Images Of The Family: Ours And God's

Though family structures in our society continue to change rapidly and radically (does anyone any longer know what an "intact family" is?), several fantasies of family life still captivate us, no matter how unrealistic they may be. One is that families are islands of safety and comfort in an increasingly bleak and barren, if not threatening and violent world. In this fantasy, home is an always welcoming, always peaceful place of return from weary, workaday life, soothing us after the day's confrontations at the office, on the streets, in the classroom, with disinterested peers and hostile strangers, and on the bottom of deteriorating infra-structures.

Another fantasy is that families are endlessly renewable sources of energy for approaching life in a playful spirit, like entertainment centers positioned as close to wet bars as design considerations permit, like campgrounds that beckon fun-seekers of all ages all the year around, and like circuses in which no one ever tires of cotton candy, ice cream, and daredevil displays. In this fantasy, families that play together stay together, fun is what goes and comes around, and the waves that some members make never capsize other members' boats.

Finally, there is the fantasy that families are open systems of consistent and honest feed-back between warm and loving kinfolk who enjoy one another and have only each other's best interests at heart. In this fantasy, family reunions are like bellying up to the bar at Cheers, "where everybody knows your name," or like delightedly sitting on the floor in an encounter group and being cradled in the fuzzy warmth of others' graciously tendered self-revelations.

Far from being islands of safety, however, many families are seething cauldrons of criticism and abuse. Far from being rollicking playgrounds, many families are joyless wastelands of indifference and neglect. Far from being loops of never-ending positive feedback, many families are static-filled conduits of mutual misunderstanding and mistrust. One of the reasons that so many people are wondering about whether there is any hope for the institution of the family is that their hopes are built on clinging to fantasies about family life in spite of all the evidence which undermines them. When facts demand that they give up the fantasies, they give up hope, too.

Together, the three small fantasies just described point to one much larger one, a Master Fantasy if you will, that families should not rest content providing us with what we need in order to help us to get on in life. Instead, they should sacrifice themselves in order to provide us with everything that we want --- so that we will not have to make a life for ourselves at all. Life under this Master Fantasy is truly tragic. Conflict, covert and overt, is the real story of every family relationship dominated by the fantasy; deep down, each family member blames someone else for making life less than it is supposed to be; and no one truly believes that anything and anyone can change for the better. This Master Fantasy, and all the little ones besides, we are better off without.

Does God dwell in fantasies about human families? I doubt it. Does God have hope for families? I am certain of it. For God has not left us clueless about what his own image of the family might be. To me, one of his most valuable clues is in the letter to the congregation at Ephesus, specifically at Ephesians 2:19: "You are members of God's household." All of us, the writer is telling us, are part of a larger whole, larger than our nuclear and extended families, and larger even than the family which is humankind itself. We are already approved and initiated, full-fledged, lifetime-and-beyond members of the family of God.

What can this mean for us, as we seek greater fulfillment as families? Primarily, that as members of God's family first and foremost, we have a higher loyalty than just to our own families and to making them into refuges, carnivals, and therapy groups. The loyalty that God asks from us, as his children, is a loyalty to building each other up to care about and to serve the needs of others, as he cares about us and sent his son to die for us. For as long as a family's interests remain self-centered only, for that long will that family's quality of life continue to deteriorate. For as long as family members look beyond their own interests, and ask what they can do, together, to make God's world better for everyone, for that long will their bonds become stronger and healthier.

Leroy's Plan

In 1974, shortly after Nancy and I came to FUMCR with our two daughters in tow, I offered my first course to the adult membership, on prayer. It went well enough to encourage the staff to ask for more from me, and I kept offering Bible and theology courses there and elsewhere. Since that time, my life has been constantly enriched by teaching some of the liveliest, most inquiring, and most caring laymen and laywomen any minister could hope to meet anywhere.

And the work goes on, this time in a new format, a column that focuses on how we can relate faith and theology to the important issues with which every Christian struggles, sooner or later, in everyday life. The first few columns will deal with issues that I think warrant our thinking about, together. After these, the next columns will address topics that you also identify as you take the time to contact me. My hope is that the columns, your e-mail reactions, and my personal responses back, will generate the kind of spirited conversation that I have grown used to by working with so many of you in face-to-face situations.

In all of my teaching, both at Perkins School of Theology and in local congregations, what I have tried most to do is to offer a way of studying and thinking hard about what faith is, as faith is illumined by the scriptures, the Christian tradition as a whole, human experience, and reasoned inquiry. The single most important question that I keep asking myself is: how can we best bring the insights and the power of our faith to bear upon the decisions that we as Christians regularly must make about living as God wants us to live in the world? Over the years, it has been a constant source of gratification to encounter increasing numbers of people willing to ask this same question, who are as impatient as I am with ill-considered, superficial, or overly dogmatic answers to it.

At this stage of my ministry and life, one thing about the Christian faith is especially clear to me: God's work in the world is more encompassing, and sometimes more mysterious, than our finite understanding of things can often express adequately. Words, symbols, creeds, and doctrines are but finite and imperfect means of representing what is infinite and perfect. Together, they are like clouded glass through which we can see the things of God only dimly (1Cor.13:12). Until we see God face to face, however, they are all we have. As such, they deserve to be handled respectfully and tenderly, and with compassion toward everyone who seeks God's truth with their help. For surely it is better to see only partially than not to see at all.

In the columns to come, the work that I will be striving to accomplish bears a strong resemblance to the work of washing windows. Its aim is to keep the glass upon which we are so dependent for seeing God's truth as clear and as polished as my finite abilities and imperfect understanding will allow. A lot of what I will be doing to this end will take the form of wiping away grit and grime that constantly accumulates from the gusts of poorly conceived, badly thought out, and downright false teachings that break over our lives like dangerous tropical storms. Along with the spiritual ammonia, I also plan to bring the corrective lenses of the scriptures and the history of Christian thought to our attempts to see things more clearly as Christians, acknowledging at every step of the way that in this life our knowledge of God's world, and all that God is doing in it, is less something we possess, and more something for which we hope.

Years ago, a former student of mine wrote me a note of appreciation, closing it with a phrase I have never forgotten: Thinking Christianly, Don. Grammatically, I suppose, Don's parting words do not constitute a shining example of English usage at its best. Theologically, though, Don has it right. Loving God with all our mind is not primarily a matter of having and entertaining a lot of thoughts, even well-formed and convincing thoughts. It has to do more with engaging in a never-ending process of thinking, a process so infused with faith in the Lordship of Jesus Christ that when we are engaged in it we really can describe ourselves as thinking Christian-ly. Please accept this column as an invitation to think "Christianly" with me.