Family
Haggai 1:15b-2:9
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Psalm 145
Luke 20:27-38
I remember encountering this verse for the first time as kid. It terrified me. I didn't like Jesus' answer to the Sauducees' question about marriage. They are trying to trick Jesus, as always, with questions that will prove he isn't as smart or as knowledgable as his followers believe--so they ask him about the afterlife. If a woman has seven husbands, marrying each in succession after the previous husband dies, whose wife will she be in the next world?
Jesus answers that in the next world, we are all God's children, and so there will be no need for marriage. I didn't want to believe this. If marriages wouldn't exist in the next world, then what human relationships would exist? This seemed especially perplexing when I thought about my mother. Whenever I met her again in the next life, I wanted to encounter her as the woman I'd known her to be, to be loved and cared for in the same way she had loved and cared for me as a child. It didn't occur to me that, hopefully, by the time I died, I wouldn't be that child anymore, wouldn't need my mother to be who she had been.
Now, as an adult, I have no idea what I believe about life after death. I do believe the dead are still alive, in our memories, in our bodies, in the way we live out what we learned from them, and what they learned from the people who taught them, raised them, loved them, and so on, back through the ages. In this way, even when the memory of a person has died--that is, when all of the people who actually knew that person have also died--even if all evidence of a person's impact on earth is gone, their legacy is still lived out in those who somehow descend from their influence.
As I continue to contemplate what it will mean to mother a teenager who has spent the last four years in foster care, I realize that this legacy of influence is not always positive. It is up to each of us to remember and live the legacy of those who raised and taught and loved us by choosing our paths carefully, so as to honor the good in them and to reject whatever was hateful, harmful. In other words, we are bound to the people we encounter in our lives, no matter the duration or the impact of their influence, in mysterious ways.
I know, for instance, that my grandmother was not only influenced by her parents and siblings and those in the village in which she was raised, but also by the myriad of people who welcomed her when she came to the U.S. and who saw her on a daily basis at the grocery she ran with my grandfather, at the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Akron, at the Greek community get-togethers. And so, all of those people, many of whom I've never met, never even heard stories about, live on in me, because in some small way, she must have been shaped by them. My children, and even those who take my classes, who get to know me as a friend, will also be shaped in some way by those who surrounded her, because I will pass that influence on to them--I am doing so even when I do not realize it.
And so I think Jesus' answer can be read not as a story that tells us our relationships on earth won't matter in the next life, but as a story about how all our relationships matter, how family is more expansive, perhaps, than what we might imagine in our earth-tied, human lives.
Yesterday I was talking with a friend about recent changes in relationships in my own life. He reminded me that relationships are sometimes cyclical, though the cycles may vary widely in their length of time, and that people ease in and out of our lives, their touch sometimes light, sometimes intense. These were words I needed to hear--both because they were comforting and because they were wise words for someone considering parenting a teenager whose love for me, and mine for her, will likely also move in cycles depending on the day--even if there is a constancy, a stability, underlying the relationship.
Family is bigger than the biological and marriage-based ties that connect us; the people who matter have to expand beyond our homes and our neighborhoods if anything in our world is to change--if any hurting person is to find love. But the form those ties will take will vary widely, as nothing about human relationships can ever remain the same.
The bible tells us again and again that nothing is constant, as does our physical world. Yesterday I spent a relatively warm day raking leaves and taking down the garden, throwing several dozen green tomatoes along with their vines into the compost. Everything else in the garden had come to term, has been eaten or frozen by now, except that some of the tomato plants came to fruit too late to be enjoyed. Still, there is next year, and the year after, and the year after that. "One generation will commend your works to another; they will tell of your mighty acts," the psalmist writes. "The Lord upholds all those who fall and lifts up all those who are bowed down." So it has been, and shall be, as part of a human family cared for by God.
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Psalm 145
Luke 20:27-38
I remember encountering this verse for the first time as kid. It terrified me. I didn't like Jesus' answer to the Sauducees' question about marriage. They are trying to trick Jesus, as always, with questions that will prove he isn't as smart or as knowledgable as his followers believe--so they ask him about the afterlife. If a woman has seven husbands, marrying each in succession after the previous husband dies, whose wife will she be in the next world?
Jesus answers that in the next world, we are all God's children, and so there will be no need for marriage. I didn't want to believe this. If marriages wouldn't exist in the next world, then what human relationships would exist? This seemed especially perplexing when I thought about my mother. Whenever I met her again in the next life, I wanted to encounter her as the woman I'd known her to be, to be loved and cared for in the same way she had loved and cared for me as a child. It didn't occur to me that, hopefully, by the time I died, I wouldn't be that child anymore, wouldn't need my mother to be who she had been.
Now, as an adult, I have no idea what I believe about life after death. I do believe the dead are still alive, in our memories, in our bodies, in the way we live out what we learned from them, and what they learned from the people who taught them, raised them, loved them, and so on, back through the ages. In this way, even when the memory of a person has died--that is, when all of the people who actually knew that person have also died--even if all evidence of a person's impact on earth is gone, their legacy is still lived out in those who somehow descend from their influence.
As I continue to contemplate what it will mean to mother a teenager who has spent the last four years in foster care, I realize that this legacy of influence is not always positive. It is up to each of us to remember and live the legacy of those who raised and taught and loved us by choosing our paths carefully, so as to honor the good in them and to reject whatever was hateful, harmful. In other words, we are bound to the people we encounter in our lives, no matter the duration or the impact of their influence, in mysterious ways.
I know, for instance, that my grandmother was not only influenced by her parents and siblings and those in the village in which she was raised, but also by the myriad of people who welcomed her when she came to the U.S. and who saw her on a daily basis at the grocery she ran with my grandfather, at the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Akron, at the Greek community get-togethers. And so, all of those people, many of whom I've never met, never even heard stories about, live on in me, because in some small way, she must have been shaped by them. My children, and even those who take my classes, who get to know me as a friend, will also be shaped in some way by those who surrounded her, because I will pass that influence on to them--I am doing so even when I do not realize it.
And so I think Jesus' answer can be read not as a story that tells us our relationships on earth won't matter in the next life, but as a story about how all our relationships matter, how family is more expansive, perhaps, than what we might imagine in our earth-tied, human lives.
Yesterday I was talking with a friend about recent changes in relationships in my own life. He reminded me that relationships are sometimes cyclical, though the cycles may vary widely in their length of time, and that people ease in and out of our lives, their touch sometimes light, sometimes intense. These were words I needed to hear--both because they were comforting and because they were wise words for someone considering parenting a teenager whose love for me, and mine for her, will likely also move in cycles depending on the day--even if there is a constancy, a stability, underlying the relationship.
Family is bigger than the biological and marriage-based ties that connect us; the people who matter have to expand beyond our homes and our neighborhoods if anything in our world is to change--if any hurting person is to find love. But the form those ties will take will vary widely, as nothing about human relationships can ever remain the same.
The bible tells us again and again that nothing is constant, as does our physical world. Yesterday I spent a relatively warm day raking leaves and taking down the garden, throwing several dozen green tomatoes along with their vines into the compost. Everything else in the garden had come to term, has been eaten or frozen by now, except that some of the tomato plants came to fruit too late to be enjoyed. Still, there is next year, and the year after, and the year after that. "One generation will commend your works to another; they will tell of your mighty acts," the psalmist writes. "The Lord upholds all those who fall and lifts up all those who are bowed down." So it has been, and shall be, as part of a human family cared for by God.
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