True Family

Today's reading is from Mark chapter three, verses thirty-one to thirty five.

And his mother and his brothers came, and standing outside they sent to him and called him.

And a crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, Your mother and your brothers are outside seeking you.

And he answered them, Who are my mother and my brothers?

And looking about at those who sat around him, he said, Here are my mother and my brothers.

For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

Are any of you exhausted?

Yeah, totally.

I am too.

We got dressed up, hung out around the kitchen, and ate a lot of food, and I'm exhausted.

It's crazy.

But thanks for joining us.

My name is James.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church.

Couple of announcements.

Membership is available right now.

So if you're interested in becoming a member or starting that process, you can email info at redemptiondenver.com.

Now, a great thing about starting that membership process is just a great way to begin a dialogue with the leadership of the church.

Those are called elders, which doesn't mean we're old.

In fact, we tend to be pretty young.

Our oldest elder is right there.

He's like 40.

But do you know that senator also means old?

Yeah, see?

How does that make you feel?

It's the same sort of word.

So anyway, it's a title, is my point.

That's a useless tangent.

Membership is available.

It's a great way to begin a discussion with leadership of the church and discover what the church means, what your faith means in relation to the church, uh, and how that all works.

So to do that, just reach out to info at redemptiondenver.com.

Also, uh, the first of the year is almost upon us, and that means New Year's resolutions and commitments and things we're looking forward to getting started.

One of the things that has been incredibly meaningful in my life, uh, and that I hope to uh it can be equally as encouraging to you and in the life of our church is doing a Bible reading plan each year.

So looking to get in into the scripture, when you pick up the Bible and you're like, where do I start?

How do I even begin to relate to a text like this can be really daunting and a uh really nerve-wracking type of experience.

So one of the things that's been very helpful for me is to take an old system for reading scripture and just use it.

Uh that way each day you wake up and it's like, okay, I just read these scriptures.

The plan that we offer as a church is an old plan uh created by this Scottish pastor who is a young guy who obviously loved numbers and things and organization.

And uh his name was Robert Murray McShane, so it's the McShane Bible reading plan.

And it takes you through the whole Bible in a year uh and then the uh Gospels and the Psalms twice.

Uh so you it's even a little bit more than the Bible in a year.

You can find the first quarter, so it takes you through March of that reading plan, we have printed out on a post it on a postcard so that you can use it as like a bookmark in your Bible.

Uh, and that's on the welcome table outside.

And while you're at the welcome table, uh if you could sign a thank you card that is on that table, because the table that you're signing it on was given to us by a company called Aspen Leaf, which is just up the street.

They do kitchen renovations, and we reached out to them to do the new cabinets and uh kitchenette little area that's in the hallway right when you walk in.

Uh, and they just gave it to us for free.

They gave us cabinets, which is really nice.

Yeah, that's right.

So if you could take all that golf clap energy that you guys have got and turn that into signatures on that paper, I think it'll mean a lot to Aspen Leaf.

All right, let's pray, and then we'll talk about how Jesus says no to his family.

Does that sound good?

Hmm.

All right.

Father, thank you for bringing us together this morning.

I pray that your word would uh enliven our hearts and that you would apply your word by your spirit to our hearts, into the particulars of the situations and the families that we come from.

Lord, you speak into every area of our lives, from uh our spiritual personal lives to our social lives with our friends, our lives and our work, and of course, how we relate to our own families.

So, Lord, I pray that you would speak clearly into that this morning by your word.

In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, so we're gonna finish off our time in Mark for 2020.

The next time we'll be back in Mark, we'll start in chapter four.

We're finishing off chapter three.

We'll start in chapter four in the fall of 2021.

Now you'll remember kind of the pattern that we're doing is in the beginning of the year, we're doing Genesis, and then in the fall, we're doing uh a gospel.

So we're moving through the gospel of Mark.

So this is our first year that we've done that in 2020.

So we did the first 10 chapters of Genesis at the beginning of this year, and we're going to move in, uh, actually starting in chapter 12, and we're gonna start moving through the story of Abraham.

