Who Is My Family?

Wendy Wright

 Wendy Wright in addition to giving a keynote also gave the sermon in the closing service at Stone Church. It was inspiring to those who listened and so it is included here.

This passage of scripture has been lifted up this morning as key to the developing vision of home and family ministries in the Community of Christ. We have referred to it again in the worship service: “…Your people shall be my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16 NRSV).

I would like to offer one verse from scripture that can be a good counterpoint to this Ruth scripture: “Come to me and learn from me for I am gentle and humble of heart” (Matthew 11:29).

Come to me and learn from me, learn from my heart.

The topic today is this: Who is my family? It is like the question put to a Jewish teacher: Who is my neighbor? Jesus responded to this question with the story of the Good Samaritan. The people didn’t expect Jesus to answer this way.

What if we were to ask Jesus, that same teacher, “Who is my family?” Put another way, who is it that is to claim my love? Don Compier, dean of the Community of Christ Seminary, reminded us yesterday that the scripture itself does not really provide us with a blueprint for the family. Certainly what Americans think of as the nuclear family is not reflected at all in the scriptural witness. In fact Jesus is often depicted as challenging what was the normative kinship system of his day. Just reflect on his saying, my sister, my brothers, my mother, my kin are those who do the will of God, who love God and do the will of God. So we can not really look to scripture for a blueprint, nor a formula, nor a how to, nor a prescription for the forms of family that we discover today.

How then do we ask who is my family, who is it that claims my love? Who is it that I am to give my love to? And how do we approach this teacher Jesus for the lesson that he is to teach us?

So I return us to that Matthew passage, “Come to me and learn from me,” he is quoted as saying, “for I am gentle and humble of heart.”

I am reminded by that scripture passage of a favorite old time hymn written by a Missourian, Cleland Boyd Chaffee, in 1910. It’s the hymn, “Near to the Heart of God,” and maybe you remember at least the first two or at least the first full line from that hymn:

There is a place of quiet rest near to the heart of God.
Repeat: There is a place of quiet rest near to the heart of God.

I want to place us there, leaning on the breast of Jesus, coming to the scripture as the beloved disciple. I do not know if you know this but that idea of resting near the heart of God is a very old one in the Christian tradition and it becomes important particularly with the great church father Origen. Origen looked to the story of the last supper where John, the Beloved Disciple, leans on the breast of Jesus. And he said that is the image of all of us as beloved disciples, and when we lean on the breast of Jesus, we become seekers of wisdom. We can listen to the very heart of God and learn from the deep heart of God by leaning on Jesus’ breast. The tradition also, expanding on that idea, says somehow we are leaning close to the heart of God as pray-ers, as followers, as disciples. The medieval tradition speaks of how we not only lean next to the heart of God, but we get so close that our heart is exchanged for the heart of Christ. We get so close that our heart begins to take on the qualities of the heart that we lean against. We learn that heart so well that it becomes our heart.

So to that quiet place resting on the heart of God, like a beloved disciple, that we are invited. We are invited to risk having our hearts shaped by the heart of Christ. In that quiet place what is it that we are taught? What is the wisdom of the heart of God? Or to put it another way, how does God love and then how do we love?  And whom does God love? And then who are we to love? Who is my family? Who claims my love? And I think maybe like the asker of the question, “Who is my neighbor?” we might be surprised as well.

First, as we lean next to the heart of God, I think we are taught that God’s heart loves in the particular. What do I mean by that? Really the central mystery of the Christian faith is the incarnation, the coming into flesh, the en-fleshment.. God comes to be with us. God becomes human. God loves us, not in a kind of generic, bland, spiritual way, floating above this globe in our lives. No. God comes to us in flesh. To paraphrase the poet, John Donne, in his poem, La Corona,

“Infinity [is] cloistered in a dear womb.”¹

Infinity is cloistered in a dear womb. God the unspeakable, the immensity of the divine life, comes to be with us in our lives in very real and fleshy ways. What this means for how we love, if we are somehow to take on the heart of God in our small ways, is that our hearts cannot be fixed on a generic ideal. In other words we can not just love in a kind of general way. We also have to encounter God and learn to love God in the specific people the specific persons, those with whom we share a home, those with whom we share a neighborhood, those with whom we share this fragile planet. To have a heart like God’s heart we must love specific people in all their idiosyncrasies. And I think you will agree with me that it is easier to love in a kind of general way. Oh, I love children, right? But specific children are more challenging to love, especially at specific moments of their darling lives.

We are called to practice and energetically engage love that mucks in the messiness of particular things, particular people, the faces that are right before us. This capacity to love, to see into what is often a very opaque, foggy kind of world in which we live, to love in the flesh, is a wisdom teaching. It is what we are called to do as disciples. It invites us not only to look closely at our relatives - we need to do that – and also the circle of persons we call friends to find the face of God.

In addition, I think of Jesus standing on the Mount and teaching us this: we are also called to try to see that face of God incarnated in those we call our enemies. We are called to perceive what is infinite in the finitude of the people we naturally love, the people we have things in common with, the people we like, the people we have to get along with because they are our co-workers or whatever. But we are also asked to love those we do not like and to love those who are not like us. And to love those who are really our enemies. This requires a capacity to pierce through stereotypes and appearances, to try to find the core of goodness that lingers in all human beings.

The wonderful hymn we just sang, “Brothers and Sisters of Mine,” called us really to experience God’s image found in all human persons. And I am not suggesting that this is a simple thing to do. But nevertheless that we live in that hope, that somehow the goodness, the Godness, as buried as it is, as distorted as it is, as wounded as it is, as covered over as it is, as hard as it is for us to even to experience it ourselves, can be found in seeking the beloved community in which even our enemies become friends with whom we are reconciled.

