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Acts 16:9-15, John 14:15-29

May 13, 2007

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

 

            Today the UCC Calendar tells us we are celebrating the Festival of the Christian Home. For general American society, it is also known as Mother’s Day. For many years this holiday was a nightmare for me. During thirteen years of infertility before we adopted Luke, Mother’s Day was, for me (and still is for many infertile women) a reminder that I was not a mother and possibly never would be. If I hadn’t been a pastor for most of those years, I would not have gone to church on this day each year because it was hard to wear a happy face and congratulate mothers.

 

            Part of what made those years difficult for me is that I grew up mostly in the 1960’s, and my understanding of “family” was shaped by 1960’s TV. Sitcoms all featured nice suburban homes with picket fences and 2.3 beautiful children. Mom vacuumed smiling in her skirt and pearls (who remembers “Leave It To Beaver” or “Ozzie and Harriet”?). Long before I got married, I had jettisoned June Cleaver and Harriet Nelson as my models for womanhood, but somewhere in my head still rattled around the notion that “home” equaled a house with a yard, husband and children, and the church said nothing to shake the impression that God saw this as the ideal home as well. Part of that cultural and holy equation seemed permanently beyond my grasp.

 

            For some of you, there may be other parts that stereotypical vision of “home” that are not part of your life, perhaps by your own choice or perhaps by circumstance of life. American culture is still dominated by this notion that “home” is defined in certain ways: heterosexual marriage, children genetically related to at least one parent in the house, a separate home or apartment for each nuclear family unit. And there are those in state and national governments who want to pass laws to further institutionalize that stereotype and say to everyone else: you’re not living the right way. Home and family, they say, means marriage between one man and one woman, with children, and children should only be raised in such a home.

 

            So if you are single, married but childless, gay/lesbian or transgendered (whether in or out of a committed relationship), if you are a single parent or in an abusive marriage and want to get out, you are understood to be outside the norm of culture, and further, in some religious circles, living a sinful existence, worthy of punishment or exclusion, in need of conversion or, perhaps, “completion.” In Jesus’ time a similarly narrow religious value system allowed a barren woman like me to be cast out of her home and left to depend on the kindness of relatives or strangers. This kind of thinking is what Jesus means when he talks about how “the world” thinks.

 

            Into this cultural and religious milieu come these words of Jesus: “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.”

 

            Jesus defines the kind of home God would come to and live in not by the location or structure of a building, nor by the gender or sexual orientation or fertility or marital status of the people in the home. Jesus defines home as a place where people keep his word. And that definition is a whole lot harder to understand and live out than the easy cultural or shallow theological concepts that dominate the discussion of marriage, adoption and other family matters in our society today.

 

            “Those who love me keep my word, and we will come to them and make our home with them.”

 

            What does it mean to love Jesus by keeping his word? What is the difference between what Jesus teaches his disciples about the quality of a home where God dwells and what the world –then or now—thinks it should be?

 

            Jesus, at least as the gospel writers remember it, says precious little about homes or family or marriage or parents and children in particular. He talks about this much less than he talks, for example, about money or hypocrisy. He speaks about divorce, once in Mark and twice in Matthew’s gospel, on both occasions speaking against the common practice of a man simply writing a paper declaring he is divorcing his wife on any grounds he likes, therefore making a mockery of the vows of marriage. Elsewhere he chastises the Pharisees for encouraging people to ignore the needs of their elderly parents in order to dedicate their future estate to the Temple. But then he also urges people to leave their families if those families impede their ability to serve God. He doesn’t say one word about homosexuality or single parenting, nor does he speak either for or against polygamy which was commonly practiced in his time and certainly was the norm in the Old Testament stories, where marriage was almost never between one man and only one woman.

 

            So there’s not a lot to go on here. What Jesus does speak at length about throughout his ministry, however, is how we are to act in relationship with other human beings. For Jesus, who had no “physical” home during his three years of public ministry, and whose family was 12 men, home with God was about the quality of human relationships, not about the legal or genetic configurations of family.

 

            “If you love me,” he said to the disciples, “you will keep my commandment. I give you a new commandment: that you love one another as I have loved you.”

 

            How did Jesus love those disciples? He forgave them, again and again, their hard-headed and hard-heartedness. He patiently helped them understand God’s word. He healed their family and friends. He called them to claim their gifts and use them. He gave of himself sacrificially to them. He insisted they live and speak truthfully and that they serve one another as he had served them. He respected them, but he was not afraid to chastise them when they were wrong. He challenged them to love in ways they might not have thought possible. He reached out to make disciples of people who were cast out by the religious establishment, like Matthew the tax collector.

 

            He tried to make it clear the them over and over that human relationships in the image of God are shown by qualities of truth-telling, forgiveness, generosity, presence, service, prayer and hospitality. Is it too cliché to say that it actually does boil down to “they will know we are Christians by our love?” By our love, you see, not by our gender or sexual orientation or fertility or marital status or genetic compatibility. So a Christian home, a place where God will come to dwell, is defined by the quality of love exhibited and not by any of those other things.

 

            Our reading from Acts today shows that even Paul, often held up as a model for conservative family values or vilified as sexist, recognizes this character of home as he meets and comes into a working relationship with Lydia. We know very little about Lydia, only what we can surmise form what the author of Acts tells us. She was a wealthy woman; she ran her own business selling the most expensive cloth available. She was probably unmarried, because the text notes that she makes decisions for her household and in that time a married woman could not have done so. We don’t know if she had ever been married or if her household included children to whom she had given birth.

 

            In short, Lydia was no June Cleaver.

 

            We do know she had a heart and mind receptive to the message of the gospel and a strong spirit of hospitality. She also had an adventurous and open spirit that allowed her to take a chance on supporting this controversial preacher who was stirring up so much trouble in Philippi. Because of these things, what she calls her “faithfulness,” and not because her home was the cultural ideal of his or any other age, Paul and his companions made their home with her while they stayed in Philippi, and she welcomed them back even after they’d been arrested and thrown into jail as public nuisances. Tradition has it that the church in Philippi met in Lydia’s home where she was one of its leaders. The letter of Paul to the Philippians is one of his warmest and shows a church full of generosity, courage and love.

 

            “Those who love me will keep my word, and God will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.”

 

            If your home fits the Hallmark Card stereotype today; God wants to come and dwell with you. If your home doesn’t look like the Cleavers, God wants to come and dwell with you, also. All the invitation God needs is what Lydia gave to Paul: the quality of your love. Amen.