We're gonna we're gonna start moving through the story of the patriarchs.

I was focus grouping the name for that sermon series.

I was gonna name it the patriarchy, but I guess that has some baggage attached, so we're gonna name it something else.

Um and um, man, I'm glad that joke landed.

That was a close call.

The uh uh, but we're gonna be moving through the story of the patriarchs in scripture.

So we're gonna be looking at particularly this year or next year, which is just a couple of days, uh, we're going to be moving through the story of Abraham.

Uh and then back through Mark in the fall.

So uh yeah, I love preaching through Genesis.

I can't wait to get back into it.

It's gonna be really cool to see.

Uh, but here we are at the end of Mark.

And uh as I was uh praying about and discussing with the volunteers that are here for today earlier, Jesus took on every aspect of our humanity.

Uh in fact, uh one theologian says, if it wasn't embodied, it wasn't redeemed.

And that means that Jesus redeemed all of what it means to be a human, and that means he embodied all of it.

And one of those aspects that he took on is family.

Now we may think Jesus' relationship with his family must have been pretty simple, because dad was God.

But in fact, Jesus had just as complicated of a relationship with his family as you do.

How you relate to the difficulties of your family, Jesus took on that very same dynamic and he relates just as well.

And today we're seeing how that dynamic between him and his family reaches a sort of critical point where they have to begin working through who Jesus really is and relating to him in a way that goes even beyond how they relate to him as a son or as a brother.

Now, this has a lot of analogies for the way that we relate to our families, but we'll see that the way that Jesus it the way that Jesus relates to his family and the way that he tells them no and then offers this redefinition of family is not just an example of how we should relate to our families, but it actually shows us that Jesus transformed what family means.

In fact, he doesn't just transform it, he restores it to what the original intention of family is and how we're meant to relate to family.

So this is a uh this should be a passage of incredible hope, and I think it's really timely because this time of year, many of you are relating back with family members that you relate to on a sort of monthly basis.

But what you find is that the second you all get back together, those same emotional pathways that were lying dormant are so easily resurrected, aren't they?

And all of a sudden, okay, glad we're all on the same page.

The uh uh and it that all that time away, all that distance, you realize that this family dynamic that has existed for as long as you can remember is still there.

You might think, how can there be hope that that could change?

That's something that's so fundamental to your life or so fundamental to your own identity, how could that be redeemed?

Well, Jesus offers that type of hope in this passage.

So let's begin.

The first thing that the family does is they attempt to seize Jesus.

So we'll listen we'll uh begin with the first verse of this passage.

Mark 31 to 35.

And his mother and his brothers came, and standing outside, they sent to him and called him.

Okay, so that's the beginning of today's drama.

Jesus is inside a house, a large crowd is gathered and they've filled up the house.

And Jesus is teaching and likely healing people.

And so there's a large group of people that are close to Jesus that are inside the house.

But ironically, the family, those who should be closest to Jesus, are outside the house.

And the family, uh, his mother and his brothers, we don't know where Joseph is at this point.

It's likely that Joseph has died at this point.

They are reaching out to try and pull Jesus back in.

This is uh the setting of today's drama.

There's no miracles, there's uh no swift debates with Pharisees.

All that happens is Jesus is with a group, his family reaches out to him, and they try and pull him out of that group, and Jesus says, No, I'm staying here.

Now that may not seem like a miracle, but in an ancient Near Eastern culture like this, that is so family-centric, we're basically witnessing a social miracle.

That Jesus is reorienting the concept of family in a way like this.

So, in order to really understand the dynamic, we have to view it in the context of Mark's gospel and really just this uh section of what takes place in chapter three.

What happens is Jesus makes a break with the Pharisaical religious structure.

And then a crowd follows him away from the normal and ordinary religious gatherings of the Jewish community, and he begins to form a leadership structure of his new community based on 12 apostles that he calls out of the crowd.

And so now, while Jesus had been moving in the stream of the normal religious institutions of his time, now he's making a break with that stream and creating a new type of movement from the old.

As he says, he can't put new wine into old wineskins.

