A few years ago my husband and I hosted our local Episcopal Service Corps Interns—six young adults committed to a year of volunteer service in the Bay Area—at our home for Thanksgiving. Other members of our family were present as well, including our teenage sons. So the meal felt full and festive and everyone seemed to be having a great time, until I noticed my sons exchange a knowing glance and then abruptly get up from the table and leave the house.
They returned about 45 minutes later, but not before I was pretty mad at them. When I asked them why the blank they had walked out—perhaps using words one wouldn’t normally say in church—they said they had gone to get in line for the release of the latest game console. And they hadn’t said anything because they knew I wouldn’t have let them go. I was mortified for our guests. But unbeknownst to me, the young adult interns were delighting in the whole exchange. One of them later said to me “it’s so much fun to watch someone else’s family dysfunction.”
And of course he was right: why else would Bristol Palin’s second unplanned child or the expensive antics of Kardashians command so much media attention? Or why would our scriptures spill so much ink over David’s messy marital relationships, or Jesus’ apparent dismissal of his biological relatives? Family—both its warmth and its capacity to wound—fascinates us.
So when Jesus asks “who are my brother and sisters?” I hear echoes of Michal’s lament in our first reading, seemingly asking herself “who is this shameless nearly-naked dancing man I am stuck with?” Recall that she was the daughter of King Saul, given in marriage to David when he was the heir apparent, and initially it seemed to be a love match. But then after she courageously protected David from an angry Saul, her father gave her to another man and David remarried. So I can imagine the slow burn of Michal’s anger at having been forcibly returned to him as one wife among many. The Israeli poet Rahel Blewstein captures something of the ambivalence of her position in these words—
Often I have seen you standing by your small window, pride and tenderness mingling in your eyes.Like you I am sad, O Michal, and like you doomed to love a man whom I despise.
Behind the question of how did we get stuck with these people is the realization that we actually are stuck with these people. And that we may even love their very despicable selves. The people we were born or adopted into, the people we have covenanted to in marriage, the people who may not be biological siblings, but whom we have called brothers and sisters anyway. The people— for example— with whom we share a historic bond as members of the Anglican communion.
I do not pretend to understand all the history or politics by which our church was sidelined by the recent gathering of Anglican primates, but I do have a great deal of respect for my own presiding Bishop, Michael Curry. And I am convinced that whatever moved him to stay with brother Bishops who had willfully marginalized the Episcopal Church in their deliberations—and of course they were almost all brothers and not sisters—was the fruit of his Scripture-soaked imagination.
Even in Canterbury, he was not far from King David and his seething wife, and with Jesus and his befuddled mother and brothers, when he said “I stand before you as your brother. I stand before you as a descendant of African slaves, stolen from their native land, enslaved in a bitter bondage, and then even after emancipation, segregated and excluded in church and society. And this conjures that up again, and brings pain. The pain for many will be real. But God is greater than anything. I love Jesus and I love the church. I am a Christian in the Anglican way. And like you, as we have said in this meeting, I am committed to ‘walking together’ with you as fellow Primates in the Anglican family.”
Family is complicated. Sometimes—maybe most of the time—it would be easier to choose surrogate siblings and watch Keeping Up with the Kardashians and laugh at somebody else’s dysfunction. But church, with its legacy of complicated family stories and painful intercultural and intergenerational misunderstandings, may just be setting in which God calls us to practice and even succeed at being family against all odds.
How did we get stuck with these people? On some level the only honest answer is… God knows. But stuck with them we are: the people we love, the people we despise, the people who embarrass us, the people who are embarrassed by us. The people we can never really escape because, ultimately, they are the people with whom we share one generous God and the blessing of this fragile earth, our island home.
