Jitterbugging for Jesus

SCRIPTURE READING: Mark 3: 20-35

KEY VERSES: (20, 21) Then he went home; and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, ‘He has gone out of his mind.'”

Saving the world was a lonely job sometimes–for a long time he wasn’t always entirely appreciated by his own brothers at home.

In a scene in which his brothers advise him to “leave here and go to Judea,” the gospel of John 7: 5 makes this parenthetical note:

“For not even his brothers believed in him.”

Being the Savior of the world was a terribly lonely job.

The good news, though, is that his brothers were totally on-board by the time of Pentecost:

“All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers” (Acts: 1: 14).

2. In my pastoral-care ministry in hospitals and hospice, my first duty was to walk through the dark valleys of grief with patients and their families. And nothing brings out the dysfunction of families like the grief that families struggle through when a loved one is critically ill, injured or facing death.

Grief has a way of seriously inflaming old family feuds and rivalries. One would think that families could let go of all the old family conflict “stuff” in a room where a loved one lay in a sickbed or deathbed. But sometimes it feels more comfortable for a family to stay stuck in the familiar darkness of hostile and bitter conflict–it is familiar after all–than to face the unfamiliar darkness of utter grief and sadness.

Still, it’s a hard fact of life that the only way out of the wilderness of grief is to go through the wilderness. Grief can be so overwhelming that it can be hard for even a devout follower of Christ to remember that Christ walks with us through all kinds of darkness, sharing the weight of the crosses we bear and leading us, in time, back to brighter, more bearable days.

3. Quite often in the ministry to those in grief, a more level-headed family member or two would pull me aside amidst all the family quarreling and screaming and high tension surrounding the illness or death of someone to apologize for the family. The family apologist would say something like this: “I’m sorry, Chaplain, but you can see that this family is terribly dysfunctional. We can never seem to get along.”

No need to apologize, I always assured, because the Bible–especially the Old Testament–is largely a running story of dysfunctional families struggling to get along and stay in the kind of loving relationship God intended.

Family “dysfunction” is an old, old story, as old as the Bible, which is the story of God and God’s relationship to us–and forever the story of us, our warts, our repetitious sins and all. (More on that in the next “Noon Wine” posting here.)

4. I hasten to add that one thing that kept me going in pastoral-care ministry–and keeps me going still–is the extreme and inspiring love I have seen in families that rallied together in times of grief!

Everything in this Christian life, in the immediate family and the family of humankind, comes down to this:

The love thing.

“For God so loved the world . . . .”