He's creating a new movement with new wineskins.

Now, when that happens, a crowd begins to form, and the family of Jesus sees this break with the normal religious structure, and he sees the con they see the controversy that's swirling around Jesus.

And this is what they say in Mark 3, 20 through 21.

This is earlier than today's passage.

It says, Then he went home, and the crowd gathered again, so that they could not even eat.

And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for they were saying, He is out of his mind.

See what's happening with the way that Jesus' family is relating to him?

Jesus is moving out of the mainstream, and the family says, This is too strange.

We've got to reach out to Jesus and pull him back into the normal stream.

Jesus is stretching a little bit too far, and what they're gonna try and do is distance themselves from Jesus' actions, and they're also, in their language, trying to distance even Jesus himself from his own actions.

Like, look, we see, look, Pharisees, Jesus is acting pretty crazy right now.

Look, this is so out of character for him.

Trust me, this isn't what he's really like.

You just gotta get to know him.

All right, Jesus, we gotta pull him back.

So they're trying to seize Jesus.

Seize is the important word here.

Now, what happens next is Mark tells the story of the Pharisees accusing, actually the scribes from Jerusalem, accusing Jesus of being possessed by the devil.

And they're saying the way that Jesus is able to cast out demons is by the power of Satan, the prince of demons.

Now, what Jesus then says is a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand.

And in fact, in order to plunder a strong man's house, this is the parable that he tells, you must first bind or seize the strong man.

Once the strong man is seized, then you can plunder his house.

What Jesus is saying is I came to bind Satan so that I could take from his house what doesn't belong to him.

Now, what doesn't belong to Satan, it's us.

It's our hearts that are bound by Satan, and Jesus came to bind Satan so that we could be freed.

Now, what happens next, right after Jesus tells that parable, is this section where the crowd gathers again, and his mother and his brothers came, standing outside, they send and call for him.

See what Mark is showing us?

He's giving us three descriptions of trying to seize Jesus.

When his family calls to him in this passage, it's simple to read and think, oh, it's just his family reaching out.

Why is Jesus, to borrow my wife's interpretation of this earlier this morning, why is Jesus being so sassy with his family?

I think it's a good question.

And we see it's because what we're what Mark is showing us is the family is trying to seize Jesus, trying to pull him out of the mission that God has given him, back into the comfortable mainstream, back into the homeostasis, back into those normal emotional patterns that the family had become so comfortable in.

Do you see the dynamic?

But Jesus remains unseized.

Jesus is unbound by Satan, and Jesus is unbound by his family, the most fundamental institution that can tend to pull us back into those old ways.

We see this in that sandwich type of uh way of writing that Mark has.

Okay, now how does that sound to you?

Let's do it again.

The crowd Jesus gets news from the crowd, your mother and your brothers are seeking you outside.

Who are my mother and my brothers?

That's just strange, right?

It's it's kind of a little off-putting.

I think sassy is the word.

Like it's a little off-putting that Jesus talks that way.

And in fact, the crowd must have felt deeply bewildered by Jesus' response.

Because we can tell, look, it's not that James, the brother of Jesus, runs in and you know, makes his way through the crowd like a male model, because they can get through any crowd.

Zoolander reference.

And they uh uh gets up to Jesus and says, uh, hey, look, we gotta talk.

Mom's outside, the rest of our brothers are outside.

Come on, we gotta talk.

No, the crowd relays the message to Jesus, which means their assumption is like the crowd's assumption is like what our assumption would be.

Your family has a special call on your life.

If they're calling you out of what you're doing now, then you should probably just respond to them.

That's the way the world works.

There's a normal relational tie to families that goes beyond your tie to this crowd.

But Jesus disrupts that way of thinking and offers this strange, he always does this.

He says something so strange that kind of like breaks you out of your normal way of thinking, and then he introduces a whole new paradigm for the way that they should be thinking about family and that we should be thinking about family as well.

So he bewilders them by saying, Who is my mother and my brothers?

To which the crowd said, Well, it's James and Mary and you know, your mother and your brothers.

