The Familial Jesus

A sermon given at Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

24 June 2018

Hebrews 2.11-13; 3.13-14; 9.15
Matt. 12:46-50

Listen to the sermon here.

This morning, I’d like us to think about what it means

            for us to be part of Jesus’ family,

and also about what it means

            for him to be part of our family.

If you’ve been following our sermon series

            on the book of Hebrews over the last few weeks

you’ll know that we’ve been looking at a number of different ways

            in which the book of Hebrews presents Jesus

            as someone who can be known and encountered

                        by those who are wanting to follow him.

We’ve seen that the basic problem for the recipients of Hebrews

            is that Jesus is experienced as absent from them;

                        either high up in heaven,

                        or lost in an increasingly distant past.

And the preacher of this written-down sermon that we call Hebrews

            is trying to explore with his congregation

            a variety of ways in which Jesus is not in fact distant from them at all,

                        but rather can be encountered as real,

                        and still very much present to and with them.

So in the first sermon we saw how the preacher describes Jesus

            as the sustaining force in the cosmos,

                        in and through all things,

                        intimately intertwined with each person, each animal,

                                    each tree, and each flower.

Then in the second sermon we encountered Jesus the pastor,

            who offers no quick fix to life’s problems,

            but who travels with us through difficulty and hardship,

                        and ultimately through death,

            giving us the gift of renewed hope even in hard times

                        by releasing us from the guilt of sin and the fear of death.

Last week Dawn led us in an exploration of the Speaking Jesus,

            who speaks the words of God in ways that we can hear.

And today we come to the Familial Jesus,

            who invites us to be part of his family,

            and becomes part of our family.

Now, I don’t know what comes to your mind when people talk about family?

            Maybe you think about your own childhood,

                        your parents or whoever it was that brought you up;

            and any brothers or sisters that you may have.

Maybe it’s a happy memory, or maybe it isn’t;

            maybe childhood for you was a time of stability and security;

            or maybe it was a time of loneliness or stress or abuse.

The reality for each of us, of course,

            is that who we are as adults is deeply affected,

                        and to some extent determined, by our childhoods.

Our ability to relate to others as adults

            will be at least in part a function

            of the key relationships of our formative years.

For better or for worse, families matter.

And those who have had children, and raised families of their own,

            will know that we repeat in our own families

            the patterns that we inherited from our parents.

Do you know the poem by the great Irish poet Philip Larkin,

            entitled ‘This Be The Verse’?

I committed it to memory as a teenager when we studied him at school.

            It has some rude words in it,

            so I’m going to give you the clean version today:

They [m]uck you up, your mum and dad.  

    They may not mean to, but they do.  

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were [m]ucked up in their turn

    By fools in old-style hats and coats,  

Who half the time were soppy-stern

    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.

Well, I don’t fully share Larkin’s cynicism about family systems,

            despite the fact that my own childhood experience

                        was not always straightforward,

            and that I have indeed avoided having any kids myself.

Families can be wonderful,

            and they’re not all about the transmission of misery

                        from generation to generation.

But one of the more helpful insights that the poem can offer us

            is its recognition that problems experienced in the present

            are not simply the fault of those experiencing them.

We are all the inheritors of attitudes and actions

            over which we have had no control;

and any family – whether functional or dysfunctional –

            will always be more than a mere collection of individuals.

Families, you see, are systems which contain individuals,

            but which also have an existence beyond the level of the individual.

If this sounds strange to you,

            it might help to think for a moment not of your own personal family,

            but of the church family to which we belong.

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, like all churches, is a family system.

            We are individually members of it, but it is greater than any one of us.

The family of this particular church

            is one which stretches back 170 years,

                        as we shall be celebrating next Sunday,

            and all of those who have been part of this place over the years

                        have left their mark on the community.

In a very real and tangible way,

            those who have gone before have an effect on all of us

            who make up this church family in our own generation.

The culture of our church family,

            the things we stand for and the things we do,

are not merely the product of those of us

            who gather here week by week,

they are the product of all those

            who have gathered here down the years,

            stretching right back to the people who first founded the church.

And this is because we are a family system,

            not a family of individuals.

This insight that families are systems

            has been highly influential in the way therapy is offered

            to people who are struggling to address problems in their lives,

                        people who may be anxious, stressed or depressed,

                        or who feel trapped in repeating patterns of harmful behaviour.

An individualistic therapeutic model would focus on the person,

            their problems, and how they can be addressed.

But a family systems model would recognise

            that each person in the family, both past and present,

            has a role to play in the functioning of each other member of the family;

and so to help an individual

            you first have to help them understand

            the relationships within their family.

And, therapeutically speaking,

            the path to wholeness, healing, and integration for the individual

            will be found in looking unflinchingly

                        at the family system to which they belong,

            for both better and for worse.

To quote the former Rector of my hometown Sevenoaks, John Donne:

No one is an island entire of itself;

every one is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

So where does this leave us,

            as sisters and brothers in Christ?

What does it mean to say that I am your brother?

            That you are my sister?

            That you are my brother?

What kind of church family system do we inhabit?

            What sort of a family is Bloomsbury?

These questions are going to be really important to us going forwards,

            because if our church is to be a functional, rather than dysfunctional, family,

                        we will need to give time and attention

                        to the relationships that bind us to one another.

