Sermons
30th December 2007 - First Sunday of Christmas
Today is celebrated in the RC church as a commemoration of the Holy family, the family of Jesus, and more particularly Mary, Joseph and Jesus. We only get glimpses of their lives together in the Bible, lots surrounding the birth, little vignettes like the flight to Egypt and Jesus being found in the temple by his parents when he was growing up, but not very much else until the last years of Jesus life, the years in which he himself comes into focus as a personality. Christmas can be the best of times for families, and it can be the worst of times. A good time perhaps to think of what our duties as Christians might be within the family.
And specifically Christian responsibility needs to be to teased out. Of course, people who are not Christians act responsibly, and ethical and principled action are by no means the preserve of the religious. Christians themselves do not always act responsibly and sometimes they act responsibly but not in response to their faith, they may act out of a need to conform, or a fear of being hurt, or a fear of being arrested, or more positively out of a desire to help. So where might lie the specifically Christian basis for what we might call our duty – or to put it another way and to quote…‘if you were arrested for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?’. Within family life about which actions can you say ‘I do that because I am a Christian’.
We are all members of families in one form or another – we all have parents whether alive or not, whether known or not, and we all have relations near or far, loved or avoided. There is a given-ness about relationship on arriving into the world, even where relationship is broken through death or estrangement or abandonment. One thing that ordained ministry teaches you is that there are very few ‘standard’ families; most family trees contain broken branches, unexpected fruit, and apparently dead wood, once you begin to hear about them. Perhaps a map is a better analogy than a tree, and family maps are like maps of country lanes criss-crossing the landscape following patterns of development long forgotten, some roads leading nowhere, others best left unexplored, not like those maps of American cities laid out in grids with clear intersections and numbers instead of names for roads. So to speak of Christian responsibility within the family is to talk of our duty of care both to those we consider to be our relations and those we would prefer were not.
Christians often turn to the Bible when they desire moral or ethical direction, and this is sometimes the best place to look. But when we turn to the life and teachings Jesus for guidance on this subject he seems at first sight to have left a rather troubling testimony. Certainly, we have the enduring relationship of Jesus with his mother, a theme that is strong in both the New Testament and in church history), but of Jesus’ relationship with his earthly father Joseph we hear little. Joseph is little more than a bemused bystander in the Bible. As for Jesus’ brothers, church tradition has removed them by one genealogical branch to protect the perpetual virginity of Mary, whilst there is no such distinction in the New Testament.
And what of Jesus’ sayings? He says, for example, ‘Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters…cannot be my disciple’, and he says ‘Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on, five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.’ And when told that his mother and brothers are waiting for him he says ‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’ And then pointing to his disciples…‘Here are my mother and my brothers, for whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother’.
These apparently brutal sayings and others like them point towards a deep theme that runs throughout the Biblical texts; that of the primacy of God. Jesus is fully immersed in this tradition and his harsh words seem to call people back when they get too earth-bound about the idea of family responsibility. To be his followers we must aim to follow his example and try to do the will of his father, being a Christian is not primarily about being nice to particular people, though we certainly should be nice to people. Being a Christian is about the primacy of God, about recognising our utter dependence on the God whom we say is fully revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The first great commandment is to love God, and if we keep this commandment our lives will be instinct with what follows on from love of God, love of our neighbour, of our families, as ourselves. Christianity is not a code of ethical principles and those who come to it in search of a rule for every part of their moral lives will be disappointed or (more dangerously) inventive, finding in the Bible whichever proscription they favour and discarding the ones that are uncomfortable for them. There are Christians who will tell you gay people are going to Hell, but most of the same Bible-reading Christians are untroubled about eating pork, or mixing two cloths in one garment, or only eating certain kinds of insects with four feet and jointed legs.
Christianity is really a sequence of revealed truths about the nature of God. So the difference between Christian ethical behaviour and other ethical behaviour is one of motive. Christian conscience is formed in response to acknowledging the first order matter of accepting the truth about God, from which flows the second order matter of looking after the transient lives of our fellow human beings, particularly those with whom we are mostly closely caught up.
We are people of the covenant, our ethical behaviour is a response to the covenant God has made with us, the proclamation of which is the cross, for on the cross we see God’s offering of himself to the world, the covenant is established in blood for all and just as there is a given-ness about entering into the world in relationship with others, so there is a given-ness about entering into the world under the covenant of the cross. God’s love for us precedes our awareness of it, it draws us from the womb, nurtures us during our brief lives, and calls us back towards its source on our death.
Our Christian responsibility to our families therefore is to respond to that ever-present love by accepting the Christian proclamation of the truth about God, only in this response will we show to those around us what it means to act responsibly as a Christian.