“Like Father, Like Son: God Help Us!”
In the interest of full
disclosure, as they say, I self-identify as a man. I am a father. I am a
grandfather. All that I say I say to myself as well as to others!
When the annual conference of clergy and
lay members of all of our United Methodist congregations in northern
California and Nevada gathers to meet for half a week of worship and
fellowship, business and respite, as we just did, we touch each other a lot!
It’s hard to imagine more greeting and hugging of one another, not once but
repeatedly. And then there’s the laying on of hands! We do it
for every preacher appointed to every church in each of the seven districts,
plus those who serve in “extension” ministries beyond the local church.
We do it for everyone who is newly ordained a clergy member of conference in
the order of deacon or elder.
And yesterday we did it in
a way we have not done before, and might hope not to do again. Our bishop asked
every person to stand who now has a family member serving in a dangerous
setting, especially as part of the U.S. military, and especially in Afghanistan
or Iraq. We surrounded each and laid hands on them. We prayed blessing and
comfort upon them, and protection and safe return upon their loved ones.
I thought back to Memorial Day.
Sierra Interfaith Action for Peace offered a vigil in front of the federal
building. It took two full hours to read the names of every one of the
more than 1600 U.S. military persons killed to that time in Iraq and to
plant a small flag in the ground for each. It took another two hours
to read the names and remove the flags and preserve them for another time.
One wonders how many fathers, how many potential fathers, as well as
mothers, there were among those named? How many might never really
have come to know their children? How many fathers are sorely wounded
in this and other wars of the world today? How many will be survivors
forever marked and damaged by war?
How many more generations
of all faiths and nations will we sacrifice in this way? To what real ends?
And what are we doing to stop, to change ourselves, to find other ways – to be
men? To be fathers? To be human? To be faithful? I also thought back to the
months just before our last war on Iraq began. February 15, 2003, ten million
people gathered in streets all over the world to say No to this war. Ten
million! Two weeks later 6000 prayer vigils for peace were held all around the
world. What is the disconnect here? Between what we say we want for each
other, especially our children, and what we do to each other?
The biblical sources of
patriarchy -- of male dominance, of assumptions that someone has to be “in
charge” -- the strong father-figure, tough-minded, making the hard decisions,
powerful, dominant, and in control – are obvious and irrefutable. “Might” seems
forever to be the only way we know to make “right.” The stories of Abraham,
Sarah, Hagar, in relation to one another and to their children, for instance,
could read as one long shock and embarrassment to us. Sarah feels compelled by
the system of patriarchy to offer her housemaid Hagar to bear a child for her,
as a surrogate mother, just so Abraham can be linked to a son to carry on the
patriarchal economics of the system – like father, like son – same business,
same legacy. To the third and the fourth generations.
Then Abraham feels
compelled by the system of patriarchy to offer his wife Sarah as a way of
protecting himself against a threatening king. He pretends his wife is his
sister! He invites the king to have his way with her. She is of no value to
Abraham unless and until she produces a son! And even after Isaac is born, a
miracle, to Abraham and Sarah in their old age, and after Hagar and her son with
Abraham, Ishmael, have been dismissed and run off and fend for themselves,
Abraham feels compelled by the system again (as Sarah is not even mentioned in
this part of the story) to offer up Isaac, this one on whom all their future
depends, in ritual sacrifice to God. Abraham hears God calling him to suspend
every other more human consideration to be strictly, blindly obedient to this
order. Fortunately, for Isaac and for the whole promise of many descendants,
God seems to change God’s mind and provides a ram in the bush instead.
Little wonder that Jesus
offers this challenge, this change, this alternative, this new way to see family
and children – from economic or even biological family of origin to what Gail
Ramshaw calls in our Words for Meditation “fictive family” -- family made up of
whomever is called and appointed together in any one instance of time and place
to be loyal before all else to the teaching, the living, the dying and living
again, of this Jesus whom we call Savior and Lord! Family among whom children,
over against much of the culture, are to find a very special and secure
place.
Jesus repeatedly lets the
children come to him. He points to them as our examples of how to go before God
as loving parent and to expect to be honored and cared for, nurtured and loved
in return. A major focus of annual conference was to continue and build upon
our Bishops’ Initiative on Children and Poverty. In recent months rallies were
held by United Methodists at the capitols both in Carson City and in Sacramento
to lift up the priority needs of children and families and to call for
legislation putting them first in real terms, with real dollars. We know what
that means to families in our own setting – not only to families fortunate
enough to make their way into IHN, but families still sleeping in vans and still
skipping from motel to motel one step ahead of eviction.
