Families Based on Love - Advent 1 - November 28, 2021
Genesis 29:15-31 and Luke 1:5-7, 11-14
Deborah Laforet
Families Based on Love
Let us pray. May the words from my lips and the meditations of my heart be guided by the Spirit and be words of wisdom for this day. Amen.
Many people believe that it’s our bible that tells us how we are to be a family, that there are certain rules that come right from the bible. We should not bear children outside of marriage. One man and one woman shall marry. Marriage is forever and divorce is wrong. Good children always obey their parents. Those families that follow God will never be dysfunctional. Sorry to burst that bubble, but if anyone has ever sat down and read the stories of the bible, they will find all kinds of different families and all kinds of dysfunction.
It’s one of the reasons I enjoy reading the stories in our bible. The people of God, thousands of years ago, were very similar to us, living their lives, longing to be loved, getting hurt, hurting others, making mistakes. God does not ask for perfect people, but faithful people.
During the next three Sundays of Advent, we’re going to explore three biblical families. In our pageant, on the fourth Sunday, on December 19th, these stories that we explore will be interspersed throughout and will represent our usual cast of characters in the Christmas story.
Today, we look at a story from the first book in our bible, from Genesis, a book filled with stories of families. Throughout the bible, we hear of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Each of these men had wives and children. Today, we’ll look at the family of Jacob.
How many of you know this story? It starts with Jacob and his twin and Jacob’s deception of his brother and father. He then runs away to stay with his mother’s family and to start his own. Do you remember the names of his wives? Yes, Jacob had more than one wife, and they were sisters, Leah and Rachel. Do you remember the number of children Jacob had? Jacob had 13 children, but those children had four mothers. Leah had seven, six sons and daughter, and Rachel had two sons. That brings us to nine. The other four were the children of Zilpah and Bilhah, the maids of Leah and Rachel, who are often left out of the story. This early biblical family was a large one and maybe not unique to its time, but definitely one that would be frowned upon today.
Taryn also read for us a part of the Christmas story as found in the gospel of Luke. The story of Zechariah and Elizabeth is a familiar one in our bible, the story of a barren woman, an older woman had not been able to bear children.
It’s only been recently that women have been seen as more than wife and mother, but even now, women are expected to be wives and mothers and they are judged if they aren’t. If a woman remains single, she is sometimes called a spinster, and people wonder what’s wrong with her. If a woman decides against having children or can’t have children, people wonder what is wrong. In the time of Zechariah and Elizabeth, it was worse. A woman was expected to provide her husband with a child and could be divorced for not doing so. A woman did not live on her own and did not have a choice about having children. And if you were barren, people assumed you or your husband was being punished by the gods in some way.
So, here we have two extraordinary families: one with a father, four mothers and 13 children, and another, a couple blessed with a child at a later age.
Families have looked differently over the years. Living in a patriarchal society, it has mostly been advantageous to men. Women have more choice now though. Gender identities and sexual orientations are becoming more accepted. Marriage is not the ultimate goal of a relationship and divorced and blended families have become more common. The modern family looks very different.
There was a long running show called Modern Family. In this show is a divorced father who has just recently married a woman from Bolivia who is half his age and she has a young son from a previous marriage. The divorced father has two adult children from his previous marriage: one is in a relationship with a man and has three children. The other is in a same gender marriage and they have an adopted daughter from Vietnam.
These are the kinds of families we now see portrayed on television and in the media, and they reflect the kinds of families we encounter in our everyday world - kids with two moms or two dads, siblings combined from different marriages, single moms or dads, bi-racial families, couples without children, single people without partners or children, and sometimes when we are alienated from our own families, when they are absent or cause us pain, we make our own families. None of these families are abnormal. None of them are wrong. None of them are misguided or broken.
We need to put more emphasis on the health of our families than on how they are put together. Does everyone feel loved and valued? Is there space for everyone’s physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs to be met? Do they treat one another with respect and dignity? Do they give each other freedom to be who they need to be? These are the signs of a healthy, loving family and these are the families that will bring love and compassion into our world.
Today we remember Jacob, Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, Bilhah, and their 13 children. We remember Zechariah and Elizabeth, who were unable to have children in a society where children were expected. We remember those families among us who struggle to put the pieces back together after a tumultuous separation and divorce. We remember those families who have to explain again and again that no, our family has two moms, or two dads. We remember those families that are expected to explain or justify why they adopted, why they chose to have a child alone, or why they don't have children.
Today we lit the candle of hope. For me, there is hope in the way our culture is changing towards acceptance of families that look different from a norm that’s been held for generations, of a dad, a mom, and their sons and daughters, who were expected to grow up and marry and create new families with moms and dads and sons and daughters. We are now seeing more families come together based on love, and the more love in this world, the better.
As a community of faith, as an Affirming congregation, it’s our job to nurture that love and to encourage that love. Our job is to share compassion, understanding, acceptance, and more love.
May we share the love that God holds for each of us and our families. May we learn from Jesus the love that doesn’t judge, but heals. May the Spirit carry all the love we share into the world, creating a world of hope, peace, joy, and love. May it be so. Amen.