But then he introduces this Mark 34 and 35, and looking about at those who sat around him, he said, Here are my mother and my brothers.

For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.

So if you're sitting in the crowd, there's something wonderful.

Jesus just called you family.

You know, you look around and he looks out at you and he says, Look, this is my mother and my brothers.

How close are you to me?

You're my own family.

You're like a mother to me, you're like a brother or a sister to me.

That's how close we are to Jesus.

He calls us in, calls us his own family, makes us that close.

But we have to admit part of that closeness also would have come if you're in that crowd with a feeling of just strangeness.

What does family even mean to this guy?

How does Jesus understand the concept of family?

Does it actually have any meaning?

Or does Jesus just find his movement, and if you're on board with him, then you're his family.

And if you're not on board, then his familial ties mean nothing.

He cuts the ties that bind.

That's Bruce Springsteen.

Well, look, in order to understand how Jesus understands family, we need to give ourselves two categories that we are likely operating in, in our own understanding of family.

And then we're going to see how Jesus is offering neither of these.

Okay, so here's two categories that we're likely operating in.

We'll call them the traditional family, which is not a sitcom, and then we'll call them modern family, which is a sitcom.

And so that's how you'll keep them separated.

One isn't, one is.

So first, traditional family.

Traditional family structure is the one that we see in Jesus' culture.

The family is the dominant unit of society, and it is the most fundamental aspect of your identity.

You find your identity in the family unit.

You and yourself, you're not separable from the family.

The family shares honor and shame together.

So this is the traditional family structure.

And what happens in a traditional family structure is when one uh when one unit of the family breaks out and goes rogue and moves away from the traditional stream, then it's the family's job to reach out, seize them, and bring them back in.

So that the whole, so that the family as a whole saves space.

Now, we can see clearly that that's the dynamic that's taking place here, right?

Jesus is operating in a traditional family structure, he's operating strangely, so the family unit reaches out to try and pull him back in to this traditional family structure.

Now, in seeing that, what our minds do is they say, okay, so what we're seeing here is like the advent of the first modern family structure.

What's a modern family structure?

It's not where the unit is primary, but it's where the individual is primary.

And the family unit is secondary to the individual.

So we have plenty of movies about this where you see the family structure that's holding you back, but then in order for you to realize your full self and your full potential, you need to abandon and throw off the ties of your family, and you need to cut out on your own.

And baby, we were born to run.

I'm just gonna do as now that we're in this vein.

And the uh uh when you see that tradition, so what we can think that Jesus is doing is saying, see, you aren't defined by your family.

You're defined by yourself.

And look at me.

I'm so liberated that I'm able to operate unbound by my family with the self-definition that I bring into the world.

Now, those are the two categories: the traditional family and the modern family.

When we read this, what would be our tendency is to read that Jesus is moving from the traditional family to the modern family.

I want to give you one more quote, which I should have given earlier, to discuss the uh uh what the modern family is.

This is from uh Edwin Friedman's book, Generation to Generation.

And he describes that I just thought this was a great description of.

The modern category of family.

And he interacts with this in terms of individual counseling models.

That is counseling models that view the individual as the primary locus of identity.

He says this individual counseling models tend to see the extended family field almost exclusively as the source of difficulties or pathology.

The model tends to focus on what is sick or weak in the family, what to avoid or keep at a distance.

It therefore encourages individuals with problems to see their family of origin only as a source of their weakness and not as also a source of their strength.

Does that sound familiar?

I mean, there's kind of a pun there with no, no, no.

Does that sound familial?

That's the pun.

Sorry.

I'll see you guys later.

I'm gonna be.

But does that that dynamic, do you see the way that individual model works?

And it's easy for us to think that's what Jesus is doing.

See?

Your family of origin is just the source of your pathology.

It's just the source of your weakness.

It's just the source of your problems.

The way that you become a fully realized human is you create distance between yourself and your family of origin.

And look, I can prove it.

That's what Jesus is doing.

See how easy it is for us to snap into that way of thinking?

