dysfunctional families

so I read and see a lot today about dysfunctional families.... the talk shows over the past 2 decades have familiarized us intimately with every sort of family ill imaginable - and some which are beyond imagining...

And it reminds me of how blessed my childhood was, and how incredibly blessed I am today by my family.... sure we have our skeletons and secrets and problems... (you think your family is weird... wanna compare?) but by and large, we are blessed.

I have friends and acquaintances whose families cause them untold stress... cheating husbands and ill-mannered children and unsupportive spouses and sick in-laws and bitter moms and drug-addicted sons and selfish sisters... and I pray God will provide peace in this lifetime. But one thing we learn from the story of Job is that God will provide to some the blessing of deliverance and to others He gives the strength to endure.

Wherever we find ourselves along that continuum today, we must take strength from our Father... and, by the way, our Father knows a little bit about dysfunctional families...

Because to whatever degree your family may be 'dysfunctional', take heart... Jesus' lineage was anything but 'normal'! In describing the origins of Jesus, the Gospels point to as many sinners, liars, and schemers in his genetic and historical lineage as they do to saints, honest people, and men and women of faith.

We see, for example, in Jesus' genealogy a number of men who didn't exactly incarnate the love, justice, and purity of Jesus: Abraham unfairly banished Ishmael and his mother, Hagar, rationalizing that God favours some people over others; Jacob, by scheming and dishonesty, stole his brother Esau's birthright; and David, to whom Jesus explicitly connects himself, committed adultery and then had the husband of his mistress murdered to cover up an unwanted pregnancy and in order to marry her.

And the women mentioned in Jesus background aren't much better. The Text mentions Tamar, a Canaanite woman, someone outside the Jewish faith, who seduces her father-in-law, Judah, so that she can have a child; Rahab, also a Canaanite woman, and an outsider, who is in fact a prostitute; Ruth, a Moabite woman who is also outside the official religion of the time; and Bathsheba, a Hittite woman, an outsider who commits adultery with David and then schemes to make sure one of her own offspring inherits the throne.

All of these women found themselves in a situation of marriage or pregnancy that was either strange or scandalous, yet each was an important divine instrument in preserving the religious heritage that gave us Jesus. It's no accident that the Gospels link these women to Mary, Jesus' mother, since she too found herself in a ritually taboo pregnancy and in a marital situation that was peculiar.

What's to be learned for all of this? Perhaps Raymond Brown captures it the best. What all this tells us, he says, is that God writes straight with crooked lines!

Two things to remember:

1. no matter what our families are like, God has sent His Holy Spirit to comfort and guide and keep us... so let us seek Him out daily and let the Spirit do His work through us
2. our own lives, even if they are marked by weakness and insignificance, are important to continuing the story of the incarnation

Blessings!