Siblings by Choice
Mark 3: 31-35
Reverend Jae-Haeng Choi
Epworth United Methodist Church
Who is our mother, our brother and our sister? This is the key question that we should raise in the world which is broken by war, nuclear threat, international terrorism, religious conflict and environmental crisis. Last Sunday, after worship, we watched the movie, “Inconvenient Truth,” which is Al Gore’s movie about Global Warming. Watching that movie, I keenly realized that the world in which we live is a single organism. Our action and reaction toward the world influences this single organism either negatively or positively. A single nuclear test, bombing, war, a small destruction of natural environment, corporate greed, poverty or hunger that take place in a far corner of the global village impacts the whole world. Our world is interdependent and interconnected. Unless we live as siblings by choice, unless we break through barriers such as religion, nationality, race, gender and sexual-orientation and unless we all together seek the well-being of the world and the harmony of life, the future of our world is dim.
Then, how can we, who come from different cultures, societies and nations, become one family that together struggle against common injustice and violence? In today’s scripture, Jesus raises the key question, “who is my mother, brother and sister?” He answers, “Whoever does the will of God is my mother, brother and sister.” Jesus defines a new family against a conventional concept of family that is related through blood ties, clans and tribes. The only requirement to be a member of this new family is to do “the will of God.”
Doing the will of God and becoming a mother, a brother and a sister in Jesus’ family is in the radical sense of being willing to drink the cup of solidarity and suffering. Mark offers a key to what doing the will of God is like and why it makes a person into a mother, brother and sister to Jesus. In Mark 14:36 we hear Jesus’ prayer, “Father, all things are possible for you. Take this cup of suffering away from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” Jesus incorporates a communal quality of discipleship into a new family. Doing the will of God is willing to give up privileges, conveniences, comforts and boundaries in the personal, national and international levels. It may be in conflict with the conventional understanding of family based on blood ties, skin color, nationalism, gender, sexual orientation and class. It may demand sacrifices, persecution, suffering and death. However, it promises the future and hope for our children.
Let me read Mark 10:28-30 in Eugene Peterson’s translation:
“Peter tried another angle, ‘We left everything and followed you.’ Jesus said, “Mark my words, no one who sacrifices house, brothers, sisters, mother, father, children, land whatever because of me and the message will lose out. They will get it all back, but also in troubles. And then the bonus of joy and grace.”
As Mary Ann Tolbert, a New Testament scholar says, doing the will of God is costly. It involves sacrifices, leaving everything, even giving up the priority of blood family, clan and nationality. Then, we find new connections again and again, a hundredfold expansion of brothers, sisters, mothers and children in this age and the age to come, great celebration.
Last year on Thanksgiving Day, a story about the women of Kireka was put in the New Orleans Times. These Kireka women live in a slum which is located in the rocky hillside looking down on Kampala, Uganda. The men who live there dig rocks from the soil, and the women pound them into smaller chunks to sell for construction purpose. They make $1.20 a day for breaking rocks with their bare hands in the African heat. When news of Katrina’s disaster arrived at Kireta, women there, most of them dying of AIDS told a Ugandan nurse and relief worker that they wanted to help. Two hundred Kireka women raised money. After a few weeks, a U.S. relief worker was called to the slum to receive their gift: nearly $900.00. To the Ugandan nurse, these women said this: “those people who are suffering, they belong to us. They are our people. Their problems are our problems. Their children are like our children.” Considering that these women earn $1.20 per day, imagine the cost of their sacrifice. These Kireta women, most of them dying of AIDS gave up almost everything to gain a new global family.
Every day we hear our local and global siblings cry for food, clean water and air, peace, justice, love and freedom. Archie Smith, professor at PSR, illustrates “siblings by choice” as the process in which women, men, and children from different cultural and spiritual backgrounds struggle together for a new vision of God’s family.” To do the will of God, to become “siblings by choice” requires sacrifices and suffering. Whether to struggle against one another as enemies or to struggle together as “siblings by choice” is our decision. Let us listen to Jesus once again, “Who is my mother, brother and sister?” “Whoever does the will of God is my brother, sister and mother.” Amen.
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