We Are Family (full version)

What do you think of when you hear the word "family?" If you're an American, especially if you live in the suburbs, then you probably think first about the nuclear family - parents and their kids. You probably think about a house that belongs to that family, where they live, where they eat, sleep, do their homework or housework. You probably think of mom and dad going off to work and the kids going off to school. Once in a while they invite someone else over and have dinner or lunch together. You might also think of the rooms inside of that house, where each member of the family can have their own space and their own stuff.

That's pretty much the way we do family today in suburban America - with a few caveats, because what I just described is the American dream. It's an ideal (though I'm about to question whether or not it's truly ideal). This is not reality for many families. There are a whole lot of single parents out there, and before you can be a single parent, you have to have first had a relationship with the other parent, so that means that a single parent has been broken away from the other parent, and that results in pain, and that pain gets passed on to the kids. Single parent means single income, which means struggle, in most cases. It means lots and lots of work, wondering if you'll be able to make ends meet, constant anxiety, and this adds to the pain.

Even where there are two parents, there's the struggle to keep up with the Joneses. We feel like we need a bigger house than we really need, or more stuff in it than we really need, or nicer cars than we really need. We're so focused on the pursuit of all of that that we don't really pursue each other, and first and foremost, family means relationship.

This is the reality of most American families today, so when we in the Church read about how we are family, it doesn't really mean much to us. Family in Biblical times meant something very different. Yes, there was some brokenness, yes there was divorce, yes there was poverty, but relationships were so much more central to the way of life. Most of the Biblical writers were coming from a Jewish perspective, and the bond between the Jews was pretty tight. After all, they were all related by blood, and they knew it. Your tribe was your family, and you spent a lot of time with them.

When you said "family" to them, they would have thought of the extended family, not just parents and kids, but aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. Often, extended families lived together, so you didn't get much alone time, but you probably didn't think about that much. Work around the house was shared by a lot of people. Visitors would have dropped by unannounced, and when that happened, you were expected to be a good host and provide a meal for them. If you didn't, you were the one being rude, not the unannounced visitor. Life was spent in the presence of others, often many others.

That was family back then, or at least something approaching their ideal, and that would have been the context for that word when Biblical writers wrote that word. So while they were thinking of that concept, they were writing that we - you and I, if you are a follower of Christ and I am a follower of Christ - are family. It wasn't meant to be some cutesy, warm fuzzy metaphor. In fact, I would argue that it's meant to be the other way around - that earthly family, broken though it is, was meant to be a metaphor for the spiritual family that God is seeking to create.

We like to keep each other at such a distance. We like to have our own stuff so we won't have to share our stuff, so we can use it when we want to. We want to have our own little kingdoms where we can make our own rules, where we can control who comes over and when they come over and how long they stay. We like to have fair warning when they're coming over so we can clean up the mess and maintain the appearance of perfection. We value the ease and convenience of not having to deal with other people if we don't want to. We value privacy. We don't want to be alone, and yet we don't really want to be known.

Don't we work hard at teaching our kids to share, to get along with other kids, to learn how to resolve conflict in healthy ways? Why, when we grow up, do we work so hard at getting our own stuff and our own space so we don't have to do all of this ourselves?

I propose that this is Wrong, that we have given in to selfishness, laziness, and fear. Selfishness, because we insist on having our own stuff and our own space. Laziness, because meaningful relationships take work, and we just don't feel like working at learning to love those who we find less easy to love. Fear, because that is what keeps us from really opening up to each other. After all, if you really knew me, you probably wouldn't love me.

This way of life has cost us a lot. A whole lot. Every nuclear family (on average) has a mortgage, property taxes, homeowner's insurance, two cars, car insurance, energy bills. Many people are lonely. It has cost us our peace, because many of us struggle to make ends meet, to keep up with the debt. Many of us are lonely, because we have isolated ourselves in our own little kingdoms.

In Genesis, God is creating everything, and after each day of creation, He looks at what He's done and says "it's good," until one day, He says that "It is NOT good for man to be alone." This statement blows my mind. Sin hadn't entered the world yet, and Adam had perfect, unbroken relationship with God, and yet God said that he was alone, so this means that there is something really, really important about human relationships. Theres something going on there that God won't substitute Himself for.

It is possible to be surrounded by people and yet be completely alone. We weren't meant to be alone. We are meant to be family - not family is reality defines it today, but family as it was meant to be. As much as we try to ignore it or reinterpret it, it's all over the Bible. We are meant to share our lives together, to know and be known by each other. God says that that's a good thing. Do we agree with Him? Is it worth pursuing?

