St George's Cathedral, Cape Town

A Sermon preached by the Reverend Bruce W. B. Jenneker in the Cathedral Church of St George the Martyr, Cape Town, on the Third Sunday in Lent., 15 March 2009

The renowned Hawaiian author Dr Paul Pearshall writes in his book The Power of Family that 'our most basic instinct is not for survival but for family. Most of us would give our own life for the survival of a family member, yet we lead our daily life too often as if we take our family for granted.' This evening, the lectionary focuses our attention sharply on the family. From the Hebrew Scriptures we have the next instalment in the saga of Joseph and his family, a history of favouritism and arrogance, jealousy and betrayal; the slow, painful journey to knowledge of the hart and the joy of reunion. From the Gospel we have one of the many instances of the rejection of the primacy of family in the teaching and practice of Jesus. “You don't choose your family,' Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu said once, 'They are God's gift to you, as you are to them,' he said.

Did you notice how Mark defines our Lord's family, both in the announcement of the crowd and in the response Jesus makes? “Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside,' the crowd tells Jesus. 'Who are my mother, my brothers and my sisters?” Jesus asks. Our Lord's father is not mentioned – neither by the crowd nor by him. Is this because Joseph was by now long dead, as tradition would have it? Or is it because Jesus has only one Father, the God he called Abba in their hearing?

In 2004 Santiago Guijarro, Professor of Theology at the University of Salamanca in Spain, wrote a landmark article on the family in the Jesus movement in the Biblical Theology Bulletin. He suggests that one of the most relevant aspects of the beginnings of Christianity is the evolution that can be observed with regard to Christian attitudes towards the family and the household. The documents of the first three centuries of Christianity, beginning with the Gospels, continuing with the letters and including the writings of the Early Church Fathers, witness a process that begins with Jesus' apparently anti-familial attitude, continues with a critical acceptance of the family in the writings of Paul, for example, and concludes with an enthusiastic acceptance of the household structure.

The most problematic aspect of this evolution is the discontinuity that appears to exist between the Jesus movement before his death and that of his disciples after his resurrection. Some New Testament scholars, like Bruce Malina, see in this break with the attitude and teachings of Jesus a shift from the realm of political religion to that of domestic piety. For first century Mediterranean society religion was not a separate and independent system, something one either chose or rejected, rather it was embedded in the domestic and political life of all people, from the lowest slave to the highest nobles, including the emperor. While Jesus did not fulfil the political expectations of many of his followers and certainly rejected their hopes of a violent overthrow of the occupying tyrants, he nevertheless preached a political Gospel – one which entailed citizenship of different kingdom, laws and values diametrically opposed to those of the status quo, and unconditional loyalty to the Highest Power of all.

In this Jesus was redefining a way of life, designing a new paradigm for being in the world. His teachings rejected with equal fervour the politics of the Empire and that of the Temple. And equally importantly, his teachings rejected the prerogatives of the family. All three of these, the Empire, the Temple and the family sought to define the identity of individuals, prescribe their loyalties, require their obedience and demand control of their resources. This was precisely what the Good News of Christ's Gospel sought to reconfigure. His words of life were a radical re-visioning of what it means to be human, to be alive, to be one person among many other persons, sharing the time and place of this life. 'The greatest among you is the one who is servant of all,' he taught, radically redefining the notions of authority, power and empire. 'When you pray, do not prattle the formulas of ritual piety on the street corners or in the synagogue, but go into your room and find God who waits there for you,' he preached, shattering the chains by which the religious authorities bound the faithful. Further and equally subversively he declared, 'What constitutes family is not the blood that makes us mother and brother and sister to one another, but listening to and hearing and obeying the word that comes to all of us and makes of us who are many, one holy people.'

Jesus was not rejecting citizenship, religion or family life. What he was doing was putting those loyalties in a new perspective. This was a political act on his part, one that was both radical and subversive. From the standpoint of the authorities, he was undermining the state, he was blaspheming and espousing heresy and destabilising the family. They killed him for his presumptions. But the authorities killed him also because they refused the life he offered: it was too noble, too idealistic and too altruistic.

Christian theology understands that in the life and teaching, passion, death and resurrection of Jesus, God is acting to call the world away from a doomed way of life. In Jesus Christ God is calling us darkness to light, from ignorance to wisdom, from death to life. By his self-offering, Jesus breaks open the way for us to turn away from all that threatens to diminish and destroy us and reach for abundant life. The way that Jesus offers is a counter-cultural way, one that trusts only God and God's promises and lives by them with confidence and joy.

How much easier it is for us to trust and depend on the ways of the world, the practice of religion and the security of family life. Jesus points us beyond these to a way of life in which our gaze is lifted higher, our understanding stretched to wider horizons and the demand on our commitment is for nothing less than total surrender. Harbours of a new kind of safety are being offered here, not the shallow moorings of party politics, civil religion, family ties. In Jesus Christ we are offered safe anchorage in the deep waters of all the changes and chances of life, in him we find security that endures while life's billows roll and triumphs in the midst of the tempest.

Even so, you and I find our comfort in religion that is easy, not in Christ's way that demands that we redefine the way we see society, reconfigure the way in which we operate in our culture and rearrange our priorities.

And so it is that we are given a key to unlock the meaning of the parable of the sower and the seed. The sower scatters the seed and some seed falls on the path, some on the rocks and some among thorns. These areas are unwelcoming and inhospitable, in each of them the seed shrivels and dies. Some of the seed falls on good soil – those who hear the word and believe it, Christ's family, mothers, brothers and sisters. Among them the seed grows and yields a hundredfold. Those who receive the seed of Christ's Gospel of the renewal and reconfiguring of the world, these are they in whom the Gospel can grow and yield much fruit. Some are too busy plotting their ways along paths of this world to receive the seed. Others are rock-hard in their self-serving and life-denying ways, others are lost among the thorns that beguile and enthral. Those who are ready to receive the seed of the Gospel and to be the place of its germination, these are the members of Christ's family, Christ's mother, Christ's brothers and sisters.

Marie de Rabutin- Chantal, Marquise de Sévigném the sixteenth-century writerm had this to say about family relationships: 'We cannot destroy kindred, our chains stretch a little sometimes, but they never break.' Pray God that her words are true of the family of those that bear Christ's name and preach Christ's Gospel. For our connections are stretched indeed. Among us Gay and Lesbian Anglicans have no real dignity or respect and remain excluded from the right and privileges that are theirs by their baptism. Patriarchy divides us still and the full inclusion of women in the life of faith remains more of a hope than a reality. Children along those who live with handicaps – those who are deaf, blind, crippled to seldom have a voice and influence on our common life.

Political agendas you say – all of them are political, yes, and also so much more. The vision of humanity for which Christ lived, died and rose again is of a humanity completely restored to the image of God in which it is created. This is the vision locked in the seed of the Gospel and which has been scattered onto our hearts. Pray, my sisters and brothers, that we may prove good soil.

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