O The Joy of Family Gatherings

Nostalgia in the 19th century was defined as an illness, sickness. Hence the phrase homesick. To be nostalgic was to suffer. It was considered a disorder. The origin of the word means to suffer for your home.

I can remember the first time I suffered nostalgia; it was November of 1990. We'd moved from San Diego to Princeton. And the idea of making a large meal in a small apartment with two kids under four who would eat none of it, well, it made me homesick, I grew nostalgic.

So nostalgic we piled the kids into our small car and ventured to our only living relatives on the East Coast. Kathy's Aunt Tina, her husband Jeff, and their children, Buzz and Heather. I remember it was very cold and damp and smoky. I also remember driving through the Bronx and seeing cars on the side of the road, upon blocks without doors or engines. Kathy said, 'what happened to them?" I said, "they stopped."

Tina tried her best, which is more than I can say for the residents of the five boroughs, but it wasn’t enough.  The nostalgia for our families was intense.  Thanksgiving, for me, was a store house of memories.  Gathering with family was not only a seasonal event, it was a flood of images and experiences, sights and smells. Treasured memories which you cannot unlock in new place.

The second state of nostalgia occurred a month later. We weren’t alone this time, Aunt Tina, Jeff, Heather, and Buzz drove down to us, they braved the Bronx.  So we were not alone, but we were still not home.  The presence of family was not enough to cure our nostalgia.

Years later I would realize that many of these moments were the beginning of our own family.  We had families when we were married, but we became one here in the Garden State.  But such insight was then far off.  What was close at hand was a pain, a heart ache, a longing for Christmas where there are more palm trees than spruce trees, where you were more likely to see a tree covered in fake snow than any real snow on the ground.  There was a long list of what we missed that first Christmas.  There was a void; a cache of traditions offering a great ease were palpably absent.

The suffering of nostalgia persisted until February.  Into this moment, two things happened.  One was a shoebox filled with cookies, oatmeal and raisin.  Also there were peppermint patties sprinkled about.  Last in the shoebox was a check and a direction to “go have fun.”  This was the work of Kathy’s grandmother, Anne Laputz. She baked the cookies, emptied the bag of peppermint patties, or most of the bag would be my guess, and wrote the check and mailed the box.

When the shoebox arrived, it was as if her spirit filled us. She was excited for us.  For Anne we were on a grand adventure not a trial by fire.  We were not lost, we were so close to the haunts of her childhood: coney island, the Rockettes, other people who could not pronounce bananas, but said bananers.  The shoebox that came in the mail eased the suffering of nostalgia.

The second occurrence bringing relief from our malady was a phone call. I got a call from my grandmother.  She was curt and short with me on the phone.  I could tell that she was mad and you don’t want to cross her when she is mad.  All she said was, Freddy, your smart enough, come home.  She argued with me for a good thirty minutes.  Each line of debate would end the same: Freddy, you’re smart enough, come home.  She was not joking.  She wasn’t being funny.  In her mind I was more than smart enough, and it was high time I packed up and came home where I belonged.

She was right in a sense.  I would never suggest Princeton made me smarter, nor would it offer the wisdom to live a happy life.  Those smarts and life lessons would come from you, from congregations, from a life in ministry.  Yet, what she could not see is that we needed to lose our life to gain it; we needed to become the least, to see how to belong in a whole new way.  Seminary could make you feel quite small, but that is different from becoming the least.

All I really knew was that giving away the life we had was a part of being called to ministry just as it is being called to believe in Jesus. In the cookies, in my grandmother’s chiding and demands, I began to see how much life we were losing and felt just a bit of what it would mean to regain life, be born anew, find a new life.  In this we had to reimagine our past and be open to a whole new future. To do this we needed to overcome nostalgia we needed to live resisting the temptation to discard the past all together.

Making too much of the past or completely discarding it are the unhealthy views of history today. We are being invited to remember a romantic, simplified, glorified past when we strove with the gods and made the world safe for democracy.  This is the past where Detroit was an amazing place and like the song, everybody pulled their weight.  It is not hard to poke holes in this thin veil of gauzy memory, the nostalgic.  The world of Archie Bunker will not make America great again.

Yet, neither will the zeal of those who simply want to discard the past.  Those who can only see colonialism and capitalism and patriarchy.  Like the myopia of a monumental history so is the reduction of the past where to be a man is to be evil, all profit ill-gotten, all land as stolen.  Neither of these are honest and what is more, neither of them can endure the weight of paradox, contradiction, irony, and mostly the need to be right and wrong at the same time.