During times of “holy conversation” in
small groups with one another sitting at our tables during conference, each
of us was given the picture of a child from somewhere in the world. We
were asked to give each child a name – This is now “Makesha” to me, from
West Africa, or the West Indies – and to imagine a direct and personal
relationship to this child and to tell each child’s story, their hopes and
dreams, their gifts of life and of love, to us and to all the world, as we
carry their picture with us. We found it was not all that hard for us
to do. There is not all that much difference in children’s hopes and
dreams, their gifts of life and of love, anywhere in the world! If we
give ourselves chances really to know our own children, we are well on the
way to knowing all children. We were asked to write on the form of a
leaf a prayer for each child and to hang them all on a “tree of life” in our
assembly -- until at the closing worship each of us received a leaf back
with communion to bring to our congregations. We were asked to bring
“a copper mile” of pennies from our congregations. Turns out we
brought more than five miles! Some $4000 for the carrying on the
Bishops’ Initiative!
This gospel of Jesus is asking us, in
rather discomforting words and ways, on this Fathers Day and beyond, to
question some of our basic assumptions about what all may mean to be men, to
be fathers, to be families – not only of life but of faith together.
For in a sense we are born into one family, baptized into another. We
are called to live in a creative and life-giving tension between the two.
We are not to neglect or abandon the one, but we are to nurture and bear
with the other. Our hope is always to find balance of our two families
in such ways as we do not have to feel we are choosing between them.
But Jesus always wants us to grasp and to count the cost of discipleship,
the full challenge of being identified with him and following him in his
life and work – not only in our own lives, but in the life of the whole
world around us. We know what was done to him in response to his life and
work. If we are to carry on his life and his work, we cannot be
surprised at what is done to us as well.
Jesus wants us to have no illusions.
And that begins with giving up sentimental, romantic, idealistic illusions
about who and what family are and can be in the first place. We may
need to say this week, the acquittal of Michael Jackson does not acquit us.
Most of the violence against women and children takes place in our own homes
and families – not to mention what we have been awakening to recently as the
ways our churches and congregations have been complicit in attitudes and
even in actions against the safety and well-being of women and children,
among other persons of status.
We need to hear Bible
scholar Walter Wink say of such passages as this one from Matthew: “In the new
family of Jesus there are only children, no patriarchs: ‘call no one your father
on earth,’” Jesus puts it later in Matthew, “’for you have one father –
the one in heaven.’” Families must be protected, Wink goes on to say, but also
critiqued and challenged: “We never transcend the need for kinship [Many now
use the terms “kinship” and ”kindom” in place of “kingship” and “kingdom” to
show what a break Jesus makes with tradition!] . . . But the failure to
transcend the patriarchal kinship system is making democracy impossible in so
many parts of the world [including ours? The example we set? And impose on
others? Just asking.], because as families are structured, so is the state!”
[Repeat!] The goal is not the eradication of kinship ties, but their
transformation into a nonpatriarchal community of mutuality and love. As such,
families can become exemplary of the new family of Jesus.” How is it with our
new family of Jesus? How are we giving our life-and-love leader first place in
our lives?
Paul does not make it any easier for us
here. Being part of the family of Jesus, the family of baptism, will
cost us our life as we know it. To be baptized is to die with Christ
to all of our old ways –especially to those that are self-serving,
power-protecting, death-dealing, enemy-eliminating! So that we may be
born again, into what Paul calls “newness of life” – the third way – neither
fight, nor flight, but friendship, even family – beyond all violence, beyond
all war (and every last weapon of war – Did we see now the world spends one
trillion dollars a year on armaments? Weapons of death and
destruction? Every penny of that as General and President Eisenhower
would say, a theft from children in poverty!
And the United States, our nation, spends
as much of that as all other nations combined!). Surely, we can do
better!
Surely, Jesus points us to
a new way of our being human – like his way! For the power of love -- the power
of nonviolent organized love in action as justice and peace – is stronger to
heal and make whole than every last power of death to divide and conquer, to
detain and humiliate, to hurt and destroy. Let the family of Jesus say, Amen.
Rev. John J. Auer
