Sermon: Re-Focus on the Family

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Re-Focus on the Family

By Charles Rush

October 7, 2012

[ Audio (mp3, 6.4Mb) ]

was listening to an ad in this political season that was pitched to the religiously conservative. It depicted a blacksmith working a forge, as to suggest that some issues are so foundational they aren't matters of opinion but one's of moral conviction. And one of the issues was Marriage with the tag line, “it needs to be re-inforced, not re-invented.”

“Really?” I thought. “How about re-imagined.”

I was thinking how much I've personally changed over my life on this subject in my life and how much our world has changed in the past few decades.

We all got that lecture when we were kids if you grew up in the heartland of our country either in church or in parochial school.

You heard the natural law arguments that everything in nature has its appointed end or goal, rightly ordered. “So boys, when it comes to sex, God has appointed us three ends for our fulfillment, pleasure, to re-inforce marriage, and for procreation. Procreation is the highest goal and pleasure the least.” Already, to a room full of boys, we are all scratching our heads. So we should only have sex when we are married and prepared to raise a family. Straight forward enough.

Then during the question and answer period, in discussion of some examples, the priest would point out that sex outside of this telos or goal whether is was masturbation or oral sex or anal sex was not good because it denied God's full intended end for our sex lives. The technical phrase that I learned later when I taught ethics at Rutgers University… The line was that it was ‘objectively disordered.'

I love that line ‘objectively disordered.' In the sixties that became something to be aspired to for a lot of people.

I was remembering how much that thinking permeated the way we thought, not that you agreed with the whole argument, few really did that I grew up with. But it got you to thinking that there was kind of natural family, a kind of normal family and then there was everyone else who is a little less than. And it induced ‘guilty feeling's about sex, not that we needed religion to re-inforce that in the South where I grew up.

And the speech that went with that lecture was how the ‘family was under threat' and needed more support than ever. It was true that divorce was picking up steam, people feeling like they weren't going to stay in marriages that had dead ended for one reason or another. In fact, I've read a spate of articles on this subject in the past year, people my age writing about been a teenager in the 70's. In the days before tele-commuting, I was surprised how many of them described having Dad away almost the entire week and Mom out finding herself, with these teenagers having very few rules, lots of free time and just making their way on their own. A surprising number of these people left home early and describe their lives today as having been more or less on their own since they were fifteen.

These same people grew up to become the ‘helicopter parents' you read about today. These are the people that we can't get to leave campus after they drop off their freshman at the dorm nowadays. Every generation overcorrects does it not?

But there was apparently a fairly large number of homes that were unhappy in that era, spouses doing their own thing, and teenagers (then as now) all migrated to the houses with least structure in Connecticut where I went to high school, pretty typical for that era. We got the piece that marriage was under assault and I think we broadly believed that we needed to inject more love into the family in the next generation if we could.

But the notion that gay people were ‘objectively disordered' in their sex lives, that somehow or other they just weren't normal, started to fall apart pretty quickly when I actually met gay people and got to know them personally.

In the 70's when I was in college some people were starting to come out of the closet but others did not feel that freedom. Just after we graduated, I was in Boston with a large group of my fraternity brothers to attend the wedding of one of them who played basketball for Wake Forest when we were in college.

Instead of the normal ‘rehearsal dinner' before the wedding, the groom got all of us tickets to the Red Sox game. We had a lot of athletes in my fraternity back then, so it was a big hit. We hadn't seen each other in a while and I remember that things almost got out of hand when a couple of them were wrestling in the line for the bathroom, trying to pinch each other's nose, so that someone called the cops thinking that they were fighting. We were still just very big boys.

The Sox are way ahead in the 7th, so one of my fraternity brothers asks a few of us to go next door to get a beer at one of the bars right next to the stadium. Beer always seemed like a good idea at that age, so we followed. In very short order, we were walking into this pub, full of men, and finally one of us realized that it seemed to be full only of men. Eye contact was exchanged as I think at least a couple of realized that we'd never actually ever been inside of a gay bar.

Sure enough, the guy that invited us, decided he wanted to tell us that evening that he was gay. It was a little bit shocking actually because until that moment, I don't think any of us had ever thought that was possible. Varsity athlete, great looking guy, always had a great looking date to the parties we had. I think we all stood there sort of scratching our heads and finally muttering something really lame like ‘yeah, sure, whatever dude. No, I mean cool.' We downed our beers and left awkwardly.

It was one of those things we talked about on the way home with our spouses, as in, ‘you're never going to guess whose gay?' with a couple missed guesses followed by ‘you're kidding. Wow.' And it kind of rolled around in my head for a few days.

One night I finally picked up the phone and called him back on the phone, not exactly sure why. But after a couple minutes, I said, “Listen, I just want to apologize for all those gay jokes we used to tell in college. I mean, I never really thought about them like, you know, like they might be offensive.” He was very gracious but he remembered these incidents too.

And then I said something fumbling like, “I never really thought about the whole climate we created. You always had these great girls that you brought to the dance.”

“They were good friends” he said.

“Yeah, well, I never really thought about how awkward that must have been for you and I never really thought about that.”

“Sure. If it make you feel any better”, he said, “a few other guys have called to tell me the same thing and I'm over it.”

Of course, some version of that happened a few more times after graduation as the climate in our country changed and gay people felt a little more freedom and confidence to be themselves. And it was funny my reaction and the other guys my age.

