Who are my mother and brothers?

I come from a traditional family.   My parents have been married for forty years.  My grandparents were married for longer.   The only step anything I have are nieces/nephews, and one cousin, who I do not call my step cousin, just my cousin.  I have seen--and benefited from--effects of a traditional two parent home.   I know what it means to belong without actually fitting in to a family.   I have also noticed that the older I get the more I realize how absolutely blessed I am to have been born to these people.   We have our problems, same as everybody else, but at the core of it we still love each other and when it hits the fan, we back each other up. 

I'm convinced that's what makes my family functional.   Functional in the sense  that at the moment everyone is speaking to everyone else and that we're all part of each other's lives.   Today's gospel reading made me think today that maybe Jesus' family was functional in the same way.   They may have thought he was nuts, but in the end, especially in the end, they showed up anyway.   Jesus, likewise, seems annoyed but uses the moment to make a point:

  Mark 3:31 Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him.
3:32 A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, "Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you."
3:33 And he replied, "Who are my mother and my brothers?"
3:34 And looking at those who sat around him, he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers!
3:35 Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother."

Notice that the ties that bind could not have possibly been severed completely because we have his brother James showing up in the Book of Acts at the Council of Jerusalem and his mother follows him to the cross.  No one is throwing anyone away here.    He's just widening the circle.  Widening the circle big time.

I once had the big brass lady balls to say at church that my family never shows up and I have no one to spend Midnight Mass with.   I was immediately corrected.   I say big brass lady balls because those people have been putting up with me since I was 15 years old.   I should know by now that those people are my family.   Put a qualifier of church family on it if you must, at this point, I think we're stuck with each other.

There's more than one way to be family.   I saw La Cage aux Folles Friday night with my good friend and her fiance and saw that played out on the stage.  The crazy maid, the straight son, the drag queen mother, and the father trying to play referee between his son's desire to get past his future in-laws and his partner's need for recognition for his role in raising the boy.   What makes a family?  Is it children?  Long suffering each other's company?  Who was more of a mother?  We didn't see much of her, but I think Ann's mother was more interested in keeping that corn cob in its place than in making her daughter happy.  I think in that family it was the mother.  He wasn't just his father's partner, he was the one who turned their house into a home.  That deserved respect.   Jean Michael deserved respect too.  He turned out different than his parents without turning his back on them, and dealt with all the trauma and drama that comes from the way people reacted to his family when he was growing up.  

There's more to raising kids and living right than being in a traditional relationship and having the equipment to produce offspring.  I know families that are incredibly dysfunctional that are not broken homes in the sense that the parents are divorced.  They are broken in the sense that the love just isn't there.   The father tries to kill the daughter and no one, especially not the mother, calls the cops.  The daughter doesn't think she has any business getting angry about not being protected.  It's just broken.  Never mind that there's not a divorce decree involved, that family is broken.

So what makes a family?  Blood?  Affection?  In the case of Jesus, whoever does the will of God?

Worthless

“Thus says the LORD: What wrong did your ancestors find in me that they went far from
me, and went after worthless things, and became worthless themselves?”

I’m thinking this is a rhetorical question. Most of the time when I wander away from
God, it’s because I’m doing something I don’t want to think about. I’ll get caught up
in something I find interesting or alluring and neglect my spirituality. It seems to be
different for other people. Something bad happens to them and they get angry and after a
while their anger turns to indifference.

I’ve heard some folks’ wanderings described as being like kittens chasing after a sequin
ball, which is, after all, pretty worthless. What worthless things do you go after? What
wrong did you find in God that you ran in the other direction? (Even if you’ve found your
way back home.)

Feel like dying

“You brought me up, O LORD, from the dead; you restored my life as I was going down to the grave.”

We’ve all felt like it was the end at times. Maybe it’s the stomach flu that has you spending the night on the bathroom floor begging God to let you die. We lose a friend or a lover and it feels like the world comes crashing down on our heads. Or we lose all our friends because we did something wrong or are perceived to have done something wrong.

There’s more than one kind of death. I also believe there’s more than one way for God to restore our lives. Think about the times you ‘almost died’ and how you came out of it. Do you see God’s hand in it? Were you looking?

An Endless Parade of Crazy

I'm going to tell you all a terrible secret.

I've sworn in church. It's true. I really have. I didn't do it intentionally. When someone pointed it out I said "It's okay. God knows I swear."

I wasn't trying to offend anyone. In fact, the reason I don't typically swear in church is that it does offend people. Like I said, God knows I swear. He has met me. For some reason I've never put my finger on, he loves me.

