Restoring Family Values
Plato reportedly said, “One ought to marry at all
costs for if it proves to be a happy relationship one will experience bliss and
heavenly delight. If it proves to be an unhappy relationship, one may then become
a philosopher, and experience the joys of the mind.” From Plato’s point of
view, I’ve beaten the system. Not only have I been able to experience the joys
of philosophy, joys I have helped many of you experience too, I have also
experienced the “bliss and heavenly delight” that comes from a long and happy
marriage, even one blessed not with children but only a couple infamous
cats. Compared to that, even the joys
of the mind pale. In family life we are graced with what the old Anglican
prayer book calls “mutual society, help and comfort.”
Who can be against the
family? Generations of accumulated
human wisdom and sheer common sense speak for it. Your parents, siblings, children at times drive you crazy yet
home remains a wellspring of enduring happiness, safety and acceptance, as
Robert Frost said, the place where they have to let you in. Making a good
marriage and a loving home is a major and worthy goal in almost everyone’s
life. The multiply divorced don’t often give up on the thing; they just keep
trying, hoping that this time it will last. Even those who have had
horrendous experiences growing up in dysfunctional families almost always want
to start their own. It’s hard to imagine anything more widely agreed on than
that the family is a good thing.
Yet, as we know, the family has come upon hard times.
Things are a mess: high rates of divorce, amounting to serial polygamy in some
parts of the country, broken homes, child abuse, domestic violence, children
growing up without fathers, many children born unwanted or born to women not
ready to care for them, many pregnancies aborted, parents more concerned about
their own wants than their children’s’ needs…Trouble in the family as a social
institution has well known effects on society at large: poverty, crime and
misery. The present unhappy state and
uncertain future of the family should be a cause of concern for everyone.
In a way it is no surprise that, beginning about
twenty years ago, this became something many Christians felt called to do
something about. Thus were born organizations like Focus on the Family, The
Family Policy Research Council, The Moral Majority, Promise
Keepers, and many other groups dedicated, directly or indirectly, to
promoting what became known as “family values.” Whatever their success in
reversing the trends in society at large, this movement has had a significant
impact on the Christian community.
Taking a stand on behalf of “family values” has come to occupy center
stage on the agendas of thousands of Christian churches, and for millions of
individual Christians being on the right side of “family values” issues has
become a crucial aspect of the active expression of their faith. At the same
time, the scope of family values has broadened to include a whole cluster of
interconnected beliefs and attitudes, some only remotely connected to the core
issues of the breakdown of the traditional American family. Opposition to abortion, to single parent
families, to equality for homosexuals, to cloning, fetal tissue and stem cell
research, euthanasia, and even to the teaching of Big Bang cosmology or
evolutionary biology, as well as resistance to changes in the traditional,
subordinate role of women… these have come to characterize a large number of
Christians. Indeed, these have for many, both Christians and non-Christians,
become identified as the most important things that Christians believe,
surely the most important things that conservative, fundamentalist or
evangelical Christians believe.
Intentionally or not, we Christians often present ourselves to the world
first and foremost as bearing the message of family values.
So, what should we make of this movement? There are various ways to approach it. We
could, with world enough and time, ponder each of the issues and stances on
them that make up the package of family values so dear to so many of our
brothers and sisters in Christ. Each in its own right is a complicated moral,
political and social issue; each deserves sustained analysis and sober, careful
judgment. About each we can ask: what makes sense in light of the Gospel? My own view is that on some of these matters
the defenders of family values are clearly right, while on others they are
drastically mistaken. But my concern
now is not with the particular beliefs and attitudes they espouse, but with the
underlying assumption that the defense of the traditional family is something
it makes sense for Christians take up as their cause. Let me share some grounds
for being skeptical about that assumption.
First, there’s Jesus. He’s important. Yet I have a
hard time seeing Jesus as being an enthusiastic supporter of family values. As
we read the Gospels, it’s abundantly clear that Jesus says and does a lot of
things that undermined the traditional family of his day. In the lectionary text from Matthew 4 that
many of you heard in church yesterday Jesus calls James and his brother John
who leave their father Zebedee in the fishing boat and take off with Jesus;
this was for first century Jews an outrageous sign of disrespect and disregard
for their family. In another passage we hear Jesus advising a young man who
wants to become his disciple not to go home to serve, care for and ultimately
bury his father – a supreme moral obligation
-- but instead to “let the dead bury the dead.” Another time he
tells a rich young man that he should sell all he has and give the proceeds
not, as tradition dictates, to his family, but to the poor. Then there’s what
Jesus said about divorce: today some readers fix on this to find a Jesus coming
out in defense of family values, but that tears his words out of their context.
