Choosing Family

Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

Isaiah 40:21-31, 1 Corinthians 9:16-23, Mark 1:29-39, Psalm 147:1-12, 21c

“And the whole city was gathered around the door.”

Imagine, for a moment, the whole city gathering around our door. Imagine our courtyard filled with the healthy, discussing the best place to get fresh greens; with the motivated vulnerable, hammering out a strategy to challenge local policies on acceptable uses of force by the police, scrawling ideas out on butcher paper; with kids from the local art school practicing on just a few too many electric guitars as they prepare for an upcoming talent show; with hospice patients from next door getting a breath of fresh air; with the gamers throwing dice over whatever role-playing game is the hot new trend; with the hungry family sharing soup leftover from last-night’s evening prayer; with folks recently released from prison trying hard to build new friendships; with artists sketching the scene; with the omnipresent bookworm who wants to be around people without actually talking to them (that was me by the way).

Which of these folks can you imagine as your family? Which of these folks just stretch your vision of family? Which are just too strange, uncomfortable, or “not our type of folk?” Really, be honest here, I am not going to ask you to say it out loud, I promise.

“The whole city gathered around our door.” 

Perhaps this vision excites you, energizes you. Perhaps it makes you want to make sure no one tramples the plants or knocks over the new bird bath. Perhaps you want to ask the bookworm about the book, or the gamers how to play. Perhaps you think our courtyard should be a haven of quiet prayer.

In this passage, Jesus needs solitude, silence, prayer. But he needs it so he can get up and go to the next town, and keep doing the thing that causes people to crowd at the door of his chosen family: healing, liberating.

“Chosen Family.” It is a phrase that right now is heard most often among the LGBTQ community. For many of us in this community, our family is chosen because our given family has rejected us. It remains difficult to be gay or lesbian, and I don’t know of a single queer friend of mine that has not experienced some level of painful family rejection. The stories of our trans siblings, and especially our trans siblings of color, are worse, much worse. Queer folk choose families because like all people in human history, we need a community with whom we can cooperate to live in this world. We need a family, and thank God we can sometimes choose that family when our own fails us.

Today, the phrase “chosen family” is often used by those whose lives simply do not reflect the heterosexual norm of male/female, masculine/feminine, husband/wife. Yet this contemporary language of chosen family is hardly new. David Brooks points out that the queer communities’ creation of kinship bonds that have more to do with need and affinity than biology is hardly new. What we think of as the nuclear family is the new kid on the block, and, as Brooks argues, it is a kid whose tumultuous adolescence has benefited mostly the wealthy, and wreaked havoc on those vulnerable in body, in ethnicity, in status. Unlike our current cultural ideal, Brooks notes that “for vast stretches of human history people lived in extended families consisting of not just people they were related to but people they chose to cooperate with.”

Family may be a group into which we are born, but in truth, it is those with whom we cooperate. 

This is, I think, what we see in this passage, and something Jesus makes quite explicit later in the gospel of Mark when he rhetorically asks, “who is my family?” and then answers, “those who do the will of God” (Mark 3:33,35). 

Here, we see it: 

Jesus, James, and John enter the house of Simon and Andrew to find that Simon’s mother-in-law is sick. This unnamed woman is, in all likelihood, the one who runs this household, ensuring that like all middle-eastern households, it is always ready to provide hospitality and welcome to the stranger, a stranger who, as Father Samuel reminded us last week, is also a guest. At this moment, it is quite possible that adequate hospitality has ground to a halt due to her illness. And so Jesus takes the time to heal this woman, who gets up and “diakoneos” them. 

I use that word intentionally. Our text says she gets up to “serve them.” And while I usually try to not make too many different points in a single sermon, I am too much of a feminist to pass this up. The Message bible reads “she was up fixing dinner for them.” The KJV says “she ministered.” The NIV says “she began to wait on them.” The word for what she does is used exactly three times in Mark. Once, in reference to Jesus who came not to be served but to serve (10:45), and later in reference to female disciples who followed, served, and came to Jerusalem with him (15:41). It is the word we use to describe an essential ordained ministry in our church, that of the deacon.

It may be that she indeed jumped up and fixed dinner. But in our culture, that is a loaded image, and given the general perspective on sex and sexuality reflected in some of the translations I mentioned, we should be cautious. We need to hold in tension both the androcentrism and misogyny of the scriptures, and our culture, with the liberation we are called to practice. On the one hand, ensuring that hospitality is fully offered is the honor and privilege of the senior female of the household; on the other hand, assuming such hospitality is solely the purview of women, and therefore a lesser gift or role, is flat-out misogyny. 

The fact is that there is nothing like eating together that both reveals a family for what it is. Think of how we prepare for big family gatherings. If our family is caring and loving, we look forward to the meal. If they are not, we prepare ourselves for a fight, or remind ourselves to bite our tongues. 

In the Christian church, we believe that eating together not only reveals who we are, a people who pray, give thanks, rejoice, and weep together, but that eating together also makes us who we are. This thing we do together every Sunday, this work we do, makes us who we are called to be: a people who through sharing, praying, grieving, celebrating, and eating become a chosen family at whose door the whole city wants to gather.

Truthfully, we are not always revealed to be a sharing, praying, grieving, celebrating people. Sometimes, we are better at eating one another than praying for one another. Just like our given families, our chosen family fails us. I am pretty sure that every person in this room feels disappointed, grumpy, or even flat out angry at another person in this room. 

This is why we have, embedded in our liturgy, a moment to ask for and receive forgiveness. The ancient practice of the Peace was actually a kiss, specifically, a kiss exchanged as a ritual bodily practice of recognizing that someone in this room might have something against you, of putting your gift down, that is, the gift meant to be used for the Eucharist, finding that person to ask for forgiveness, and sealing that reconciliation with a kiss. Christian liturgists of millenia past knew very well what a fractious family we could be and so every Eucharist begins by creating a place to seek from one another. 

We are a chosen family. Whether baptized as an infant or lingering on the edges hesitant to formally commit to membership, we are a chosen family. 

And like Jesus’ chosen family, our family exists for a purpose: to heal and liberate. That is what Jesus does, he takes the time to heal his own chosen family, to enable them to use their gifts so that everyone can use their gifts. Jesus heals Simon’s mother-in-law who diakoneos Jesus so that Jesus can go out and heal and liberate all those crowding into the family courtyard.

I pray that our courtyard becomes full, that the whole city gathers around our door to receive, and in turn share, the healing and liberation of God. That the people of Tacoma, of Stadium and North Slope and Hilltop and Central, and all the places from which we come, join our chosen family by cooperating together in practices of justice, compassion, and love.