Starting a Family

Mark 1:9-11; Leviticus 19:1-4; 2 Peter 1:16-18

Starting a family is one of the biggest decisions we can make as human beings. It immediately throws us into responsibilities, commitments, and work in ways we never imagined possible even when we think we fully understand the implications of our choice. Starting a family at once fills your heart and breaks it at the same time. Cementing connections in place binds us, but it also completes us. It promises unparalleled joy, but also unparalleled suffering. 

So why do it? Why join that fray?

Because we were created to.

Now, some may recoil from that observation as proof once again that God is nothing if not a practical joker who may not be as benign as we make God out to be. God created us to find ourselves in the very place that will break us? What sort of mean prank is that? It is like giving a starving man food laced with carcinogens—it will feed him, but it will also slowly kill him.

But is that really what God intends?

I earnestly do not believe so.

God is good and grace abounds. God is love. So, all that God created is work of love, including us, and will find its fruition in the embodiment of love. That eradicates any ill-will in anything God does or says, especially with regard to us. 

Therefore, the fact that God calls us to find fruition in the formation of families cannot be seen as anything other than an expression of God’s love for us. We see this as we take a look at the three texts before us—God reveals God’s own family; God instills the commandment to treasure those from whom we come; and God reveals that, in the end, we are all part of God’s family related to one another as siblings formed by God for life together—even when nothing much connects us except our most basic existence as human beings. 

Begin with God himself.

In our religious expression, we define God as a Trinity—a complex being that is more verb than noun. God is a unified multiplicity, or a multiple Oneness. In other words, God is beyond our comprehension, save for the fact that God is love in and of God own’s being. Or, to be short and simple, God is a family as God—the Father loves the Son; the Son loves the Father; and the love that binds them together is the Holy Spirit (following Karl Barth). 

Now move to us—we are made in the Image of God—i.e., our existence reflects the existence of the God who made us. However, we are not made complete as individuals, but rather God left us to discover, first, our incompleteness, then, second, to find our completion as we become connected to one another, recreating God’s own being in our communal existence. 

Stop. Pause. Breathe. Let that sink in.

Immediately, we face a conundrum in our context, for we live in a time and place defined by self. We blithely accept that the greatest achievement we can make is to aggrandize and actualize our individuality—we aspire to be self-made persons, beholden to no one, free from anyone telling us what to do, what to be, and how to live. We drive to claim that what is ours is ours alone. We want to declare boldly that we owe no one anything. Nothing matters except how things effect and affect me, myself, and I. 

But with what end?

Can any of us honestly say the world as it is is exactly as it should be?

Instead, we live in an egregiously disconnected time and place, despite being able to connect to anyone anywhere anytime. We exist in a time and place where the chasms between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, and full and empty are becoming nearly unbridgeable. Our sense of accountability and responsibility diminish to the point of non-being. Problems simply fester as unsolvable. Violence—literal, emotional, spiritual—rages in every arena of human being. 

In short, we are lost.

Something remarkable happened in a trickling, sickly creek the locals named a river, though. A meeting occurred—a meeting between two men; and a man and God. In that meeting, the world changed forever. In that meeting, repercussions reverberated through the ages even sounding in our own time and place. One man was inspired by God to the point of no longer fitting in any human community. The eyes of his heart blazed with seeking the rekindling of God’s holy fire. He had no patience with anyone who countered his vision, especially the supposed experts in the field of God. They were as blinded by human volition as anyone, long ago losing any sense of God, although adamantly committed to keeping God’s holy rulebook as a club over everyone. The other man was a nobody from nowhere who suddenly became aware that he was the embodiment of God’s own love as he dipped in the river. The first man suddenly saw what he was looking for, and the second man joined him in holy affirmation that they were blood brothers. A family began—a family of faith—a family of God. 

In that moment, we were found.

We were found, but left to find ourselves found. I know that rings as hopelessly contradictory—how can someone lost find themselves found? Kind of like when you make that horrible wrong turn in the city, but after wandering about, turn still another corner and realize everything looks familiar again. Nothing has essentially or existentially changed within us. We are still the same creatures formed by the loving hand of God. We are still creatures made to love. We are still creatures whose only real and lasting fullness comes with the experience and embodiment of love in our own being. So, being found means seeing ourselves as we actually are, shutting down, tuning out, and dismissing the false prophets of our time who preach only self. 

Peter did so, as did the others with him, and they formed a community that is ours this morning. To be that lasting means that they saw exactly what they were supposed to and did what needed to be done to find themselves.

Now, it is our turn. Hear the story, accept its message, and go and do likewise.