This sermon was delivered on June 6, 2021 at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Minneapolis. The lectionary readings used in the sermon are here.
This is a story of my family, a story told quietly at family gatherings when children like me were supposed to be playing outside, a story that was not to be shared with anyone outside that room and certainly not live-streamed at a Cathedral. It is a story, though that needs to be said out loud without shame or fear, a story of creating and holding and, finally, casting out demons.
I had an aunt–my godmother– who, barely out of high school, married a neighborhood man, several years her senior, just back from the war. My mother’s parents, staunchly traditional Roman Catholics of the 1950s, didn’t question the marriage. Women graduated from high school, married in the Church, and raised their children. My Nana had married my Pop-pop, ten years her senior, at about the same age. Those were the rules they lived by.
My aunt had her first three babies in quick succession while my mother was away in another state, working her way toward the college degree my grandfather believed was unnecessary for a woman. This I learned much later in hazy bits and pieces: when my uncle’s drinking started to affect his ability to hold a job, my grandfather forbid the family from helping or even acknowledging what was happening My aunt’s marriage, I imagine him thinking, was a lifetime commitment. There were rules. It was her cross to bear. My aunts tell me that some family members did what they could to help, quietly–my parents after they had returned home, my Nana’s sister, but the babies kept coming. And then, sometime after the seventh child was born, she left her children and her marriage, left with one of the boarders she’d taken in to help pay the family bills.
The pain in this story is everywhere. What unspoken trauma did my uncle carry home from the war? What was the helplessness that filled my aunt for years until finally, she could find no other option than to leave? How could she have taken her children with her, with no education past high school and no money to keep them safe? And of course, the children–my cousins–so resilient, so clearly, so fiercely loving one another–even I, the child, who didn’t know the story, could see that. Now they are grown, good people living ordinary lives. How did they get through? I don’t have the answers to any of these questions; this is my family, but I don’t know their stories.
This week in the first lesson, we heard about the Israelites demanding a king to protect them who would, Samuel warns, inevitably oppress them. Then in the Gospel, religious leaders from Jerusalem accuse Jesus of being possessed by Beelzebub–Jesus, who has been healing the sick and casting out demons, so many that he doesn’t even have time to eat. As I read through these lessons earlier this week, the story of my aunt kept coming back and would not let me go. And instead of the mistakes, I just kept seeing pain–the deeply held losses and trauma these angry, demanding people of God were holding inside. How far the Israelites must have felt from Yahweh, how tenuous their lives, to need a human king to feel safe. How fearful the leaders in Jesus’ time were of disrupting the tyranny of Roman rule. How Jesus’ family came for him because they’d heard people saying he is “out of his mind,” fearing for his safety and, most likely, their own.
And I began to think about how long and how deep the roots of pain run through the People of God–back to slavery in Egypt and, before that, to the flood that destroyed everything and before that to the terrible cost of Adam and Eve breaking God’s one rule. And about how deep and wide the roots of my own family’s story spread, connecting us all in their tangle. As Father Richard Rohr puts it, ”If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it—usually to those closest to us: our family, our neighbors, our co-workers, and, invariably, the most vulnerable, our children.”
Yet the desire for control runs deep in the people of God: the passion for following the law exactly as written; the desire for a king no matter the consequences. And how quick they–we–are to ignore, silence, and condemn those who stray. My family is no exception. In her 50s, in a paper written as she pursued a graduate degree in counseling, my mother described her childhood household this way: “The rules were written in stone. There was no room for extenuating circumstances or personal value systems. God was portrayed as the punisher of small infractions. These rules were the substance of our family’s religion for many years.”
When someone broke the rules, the consequences were harsh. And so, while my cousins were part of our regular family gatherings at holidays, baptisms, and my grandparents’ birthdays, for many years after she left, my aunt was not allowed in their home, and my grandparents rarely spoke her name.
My mom, also, though she would talk about growing up with her sister, never spoke of what happened or how she felt about it. In truth, in those days, she rarely spoke of her feelings at all. The brilliant brain that freed her to leave home, work her way through college, start a career, and marry when she was ready, firmly controlled her emotions. My parents never argued. Mom dealt with our anger and childhood upsets by sending us to our rooms until we were “calm,” rarely acknowledging our hurts. The rules, rooted in faith, that kept my family from an active, loving, relationship with my aunt when she strayed from the correct path held us all in their grip–and the silence and shame that followed, the refusal to help or even to see, were their bitter fruits.
This is, I believe, the kind of demonic power that Jesus gives his life to put out–the desire for control, for safety, that creates walls between us, that substitutes accusation for compassion, that shuts down relationship, that leaves no room for those who do not follow the prescribed path: that keeps us from God’s kingdom. We work so hard to avoid drowning in the deep, unspoken pain that we feel within ourselves and then twist and inflict on one another–in our families, our communities, our churches, our nation. And yet, until we face it, how can we live as God’s people? “To accept one’s past–one’s history–” James Baldwin says “is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.” Or in Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel, “If a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.”
The end of my story tells how my own family was saved from drowning. My father–a generous and steady provider who loved his family extravagantly and unconditionally–died suddenly, in his 40s, from a heart attack. I was 18; my youngest sibling was 13. It took that devastating loss to finally break the silence in my family. Slowly, my mother opened up, told us how much she loved us, talked to us about her long-seated fears for my father–who smoked and drank too much, who gambled at the track and with his health. And while she still never talked much about what had happened to her older sister, my aunt and her eighth and youngest son, the same age as my brother, visited us often.
And when, in the 1980s, my twenty-year-old sister came out to my mom, mom did not turn away. She read up and found a support group. She visited my sister and carried a sign in her first-ever Pride parade. She made an appointment with her priest, and she asked him why the church she loved would reject the child she loved. Years later, after I was ordained, when I went to mass with her, she made a point of introducing me to the celebrant as, “My daughter Mary, also a priest.” And her love for us and for God deepened: not by following the church rules that had taught her that birth control, gay marriage, and the ordination of women were sins, but by opening herself to the God of today’s psalm who, when she called, increased her strength from within.
Like my Mom, my family no longer put their faith in rules that promise safety at the cost of open and loving relationship. Even my Pop-pop eventually came around and invited my aunt back into their home telling me. One day when she was visiting, he told me, “I’ve gotten older, and I realize my mistakes: family is most important.” My family’s journeys of faith have taken us in myriad directions, but the silence is broken; the journey is shared.
My own faith now is in the One who is with us even when we follow the wrong leader or the wrong path; in the healer; in the teacher who names all those around him family. With a Messiah like that, we can face our demons–including the quiet, submerged, generational pain that resurfaces over and over in new forms of anger, silence, and hurt. We can tie up that strong man and plunder that house until in Paul’s words, “we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens,” a building strong enough to hold all of our stories, a building wide enough to welcome everyone in.
Sunday Morning Words 