Those are the normal ways of operating, I think, for us, the traditional model or the modern family model.

But neither of those are what Jesus is describing here.

This is not an individual identity versus a collective identity.

This is not the family versus the individual.

That's not the dynamic that Jesus is operating here.

He's not saying, see, we choose the individual.

See, you don't uh don't be bound by your family.

Instead, he's saying neither the traditional nor the individual are correct.

But the most fundamental aspect of your identity is not your family nor what you discover in yourself, but it is your relationship to God.

The most fundamental aspect of your identity is not what your family says about you, or not what you discover in yourself that you have freed from your family's saying about you, but it's your relationship to God that is the most fundamental aspect of your identity.

That's why Jesus says in Mark 3, 35, for whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.

What Jesus is doing here is he's putting the family back into its God-ordained proportion.

What gets out of whack in our relationship to our families is the proportion of influence that we give them.

And in both the traditional model and in the modern model, we're giving too great of an emphasis to the family's role in our identity, something that's reserved for God alone.

In the traditional model, we say, look, even if you're pulling me back, like if Jesus had obeyed the traditional model, when the family reached out to pull him back into the normal dynamic of their families and pull him away from the God-given mission that he was sent on to be obedient to God, then Jesus would be idolizing the traditional model of the family and denying what God has called him to do.

He would be bound by the family.

But in the modern model as well, we think of it as being liberated from the family.

But if the if the only way that you are able to be liberated from your family is to create a physical distance from them and an inability to be near them or around them without feeling taken advantage of or feeling oppressed in some way, then that family is still the controlling factor of your identity.

You see, in both ways, the modern and the traditional, there's an idolization of the family.

Jesus says that needs to find its proper proportion.

And how does it find its proper proportion when we see that the primary factor in our identity is our relationship to God?

Now, consider this.

God created family into the world even before the fall, even before things went wrong.

Family was in the world, which means family is good.

And family is the fundamental aspect of how we are, how our uh identities are formed, how we're formed as people, and how we relate as communities.

It takes place within families.

So God made the uh made humanity and he made us in families.

That's why he doesn't make one person, he makes two, he makes Adam and Eve.

And then he commands them to be fruitful and multiply, make a family.

That's the environment that we are meant to relate in.

But what happens is that that environment was meant to be related in with God as Lord over everything, and our direct lineage coming from God who makes us.

But instead, what happens is Adam and Eve sin, and that sin passes on to their children, and so they grow up in a sinful environment, and then they have children who cultivate a sinful environment, and they have children, and they have children, and then you know, thousands of years later, here we all are in a room from all of these families that are incredibly messed up.

You know what the problem with your parents is?

They had parents.

And you know what the problem with your kids is?

You.

You see, this isn't about the individual versus the family, because when we understand the scope of our sin, then we realize that neither a family model can help us, nor an individual model can help us.

Because the family is corrupted by sin.

And even if we get rid of our families to try and free ourselves, we ourselves are corrupted by sin.

And so what we need is someone who can come and bring us into the depth of relationship that we were meant to experience with God, so that that relationship might be reoriented.

And then we can re-enter our families, not requesting so much of them that they give us the whole of our identity.

We're not projecting so much of them that we see all that they have done is ruin us.

Instead, we're able to move into them with an identity that's from God, so that we may bless and love and care for and not even look down upon, because we realize we are all corrupted by the same sin.

Listen to what John says of Jesus' ministry at the beginning of his gospel.

In John 1, 12 and 13, says of Jesus, but to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

Jesus comes to give us a new primary relationship from which our identity can freely flow, where we find our identity in the family of God.

So we are born not of blood.

That means the primary aspect of our identity is not our heritage.

It's an aspect, but it's not the defining aspect.

We aren't born of God by being born of blood, nor of the will of the flesh.

That means we aren't even able to say that this, that our relationship with God reduces to a decision that we made.

It doesn't even reduce to our own will, which means that when we find our identity in God, we aren't even able to look down on others who don't.

Do you see that?

