April 15 sermon - A New Family

It's likely going to be another week or two before I get the next sermon online, as I adjust to the new routine of having a baby in the house, but for now, here is the sermon from April 15, which I hadn't posted yet.

A New Family
Rockland Drive United Baptist Church
April 15, 2007

Redrawing Family Lines
Christians, generally, are champions of the family. Groups like Focus on the Family have simply become a built-in part of our worldview. We defend and fight for the success of the nuclear family: mom, dad, and kids.

Rightly so. The Bible has important statements in it about husbands and wives loving each other, and parents and children having proper relationships. It even compares the love of husband for wife to the love of Christ for his church.

But we look around us and see that many, maybe most, families don’t fit this picture. We see many families made up of “yours, mine, and ours,” as some people like to describe it. Sometimes we even see Christians lamenting the existence of these blended families, seeing them as proof of the breakdown of something pure, something God-ordained, found in the traditional family.

I’d like to suggest that in the blended family we see a wonderful parable of God’s grace. After the resurrection of Jesus, the Holy Spirit formed a new and very untraditional family out of the broken pieces of a world separated from God by sin and now brought together by the death and resurrection of Jesus.

We’ll be starting a short series this morning on the early church. For the next few weeks we’ll be settling in to the continuation of Luke’s story of Jesus in the book of Acts, but today we will look back and see how in the lifetime of Jesus he was already redrawing family lines in terms of people who either followed him or didn’t, and placing a bigger priority on this new family than on the traditional one.

I hope this will help us be able to gain a proper perspective on our biological families as well as a vision for what the life of the church really ought to look like.

A Strange Family

The very popular Harry Potter books have at their heart an untraditional family redrawn along lines of shared concerns and causes rather than biological lines.

The story’s hero is an orphan whose parents died when he was a year old. At that age he was placed in the care of his aunt and uncle, who were to raise him as their own son. Things have not turned out as they were expected to, and by the age of eleven when it is time for Harry to go off to the boarding school where his parents had met, he is in a miserable family situation. His cousin is given every luxury imaginable while he is deprived. His uncle and aunt have failed, very deliberately, in their role as Harry’s family.

Once he goes off to school, however, Harry finds himself accepted, taken under the wing of various friends of his parents, virtually adopted by his best friend’s family, and cared for and protected by more people than he could ever have imagined. In the fifth book of the series, there is a scene that strikes me particularly strongly for its analogy with the community of Jesus. There at the kitchen table, a group of adults have a somewhat heated discussion about Harry, each one defending their opinion as “what is best for the boy.” They argue about what Harry should and shouldn’t be allowed to hear and be told about, and Harry becomes aware that he is in a very different family environment now than the one he has been raised in.

In this new community, there is acceptance, there is sharing, there are pure motives, and there is a sense of a new family having been assembled around new defining lines. In significant ways, it looks just like what the early Christian community looked like, where even the arguments are based around questions of what is best for the family based on their understanding of who they are as a people.

Jesus’ Family, a Community of the Spirit

In Mark 3, Jesus forces the issue head-on when his family comes looking for him. In verse 21 people have ridiculed him as being “out of his mind.” I imagine it’s possible that his mother and brothers are looking for him with a plan of talking some sense into him, calming him down about all this “kingdom of God is at hand” stuff. We read from other places in the New Testament that it wasn’t until later that his earthly family joined the group of his followers and became important figures in the early church. At this point they still seem to be stuck in unbelief. Perhaps even Mary is a little bit confused and a little bit cautious about the trouble Jesus might be heading towards. In any case, his family doesn’t appear to be on the same page as Jesus in the pursuit of God’s will.

With that background for this scene, we then hear Jesus’ revolutionary pronouncement. The people his family sent find him and tell him, “your mother and brothers are looking for you.” He at that moment breaks down the traditional definition of what a family is, saying as he looks around himself: “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:34-35).

Jesus made a number of statements throughout his ministry to the effect that the kingdom of God is more important than family ties and that the group of people who were in line with Jesus’ mission were to look at themselves as a new family. After Jesus’ death and resurrection, we see this view intensify in the rest of the New Testament.

