247 - Open House: The American Family in the Household of God

Open House: The American Family in the Household of God
By Brett Webb-Mitchell

When we hear the word "family" in the American context, what assumptions come to our collective imagination? Many in America assume that "family" means a modern nuclear family, usually biological, with one or two parents, approximately two children, a certain menagerie of pets, and issues of social integration in community-wide activities like school, ballet, soccer practice, and church as the normal points of stress. For others, "families" come in all shapes and sizes. Today many are divorcing, stepparenting, and in the words of Scott Walker, "buying birthday presents for our third husband's first cousin." Walker goes on to say, "There aren't many maps for this new territory." ¹ Social critic Stephanie Coontz has observed that the idealistic American family, if there ever was such, is dissolving (if not destroying itself) before our eyes as the possible patterns for being a "family" continue to increase in geometric proportion. ²

One of the most powerful sources for creating and reinforcing the illusion of the nuclear family is television's presentation of the family, from "Ozzie and Harriet" to "Roseanne." The television versions of nuclear families, writes Stephanie Coontz, share several characteristics. First, there is the "Mother Axis." Everything in the household rotates around mother, leaving father and mother in an awkward relationship. Most families who consider themselves "nuclear" are middle- to upper-middle-class, white families, a creation of nineteenth-century European bourgeois culture. Civic holidays, such as the Fourth of July, are now as

Brett Webb-Mitchell is Assistant Professor of Christian Nurture at the Duke Divinity School. He is the author of Unexpected Guests at God's Banquet: Welcoming People with Disabilities in the Church (1994).
¹ Scott Walker, The Graywolf Annual Eight: The New Family (St. Paul: Graywolf, 1991), p. 4.
² Stephanie Coontz, The Ways We Never Were (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 17.

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important as religious holidays and have become this country's new "family" holidays. ³

Prior to the nineteenth century, American families were quite different from today's icon of sweet wholesomeness. Family researcher Judith Stacey maintains that, for the family in eighteenth-century colonial America, all marriages were arranged. Boundaries between public and private lives were permeable, if present at all. Communities regulated proper family conduct to the point of intervening actively to enforce disciplinary codes of the township, and parents freely exchanged children as apprentices and servants with other families. ⁴ This colonial model of family life is still evident among Amish Christians, where spouses are chosen rationally, not romantically, and affection for one another is created after the wedding, not before, since there is the danger of loving the spouse inordinately.

Mainly, what destroyed this model of family life in America was the Industrial Revolution, in which family work was considered different from productive work, with the husband going out of the house to work at another work place, rather than working at home. Love and companionship became the ideal purposes of marriage, since men were no longer home and women were devoted to nurturing children. Motherhood was, and is still, exalted as a natural and demanding vocation.

"The family is not the primary vehicle of God's grace and salvation for a world on the edge of dispair. "

According to theologian Rodney Clapp, many Christian families today live by the following formula of family life: nuclear family = traditional family = biblical family = natural family. But this equation is false. There is no biblical mandate or support, argues Clapp, for the middle-class ideal American nuclear family. The sentimental, romantic notions of the family are alien to the biblical view of the family. ⁵

Theologian Janet Fishburn understands how this sweet, romantic idealism of the nuclear family threatens the community life of many churches. Fishburn rightly argues that we seek to worship the "Family Pew," the pew where the family would sit every Sunday behind and in front of another family, and that attending church is where the American family shares their vision of good citizenship and family life. In this "Family Pew," we use religious language and religious rituals of the church, she suggests, to reinforce the nuclear family's commitments. What emerges is a superficial, controlling folk religion where believers use God as a means to achieve their ends: the support of their family in

³ Ibid., p. 17.
⁴ Judith Stacey, Brave New Families (New York: Basic Books, 1990), pp. 6,7.
⁵ Rodney Clapp, Families at the Crossroad (Downers Grove: Inter-Varsity Press, 1993), pp. 12-15.

