God and the family
Monday, 19 November, 2007
Ignored the Briefing editing today in favour of finishing off the web extras (woohoo!) You can now find them all in the list of fulltext articles. What can I say; I rock.
Left somewhat promptly at four to do laundry at home. (Need to wash wedding clothes in preparation for two more weddings this week: Little Rachel and Seamus, and Ynping and Andrew. I also started hard core reading for my talk for women's fellowship (which, like I said before, is on the family). I read Glenn Davies on polygamy and Bill Muehlenberg on the assault on marriage and family (which talks more about gay marriage and the right of gay couples to adopt). I also listened to Gordon Menzies on economics and marriage but that wasn't as useful for my talk as I'd hoped. What turned out to be incredibly useful was Andrew Cameron on Jesus and the family. He summarised his main points at the end like this:
Christian thought generally is both world-affirming and world-denying. That is, Christian thought celebrates the good things that God has stitched into life on earth. And it also points to the future world of God's kingdom that is even better than our current version.
So it is with family: God schools us in the preciousness of other people in two ways—by both affirming and denying something to do with families. Firstly, God schools us to enjoy and be competent in our family responsibility. The calling of the the married is to be married well and to nurture children well. Until the Lord returns, family is the place for nurturing the preciousness of other people. Family is the first church, if you like, and churches become places where families of the married are strengthened and honoured and assisted.
But on the other hand, God also schools us to see beyond our own family. By calling us together as a church of many tribes and people and nations and languages—by calling me to serve others within that church—we learn to recognize the preciousness of others beyond our own family. Indeed, I suggest it's actually quite hard to see how such recognition can be found elsewhere than in the Christian gospel since, when left to its own devices, humanity seems naturally to gravitate towards the exhortation of the lonely individual or to the harsh servitude of some tribe. So in this way churches can truly be said to become the family of each single person.
Single people, in turn, have a very important minsitry to churches because they show us how it is possible to relate deeply beyond the ties of blood and kinship. They show families how God's family takes eventual precedence over the bonds of tribe and clan and blood that can so easily divide us.
(Andrew Cameron, “‘Let the dead bury their own dead’: Jesus on the dark side of the family”, God and the Family CASE conference, 25-26 November 2005.)
And it made me think about my post about how women relate and the comments that have come out of that. I realise that things change a lot for women when they start having kids because all of a sudden they have to focus much of their time and energies on this new life. Of course it's natural for that to spill over into social interaction—talking about pregnancy and childbirth, babies and poo-ey nappies, and the various anxieties of parenting. I'm not saying that women shouldn't do that. (Oops! Double negative.) I'm saying it's good and right for women to do that, and I am happy to listen to other women talk about that sort of thing.
But where it becomes a problem, I think, is when it's all-consuming—when women forget that their world is more than pregnancy, childbirth, babies, poo-ey nappies and parenting—when women start using such things as an excuse not to relate to other people (as one friend put it) or as a means for excluding others (as another friend put it). If I ever have kids, I need to remember that because family is more than just dad, mum and the kids; family is ultimately the household of God into which we have adopted, for God is our Father and Christ is our elder brother who said, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (John 14:23).
Blinks:
A way of funding writing in the future: pitch and idea and get people to support it.
Place where you can hire play equipment for parties, etc.
How to recalibrate the home button on your iPhone.
Unsolicited manuscripts accepted by Pan Macmillan with certain conditions.
Thought Balloon is a group blog in which the writers tackle a new theme every week? month? with one-page scripts. This URL is for their Phonogram ones.
How to sew a zipper on a knitted garment.
Issues organised by tale.
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Did you read this on the weekend?
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/take-a-load-off/2007/11/16/1194766968093.html
Somehow missed that one. Thanks, Soph! My goodness, it’s enough to make you want not tell anyone you’re pregnant!
I do agree!
I thought it was interesting, in light of your encouragement not to idolise motherhood, to see how society is set up to think motherhood is the be-all, but also to put pressure on mums to be perfect.
Thanks for being honest about this, was good to read, especially as a soon-to-be working wife of a college man:)
“Blessed is the single Christian, for they shall inherit the family of Christ”
“He sets the lonely into families…” Psalm ?... have to go look that up.