Here are My Mother and My Brothers!

In another life, I had the privilege of studying American women missionaries in north India. After graduating from college I taught English for a year at a college in the northwestern part of India that had been founded by Presbyterian missionaries. So when I became interested as a scholar in women’s work during the heyday of American missions, i.e., from about 1870 to 1930, I naturally turned back to those intrepid Presbyterians. I learned to read the elegant handwriting of Midwestern teachers, physicians, and wives. I pored over miles of letters, reports, newspaper articles, and mission magazines. I was surprised when I read the missionaries’ condemnations of the Hindu and Muslim religious practices I had found so intriguing during my own time in India. I cheered when the writers opened clinics and dispensaries, taught girls how to read, and brought a breath of fresh air to the mostly secluded women of elite Hindu and Muslim families. And I shook my head in disbelief as one after another of the missionaries wondered why the women they visited, who seemed to find the Christian message so attractive, were unable to leave their families and be baptized. Didn’t they know anything about patriarchal families? Didn’t they realize that the patriarchal family was the basic social unit, for both Hindus and Muslims? Didn’t they understand that no one but the senior males of the family, and most certainly not the women, had any power or freedom? Couldn’t they see that if the women they befriended were to be baptized they would be shunned forever by their kin?

The hearers of the Gospel of Mark certainly understood the risks they had taken in becoming Christians in a world that despised them. Jesus too understood full well the power of the patriarchal family. Instead of following the family trade of carpenter, like all the other males in his family, he had gone off to be an itinerant preacher and healer. Even when he came back home, all the riff-raff and ne’er-do-wells, the blind and the lame, those possessed by demons, and the loose women – who knows where their husbands and fathers were – crowded around him. His family was sure he was insane, and they were moving in to silence him. At the same time, the scribes and Pharisees had begun to take notice of him, and they came down from Jerusalem to challenge and spar with him. When we catch up with Jesus in today’s reading, we hear the religious leaders accuse him of working hand in hand with demonic forces. But he roundly defeats them at their own game. He presses home the point that he is indeed from God – a running motif in Mark’s gospel – and even obliquely suggests that unlike the religious leaders, he has come to offer freedom to those who become his disciples.

Then Jesus turns back to that pesky family, those brothers and sisters and mother, who have joined the religious leaders outside the house and are trying to pull Jesus away from his mission. Surely their jaws drop when they hear what he says. Even though the hearers of Mark’s Gospel, forty years later, themselves faced persecution, perhaps what Jesus said even shocked them. Looking at the faces eagerly waiting to hear more of his teaching, Jesus declares, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” No more patriarchal family, no more domination by senior males or by religious leaders. Jesus declares that his followers, who have been released from demonic powers, are now part of a new and different family, a family united not by blood, nor by allegiance to the eldest male, but by faith in him. That was truly a radical declaration in the ancient world!

Does such a declaration shock us? Can we hear the challenge to patriarchal structures in such a declaration? Most of us no longer live in extended patriarchal families, with multiple generations in the same house or compound, all ruled over by the senior male. To be sure we still have extended families, especially in this part of Ohio. Not a week goes by without a five-generation photo in our local newspapers, though in our culture the senior members are more likely women. However, in contrast to the ancient world, such families are increasingly rare. Even nuclear families, father, mother, and children in the same household, are less common than they were a generation or two ago. Now we have single parent families, gay couples adopting children, grandparents raising grandchildren, and even unrelated people living together as family. In even sharper contrast with the ancient world, marriage in our culture has become more egalitarian, and women have full legal rights with men.

So does Jesus’ new definition of family – “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” – still shock us laid back, egalitarian twenty-first century Americans? It should! As Jesus’ disciples we are still called to be part of a new and different family. We are called to be part of a family not defined by blood ties. Perhaps to the dismay of some, we are called to put our commitment to Jesus’ family above our commitments even to our own blood families. We are also called to be part of a family not defined by geography. Our heritage from the Church of England is of village parishes about three or four miles apart, each with its own vicar and local congregation. In effect our county seat parishes, each with its own distinct community, reflect that same understanding. Even today, orthodox Jews still live in close communities within walking distance of their synagogues. By contrast, we are called instead, to recognize that our family ultimately embraces the entire world, and we are called to care about our friends, our Loaves and Fishes diners, and our sisters and brothers in Cincinnati, Columbus, and even Port au Prince.

We are also called to be a family not defined by race or ethnicity. The Episcopal Church never split apart during the Civil War, but we still had segregated parishes. In this very diocese, we still have historically black parishes, whose roots go back to the time when ethnically diverse parishes were virtually nonexistent. We are also called to be a family not defined by socio-economic class. It was perhaps only a generation or two ago, when the Episcopal Church in this country was the church of the wealthy, of professionals and business people, of the managers and owners, not of working class and poor people. Is that true for this parish? Who is welcome in our parish family?

And finally we are called to be a family committed to doing “the will of God.” In this green season of growth in discipleship, all of us – not just those of us wearing a collar – are called to deepen our relationship with Jesus, to listen more intently to his teaching, and to attend to the family into which he has called us. We are called to understand ourselves as irrevocably bound together with this family and with all other Christians through our baptisms. We are called to welcome the stranger, and to love and care for each other, whoever and wherever we are.

Perhaps some of those Presbyterian missionaries might have been less discouraged by the inability of the women they visited to break out of their patriarchal families if they had known of Pandita Ramabai, a Christian activist in western India. Ramabai was born in 1858 into a Brahmin family, i.e., into the priestly and highest caste. Unusual for the time, Ramabai’s father believed in women’s education and saw to it that she was educated in both Sanskrit texts and contemporary subjects. Independent and forward-thinking, Ramabai married a man of another caste, who died soon after their daughter was born. In Ramabai’s time, most Hindus considered widows to be extremely inauspicious, and even child widows were condemned to a life spent in prayer and fasting in the back corners of their families’ homes. However, Ramabai was fortunately befriended by women of another kind of family, English sisters of the Community of St. Mary the Virgin who had founded a school and convent in the provincial city of Pune. Ramabai and her daughter thrived under the sisters’ gracious care. With their help she was able to do a lecture tour in the U.S. about Hindu women and to study education and social service in England. In 1885 she was baptized in the sisters’ mother house in Wantage, England. Just as Jesus and the CSMV sisters had welcomed Ramabai into a new kind of family, on her return to India in 1889 Ramabai herself created new Christian families. She established the Mukti, or Liberation, Mission in Pune, which serves to this day as a refuge and a Gospel witness for young widows deserted and abused by their families. She also established Krupa Sadan, a home for destitute women, and Sharda Sadan, which provided housing, education, vocational training and medical services for the needy, and she was active in the Arya Mahila Sabha, India’s first feminist organization. Ramabai died in 1922 and is venerated today by Indian Christians, who still seek to continue her work of inclusion of all into a blessed Christian family, regardless of caste, class, language, or ethnicity.

Can we do any less? Methodist scholar Will Willimon reminds us that, “every time the family of God gathers for Holy Communion … or a covered-dish fellowship supper or serves up soup to the homeless on the street corner, the world looks at this odd family and says, ‘Jesus is hanging out with the same reprobates that got him crucified.’ And we say, ‘Thank God.’”1

1. Day 1, preached October 24, 2010, quoted in Synthesis June 10, 2012, 3.