I take issue with the idea that someone knows everything about me and loves me anyway. If you're my friend, I love you. I don't love someone in spite of their faults like I have some kind of list of things and there's a point at which it becomes too much. I either love someone or I don't. I may not like everything about someone but I don't love them anyway. I just love them.

God takes this to another level. Maybe I learned it from him, I don't know. God knows I swear. He knows I lie (albeit badly). He knows I have a hard time controlling my temper. He knows I'm self absorbed. He knows all this and loves me. I know this because I have gotten completely out of hand in our relationship and he didn't turn his face away from me. I'm an Episcopalian so when I'm at church our relationship is very formal. Sometimes when I'm at home and I'm at my best I do okay at keeping up a level of formality. If I'm tired, drunk, upset, or just plain old happy though I get sloppy. God becomes Papa. In my younger days, when I got upset, I would talk to one friend, then another, then another and finally it would come down to prayer. It would just get progressively worse on the upset scale until it exploded. Until I exploded. Looking back, I feel really sorry for my friend Will. He was the last one on the list before I got to God. If he got a tornado of teenage angst, Jesus got the hurricane. By morning I was usually back to some semblance of sanity, if you can call it that, because they calmed the storm in me. I don't know how I would have gotten through the valley of the shadow of raging hormones without Him.

I'm not saying God just puts up with it. He pushes back. I just never get the sense that if I cross that line one more time, the relationship could be over. I know people who live with that fear. I know people who think they can hide the shadow side of themselves from God. I know they think they can't let him into that space. I also know that they'll never truly be free until they do.

I remember when I was a little kid being told that God hates sin and can't be around it. I was taught that it was something everybody did. So it should have followed, I guess, that God hates everybody. Then because God also loves everybody, he sent his son to earth to be murdered by a gang of... no that's not working. Wait, they don't make it sound like that. They make it sound like a set up. They make it sound staged. Which made it even more confusing...

I managed to ignore all that. Call it blissful ignorance. I remember being in the first grade and reading chapter books. When I got to the words I didn't know I'd just make a buzzing noise in my little brain and fill in the blanks from the context. I have lots of practice at skipping over the parts I don't get and filling in the blanks.

So here's what I get. God made the universe. God called it good. Something goes wrong. We do something that makes us feel like we can't talk to God without killing something or burning something. God spends lots and lots of time trying to get us back into a relationship with him. Abraham didn't find favor with God because he was perfect. It wasn't because he was super special. Abraham found favor with God because he believed God and God reckoned it to him as righteousness. He didn't get it right. He wasn't perfect. He haggled with the creator of the universe for heaven's sake!! He haggled! With God! Moses was a murderer. Noah was a drunk. King David's great grand mama was supposedly a whore. I'm not going to talk about Saul/Paul. God the Son comes to earth as the child of unwed pregnant teenager and leaves the life of a gnarly contractor guy to become a wandering preacher who runs with a bunch of first century rednecks. God does not seem to be looking for perfect people! If he is, he's having a horrible time finding good help! But he does find good help! This endless parade of crazy leads to redemption. It ends (and begins a new story) with resurrection and redemption.

The story ends with life. It ends with God not taking no for an answer. No, he will NOT leave us alone. No, he will not give up. No, he will not let us decide who he will or will not love. No, God does not accept the limitations we put on grace. No, there is nothing we can do make him listen to reason and see that we've really got this religion stuff figured out. We can't stop him from loving us. We can't hide. The more we try the more tied up we get in ourselves.

That's deadly. It's deadly because he loves us. He doesn't love us anyway. He loves us. He can do that. He's God.

And he knows I swear. I don't think he minds nearly as much as my mother does.

Where were you?

1 Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind:
2 "Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
3 Gird up your loins like a man,
I will question you, and you shall declare to me.

I love it when other people argue with God and I kind of get to watch. I like this image of Job having it out with God---and getting the tables turned on him---because I can snicker at it. I can snicker because I've been there but this time it isn't me. It's kind of like when I was a kid and I happened to overhear my grandmother chewing out my younger brother. I had to bury my face in my arm I was laughing so hard. I'm not saying it was the right thing to do. I'm just admitting I did it.

So when I see God telling Job to "gird up his loins like a man" I want to roll on the carpet laughing. I know I shouldn't laugh, but I do it anyway. Like I laugh at Jonah when he's sitting on the hill angry because Nineveh didn't get smote...and by smote I mean turned into a grease spot. Why? I've been there. I know how he feels. (I was wrong too, by the way.)