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the cast of nineteenth century bourgeois values. ⁶ The lines between God, family, church, and American nationalism are soon blurred, and these bits and pieces are rearranged to suit the needs of the family. Soon, for many families, rather than family members serving God in the context of a church, God serves the needs of the families in the home, with no need for the church. The family is now the central context for worshipping God and the source of its own values.

This "worship of family" raises the central question: What is the appropriate role and function of the family in the context of the church? Again, Rodney Clapp states it well in his preacher-like admonition: The truth is that the family is not God's most important institution on earth. The family is not the most significant social agency that makes and shapes and forms the character of Christians. The family is not the primary vehicle of God's grace and salvation for a world on the edge of despair. ⁷

Instead, the church is God's most important gathering on earth. The church is the agent of change in our world, the primary vehicle of the good news of God's gift of grace and salvation, given startling clarity by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As John Calvin wrote, "God has received us, once for all, into his family, to hold us not only as servants but as sons. Thereafter, to fulfill the duties of a most excellent Father concerned for his offspring, he undertakes also to nourish us throughout the course of our life." In the act of baptism, "God, regenerating us, engrafts us into the society of his church and makes us his own by adoption . . . discharges the function of a provident householder in continually supplying to us the food to sustain and preserve us in that life into which he has begotten us by his Word. " ⁸

Calvin's theological insight comes from Scripture. Jesus called his disciples and followers to be part of not the family of God, but the household of God. For example, Jesus told his disciples that he was going to be leaving them in order to prepare a room for them in his Father's house: "In my Father's house there are many rooms . . ." (John 14:2). In ancient Israel, a household would be considered by American standards to be "unbiblical" and more like a commune. In some ways, the popular family television show of the 1980s, "Dallas," where the many generations of the fictionalized Ewing family live with one another, is more like the ancient Jewish ideal of the household, an ideal that seems all the more bizarre for many Americans compared to the conventional nuclear family's living arrangements. In the ancient Jewish household, there was no dichotomy between the public and the private worlds, because one's work was one's world. Consider, for example, Gideon, who, with his family grew grain and fruit and his sheep grazed the land (Judges 6). The

⁶ Janet Fishburn, Confro nting the Idolatry of the Family (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991), pp. 19-36.
⁷ Rodney Clapp, Families at the Crossroad, pp. 67-68.
⁸ John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), II, pp. 1359,1360.

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average Jewish household was between fifty and one-hundred, like Jacob's household, which had sixty-six people in it (Gen. 46:26). What Americans think of as the ideal nuclear family would, in ancient Israel, be located in a larger household, and three such nuclear families were usually united by marriage and kinship to form clans, with the marriages arranged (Josh. 7:17). ⁹

What Jesus did in his ministry was nothing less than reconfigure how we are to understand ourselves and our biological kith and kin. In Mark 3:31-35, Jesus tells those assembled before him that his primary family was not composed of genetically-alike ancestors but of those who shared his obedient spirit. Telling his disciples and followers that already in front of him were his "mother and brothers and sisters" was not a denial of the importance of his biological family. Instead, what Jesus did was to transform our perception of family away from our mere biological and adoptive heritage and toward the broader context of the household of God. Jesus greatly expands our lineage, calls us to new relationships with certain responsibilities and accountability to one another.

In addressing the issue of family, Jesus announces that to be his follower is not for isolated, lonely individuals but for those created to be part of' something far greater than themselves. In the gathering of Christ's followers, we were conceived in an act of love, born into a community that names us, continues to bear responsibility for our well-being, and guides us in the ways that we ought to live among one another. Jesus is calling people to live in allegiance to the kingdom of God that he is graphically portraying through metaphor, analogy, parables, and his practices. God's kingdom precedes the claims made upon us by our biological relationships. Jesus proclaimed that God's household reigns supreme over our relationship with others in our families: "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother.... Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me" (Matt. 10:34-39).

