, strained and
uncomfortable.
As a person who is still a
member of a family of five siblings,
I pay attention to families. I take notice. The thing that I see most is that
having a family brings both joy and pain. Those who attempt it have my deepest
admiration. Not having a family of my own, I realize that I miss out on both
its joys and its pains.
A couple of times, as I
have flipped though the channels, I have been compelled to stop and watch one
of those live birth experiences that you see once in a while. I am not ashamed
to admit that I usually get choked up and watery-eyed when I watch new parents
at the moment of birth of their children. While I am proud that it can move me
so much, I am very aware that what those new parents are experiencing is a
thousand times more intense. It is a joy that I will never experience.
Not all families are
"happy" families! A few years ago, about 10:00 at night I realized
that I had not eaten supper. The closest fast-food restaurant to my house was a
White Castle about five or six blocks away. What can I say? I was desperate! I
ordered three cheeseburgers and a diet coke and sat down to watch a fascinating
show that only happens late at night in a White Castle. No sooner than I
sat down than a distressed young mother with a toddler came in and asked the
women behind the counter to call the police. Her “boyfriend” had locked them
out of the car and was threatening them in the parking lot. She paced back and
forth, one minute trying to appease her whining child who needed to go to bed
and the other minute peeking out the window to see if her boyfriend was still
out there. Sadly, like many abused women are wont to do, she went back to him
before the police got there. A few minutes later, a wild-looking young woman,
probably bi-polar, came in and ordered some cheese fries and ate them standing
in the middle of the floor, spilling some of them and stepping on them, while
muttering to herself. Before she finished, an older woman, her distressed
mother, came in telling her that she had been combing the neighborhood looking
for her to take her home. Her mother apologized to all of us and finally coaxed
her daughter into the car and left. As I left that night, I realized once again
how many things some families have to deal with. Anyone who is trying to hold a
family together these days has my deepest admiration.
Today’s readings are about
“family life:” the creation and union of man and woman, the tragedy of divorce
and welcoming children! Preaching about those topics today are not the easiest
things to preach about. In a world where family life is a painful
experience for so many, I have always shied away from those romanticized and
idealized sermons that I grew up with. They certainly did not describe my experience.
Because my family was not at all like the “Holy Family” our nuns and priest
talked about, I always left church feeling defective as a family. My religion
teachers of the past were so driven to hold up the “holy family” as a model for
all families that they may have read about in the bible. They were obviously
reading those stories about the “holy family” with rose colored glasses because
they ended up with a religious version of a 1950s TV family. Because their
reading of the stories was so idealized, by the 1960’s, people began to reject
that brand of piety, and even laugh at it, as totally unrealistic and
impossible.
A few years ago, I came to
realize that maybe the real “holy family” is more like today’s
families than we have traditionally become accustomed to think. The facts
show that the “holy family” was not that sugary little family that we use to
hear about growing up!
We only have a few stories
about Jesus’ childhood and the family from Nazareth, and none of them would be
what you would call "nice and sweet."
(1) The family started out
with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Mary and Joseph were engaged, but not
yet married when Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit. Joseph came within a
hair of divorcing Mary, but backed off because of a message from God in a
dream. (2) When it came time for Jesus to be born, Mary and Joseph were called
out of town for a census. Away from home, Mary and Joseph end up having to
deliver their baby in a barn, right there in a donkey stall. (3) No sooner that
their baby was born, a maniac king tried his best to kill all the Jewish
children he could get his hands on. To protect Jesus from that fate, Mary and
Joseph crossed the border, becoming refugees in a foreign country, until the
coast was clear to come back home. (4) When Mary and Joseph presented Jesus in
the temple for his circumcision, they were so poor that they had to make an
offering to the temple of two common pigeons, instead of the traditional, more
expensive, doves. (5) When Jesus was twelve years old, he got lost on a trip to
the big city, Jerusalem. His panic-stricken parents spent a few hellish days
till they finally found him. (6) On one occasion, hearing some of the things he
was preaching, his family came to do an intervention on him because they really
thought he had lost his mind. (7) A symbol of all sorrowing mothers, Mary
finally had to witness her son, stripped and beaten, being executed as a common
criminal.
No, this holy family was
no “goody-two shoes” family that I had idealized for me as a child. This family
had problems, big problems, but they managed to remain faithful to each other
and to God through it all. I think this family has a better chance of being a
model if we simply accept the fact that they were like us in so many
ways.
Today’s readings offer an
opportunity to say a few words about family life. The problems are easy to
list, the solutions are not so easy to come by. The most obvious fact facing us
is that families have changed. There is no use pretending they haven’t or
wishing they hadn’t. They have! Instead of pretending or wishing, we need to
develop new ways to help and support modern families, including single parent
families, blended families, adoptive families and the many other new varieties
of families that exist today.
Families and couples
cannot take anything for granted. The forces against family life are hard at
work. Families must be intentional about being a family if they have any hope at
all to work against the forces that are trying to pull them apart. To let
things slide in marriages or families is to invite disaster. Families need all
the support the community and church can give, not judgment and condemnation.
You certainly have my support! I don’t know how you do it!
The Scriptures give us an
impressive list of “family values,” values that can guide and strengthen even
our modern families in all of their marvelous varieties: honoring your father
and mother, taking care of them in their old age, offering heartfelt
compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, obedience, patience, forgiveness,
peace, thankfulness and love, just to name a few of the “family values” listed
in Scripture. Family is not something that we can take for granted these days.
It is something that must be wanted and worked for. Whatever family you have
been given or whatever substitute family you have pieced together, may the Holy
Family bless you abundantly today! I am here to support you where I can!
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