¹ But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry. ² He prayed to the LORD, "O LORD, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. ³ Now, O LORD, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live."

⁴ But the LORD replied, "Have you any right to be angry?"

Do we have any right to be angry when God is kind to people we don't like? Where were we when he laid the foundations of the earth anyway? Do we get to decide? Do we hold the keys to to the universe?

No...we don't...and thank God we don't. We can't be trusted with such things. We're too small, for one thing. We want pity when we're in trouble and laugh when someone else is in the same situation. Sometimes it's easier for God to show us we're wrong than to tell us:

⁵ Jonah went out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city. ⁶ Then the LORD God provided a vine and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the vine. ⁷ But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the vine so that it withered. ⁸ When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah's head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, "It would be better for me to die than to live."

⁹ But God said to Jonah, "Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?"
"I do," he said. "I am angry enough to die."

Ever notice how often Jonah wants to die? I digress.

¹⁰ But the LORD said, "You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. ¹¹ But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?"

They can't tell their right hand from their left---and neither can we. Oh gentle God, thank you for your kindness and patience with us. We don't deserve it---and you're constantly showing us how little such things matter to you---because love isn't something can run out.

The more you give it away the more it grows.

Making sense of things

Joseph said to his father, "Not so, my father! Since this one is the firstborn, put your right hand on his head."

¹⁹ But his father refused, and said, "I know, my son, I know; he also shall become a people, and he also shall be great. Nevertheless his younger brother shall be greater than he, and his offspring shall become a multitude of nations."

Sometimes it just doesn't turn out like we think it should, does it?

Our parents give the younger siblings something we feel like we should have because after all, we got here first didn't we? When I read this passage this morning I thought of King David---the youngest of his brothers---whom Jesse assumed wouldn't be God's chosen because he was just a kid. To top it all off, he wasn't just just a kid, he was the youngest boy in the family too. God doesn't always seem to make a lot of sense.

My older brother likes to tell me how much meaner our parents were when he was growing up. How he never would have gotten away with half the stuff we did. I think the early Christians--the Jewish ones-- probably felt the same way about the gentile Christians. The council of Jerusalem must have left them feeling flat. These newbies--these 'kids'-- didn't have to keep the law to follow the Way. What a disappointment! From what I've heard, the Church is easing up on us younger folks too. It used to involve more work to be a Christian! Did it? Was the point of the whole thing ever really keeping ritual purity laws in the first place? Or was it learning to put the Lord first? Is the point of Church not wearing lipstick during communion, keeping a doily on your head inside the doors and making sure you didn't have that first cup of coffee before you leave home? Or is it something else? There's nothing wrong with any of these things as long we don't forget that they're not the point. We have to remember what they point to--and remember that even when God doesn't seem to make a lot of sense--he makes sense.

Finding what you're looking for

"O God, you are my God; eagerly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you,
as in a barren and dry land where there is no water. "

There are some moments in life that are just what we've been looking for. Pulling into your own driveway after the long car ride back from a trip. The final moment before sleep in the evening where you situate yourself in your bed and you reach over turn off the light. Waking up in the morning and having that first cup of coffee. They all feel pretty good.

Several years ago I was at a cross roads in my life. I knew I had to make a choice about whether or not I was going to continue to be a Christian. Two of my friends had recently lost their faith--both of them were my 'prayer buddies'--and I was very upset. I went away for a weekend to visit another friend and somehow I knew that I would be making a decision that weekend. I felt completely free from compulsion. I felt no tugging from the Holy Spirit--nothing. I can't explain it, but that was the right way for the question to be resolved. By the end of the weekend I had made my choice. I knew that it was right for me to believe in God and that it was right for me to seek him in Christ. I had time away--from home and church--and I came back knowing what I was looking for.

I hope you all find what you're looking for.

You don't always get what you think you want

The little dog was dangerously thin and scared to death when I brought her home. I remember her trembling in the back seat of my parents' Buick as I tried to make friends with her. We got back to the house and she went in the backyard and ran around a bit. She came back in the house (too soon) and relieved herself under the coffee table. I remember when I washed her that her little spine was showing through her skin and it was then I noticed her tail had been broken. She wasn't quite a year old.

