A vision for Regeneration: Family
Readings:
1 Corinthians 3:1-9
Matthew 5:21-37
Our current preaching series at St John’s is looking at the Bishop’s vision of regeneration for our Diocese, our Anglican Churches across our region.
At his Synod address last year Bishop Peter called us to “Regeneration through Making Disciples, Supporting Families, Strengthening Communities.”
Today we are focusing on the “supporting families” part of this vision.
Just a note before we begin – as we talk about families today, we are talking about whanau and households, not just the modern idea of a nuclear family. We are talking about the people we live with and relate to, day by day, whoever that may be. Parents, children, grandparents, aunties, uncles, cousins – households with married couples, single folks.
Family in today’s world is complicated. Relationships have always been complicated, that isn’t new – but there are some pressures on our households that seem to loom large in this moment in which we live.
Busy busy busy
You might have seen the latest ads from State insurance.
“Monday – Don’t like Monday. Busiest day.”
“Tuesday. Rename to busier Monday.”
“Thursday. Nope. Still only Wednesday.”
“Thursday. Busy thinking about the weekend.”
“Friday. Fun-ish. Still too busy.”
“Saturday. Supposed to be chill. Definitely not chill.”
“Sunday. Too busy for ‘rest day.”
-Under all of these is the catch phrase “Insurance for too busy lives.”
State Insurance have captured the mood of our moment in history perfectly. We are simply put – “too busy.” This ad campaign wouldn’t exist if it didn’t touch reality in some way. People are paid lots of money to figure out what will connect, and what makes us tick. Apparently right now it is appealing to our busyness.
Our households are busier than ever.
Brokenness
Not only are we busy, we are broken.
So many of our households face the crushing sadness of separation and divorce.
Culturally we minimize the impact of divorce in all kinds of ways. (slide)
Our movies normalize it and tell us it is simply a phase in the life of many people that if navigated well isn’t such a big deal.
But Hollywood aside, divorce has wreaked havoc in many lives. Anyone I’ve talked to who has been through it describe the experience as deeply painful.
It takes a toll on couples and it takes a deep toll on children, shaking the foundation of their lives which was forged in the union between their parents.
Divorce isn’t the only expression of broken relationships in family life. Relationships being complicated means many of us have experienced estrangement from family members or close friends.
Being part of any wider family will usually (if not always) involve pain and brokenness of some kind in relationships.
In today’s world it seems that this is exacerbated by our hyper individualism and a cultural worldview that places our needs and wants at the centre of life.
Isolated and individualized – connected but without conversation
Speaking of individualism, another big issue for us in our relationships is that in many ways we are isolated.
We are more connected than ever via technology, yet not necessarily richer for it in relationships.
We have a lot of connection but probably less conversation than we ever used to.
Cal Newport, a professor in Computer Science from the States, says this:
“You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types or rich interactions to which we’ve painstakingly adapted over millenia. Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emoji.” (Digital minimalism)
Simply put, people need real conversation, they need community.
Yet many people settle for digital interactions over the real thing or find themselves addicted to social media and wondering why they feel empty.
I’m not meaning to sound totally negative, rather I want to be honest for a moment about what we are all facing. If we are to hear the good news for ourselves and to offer good news to others, we must consider the context we are offering it into. Busyness, brokenness, and isolation are realities for many households today.
So how might we as the church support families?
A vision of flourishing –
We need to live with and offer a vision of hope. A vision of life beyond the grind of busyness, a life that offers healing in the midst of brokenness, and genuine connection and love instead of isolation.
Jesus talks about his mission as the good shepherd to come that “they may have life and have it abundantly.” (John 10) The “they” is those who come to Him. The vision of the Christian life is not just surviving the ups and downs of our daily reality, it is to flourish, to find fullness of life in God.
The vision of the Psalmist in Psalm 1 gives a similar picture – that of a tree flourishing and full, planted by water – that water, is God, the source of all life and flourishing.
Our message of good news is that Jesus offers life in its fullness and calls us to a life in which our families, our relationships flourish. He will bring peace and a rhythm to our busy souls, healing to our hurts, and give us a church family to belong too.
The church itself is a family, a whanau, an extended household of believers. We see this at work in the New Testament as people from all different places gather around Jesus to share their life and flourish in Him.
The church gathers for worship, and the church has a high calling to be the family that shares the good news of God with the world.
Catherine LaCugna puts it this way:
“The church’s life is to mirror God’s life, to be an ‘icon’ of God’s life…The Church, in other words, should exist as the mystery of persons who dwell together in equality, reciprocity and mutual love.”
In other words, when people look at the church, and how people relate to each other in it, they see God’s love.
Today’s readings from Scripture ask us to look closely at this calling and examine the reality that we struggle and need help with being a family.
Let’s be honest, we can only support families if we ourselves offer a healthy family. Regeneration must begin in our family and extend outward.
So, what does a healthy church look like?