To men for whom traditional family values include the husband’s absolute right
to treat his wife as his sexual property and to divorce her at will, Jesus says
that if they do that they are adulterers. In saying this, Jesus is declaring
the wife the equal of her husband in the marriage relation and attacking their
family values at the root. For them the essence of the family is its being a
hierarchy with fathers and husbands over women and children. Note the
disciples’ indignant reaction as recorded in Matthew 19: “If such is the
case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry!” On another occasion, facing an angry crowd
about to stone a woman caught committing adultery, Jesus says “Let he who is
without sin cast the first stone,” effectively removing his society’s
principal way of imposing sanctions on those who threaten the integrity of the
family. This Jesus asks, “Who is my
mother and my brothers?” His model of the human being who can enter the
kingdom of God is not the patriarch of the family, steeped in the Law and rich
in good deeds; to enter the kingdom of God one most become as a little child.
He turns the family value system upside down. Beyond Jesus’ words consider what
he does: he goes around the countryside with a group of persons out of
place in society, disreputable, disconnected from their proper roles as sons
and daughters, brothers and sisters, husband and wives. And what he doesn’t
do: discharge his most basic obligation to augment the wealth and honor of his
own extended family by taking a wife and producing children of his own. Almost everything about Jesus is, in his
first century context, anti-family.
Back then anyone devoted to family values would have seen Jesus as a
menace.
There is a possible response to this: Jesus shows at
best indifference, and probably hostility, to the family of his day because, as
ancient and traditional as it was, and God-given as it seemed to them,
it was not in fact what God intends the family to be. But today
followers of Jesus should take up the family values cause because now
what is for us the traditional family
-- an institution very different from what the family was in Jesus’ day
– is close to what God intends.
I wouldn’t entirely discount the idea that the modern nuclear family is
better for the individual human beings that God loves than the hierarchical,
patriarchal family that Jesus treated so badly, though I think that’s a long
way from seeing our present day institution as being fully approved by God.
But even if somehow we knew the way of life
defended by today’s advocates of family values was decisively best for human
beings, needing not to be criticized and changed at all but only defended as
what God intends, I’d still be pretty skeptical about the family values
movement.
One of the biggest influences on me over the years
has been the French Reformed thinker Jacques Ellul. In one of his many
remarkable books called The Subversion of Christianity, Ellul argues
that times in history when society is in moral decline, wickedness runs
unchecked, and chaos is everywhere, the Christian faith is most at risk. For it
is precisely those times that Christians are most tempted to offer the world
something else, something other than the good news of God’s grace in
Jesus. Times of decadence and moral disorder cry out for us to do
something to get people to behave themselves. When we see people’s lives
disintegrating all around us because they’re not living the way God intends
human beings to live, it is terrifically tempting to exchange the gospel for
some other message that seems more important, more relevant, more efficacious,
surely safer than announcing that God loves people unconditionally. Tell
them that and who knows how bad they’ll get! Few of us at any
time are comfortable telling people that God loves and accepts them just as
they are, that salvation is not a matter of being good, that human goodness and
badness are simply irrelevant to our being accepted by God. When people
are behaving in destructive, foolish, dangerous, and plain wicked ways it’s
even harder to proclaim the good news. Instead, we are ready to abandon the
gospel in favor of something that makes more sense, to give in to the natural,
powerful inclination to re-invent the Christian faith as one more religion of
social control and appeasing God through good works. History shows that we are
always, and especially in ages of moral disarray, likely to give up on the
foolishness of God in favor of the wisdom of man, and to set ourselves up in
God's name as guardians of good morals, of respectability and decency. The Church of the scandalous good news
becomes the scolding guardian of morality and indeed of all things conservative
and conventional. Doing something useful about sin seems more urgent than
trusting in the power of the God who died a crucified felon to save
sinners.
My take on the family values movement is that it
might be just that kind of well-intentioned rejection of the gospel in favor of
moralism. Strong families, sexual self control, personal responsibility,
unselfish care for children…these are all good things but, like all good
things, they can take the place of the one thing necessary, the one word we are
utterly bound in love and gratitude to speak: the good news that God was in
Christ reconciling the world to himself.
