Family
This is the sermon I preached on 6/9/24 at St. Timothy Lutheran Church. The gospel text was Mark 3:20-35.
Have you ever felt like an outsider? You are with a group of people who may be friends, classmates or co-workers, or even family. You just don’t feel like you fit in. Furthermore, you’re different; on the outside.
I have often felt like that. My nuclear family was more dysfunctional than my friends’. Both my parents were alcoholics. My home life was different from that of my peers. There were only a couple of close friendships that developed during my early years. I was longing for a family.
I found family in Jesus and his church. Over the years, it is those relationships that supported me through the ups and downs of life. In Christ, I had found a family that loved and accepted me just as I am.
Jesus struggled as well with being an outsider. In today’s gospel, he experienced family opposition as well as religious opposition from the scribes. Finally, Jesus explains who his real family is.
We’re likely familiar with the phrase “sandwich generation,” referring to those who still have living parents to care for as well as children. That puts us right in the middle, which can be a precarious place, having pressure and responsibilities all around us. It reminds me of a song from the early '70s whose refrain is:
Clowns to the left of me,
Jokers to the right, here I am,
Stuck in the middle with you.
We can look at Mark's writing in a similar fashion. Instead of clowns and jokers being on the right and left, it's family and real family, with Jesus stuck in the middle with the scribes. This is typical of Mark's writing-it starts out with one story, which in this case is his family's concern about his actions and what that might mean regarding his mental health. Before the story is completed, something else is talked about. Here it is the scribes accusing Jesus of being in league with the devil. Then the other part of the sandwich is back to Jesus' nuclear family and what family looks like for followers of Jesus. The bread part of the sandwich goes together thematically, then the filling is seemingly unrelated--hence, the Markan Sandwich.
Everyone seeks to have control of Jesus. His nuclear family wants him to leave the crowd and to regain his composure.
The scribes from Jerusalem declare that He has a demon and casts out demons by the prince of demons. They want him to be their preconceived idea of the Messiah.
The problem is, you cannot put Jesus in a box (or in the middle of a sandwich) because he will break out of the box of our preconceived ideas about what the Son of God should be and do.
Then we go back to family pressure and Jesus' declaration about who really is Jesus' family.
Another way to look at these groups of people are as insiders and outsiders. Those you would expect to be insiders; Jesus’ family and the scribes, are the outsiders, literally. While those dining inside with Jesus are the true insiders: the disciples and the riffraff. Jesus turns the paradigm of his time on its head, declaring these to be his family. He is so good at turning everything upside down!
Where are we in all of this? It depends. Are we going to force our ideas on God concerning the way God should act and interact with people? Are we going to accuse anyone and anything that doesn't fit our paradigm of God, to be from the devil? Or are we going to be among those in the family of God with Jesus as our brother? Jesus said, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (v. 35).
Don’t we want others to experience this family as well? Spend time with friends and neighbors. Welcome those who are different, who would not normally be invited into the life of a family—those who struggle with mental illness and addictions. I’m not saying they have to live with us, but we can still welcome them as Jesus did. Why not invite people to our first movie night this Friday? Thank God for the inclusiveness of Jesus then and now, for this spiritual family that is ours forever.
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