“Come, Holy Spirit, come. Come as the fire and burn. Come as the wind and cleanse. Convict, convert, consecrate, ‘til we are wholly thine.”

This is actually a rather disturbing prayer.

It’s imagery is discomforting.

Especially today, for those who lived through Hurricane Andrew and today are experiencing post-traumatic shock flashbacks as we view the devastation on the west coast of Florida.

Today is a disturbing day.

Anytime we experience catastrophe on a scale like Hurricane Charley our lives are disturbed, our faith is tested.

When life spins out of control, we look for that Divine Protection that we expect is part of God’s job description. After all, the Bible is full of imagery of blessings and peace, protection and care.

But those are not the only images in the Bible.

Those images are tempered by images much more disturbing, like those we read this morning.

Tough words from Jesus: Don’t think that I have come to bring peace on the earth. I’ve come to cast fire, to burn up the status quo, to disrupt present arrangements. I’ve come to disturb and to disrupt your family. (Now, I am not suggesting in any way that Hurricane Charley was part of a cleansing effort by God.)

But part of the blasphemy I want to address this morning, part of the religious cancer eating at the soul of our nation and world, is spouted by those with a simplistic view of faith and of God, who also tend to suggest such blasphemies as “God protects true believers, or those born again.”

“If you just pray hard enough with enough faith all will be well and you will be blessed, protected, and successful.”

The greater blasphemy which Jesus addresses today is actually more political than religious, that of “family values.”

I don’t know exactly when Christian faith was shifted away from a focus on God and God’s desires for justice and toward the family, but it was a smooth public relations move. It offered an easy answer to the question: “What is faith good for?” Obviously, it keeps the family together, despite the modern ills of two-income families, day care, teenage promiscuity, Attention Deficit Disorder, and frozen dinners. Such theology buttresses a certain view of the family and gives it a divine stamp of approval.

If only we would follow the divine plan for families, our ills would disappear!

Stanley Hauerwas, Christian Ethics professor at Duke University, begins one of his classes by reading a letter from a parent to a government official. The parent complained that his once obedient and well-motivated son had become involved in some weird religious group. The group had completely taken over his life, forced him to forsake all of his friends, and turned him against his family.

The parent was pleading with the government official to intervene and take action against this obviously disruptive group which had caused such difficulty in this person’s family.

Then Hauerwas asks his class, “What is this letter about?”

The class thinks that it is probably concerning a kid who had gotten mixed up with the Moonies or some other controversial sect. To their surprise, Hauerwas reveals to them that the letter was composed from a number of letter from third-century Roman parents complaining about a weird religious group called Christians.

We forget that one of the chief Roman criticisms of Christians was that Christians were anti-family, turning children against their parents and encouraging wives to be disobedient to their husbands.

No institution was more beloved in imperial Rome than the family.

The family determined one’s social and economic destiny. There was almost nothing that classical Romans would not do for their families.

Into that culture comes Jesus calling for a higher loyalty than loyalty to family. That loyalty is to God and the ways of God and the values of God.

Even the Bible acknowledges that families rarely help us to embrace that loyalty, in fact, just the opposite, they tend to get in the way and mess things up. After all, which families do you want to look to for models of family values in the Bible? Adam and Eve? They disobey God from the start, blame each other, and their children quarrel to the point that one son kills the other son. Abraham and Sarah? Sure they follow God, but they continually distrust God taking matters into their own hands and their grandson Jacob is a known liar, scam artist and thief who plays favorites among his sons. What about King David? He sleeps with another woman, impregnates her, has her husband killed in battle, one of his own sons leads a rebellion against him. King Solomon? Known for his wisdom, he also had over 400 wives! Then we have Jesus, whose paternity is questioned, whose own family is barely mentioned, and then usually in unflattering light, and who calls people to leave their families to follow him and suggests that his own family does not consist of biological ties, but those who do the will of God. What about Paul, whose teachings on family relations in Ephesians is so often the core of the “family values” crowd? What about his suggestion that it would be better not to marry but to devote oneself to ministry and God’s way of life, instead, but if one burns with sexual lust, then marry as a last resort?

Your human family, for all of its strengths, is not enough to make you a follower of God and the ways of God.

Again and again, the Bible demonstrates that the ways of God are contrary to the ways of this world, and therefore, if you are going to follow God there will be conflicts.

There will even be divisions within families.

The truth is, so much of what passes for “family values” in our society today is really code language for distinguishing between “them” and “us”, “insiders” and “outsiders.”

So much of that talk actually embraces a model of family based on exclusiveness, power, and kinship.

But the family values Jesus embraces are God’s values of inclusiveness, humility, and the priority of discipleship.

The family of God that Jesus calls people to join is inclusive: no one is turned away. It includes every type of “wrong” person, every type of person who feels marginalized and excluded by the prevailing standards of social value.

It is a family, not of privilege and power that flows down from the top and understands that most members of the family exist for the welfare of those at the top, but is a family of radical equality formed around the principles of humility and service. It is a family where everyone takes care of everyone else and no one is too high, too proud, to privileged to not be able to wash the feet of, or bandage the wounds of, the weakest, the dirtiest, member of the family.

It is not a family based on kinship ties, but on loyalty and devotion to God and God’s way. It is a family that proves the lie to be “blood is thicker than water.” For nothing is thicker than the water of baptism that demonstrates our entry and standing in the family of God. Through our baptisms we have been adopted into God’s family and we no longer belong to ourselves or our blood relatives or our tribes: we belong to God.

A wise woman once said: “When you ask God into your life, you think God is going to come into your psychic house,, look around, and see that you just need a new floor or better furniture, and that everything needs just a little cleaning — and so you go along for the first six months thinking how nice life is now that God is there. Then you look out the

window one day and you see that there’s a wrecking ball outside. It turns out that God actually thinks your whole foundation is shot and you’re going to have to start over from scratch.”

We trivialize Christianity by keeping our lives intact.

We look at our families: we’re struggling, and we’re lost, and the confusion is painful. There are casualties everywhere.

We have failures of communication; we are dishonest with each other at home; there are these unbearable tensions and distance, and we don’t know what to do. Sometimes, we think that we’ll just patch a little prayer on top of it all, and we decide that we’ll have a little family prayer time.

We pray for two minutes a day, and it doesn’t work.

The reason? You can’t pray a couple minutes a day, patch that prayer onto an otherwise unchanged life, and expect it to be different. Jesus does not come so our behavior will be just a little bit different, but so that everything will be transformed. To be a follower of Jesus means we take his life seriously as we make our decisions about our lives: as we decide what we’re going to do as a family, how we’re going to spend our money, what we are going to do with our time, how are we going to raise our children.

The question becomes, what family values are we going to live by? Those that exclude and subjugate people, building walls and creating enemies?

Or those who welcome all people into the family, where we take care of one another in increasingly open and freeing relationships that build friends through love?

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