What I’ve said so far might sound pretty negative, but
I want to end with something positive. The earliest followers of Jesus formed a
community that saw itself as in important ways replacing the families of the
ancient world. They ate meals together and held property in common, both in
that time signs of being family. They called one another “brother” and “sister”
and, like Jesus, they came to know God not only as Creator and Ruler of the
universe, but as Father. A
vision of the Church as a family is one I think we need to recapture. We have
come to have a very different idea: the idea of the Church as a club. Consider
the difference: to belong to a club, you have to follow the rules, you have to
pay your dues, you have to be worthy of acceptance. Being a member requires
having the right credentials. A club draws a line and carefully decides who’s a
member and who isn’t. Let me tell you two stories that show us thinking of the
Church as a club: several years ago in New York I knew an extremely thoughtful,
inquisitive student; he was intellectually faithful, asking a lot of hard
questions about his faith. One semester Richard started to attend a certain
church. In conversation he happened to say to someone there that he did not
understand the Trinity. This got back to the consistory; they discussed his
failure to understand the Trinity and sent a representative to inform him that
this was O.K. for now, but if he didn’t understand the Trinity in, say, six
weeks, he would no longer be welcome at that church. To be a member there you
had to understand the Trinity. It was no surprise that Richard did not bother
waiting the six weeks but parted ways with that church immediately. That’s -- I hope – an extreme case. But it
illustrates the very common idea that the church is a kind of club for those
who believe the right things, in the right way, for the right reasons.
My second story is really a summary of discussions
I’ve had several times in different places, including here at
Northwestern. It starts with me asking
someone how his church would respond if a gay person showed up and wanted to
join. He says that would be fine so long as the gay guy was celibate; “we hate
the sin but love the sinner.” I say, no, I’m talking about a gay guy who lives
with another gay guy in some sort of ongoing, committed relationship. Oh, he
says, then he wouldn’t be allowed to join our church. Why not? I ask. Because
that person is sinning; homosexual actions are sins. So I say, I see, your
church doesn’t allow any sinners among its members… No, he says; that’s
not it. We are all sinners. But if he were living like that it would show that
he’s sinning but not acknowledging what he’s doing as sin. That’s what
would keep him out. So I say: So at your church sin is allowed but there’s no disagreement
allowed about what is and what isn’t sinful?
Well, no, it’s not that, he says. At this point I figure I’ve probably
annoyed this student enough for one day and change the subject. Whatever you
think about the particular question in this example, consider how easy it is to
buy the idea that the Church is a kind of club with membership restricted to
those who are willing to accept a certain way of life. Those who don’t endorse
that standard of behavior are not allowed to join, no matter what they think
and feel about Jesus.
Contrast a club with a family. Being a member of a
family has nothing to do with your credentials. It’s not about having the right
beliefs or acting the way you ought to act. Membership does not depend on
having your dues paid up, or following the rules. How you treat other members,
as well as how you treat yourself, might be pretty important to the other
members, but that has nothing to do with whether or not you’re a member of the
family. It’s a matter of birth.
Or it’s a matter of adoption. Even if in the extreme they disown you,
that’s just a legal thing; nothing changes the fact that you are a child of
that family. That’s how I think it
ought to be with our Church. To me, nothing else, especially not the club idea,
makes sense in light of the good news of Jesus. The family value I’d like to
see restored is the idea of the Church as like a family. God’s family; he adopts you into it, give
you new birth into it with no more attention to your worthiness than your
parents paid when you were born into their family. It’s human nature always to be looking for a reason to exclude
someone. It’s one of the main ways we assure ourselves that we’re doing OK;
we’re on the inside, not like those outsiders, those people who don’t have the
right beliefs, who don’t have the right way of life. That motivation is always
with us: we are, after all, sinners: we want to justify ourselves rather than
trusting in God’s way of justifying us.
But to be the Church of Jesus demands that we be ready to let anyone in,
just because they are for some reason drawn to hear about Jesus, no matter what
they believe, no matter their way of life. A Church like that would probably
look different from a lot of our churches. The unwashed, the unwanted, the
morally unacceptable, the suspect, the confused, the doubters, the outright
skeptics…who knows who would fill the pews?
We’d be putting up with people we might not like very much, people very
different from us. It would not be a group of people who believe, think and act
the same way. Its center would be loyalty to the gospel of God's
no-strings-attached love, not being right and in the right. There would be big
disagreements about big things with nothing but a shared, flying-in-the-face
of-reason-and-common-sense kind of love to hold everyone together. It would be
as wonderful and crazy as your family, maybe even as mine. That’s the family value I wish
captivated the hearts and minds of Christians today.
Amen.
Donald
Wacome
Christ
Chapel
Northwestern
College
28
January 2002
German Gold
The Old Man and a Child