Pentecost 2 B

I have an important question for you: when you eat your meals, do you like to keep each item separate…or do you like it when the different parts mix together? Ok, so it’s not that important of a question — but I am going somewhere with this. I’ve noticed that some people like to blend their food together on their plate, and some that very intentionally keep their foods from even touching. And, if you really like to keep the parts separate, you can use those plates that have the divided compartments for each food.

Now, I’m not going to tell you how to eat.

But I like that image of the divided plate to think about something that happens to all of us to a certain extent. We get our lives into little sections. I’ve got my faith section here. And my finance section here. And my family section here. Each in its own spot.

(This will probably be one of those sermons that I’m mostly preaching to myself, because I really struggle with this…my plate often has all my faith stuff neatly placed inside my ‘professional’ tray, and gets separated from the rest.)

And then Jesus comes along with words like those found in today’s Gospel and it really messes up my plate.

Isn’t this story uncomfortable? Jesus is inside teaching his followers and he gets word that his own flesh and blood family is outside calling for him — and he seems to dismiss them. His own mother and brothers and Jesus ignored them! This is our Holy Scripture! It’s a good thing we’re passed Mother’s Day.

Although most of this Gospel lesson sounds weird to our modern ears (after all, it talks about both demons and Jesus being mean to his family) there is a lot going on here that would have been made an important point to someone in the time of Jesus.

The driving force is that Jesus is being deviant. To the people around him, his preaching and teaching have come from nowhere…he wasn’t born into a family of pharisees or religious leaders or even highly educated people. Which meant in his society that he had no business teaching about God.

And then there was the role of the family in Jesus’ time: your position in a family was the most important part of your identity. The difference could be illustrated with this question: what’s more important now, if you were to introduce yourself to a stranger…would you tell them about you first, or your family first? Most of us would start with our individual identity, and then maybe go on to share our family history and background.

It was the opposite in Jesus’ day…

Every family had a certain amount of honor. It was more important than money. And acting outside of your ‘place’ meant losing that honor. What Jesus is doing is putting himself and his family at risk, which is why they try to restrain him.

The truth was that your biological family meant everything at the time of the New Testament. It was the divider that you could not cross. And everything that you did, and everything that God did was believed to have to respect that compartment.

Now, we modern folks don’t have that particular barrier for the most part anymore. We think of ourselves as our own persons now, regardless of who our parents were. But we still struggle with that compartmentalization that splits our faith into just one category of our life. We’re so good at keeping separate the way we act professionally from the way we act with our family to the way we act while shopping that we can start to think of our relationship with God as just one of those categories. Our faith life becomes just what we do on Sunday morning.

This is how worshippers can drive to lunch after church and yell at their waiter for bringing the wrong soup. This is how Christians can be so moved by a sermon on Sunday and then lie and cheat and steal on Monday. Compartmentalization. It doesn’t cause us to do those things — we’d do them anyway — but it’s what makes them so easy to do:

If I can just keep God over there, in that tray with the peas, then I can enjoy these mash potatoes however I want. And I can neglect those lima beans over there without even feeling guilty!

We like to stay in control by keeping everything in separate trays, but really we become fragmented. And distracted. And each separate part of our life becomes its own religion with its own God. And so many competing rules for each one. And even 2000 years ago, Jesus said “a house divided cannot stand.”

…

Jesus reminds us that God’s Grace pours out over our plates, flooding every section, breaking down whatever divisions we’ve made, and bringing Good News to even the smallest fragments of our lives.

Even the section of family is broken and opened up. Jesus asks: “Who are my mother and my brothers?” And looking at those who sat around him, those who were not within the biological family compartment, Jesus said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”

Jesus is not anti-family, but he refuses to let the family become an idol. Jesus does not let us turn our family or our loved ones into God. This is good news if you have ever felt to the pressure to have the perfect family, but maybe didn’t quite fit the mold. Didn’t have exactly one mom plus one dad plus 2.1 children… Didn’t feel like you were the perfect family member…

Yes, God works through families in wonderful ways. But families are not God.

When I work with a couple preparing for marriage, one of the things we talk about is how the ideal marriage, and especially the ideal wedding is one of those sections of the plate that we like to keep real nice and clean and special. And we’re taught and told that the wedding is the special day just for that couple — it’s own stressful challenge and if it goes well, its own reward. I invite the couple to see it differently: to see marriage as not just for its own sake, but for the sake of the world.

I invite them to see their marriage as more than just for their own happiness. All families — whether they are one person or twenty one — have something to offer.

Martin Luther described a certain flow of God’s love. Luther, that pastor after whom our church is named, was also a deviant in his time: while others were focused on what we can do to earn our way up to God, Luther knew the flow worked the other way, that God’s love always comes down to us into our lives.

But it doesn’t stop there.

God’s love fills us up and overflows whatever sections and dividers and trays that we’ve built and spills out across our lives — and beyond. Out of ourselves. Out of our households. Out of our churches into the world.

God’s love pays little attention to the compartments we’ve set up. God wants to make a radical difference in every part of your life. From the public meetings to the private discussions at home, being a follower of Jesus becomes radically inclusive of every facet of life.

So when we join together around this table today, imagine that the bread and wine that we share spills over the table, over the rails (much to the surprise of the altar guild) and through you out the doors of this building and into your lives, and beyond.

How will you pray during your next meal after communion, knowing that God’s gift of food and forgiveness is yours every day, not just Sunday? Since our trays are overflowing and our cups runneth over, whom might you share a meal with this week?

What compartment in your life is next to be flooded with God’s love?