The woman I bought her from called her Madison. She told me over the phone that she had been her grandfather's pet, and that she was already potty trained. Maddy didn't respond to her name for a week. She was scared to be around anyone but me at first and when I took her to the veterinarian's office he told me he would give her shots but that spaying was out of the question until she put on a little weight. I bought her Caesar puppy food because it came in a container the dog could eat of and would be less of a mess. She carried the dish across the living room with her to eat it and almost always ended up turning it over on the floor.

So how did I end up paying someone $250 to rescue the dog they'd been neglecting?

It started around 2004 or so I when I moved into a duplex with my college roommate and my skittish barn cat got sick and then ran off after I let him outside too soon. I was at Laura's grandparents house in Mid West city one weekend and I was complaining about not having a pet. I've always had pets. Our family had two dogs and two cats when I was growing up and in my mind, that's just the way it should be. As was typical, she got tired of listening to it and started looking through the paper. There was an ad for a Shitz Tsu mix dog. We drove to Purcell and met the dog that would end up being called Hermione. "Mione" was at this person's house in a side yard covered in fleas and eating garbage from a pale. The woman at the house called her "Sunshine"---a name that was just too stupid for words and was quickly abandoned. There were about thirty purebred dogs at this house and they all looked groomed and well cared for...and then there was Mione. I bathed her once before we even put her in the car, twice more before I would take her to see the Vet. The only thing we could tell about the dog at first was that she had really awful hair---as did the girl in the Harry Potter movies---and it was either that or Retzia. (Spelling? It was a charactor in an Opera Lj was singing an aria from.)

After Mione figured out the toys were for her, and learned to walk on a lead, she turned out to be a great dog. She'd play fight and fetch and she was just cute as she could be. Her only drawback was the garbage eating-dog habits she'd learned as a puppy. I had to have velcro on the kitchen trash and just keep food trash out of all the trash cans. She raised my two cats and they got along swimmingly. During my senior year, I broke my leg. I lived alone by then and since Mione liked to dig for gold in the litterbox, my parents took her home as a 'foster dog' until I could keep up with that sort of housework again.

I moved back home and not too long after that, Mione got in some garbage and gave herself pancreatitus. My parents, who had fallen in love with her, heroically paid for her to be treated at the OSU veterinary clinic and she got well but by this time she had ceased to be my dog and started really being their dog. I moved out of the house and let my parents keep her, taking the cats with me.

I found out in 2008 that my landlord was a registered sex offender. Between that and waking up to my front door being wide open one morning I decided I had to get a dog. I really wanted another Shitz Tsu but I ended up getting talked into a Pekingese by an insightful kid at the SPCA. Jasmine is a wonderful little dog. She came to me house trained, and quite nice and very sweet. It turns out she is also very old, going blind, and mostly deaf. She is a lousy guard dog but otherwise lovely. After I bought the house last year and Mom managed to get all the way into the house, into the back bedroom and had to wake Jazzy up to get her attention, I decided to get another dog.

I had my tax refund from buying the house in hand and this time I was not going to get a rescue dog. I wanted a non defective dog. No mental issues! No garbage digging. No puppy dog dementia. I didn't want have to nurse another dog back into sanity and I already had one geriatric dog. So I started looking in the paper... only baby puppies. I didn't have time to really potty train a dog. I started looking Craig's list and got sucked in by an ad for a black and white Shitz Tsu. I called the lady and she wanted $250 for this dog. She also told me that she had been her grandfather's pet and that he had died and that she had papers.

I don't know why I fell for this. I can't imagine selling Izzy (mom's yorkie) to a stranger for money. If I really didn't want the dog, I'd have been looking high and low for a friend who was good with animals to take her in. So I shouldn't have fallen for it and talked my mother (who is just as softhearted as I am about sad abused puppy dogs) into going with me to "keep me from doing something stupid". I do know that God has ways of making things happen. Someone hurt that little dog. Someone broke her tail and didn't give her enough to eat. For some reason, God sent me to her even though I didn't think I wanted her. I'm not one to toot my own horn, but I'm pretty good with scared animals. She needed me. The old dog, who I also didn't think I wanted at first, has been a big help with her. She taught her how to walk on a lead, how to go outside to relieve herself, and generally how to act like a dog. I think Maddy would have been a far more difficult dog to rehabilitate if I hadn't had Jazzy around. I also think it was God's way of getting his tithe out of that government stimulus package. :)

Maddy is a great dog. She's filled out nicely, she's healthy, and she actually barks when someone comes to the door. She also likes to play fight, herds cats, is loyal little sweetheart that I wouldn't trade for a hundred non defective dogs with genuine papers. Maybe one of these days I'll stop thinking I know what I want.