The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
June 25, 2023
Proper 7A
Today’s Gospel reading reminds us that Christianity is not all about the family. Here in America, and especially amongst certain traditions within Christianity, that’s the message that gets proclaimed. For those traditions, belief in Christ is tied together with “family values” or “families are forever” to use a phrase in the tradition I grew up in.
I get the appeal. I get why that might sneak in as a value – because for most of human history, religion and family were tied together. In many religious traditions, there is an emphasis on the need to get married, raise children. One of the life goals is to get married. Marriage is a religious obligation.
Which, of course, means that if you’re not married, then the logic would be that you’re doing something wrong.
You can imagine the pressures that would fall upon people. Parents might arrange marriages to ensure that their child had someone from a suitable family to marry. Problem solved! Or endless attempts at matchmaking – maybe the parents will hunt for a suitable spouse, or pay a matchmaker to get the ball rolling. And what’s the message the whole time: you’re incomplete and imperfect until you’re married, and if you really cared about the nation and the family you’d be married and have kids.
That’s what’s lurking in the background. It’s not just the family – it’s the nation. It’s a series of concentric circles: the person in the middle, but what they do affects the family, the community, and the nation. And in this mindset, to not be married with children is a threat to the whole thing.
But Christianity says something radically different: no, it’s not all about the family. The individual and the community exist together. The individual has a sacred dignity on their own, and they are not alone but tied together in community.
And there were plenty of ears eager to hear that message. There were plenty of people who had been told that their worth was solely as a spouse. There were plenty of women who had been told that their life was always in relation to men: first to be a good daughter to their father, then a good wife for their husband, and then a good mother to their son.
And here is Christianity breaking onto the scene. Jesus shakes it up. It’s not about marriage, and family, and having children: no, each person is sacred, and the community gathered in His name is called to be a blessing even in the midst of persecution.
This is what made Christianity a threat to the Roman Empire, you know. Suddenly Christianity is saying that a woman isn’t merely a wife to a husband, that women (and men!) could be single, serving God, praying as part of the community, helping their neighbors and be perfectly worthwhile. The Roman Empire was not going to tolerate this – it was a threat to their birthrate. It was a threat to the social order.
Sometimes we moderns forget why so many people, especially women, in the early Church became vowed virgins and remained celibate. We think that it’s because of the early Church’s views on sexuality, but the Roman and Jewish cultures were hardly prudes. No, the idea of celibacy, of not being married, was freedom. Freedom to be themselves, to do what they were called to do without being constrained and contained by marriage and family.
And this kind of freedom was going to be a threat to the family and social order that expected people to stay in their place. Don’t rock the boat. Know your place, and do what you’re told.
Now you see why this emphasis on divisions in family is put right in the middle of these descriptions of persecutions. Society and family are tied together. Jesus is not coming to make society or family happy – Jesus isn’t in the business of defending the status quo but Jesus is in the business of proclaiming the Kingdom of God, and if that shakes things up, then so be it.
Because people are more than marriage or family. Each person has sacred dignity. It’s not about being married into the right family, or having children who go into the family business to carry on a legacy.
We would do well to remember that. People are so much more. The person who lives the single life, the person who raises children on their own, the people who co-parent after a divorce, people who are living together but not married, the people who are married without children and those who have children, people who are widowed – everyone is so much more than the family they grew up in and the family they may live in now. Everyone is much, much more. When we say that every human being has sacred dignity and worth, we’re saying that everyone matters. Every single person matters. This is news that will shake the world.