There are little hints of it throughout. Paul spoke of Timothy’s work with him as if he were a son working alongside his father. In his letter to Titus, Paul speaks of the importance of older women being examples to the young women, “so that the word of God may not be discredited.” Our life as the community of Jesus’ followers is to work on a family model. It is a witness for the whole wide world!

One of the most important statements comes in Romans 8. There, while Paul makes his statement about the greatness of God’s plan of redemption for all creation now that Jesus is risen, he says: “For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.” or “within a large family,” another translation says. As the Spirit conforms us into Christlikeness we identify with Jesus as his brothers and sisters, a new family.

In the early days of the church as we read about it in Acts, we see what this looked like. In Acts 1 we see that the Christians were staying together in the same place. I picture it as a sort of headquarters, where they meet to discuss this new commission from Jesus, that “you shall be my witnesses” (Acts 1:8), as they wait for the promised Holy Spirit. In Acts 2 we see a beautiful picture of a blended family as they all come together, bringing the possessions they’ve previously held, and sharing them in order that none may go without. This new family includes all who believe in Jesus, and is a place where distinctions of race, class and gender just don’t matter anymore. They are all in it together. Over the next few weeks, we’ll look more specifically at some aspects of the earliest church.


The Place of the Traditional Family

So what is the place of the traditional family? Should Christian families be ripping themselves apart at the seams in the service of Jesus?

Of course not. All the emphasis we’ve placed on the importance of the family has not been wasted. The themes in the Old Testament of children honouring their parents (Exod. 20:12), of parents teaching children the ways of the LORD (Deut. 6:4-7), and even of comparing God’s relationship with his people to that between a husband and wife (Jer. 3:20, Hos. 1-2) are picked up in the New Testament as we’ve seen already.

All of these New Testament writings, however, are addressed to Christians, and show us how we are to look at our families in light of the love and faithfulness of God and our faithfulness to Jesus. In the truly Christian home – that is, truly Christ-following home – our success as a family is found as we serve the Lord. What this also means is that if our family is supposedly “Christian” but is coming between us and God’s kingdom and his family, we are on dangerous ground in putting our family first. When we look outside the community of believers, the family can still be a picture of what God is doing in the world, but it sometimes will have to be sacrificed in the service of Jesus.

Jesus makes some strong statements about commitment to him being of utmost importance: “I come to bring 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” (Luke 9:52-53).


The Challenge of the Church Family

But the challenge of this new family is ultimately a positive one. We can see what it is by looking at Jesus’ prayer in John 17. There we come to a secret place where we can hear the words Jesus prayed to his Father in his final hours before the crucifixion.

We often attach great significance to a person’s last words. They speak to us of what was on that person’s heart at a time when we would guess that only things of great significance would be thought of.

Think of a man’s last wishes. If someone you loved were dying and making a heartfelt request you would listen closely. If there were any way you could honour that request by helping to make it come true you would do so. I imagine we all feel that way. Why? Because at an important moment a loved one thought this request significant enough to ask for it.

In John 17 we see Jesus at prayer. He has spent a few years in ministry, gathering together a group of followers proclaiming the in-breaking kingdom of God in the world. Now he has a concern on his mind. His concern is for that group of followers he has assembled, that same group that he said in Mark 3 was his real family. Let’s listen to his words, concerning not just his disciples at that time, but even us:

I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.

Did you take note of that last part? If people are to believe that the Father sent Jesus, the unity of the family of believers is what will make it believable.

So if our unity is the thing that shows the world that the Father sent Jesus into the world, we must ask ourselves: How are we doing? Are we by our community making that claim believable to the world? Are we really the salt of the earth and the light of the world who bear witness to Jesus the Messiah, the hope of God’s people and of the whole world? Perhaps most personally, are we doing our part in honouring that request of Jesus to his Father? Are we doing our part to cooperate with that prayer?

Is our church a family where there is no suspicion? Where people take their responsibilities and roles in it seriously? You would not think yourself a responsible spouse or parent if you ignored your spouse or children all the time, never spending time getting to know them. Our family falls apart when we take that attitude towards it. Why should the church family be any different? Do we think Jesus was simply talking for fun during that prayer for his disciples? Or do we realize that our community is important to Jesus, and to his Father?

That is the challenge we are faced with when we think of our part in Jesus’ new family.