We didn't really understand gays and we didn't really know how to communicate acceptance very well. But our intuitive reaction was not that they weren't normal. Our reaction was a belated apology for our own insensitivity and bone headedness. We just never thought about the climate of hostility to gays that was just part of everything we did.

Years later, when I actually bothered to read the literature on pscho-sexual development because I was teaching ethics at Rutgers and one of our issues was ‘homosexuality' I found the phrase that we tried to express back when we were 22. Homosexuals comprise about 4% of the wider population, so heterosexuality can be said to be the norm for humans. But, said the literature, you can ‘deviate from the norm without being deviant.'

Maybe that ‘objectively disordered' argument in the Church needs to be re-thought altogether. It was right about that time that I was walking across campus in New Brunswick when I saw a young man handing out tracts with a picture of Jesus on the front and the provocative title, “What Jesus says about homosexuality?” Curious, I took one from him. I opened up the tract. The inside was blank. Very creative…

Jesus didn't say anything about homosexuality or sexuality at all for that matter, but he did say quite a bit about love. Jesus taught us that we should all see ourselves as children of God because God loves each and every one of us. Jesus taught us to love our neighbors, to extend some loving compassion to the suffering around us who are in need. Jesus taught us to love even our enemies and to pray for reconciliation, not vengeance.

This isn't a sermon about gays but gays helped me and most of my generation come to a richer understanding of our families. Because at some point, I remember thinking about gays that we've tried repression for the past thousand years in almost every society I can think of, and that hasn't worked out so well. Gay people feel isolated, rejected, full of introjected anger and shame. The results of the guilt approach have little to commend themselves, why don't we try the path of loving acceptance in the Spirit of Jesus? How about we try normalcy and see where that goes?

Why don't we stand for promoting more love in all of our families because it is pretty clear that we could all use that. And the tapestry of our families started to become richer and more varied every year for the past couple decades. We not only had families that were blended with step children that needed extra love and compassion to find a place in this new form of family, our world started shrinking fast.

We started having more families with adoptions and not just adoptions from around the corner but adoptions from all over the world. So moving for me was to witness the way that parents love their children born or adopted with a powerful magnetic grace.

We used to think birth was a profoundly difficult marathon of labor to bring a child in the world, fraught with all kinds of things that can go wrong, and such a marvelous miracle when that baby was born. And it is.

I remember my sister-in-law going through all those procedures to see if she could get pregnant, none of them working, only to find out at the end that she couldn't have children. The disappointment, the sadness.

And then she and her husband decided to adopt and they had to deal with this incredible bureaucracy in the states, even more bureaucracy in China. She finally gets a call and has to drop everything in her business and fly all alone to China, only to get there and be told that there is a problem. She has to stay a few more days, then 10 days, then she gets a call to fly to the middle of the country asap where she gets this infant- the ones that cry every couple hours if they aren't breast fed- and she flies back a few hours to Hong Kong, then she gets another flight for 18 hours with an infant- the ones that can't adjust the pressure in their ears so they scream on the plane flights.

No warm adjustment at home. No Nana to get you a pillow and make your meals, jostling this infant in front of tired and grumpy business people that are stuck in coach with a screaming kid. And she gets back to the Newark Airport at 5 in the morning to get another connecting flight to North Carolina. Kate and I went to meet her. She'd now been at this for 25 hours. I just remember seeing her coming down the walkway, both of these sisters in tears of exhaustion, elation… and love.

There is natural labor and there is the labor of love. Both are beautiful and meaningful.

And later on, I would see our families in Christ Church and our neighbors in Summit take an interest in foster-adoption. Another really difficult bureaucracy… And they worked through all the things the state makes you do to get qualified- finger printing, background FBI checks, turning over way more privacy than the rest of us would ever consider. The waiting only to have things not work out at the last minute. Social workers with an unmanageable case load. Really difficult situations in their families of birth. But finally, those kids, and a new family. And what is beautiful is not only that they put themselves out there, but it is the healing love that comes from being in a strong family, a place of acceptance and nurture, a place of safety, a harbor of home. What we need is love.

No, what we need, in all of our families, whether they are birthed or adopted or blended, whether they are heterosexual of homosexual, is a deeper, more profound mission of love. We need children to find their place and experience the deep acceptance of God's love that comes through our ability to love them. We need to let them become stronger in positive self-esteem because they are secure and rooted in families that nurture spiritual depth and build substantive relationships with not only their relatives but their spiritual community of neighbors that open themselves to sharing their lives on a more intimate way of being in faith and grace. We need gratitude and appreciation of what each individual brings to the table and the wonder that makes our life deeply meaningful.

We need to re-imagine the family as the locus of love that God wants for all of us to realize with each other, in our all too short time on earth.

I'm glad that Jesus didn't make many moral distinctions. We have to make them, of course. But following his example, we ought to make them provisionally and with humility, willing to admit that perhaps we are limited, partial, or just plain wrong.

Jesus kept the big picture focused on our mission of love, perhaps that is because it will take us a life time to catch the full meaning of what it is all about in our lives. Instead of simply re-inforcing the traditional natural law of the past, why don't we spiritually re-imagine our families through the Holy Spirit for the future, grounding them in all of their variation more deeply and profoundly in love? It will be more interesting and more beautiful yet. Amen.