Let’s look at the reading from 1 Corinthians to get some clues
Just for some context – reading Corinthians will always make you feel good about your local church.
The church at Corinth in lots of ways is a mess.
There are unhelpful ideas floating around, crazy sexual antics, quarrels and jealousy, debates about who belongs and what to eat.
Paul writes to them, speaking into their lives and reminding them of who they are called to be in Christ.
He opens with this line “And so, brothers and sisters, I could not speak to you as spiritual, but rather as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ.”
As one commentator puts it:
“Paul delivers a splash of cold water on their faces, which were burning with what they supposed to be spiritual ardor. “Wake up,” he says. “Stop fighting with each other; you are acting like spoiled babies, not like people who have received the Spirit of God.” (Richard B Hays)
It seems that the Corinthians were posturing spiritually, claiming that they were mature and wise.
Paul talks about milk and meat.
Sometimes we have misread this, thinking that Paul is speaking about various levels of Christians – the super Christian and the subpar Christian – milk and meat.
Rather it seems that what Paul is doing is taking their own language and using it against them. From Paul’s letter we can infer that there were divisions in the community as some saw themselves more spiritual and wise than others (chapter 1 and 2 give clues)
Paul says they aren’t spiritual, they are people of the flesh.
It’s important to be clear about this language. This isn’t talking about a division between the body and the soul, this isn’t denigrating the flesh and blood of being human.
When Paul uses the term fleshly he is referring to a way of seeing the world in which only the present and only the needs of the self are in mind. To be fleshly is to see things only from only a human point of view.
The actual issue at hand is clearer if we skip to the next part of Paul’s argument and see this:
“For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving according to human inclinations? 4 For when one says, “I belong to Paul,” and another, “I belong to Apollos,” are you not merely human?”
The Corinthians are quarrelling over their favourite leaders. Some like Paul and some like Apollos. They are looking at the leaders in their community from a fleshly viewpoint – who is the most eloquent preacher? The better visionary? Who is wiser?
But Paul says this thinking is fleshly.
Remember how God views people? When Samuel was looking for a King on behalf of Israel, Samuel is looking at the strong and handsome Eliab and God says: “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature because I have rejected him; for the LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7).
To be fleshly is to see from the viewpoint of the current age, rather than to be people of the Spirit, who view things in light of what God has done in Christ.
Paul at the end of chapter 2, right before his comments on the division amongst the Corinthians says, “we have the mind of Christ.”
This is a key point in his argument.
The Corinthians are invited by Paul to think like Jesus.
Paul is inviting the Corinthians to a whole new worldview. He makes it clear that the leaders are merely servants, and the Corinthians have got it all wrong by elevating some and quarrelling over it. When they do this they are operating as fleshly, not spiritual.
So, what does it mean to be spiritual in this view? What is this new way of seeing things?
To be spiritual according to Paul in 1 Corinthians is to have healthy and harmonious relationships, in other words, to love one another.
In New Zealand we are often captive to the mindset of Western individualism so we think that being spiritual must look like personal growth.
Yet Paul points to how we relate. He points to the communal.
It’s true that spiritual maturity is often revealed in relationships.
I can pray every morning and get deep into Bible study but then if I cannot love my neighbour my spirituality is a hollow gong, an empty noise, a show and a farce.
I’ve found this painful clash in my life often as a Pastor. Writing this sermon during the week I was soaking in the teachings of Paul and Jesus, reading great books on community, and when my child woke for the third time in the middle of the night and Jo needed my help I was definitely less than charitable and helpful. At that point I didn’t want to acknowledge the reality that my measure of spirituality is grounded in my relating and loving.
In today’s Gospel we heard Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount.
The three sections we heard about anger, lust, divorce, and telling the truth. There is a sermon in each of those sections, yet in summary we could say that all of these topics concern our interpersonal relationships. How we deal with fighting and disagreements and hurt feelings, how we express our sexuality, how we do marriage – all of these are household ethics, about our closest relationships.
Can the church be good news in such areas? In a world of conflict, confusion, broken promises and unforgiveness, the way of Jesus is about reconciliation and right relationship.
Regeneration of our church involves us taking the call to healthy relationships seriously.
We won’t always get it right.
But with Jesus at the centre we will have all the grace and all the help we need to be the family He calls us to be.
Back to Corinthians to finish.
Paul makes it very clear that the Corinthians are called to unity because they have a common purpose, they have a mission. They are all servants together in God’s kingdom work.
This common call is a big part of what it means for us to be a healthy family.
We are part of a big whanau across the world, that stretches back into history and looks forward to the future – a family called the church.
Locally here as St John’s, as part of our Anglican Diocese in this area, together connected to churches from all different denominations here in South Canterbury, and part of God’s church right across our nation and our world.
If we as the church are to be good news in the world, it starts with us being a healthy family, a family that is committed to two essential commands that Jesus taught us:
1) Love God.
2) Love our neighbour.
Like the Corinthians we might discover that these two commands might just be closer than we think.
Amen.