Whether we’ve been here five weeks, five years, or five decades,

            none of us are immune from each other,

and we will need to continually work together at discovering

            the nature of this church family that we belong to.

Are we a confident family?

            Are we a loving family?

Are we nurturing and empowering of one another?

            Or are we defensive, anxious, stressed, or depressed?

Do we have habits of love,

            or habits that are more destructive?

The answers that we discern

            when we consider questions like this

            will need to be more than just our personal perspective or state of mind.

How ‘I’ feel is not the complete answer

            to the question of how the church family is doing.

It takes conscious effort to tune into the emotions and actions of others,

            to pay attention to one another

            and not just to our own needs.

Discerning the nature of our church family in this way is not an easy task,

            because it brings us face to face with the flaws and the hurts

            that we would rather ignore or paper over.

But it is a necessary task,

            because if we are each other’s sisters and brothers in Christ,

            then we are called to be a family, for better or for worse.

And it is in our family life together that, according to the book of Hebrews,

            we will encounter Jesus.

You will remember that the congregation

            that this sermon of Hebrews was written for

            were struggling to find Jesus?

Well, the preacher tells them, and us,

            that the Familial Jesus is discovered right here - in our midst.

Because we are not just siblings one of another,

            we are siblings of Jesus;

            he is our brother, and we are all children of God.

You see, a Christian community such as a church

            is far more than a collection of individuals

                        who have gathered together around a shared set of values,

                        or some shared goals.

We aren’t just brothers in arms

            in some fight against evil in the world.

We are a family – sisters and brothers with Jesus, and children of God.

            We are partners with Christ

                        in his mission to bring good news to all people,

            and we are the heirs of the promise

                        that the dwelling place of God is with humans.

Jesus dwells in our midst;

            he is our brother, and we are his family.

And therefore who we are as the family of Christ matters,

            because it is through our familial relationships that Christ is made known.

If we are dysfunctional,

            then we present a dysfunctional Christ.

If we are anxious or destructive,

            then we present an anxious and destructive Christ.

One of the fascinating insights of family systems therapy

            is that people in a community such as a church

            live in a system of swirling, emotional processes.

Have you ever heard someone say

            that they ‘could sense the emotion in the room’?

Well, whether we’re directly aware of it or not,

            we are all affected by the emotions of those around us,

            as well as by our own emotional responses.

So if someone is chronically anxious, or depressed, or stressed,

            we will find that we too start

                        to take that anxiety, depression, or stress into our own lives,

            as the emotions of the other person become our emotions.

And of course, if someone is joyful, happy, or calm,

            we will find that we too start to exhibit positive emotions

            the more we spend time in their company.

This is true more for some people than others,

            and some people leak their emotions more than others,

            just as some people absorb the emotional atmosphere more than others.

But to one degree or another,

            we’re all affected by the emotional field that exists

            within a family community like a church.

And if we don’t pay attention to the emotional systems of our church family,

            we will never be able to differentiate ourselves

                        from the emotions of others,

            and we will be blown backwards and forwards like grass in the wind,

                        as we are overwhelmed time and again

                        by the emotions of those around us.

What we need to discover,

                        as we work out what it means

                        for us to live together as the family of God,

            is who we truly are.

Who am I, truly, before God?

            Who are you?

I’m not you, and you’re not me.

            We may belong together in this family,

            but we are not the same.

This discovery that your problems are not the same as my problems,

            and that mine are not the same as yours,

is the key to discovering that when you are weak, I can be strong,

            and that when I need help carrying the burden of life,

            you can be the one to help me and pick me up when I stumble.

The discovery that we belong together,

            but do so as individuals emotionally differentiated from each other,

means that we can escape the cycles of reactivity

            where one person’s anxiety

                        triggers a domino effect of anxious responses

                        that travels through the whole community.

If we can learn that each of us, individually,

            matters uniquely to God,

then we can discover together what it means

            for us to be the family of God,

            where we emotionally affect each other for good.

If we can learn that each of us, individually,

            matters uniquely to God,

then we can discover ways of being together

            across disagreement.

Just because we do not always agree,

            doesn’t mean we don’t belong together.

And while an emotionally undifferentiated family system

            will find this a stressful situation to live with,

those of us who are mature in Christ,

            will discover that our call to belong together

            transcends the negative emotions of disagreement.

So, I’ll ask again, what kind of a church family are we?

            What is this family to which we belong here at Bloomsbury?

Do we hear Christ in our midst,

            calling us his brothers and sisters,

            and valuing us uniquely?

Can we discover what it is to belong together,

            respecting the fact that we are different to one another?

Will we support each other,

            recognising that emotional maturity is the path to wholeness?

Do we have the courage to recognise those times

            when we act out of our own anxiety,

and to be honest about those times

            when we are destructive of the relationships that exist between us?

In a moment I’m going to lead us in a period of silence

            that’ll be slightly longer than normal

And I’d like to invite you to use it

            to quietly reflect on the emotions that you sense around you,

            and those that you sense within you.

Do you feel anxious or at peace?

            Do you feel at ease or ill at ease?

And in response to that discernment,

            I’d like to invite you to offer a silent prayer

                        that God will draw alongside you

                        through your brother Christ Jesus.

            And then I’d like to suggest that you just listen, carefully,

                        to what it is that Jesus wants to say to you, and you alone.

Let’s be silent for a couple of minutes…