Nietzsche called the attempts to enshrine the past “monumental history,” which he described as cowardice and mediocrity. Much of Christian theology suffers from this when allegorical history describes the arc of God's actions justifying our own, and thus destroying the possibility of the kingdom of God.  History can be dangerous, especially if it is treated with a romanticism masquerading as patriotism.

Yet it is just as dangerous to demonize the past, to make our prior generations the reason for our ills. Categories like patriarchy or capitalism or colonialism are tossed around, swung like wrecking balls.  And no one dare speak up lest you be seen as what must be destroyed next. This is all very dangerous.

              In our lesson today Jesus seems to be rejecting his past.  At the very least, he is not very nostalgic. It as if he is asking who is my mother who are my brothers?  He seems to be creating a new family as if the ones who loved him are no longer important. 

This claim is close to the other hard saying of Jesus about family and origin, anyone who doesn’t hate mother and father is not one of my followers.  It's not hard to imagine that Jesus is cutting ties, calling his disciples to burn their ships.

              Our reading today has a curious omission.  When Matthew and Mark account for this moment, they paint this story a bit differently.  They emphasize the reason Mary came to call and record Jesus asking, “who is my mother and brother?”        

His family was worried.  Jesus wasn’t eating; he was in over his head, spinning out of control.  They came to fetch him, bring him home. In Luke all it says is his family came to call.  You need to read in the inference of fear and concern and a family trying to bring him back to real life.  Luke takes this out, but he leaves in the rejection. You don’t need to read in the rebuff.

              Our lesson today is one of a set of saying.  Let the dead bury the dead.  Foxes have dens, birds have nest, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head.  If you would follow me deny yourself and pick up your cross.  No one who looks back is worthy of the kingdom of God.  No one who doesn’t hate mother and father is worthy.  And ours today, who are my family?  Those who do the will of God.

              This group of sayings are not what you find on t-shirts or inspirational posters.  For the most part, these are ignored or taken as Jesus being hyperbolic or bombastic or prone to wild exaggeration.  If we are not careful, these wild sayings will create zealotry no self-respecting Presbyterian should endure.  To listen fully without falling to the wiles of the zealot, we need to consider our lesson today with contradictions that complement.  This is hard work, hard thinking; this is hard to understand let alone live.

              I think it was after my grandmother died that I began to do the math of Thanksgiving.  I had this trove of great memories of the day.  Everything from the men watching the Lions playing to the poker played by the women.  The counter covered in dishes covered in tinfoil.  The wild hooligan activity of cousins on a suburban street when children still ran free.  After she died it was as if there was an audit, an accounting.

              What I realized in the math of those holidays whose memories loomed so large and caused so much nostalgia, what I realized was that there really were not very many of them.  Those golden moments of childhood would be cut short by tragedy, by changes in families, the mere weight of time.  There were at most a half-dozen days that felt endless. 

              Along with the math came appraisal.  What I saw and valued as a child was not how I looked at things as an adult.  Gazing with older eyes I could see the problems, the truth, the brokenness.  A cousin of mine recalling these events said, "oh, how I miss grandma's cooking."  Risking the truth I said, "you're forgetting how she burnt everything."  And then I said, "she was not a good cook, but it was always fun being with her."

              My mother and brothers are those who do the will of God. This was a harsh response. We must be honest enough to admit this is a terrible thing to say.  No mother inviting a child to thanksgiving would appreciate being told, "I am dining with those who do the will of God; they are my family now."

              This terrible saying of Jesus, like his other sayings of equal challenge, they are meant to be lived in contradiction and the trust of losing life to save it.  The true healing of nostalgia was not to denounce the past, nor was it found in trying to recreate it.  The healing was to find what means to remember and love, to give away life without demonizing it. 

              We can all feel the weight of nostalgia.  Just as we can get caught up in the disdain.  Such can cause us to build moments to the past, even shroud it in romantic notions.  But this is futile.  In the same way demonizing our past or using shame as a guide offers no good end.  To follow Jesus we must let the past be the past.  Let the joy of the past be reborn and the brokenness find healing in honesty.  Not one or the other, but both. We need one voice calling us with love to come home and we need another voice calling forward with cookies and a check.  

              The heart has enough room for the past and the future, enough room to lose a life so to regain it.  Amen.