Because what often happens is one person in a family runs off and becomes a Christian, and then the family, you know, tries to reach and pull them back in, and the Christian walks back into the family and is like, I'm just better than all of you, and you all don't get it.

No, you're not even able to do that.

Because you aren't born of the will of your own flesh, nor of the will of man.

That's the next thing.

So, what does that mean?

That means that you aren't incorporated into God's family by being born into a Christian family or being a part of a community that enforces Christianity upon you.

That's an ineffective means.

The only way we become a Christian is being born of God, of God's accord.

We respond because he enlivens our hearts.

We're drawn to him because we see the beauty of his coming and of his recreating our families.

So, what does that mean?

How do we then relate to our families?

Well, it means we no longer have to retreat in fear from our families, as in the modern person who can only have their identity when their family is moved away.

And we don't have to succumb in passivity or codependency and be in and lose the identity that God has given us by our participation with our family, as in the traditional model.

So this is not one of running away, nor is this one of appeasement.

Instead, we are able to be present with our broken families in love and care and understanding because we know that the identity that we've been given is one that's been given to us from God.

Do you see that dynamic?

It is the grace of Jesus which allows our families to be redeemed.

Like the family of Adam and Eve before the fall.

That's the hope of God.

So Jesus is not getting rid of family here.

He's not saying, see, family doesn't matter.

He's saying, in order for family to work, the most important thing in your life, the most important thing about you has to be that Jesus has saved you.

That Jesus has given you a new identity.

That coming into your family means a redeemed family.

That's something he can use.

Okay.

Any questions?

How do you balance the important work of untangling the impact of our family of origin while cultivating the essential relationship with God?

Well, I don't think those are mutually exclusive.

In fact, if you could keep those apart, uh to be frank, I don't think those could ever be kept apart.

John Calvin, in his institutes, he begins uh by talking about knowledge of God.

What does it mean to know God?

And uh so he describes this, what's called an epistemology.

It's what do what do we know about knowing?

And he says that the difficulty with knowing God is that we are always simultaneously getting to know God and getting to know ourselves.

Those are not in competition with each other, they're simultaneously happening.

So what happens?

You get to know that God is holy.

Well, what does holy mean?

Well, you get to know at the same time that you're sinful, right?

You're learning the same thing at the same time.

And so, oh, can we get the question back?

And so when we're untangling the impact of our family of origin and cultivating an essential relationship with God, while you're cultivating that essential relationship with God, you're realizing, oh, you know what?

There's places in my family that God has called me to that I have sought to address by avoiding.

And or there's places in my family that God has called me to uh to demonstrate that my main allegiance is to God, and instead I've been appeasing my family.

And you realize that in order to maintain an obedience, in order to maintain an integrity of your relationship with God, and to be growing in your relationship with God, God is calling you into the untangling of these baggage that you carry with you from your family of origin.

Likewise, you start to discover that these uh these tangles, especially when you get to discover the heart of God, like Jesus is just rushing into tangles all the time.

He can't resist.

That's his heart.

He he sees these tangles, and we often view them as just like catastrophes that need to be avoided uh or or just like dealt with and put away.

To Jesus, they're like irresistible, they're they're they're the setting of the miracle.

And he can't help but rush into that.

And so part of uh untangling these things in our growth with God is it they're they're always gonna work together.

So I wouldn't worry about getting that proportion right, uh, so much as I would worry about uh making sure that that Christ holds the proportion of your heart.

Uh He will pull you into those tangles.

It's in his heart to do that.

He he can't see the man's withered hand without saying, I'm gonna straighten that one out.

The same with your family.

Even there.

He didn't, you know, you know how orcs are made in Lord of the Rings?

From like those bubbles in the ground that they pull them out of?

You know, I think a lot of times we think of Jesus like that, where it's like they're just grown, like he just grew out of the ground, disembodied, but no, he came to redeem it all, which means he came in a family.

So the main thing I want this sermon to do for you is I know we all carry around issues with our family.

Oh, and I I want you to see Jesus entered a family, he relates to me here, so I can hope for redemption even here.

It's the main thing I want you to have from this.

All right, let's pray.