Part of the Family - Mark 3:19b-22, 31-35


“This is my family.  I found it, all on my own.  Is little, and broken, but still good.  Ya.  Still good.”  If you watch the whole movie of Lilo and Stitch, you will question whether Stitch found the family or the family (Lilo and her sister) found stitch…
Families come together in all sorts of ways.  In some cases, it is the traditional—man and woman meet, get married, have children…and that cycle is repeated generation after generation; or man and woman meet, adopt children, and the family grows through additional birth or adoptions generation after generation. Like I said there are the traditional ways of thinking of family.  Many of us have those experiences—and then others of us have experiences where we feel alone.  Due to death or conflict or displacement we do not have anyone around us that blood or legal documents would define as family. 
However, families come together in other ways as well.  As I am typing this sermon, we are at Annual Conference and hearing of the Methodist Home for Children where stories are told of families formed by the foster care system—with children being able to say, I know who my true family is.  Sometimes it happens through communities that come together for a variety of reasons—I remember when Davey first started running cross country that the way that team formed around one another was less like sports teams I grew up with, but more like a family.  I’ve talked with folks whose workplace environment was such that coworkers became family—such as the daycare where I worked after graduating from Methodist.  In some cases it is like Lilo and Stitch, just getting thrown together, and then learning to love one another.
Then there’s this other family and how we become members of it. 
Jesus brings this to our attention this morning, and even how it passes or supplants those biological or legal families of which we have been a part.
In the Gospel of Matthew and Gospel of Luke we read the story that parallels our reading from Mark, but I chose Mark because I feel like Matthew and Luke might leave us scratching our heads.  If we just read those passages, it might leave us scratching our heads.  Jesus is at a house teaching, a large crowd has gathered, and then his mother and siblings show up at the house.  They tell someone to pass the word to Jesus that they are there and need to speak with him.  We might expect Jesus to excuse himself for a moment and go out and embrace his family and spend some time talking with them, as he had been traveling around in his ministry and there doesn’t seem to have been a connecting with them in the meantime.  However, that is not what we find when we read the story.  Jesus, surprisingly, dismisses their request—in fact He seems to dismiss His mother and siblings altogether.  Jesus tells the one who brought Him the message, look around you my friend, my brothers and sisters and mothers are those who do the will of the Father…look around you, my brothers and sisters and mother are not at the door, they are those who are surrounding me right here.
Why would Jesus dismiss his blood kin like that?  It is almost unbelievable to us—family is family, right?  This is the One who said He would not change one aspect of the Law, so how can He dishonor his mother by refusing her request to speak with Him?  Mark, in the verses preceding this, which I asked our liturgist to read, gives us a glimpse of what his reasoning might be.
Jesus had been traveling around preaching, teaching, and healing.  While there were many, revealed by the growing number of folks following him, who truly appreciated and believed in Jesus, there were also a fair number of folks who did not.  There were many in the community who heard Jesus and were labeling Him as crazy—love your enemies, turn the other cheek, sell all that you have and follow me, “yeah, right Jesus, we have to live in the real world not in your fantasy crazy world” was the response.  Religious leaders took and even harsher response—“He’s not crazy, he’s possessed...he’s in league with Satan.”
My brothers and sisters, Burlington is not really a small town—some of you may think it is, but you haven’t lived the places I have—but there are aspects of small town life that you may be familiar with, such as how quickly news spreads—so if folks in one part of a community start talking about something, before you can turn around, it is all over the community.  We can just picture how folks in one place started talking about Jesus as crazy and demon possessed and it traveled quickly through the region.  We may even wonder about how Mary, James, and the others learned of the rumors, possibly encountering whispers and those sympathetic or judgmental looks in the marketplace.  They may  have even heard folks criticizing Mary and Joseph—we know how people look at someone’s child and their actions, even if the child is an adult—saying, “have you heard about Mary and Joseph’s boy…if they were the parents they should have been, he wouldn’t be going around spouting all of this crazy talk.”  Perhaps Mary was thinking of the promises of who Jesus was to be that she had heard from Gabriel and was worried about how this tarnished reputation might prevent him of being all that he was supposed to be.  Whatever the case, we read from Mark the response of Jesus’ biological family: “When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.”
