Family reunions? Or not.

Did you grow up attending family reunions?

I remember hearing about people connecting with 2nd and 3rd cousins, creating memories with great-grandparents surrounded by all the newborn babies, and T-shirts with family names printed on the back. 

I really wanted a T-shirt! 

Growing up and living in Germany for 12 years didn’t lend itself to ‘keeping up with the family.’ So when our daughter and son-in-law surprised us with T-shirts (with our name!) for a family trip, I was incredibly excited! 

Thoughts about family reunions, family traits, and heritage, including family estrangement and separation came to mind following our recent Sunday School class where we continue with the 2nd chapter of Amy Jill Levine’s book “Difficult Words of Jesus, A Beginner’s Guide to His Most Perplexing Questions”. A reminder the participant statements are my recollection, not verbatim.

The phrase that captured most of our attention centered around ‘Whoever comes to me and does not hate your father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even life itself, cannot be my disciple.’   We noted the shock value, the disruption of the status quo, and the dismantling of traditional family ties that seem to be emblematic of Jesus’ teaching. We explored the idea that in choosing a relationship with God (however you understand creation), we are choosing new identities, and in that newness is transformation.

Amy Jill describes the political milieu during the time the gospel of Mark was being written, ‘In 64 CE, the emperor Nero (not one of the empire’s better efforts) scapegoated Jesus’s followers in Rome for the fire that destroyed much of the city. He rounded up Jesus’s followers and executed them in public, whether burning them as human torches or forcing them to fight wild beasts. These faithful followers, perhaps inspired by the stories of the Maccabean martyrs, the Jews put to death by Antiochus IV Epiphanes in the mid-second century BCE, had to make that horrible choice: death or apostasy.’ And then she posits this brilliant question, 

‘What allows people to face such hatred?’ 

She responds, ‘Those earlier Jewish martyrs believed in resurrection and they believed in justice. They knew that somehow the God of Israel would reward their fidelity and call to account those who were torturing them.’  

And that made me think of family reunions.

Having spent a great chunk of my academic and professional work life in seminaries and faith communities, I think those following God via Jesus’ example have a love/hate relationship with their ‘older’ family members, i.e., the Hebrew texts and varied practices of the Jewish faith. (Ask me about the Reconstructionist Rabbi who was part of our doctoral program!) How do we make decisions about which traditions to follow, which theological insights to adopt, and which faith statements to include in our current liturgy?

When do we wear the family T-shirt and when do we create a new design?

The phrase that has stayed with me is Amy Jill’s question, ‘What allows people to face such hatred?’ Is it our expectation of retribution? Do we, from a historical theological perspective, expect God to reward the just and punish the evil? Do we hope that Rob Bell’s book ‘Love Wins’ is more than a book title, that it is not only a possibility but a theological expectation?

Throughout our marriage (don’t ask me to count how many- math!) we have created, adopted and sometimes thrown out, responses to a paraphrased version of Amy Jill’s question, ‘What allows us to face —-?’  What is it that allows us to respond with kindness, with hope, with love? 

I’m thinking about creating some new family T-shirts.