Particular. We are called to particular kinds of loving in our families, with those difficult in-laws, with those difficult community members, with those difficult persons with whom we share this nation and this planet with.

Our second wisdom lesson, as we lean near the heart of God is that God’s heart is the center where all the paradoxes of reality are held in tension. What do I mean by that? Christianity in all of its forms is a tradition of paradox, a tradition that holds together all of these unreconcilable or irreconcilable things: three in one, fully God, fully human, life that is born from death. Maybe we just get too familiar with that. The Christian faith is about life born from death, an astonishing thought.

The heart of God is really the place where all those paradoxes converge. It’s the place where all of this is held in tension. There is this incredible tension of holding opposites together. And if we look at God/Jesus, as he is revealed to us on the cross, that holding together of impossible tensions: human and divine, sin and grace, sorrow and joy, welcome and rejection. This is the paradoxical holding together that creates something new. It’s incredibly creative. God’s love does not constrict itself, God does not come to us in the flesh and then hold Godself back from all the human experience. God does not hold back but holds together all the paradoxes of created life and expands to give new life.

Part of the tradition of the heart in this Christian teaching is this wonderful metaphorical truth. When Jesus died on the cross, he didn’t die from the nails, or from the piercing, or from the collapse of his lungs, or from suffocation or anything like that. He died of a broken heart. He died of love for us. The heart was so full of the paradoxes of created life, of the irreconcilable tensions, which we can’t live with, that it burst. And in the bursting, it gave life, absolutely incredible fullness of life.

What this means for us, I think, in our little ways is that we too must have generous and spacious hearts, hearts that can hold in tension both our own truths and the truths that others perceive. If we are to have hearts like this, we must learn to live with the very searing paradoxes that burn off our narrow preconceptions, our self-protectiveness, and our need to control. We must be made and hollowed out enough to allow our hearts, to be at least a little bit like the heart of God, so that the Spirit of God can move freely enough and fluidly enough in and though and between us to make a passage for new life. So the heart of God is a place where we learn the wisdom of holding together the tensions in order for new life to be born.

A third lesson that I think comes from leaning close to the breast of God is found in the passage from Matthew. “Come to me and learn from me”, we are invited, “for I am gentle and humble of heart.” What does it mean that this heart is gentle and humble? I don’t think it means that this is a doormat heart or it’s a kind of wimpy, nice Jesus we’re listening to here. A gentle heart is not a weak heart but an infinitely strong heart because it has the power to disarm and to transform all that comes into it. It is gentle because it listens to the other and it invites the other into a dialogue and transforms through disarming rather than making conflict and enemies. It is a disarmed heart. There is nothing passive about true gentleness. It is intensely active. It wishes no harm to the other. It wishes only, and elicits only, the good. Nor is gentleness fragile. An image here helps me to understand gentleness. Gentleness can be likened to a young sapling. If there is a storm, a very strong, old tree may be quite rigid and a big storm will crack it open, will destroy it. But a young sapling bends in a storm and in the wind. It has the flexibility to negotiate difficulties. Gentleness is like that.

Humility is also part of this wisdom that we learn. Humility is not groveling around and saying I am the worst person in the world. Humility is the grasp, the holding together of two truths. The first truth is that we are created in the image and likeness of God, that we are inviting into the astonishing promises of God, that we in many ways hold divinity in our hand. And the other truth is that we are incredibly limited, we are wounded. We muck it up all the time. And each of us has our own way of mucking it up. We know that. And each of us, the older you get, become disabused of the notion that we are ever going to get it all together and never muck it up again. We’re constantly mucking it up. Humility is holding these two things in tension. A humble heart knows it is called by God, knows that it is blessed by God, knows it is a child of God, it is beloved. And it also knows how fragile, how incredibly broken, how incredibly partial we are and yet God works through our weakness.

Finally, as this heart is gentle and humble, we need to have hearts that are that way too. Humble hearts that know the gift and know our limitations. Gentle hearts that do not seek to use power over others but to empower by embracing, inviting and disarming others.

Finally, the heart upon which we lean teaches us that love involves creative suffering.  As you walk to the sanctuary of your wonderful temple you walk through the shadow of the cross. God’s heart is willing to take on suffering rather than to inflict it. This is a transformed suffering, however, which just does not suffer for its own sake but suffers for a larger vision, suffers like a woman giving birth suffers in order that new life might be born. We suffer as we learn to reconcile, as we practice the art of forgiveness, as we listen attentively, as we wait for God’s word not only to be heard by one of us but by many of us, and between us as well. We suffer creatively for a larger vision.

As beloved disciples when we lean on the heart of God in that quiet place and we ask who is my family and who claims my love and how do they claim it, we hear, “Take on my heart, love with my love, exchange your heart for mine. Love particular persons, your family, your friends, your enemies. Love with a spaciousness that can hold together all the paradoxes of your life. Refuse to collapse the tension in order that something really truly creative might be born. And love with gentleness. Love tenderly with mercy. Know your deep dignity and your limitations. Let God work through them.

And finally be willing to suffer for love and love’s flourishing. This is what it means to take on God’s heart, I believe, if we lean there and we listen in that quiet place. “Come to me, learn from me, take my yoke, take my heart. It’s yours. I enflesh it in you. Love as I do and who I do. Who do I love? Who is my family? And who is to claim your love? My children, each precious child of God that I love. These are your brothers, these are your sisters, these are your sons, your daughters, your mothers, your fathers. These are your family. Come to me and learn from me. Take on my heart.”

I would like to close by having us sing that lovely song once again: “There is a place of quiet rest near to the heart of God.”

May each of you find yourself embraced by God’s love in that quiet place.

Note

1. LA CORONA, Set by John Mitchell (1941-), op. 89 (1993). Texts by John Donne (1572-1631).