So as not to diminish totally the importance of the biological kinfolk, Jesus also reaffirms what the family does in furthering the news of the coming of the kingdom, fulfilling what started at the beginning of creation. Jesus places marriage in the context of the goodness of creation, instructing his followers that "what God has joined together, let no one put asunder" (Matt. 19:3-12). Regarding children, Jesus surprised even his own disciples by calling children to come to him for a blessing, "for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs" (Matt. 19:14).

In the light of Jesus' ministry, we come to understand that the American family is not the vehicle of salvation, with its own standards and "values," free from the practices of a worshipping community. For those who follow Jesus, the critical bloodline that guides and nurtures our

⁹ Clapp, Families at the Crossroad, pp. 44-46.

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character is not just the biological blood that pulses through our bodies, but the blood of the lamb of God.

What good does this knowledge of how Jesus understood families as part of the household of God do for us in the world today? Put simply, it provides Christians with a map for understanding what is our primary family amid the fluid changes in the secular society's attempts to re-define "family." Out of the wisdom of the gospel story, practiced in our Christian traditions, we are not caught up in the struggle to make meaning of what it means to be a family.

For many families who have suffered great traumas in their lives, knowing that each family unit is not meant to do everything in life by itself as an isolated entity, a disconnected microcosmic system floating freely like foam upon the waves of the ocean with other disconnected systems, may be the news they need to hear. In my experience, those families who have suffered the most at the hands of a society that continually misperceives family primarily as a self-sufficient nuclear entity are those with children with disabilities.

Consider the story of Mary and Michael, ¹⁰ who are the proud parents of two beautiful children, a college-aged daughter, and a son, Philip. Philip, an exceptional athlete, also has Down syndrome.

"What Jesus did was to transform our perception of family away from mere biological and adoptive heritage."

Mary and Michael have raised their children according to the American dream. They are an affluent, upper-middle class, white family who attend a large, Protestant, mainline church. While they would be considered "model Christians" by most pastors, they have raised disturbing questions as to how the church has acted towards Philip. Mary felt that the church has continually dealt, at best, awkwardly with her son. She is always telling the church how to engage her son in the normal church activities, including worship, Sunday school programs, and youth groups. She has been enraged by a church that doesn't know how to support her family.

Finally tired of asking and telling the church what to do, a close friend, with a child who is disabled, told her just to separate their relationship to God from their relationship to the church. No longer should their family expect anything from the church. Now, all her expectations are to be upon God outside the context of the church. Mary claims that since she has adopted this perspective, she feels much better.

What Mary did was what many other families with children with disabilities do, since they feel vulnerable and bombarded with the strate-

¹⁰ Narnes have been changed for confidentiality.

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gies of advocating services for their children. But by separating God from the church, battling social services agencies and celebrating the triumphs in Philip's life apart from the church, Philip's family and the church are failing to live up to the meaning of Philip's baptism. In baptism, children are seen not as a gift to the biological family only but also to the congregation as a part of the whole household of God." By the act of baptism, the Church announces to the world that it is "open house" time for those called to be part of the body of Christ, regardless of one's abilities or dis-abilities.

Life with a child with a disability is like life with any other child, but more so: unpredictable, incongruous, and pulsating with life. Churches benefit greatly from guiding and nurturing a child with a disability, realizing in the practice of encouraging the child in the faith that there are even more ways to be in the body of Christ than was before imaginable. Many times, children with disabilities embody the gift of evangelism, creating a caring community around them. For others, children with disabilities encourage congregations to find alternative forms of expressing the gospel that would never have been developed if the child with a disability were not present. Finally, there will be those who will learn in the presence of the child with a disability the art of celebrating the simple joys of life, like when a child with a disability says "ice cream" in sign language. Moreover, they will be taught the importance of being in solidarity with the child when health care opportunities are being severed. All of this is understood because, by the gift of God's grace in Jesus Christ, we realize we are not isolated, nuclear families but have been welcomed into God's open house, brothers and sisters in the household of God.

¹¹"God has made you a member of the household of God, to share with us in the priesthood of Christ." From the Book of Common Worship (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), p. 414.