Maybe it was this very situation that prompted Jesus to offer the words that Matthew reports, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.  For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.  Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and however does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.  Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”[i]  Jesus’ biological family had come to call him to silence because they were more concerned about reputation, his and/or theirs, than they were about whether Jesus was doing what God had called him to do.  Jesus himself knew that living out the Will of God might cause friction within the family because it had done just that between himself and his own family.
While we may be familiar with the phrase blood is thicker than water, Jesus here declares that the waters of our baptism are greater than bloodlines…according to Jesus faith comes first, and it is those who live out this faith that are my true brothers and sisters….and anyone can be grafted into my family at any time, as long as they seek to sync their lives up with the Will of God.
My brothers and sisters, this morning we have celebrated as two new folks and eight others have confirmed or reaffirmed that commitment to being part of Christ’s family…of renouncing a focus on their selves and instead asserted that the Will of the Father is the priority of their lives.  We celebrate as we welcome newly those Jesus would call brother, sister, and mother—as they not only have not only become part of Christ’s family, but have become part of our family.  Their actions call us to examine where we might be in the family—because, while God never leaves us, there are times in all of our lives where, just like in biological families, we move away from the family, either relocating, or staying in place and becoming that fabled “black sheep of the family.”
Unfortunately, in many families when a person falls away from how the rest of the family thinks they should act, their families disconnect from them forever.  There is never an attempt at reconciliation or restoration, only separation. 
Thankfully with God, He is about restoration.  God is constantly seeking not only to bring new folks into His family, God is constantly seeking to restore former family members back into the family.  From the very beginning, when Adam and Eve chose to disconnect from being part of the family, God has been about restoring His family—whether it is providing for his children at the same time He puts them out of the Garden; or sending prophets in to offer words of correction and direction, as Nathan came to confront David after his indiscretion with Bathsheba; or Jesus eating with the tax-collectors, prostitutes, and other sinners—those that through their decisions had walked away from being part of the family of God, or Jesus’ post-resurrection appear to Paul.  Consider those who are of Jesus’ family history—Judah, who slept with what he was thought was a pagan temple prostitute, who in reality was his widowed daughter-in-law that he had wronged and again David who not only committed adultery, but initially tried to cover it up and then conspired to commit murder to end the life of Bathsheba’s husband.
In addition to restoration, we can be thankful that God has also been about inclusion.  From the beginning of His calling a family into existence with His call on Abraham, it has been about turning the world toward Himself that He might embrace them as family.  God has been about reaching out to those who have never been part of the family and bring them in.  In Jewish life, there were ways that foreigners living amongst them could be brought into the community, God ensured that folks among them could become part of the family.  Jesus first revealed himself as Messiah to the Samaritan woman at the well and brought healing to the Gerasene possessed by demons.  Again, consider those that are among Jesus’ lineage…Rahab the prostitute from Jericho or Ruth the Moabite.
Consistently God has welcomed into his family those who bring their lives in line with His Will and for those who are outside of His Will, He has constantly sought to woo them either into or back into His family.  We even see this in the life of Christ as on the cross we see his loving gaze upon his mother and the giving of responsibility for her care over to the disciple whom He loved and in the way in which Jesus’ brother James became an advocate for the faith to the point that He was stoned.
What does this mean for us?  It is good news…it is great news.  It means that God’s desire for us to be part of His family.  He has sought us to return to be part of His family since we walked away from it in the Garden.  He desires us enough that He sent His own Son to incorporate us into His family.  It means that if we have never been part of the family, He welcomes us in.  It means that we can never have walked to far away the He will not welcome us back.  He loves us too much to leave us out and has done everything to bring us in…let us surrender our will to His and enjoy life in our Father’s family.
In the Name of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen.



[i] Matthew 10:34-39

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