The Family
1988 (Year B), 28 August /
Pentecost 14
St Peter de Beauvoir Town
Maybe it’s providential, although I suspect just perverse, that at the end of the long summer holidays, when children have driven parents to distraction and children themselves are so bored and irritated with their parents that everybody is longing for the return to school, we find ourselves coming to church only to discover that the theme for today’s worship is the ‘Family’. Good heavens, one of the reasons that some of us have come to church today at all is to get away fom our family for an hour or so. It’s likely that you don’t want to think about them any more. If so you’re about to be disappointed.
You hardly need me to tell you that all families are fantastically different. Some have two parents, many one, others none at all. None function identically. Sometimes the children dictate what happens, in others the elderly relatives just about maintain control. One woman brings up children very differently from another. Men certainly do.
On the face of it might seem difficult to imagine why the family should ever provide a theme for worship. There’s so much disparity between our experiences that common strands appear almost impossible to identify, yet there are things which all families share. And one is that we’ve all got an idealised picture of family life. And that ideal is never our own. There are always other families who do things better than ours. They either inspire us or make us feel guilty. They either spend more time together than ours does, or seem more independent. They’re cleverer; more attractive; got more money so they can do more things; they don’t have children; they do have children. There are always things that we want and can see in other families. That’s one common theme. There is another. They’re all vehicles for revelations of God.
My guess would be that in the end we would all say that we would want our families to be places of creation. We would want them to be places where our needs were met; where we feel secure; where we can just be; where we can relax and be accepted for what we are. Sometimes all this falls into place and it seems so good. More often it’s all a matter of compromise because all families, like any of our relationships make demands on us; they take our time, sap our energy and use our finances. They want things at inconvenient times, when we’re asleep, when we’re already busy doing something else. One person wants to do something whilst another wants something quite different. They get ill. They irritate. They embarrass. They make us angry. They cause us to be anxious.
Yet God’s relationship with us and all creation, so the Bible says, can be compared to that of a father to his children. And it’s at this point we all get just a touch sentimental. Fathers, we think, are those who always provide for us. It’s their duty to do so. As it is their duty to protect us from things that may hurt us. They’re always kind, and above all always easily manipulated. And that’s the reality of many of our images of God. We forget that earthly fathers can also be angry, exasperated and wearied with us. We choose not to believe that our divine father could ever be that way with us.
Now there may be some here who feel irritated and isolated by all this talk of family. Those who have none. Those who have but wish they hadn’t. And lest those without sisters, brothers, children or parents feel that the theme of the family has nothing to do with them and so can afford to ignore it, let me disabuse you of that thought right now. From the readings this morning it’s clear that we’re not just to think of our family as those with blood ties. The man was knocked up in the middle of the night not by a member of his ‘family’ but by a ‘friend’ and he did it because he in turn had been visited by another ‘friend’.
God, creator of heaven and earth, has chosen to be first and foremost, a Father. And if it’s true that God is our father and we are his children, it has far reaching consequences for all of us. It means that at a very basic level we are in relationship one with another. Our friends become our family – even those we don’t like are our family. A family of brothers and sisters. And what we would want for our earthly brothers and sisters we are encouraged to seek for those with whom we are united in our heavenly Father.
Families speak to each other and they touch each other. In Latin, to bless is ‘benedicere’, which means literally, saying ‘good things’. Our divine father longs to say ‘good things’ to us. And he wants to say, with his touch and with his voice, good things of his children. He wants us to know the love we have searched for in such distorted ways has been, is, and always will be there for us. The Father wants to say to each any everyone of us, with his hands than his mouth: ‘You are my Beloved, on you my favour rests’. With those words we are welcomed into the heavenly family.
And in that family ‘the one asks always receives; the one who searches will always find; the one who knocks will always have the door opened to them’. Pray God, let it be on earth as it is in heaven. AMEN