I'll close with some quotes:

“God's aim in history is the creation of an inclusive community of loving persons, with Himself included as its primary sustainer and most glorious inhabitant.” - Dallas Willard

“Community is the place where the person you least want to live with always lives” - Henri Nouwen

Posted on Tuesday, January 15, 2008 by Chris Branscome

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4 comments (Add your own)

1. wrote:: The hard part is for our children to be familiar with and close to those we hold dear at our church family, and vis versa.
January 22, 2008 @ 4:16 PM
2. Chris wrote:: I agree - especially when they don't go to the same school together. My daughter is (currently) an only child, and though we plan to have at least one more eventually, it would be good for her to begin learning to develop relationships with other kids, and even other adults. We're so protective of our kids nowdays - for good reason - and this means that they don't develop relationships with other adults.

I'm not a fan of Hillary Clinton, but as she said in the title of her book, "It takes a village." My daughter can learn things from other kids or adults that she won't learn from us. As a kid and during my growing up years, living in a small town that was a little more safe for children, I developed relationships with some other adults from whom I learned things my parents didn't teach me.
January 22, 2008 @ 8:10 PM
3. 3 wrote:: It occurs to me in the reading of this effort that there are several points that might be offered regarding your commentary. The first might be that the relationships you attribute to the Biblical families are generally true of those groups whose level of cultural development is tribal. Within that structure, relationships are essential to the survival of the tribe and the tribe is paramount concern for its members. The essential allegiance of tribal members is to the tribe, and social as well as individual values structures develop along those lines. An examination of tribal development within the American Indian cultures would reveal significant variety regarding the definition of family. For example, I believe it was the Arapaho who developed the idea that there was effectively no family below the tribal level. Why is this important? It is important because there was variety within tribal structures, with the fact that some tribal structures were incredibly harsh upon the individual given the focus on tribal survival, and that with the transition to urban man, there have been trades that provide us with important benefits that you have not addressed.
The transition to urban man is an interesting development that has, perhaps, as many drawbacks as advantages. The transition altered the social structure dramatically, allowing or even forcing specialization within population. Thus, we see the development of wheelwrights, farmers, merchants as an aspect of the transition. While the tribe was effectively self-sufficient, urban men were not and neither was the nuclear family. The dependencies became more complex and the hierarchical structures developed that we might call classes, predicated on intelligence and ingenuity. The downsides were fairly obvious, such as increasing isolation of entire community, one from another, as associations became more optional on the one hand and dependent on class on another. The relationships that you impute to the Jewish community might have been true at a village level, but I doubt that the Pharisees, for example, often entertained the poor should they have dropped by for a little bit to eat. The networks that developed where, I believe, more within a small neighborhood, much as we had in the early 20th century United States, and extended, perhaps, by those within a business community.
I would not argue that Christ expects us to care for one another. In fact, I believe that is why we have all been given different gifts. We should use these gifts to the glory of God, not simply for the accumulation of "stuff" that is of marginal value in the context of our relationship with God. What I would offer is that too many of us have willingly forgotten that Great Commandment, and live as if it does not apply to us. We can live as Christians within small communities, such as churches, and still have things that provide us pleasure. We should not, however, sacrifice Christian duty to the acquisition of things simply because of pleasure.
January 24, 2008 @ 9:46 AM
4. Chris wrote:: You bring up the development of classes within societies. It's interesting that even today, it seems that, in general, the higher up you are in the hierarchy, the more isolated you are. Poor people in all cultures that I can think of tend to group together. When you look at this from a global level, poorer cultures exhibit stronger social bonds than do more affluent cultures, such as ours.

I'm not sure that I see how urbanization necessarily isolates people, or how specialization is a necessary by-product of urbanization. Didn't tribes also have people who specialized in certain skills? In Native American tribes, you had farmers, weavers, hunters, the medicine man, the "governor" (chief), military (warriors), etc. If a tribe is a group of interdependent people, isn't a city or other urban area the same thing? I think that what I'm not seeing, specifically, is how individualization and isolation was necessary in order to bring about some of the benefits you refer to.

And don't get me wrong - I'm by no means saying that individualization is bad in any way. After all, Revelation speaks of a day when all of us will receive a new name - a name only known to God and the individual to which He gives the name. Names, in Biblical times, were part of that person's individual identity, and the bestowing of a name specifically individualizes a person.
January 24, 2008 @ 3:31 PM

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