Ravioli makers, 2011
This Saturday, the Trevisan’s will gather to make ravioli for the annual Christmas Eve meal. It’s a wondrous and cherished tradition that we all look forward to each year.
I love family. I credit this passion to the “natural” family I was physically born into, the Trevisan’s. I am the oldest of ten and although we are all grown and have our own families, closeness and love typifies the “original” Trevisan’s and our extended families. So far, so good!
I belong to three other families as well. By uttering and honoring marital vows, I planted and grew my own family with my wife and our two (now grown) children. These vows also include me in my wife’s family, the Alfonso’s. My fourth family is a spiritual one, our Church.
Like the Trevisan family, Church membership required birth. When I accepted God’s invitation to believe in Jesus Christ and become his disciple, I was “born again” into this spiritual family.
There is a key difference between my Church family and all my other families. Whereas my relationships with members of with my physical and marital families will end at death, relationships with my Church family members transcend death. They are eternal.
Close “natural” families like the Trevisan’s may invoke the idea that “Blood is thicker than water” to suggest that blood relationships are stronger than chosen ones like friendship, marriage, adoption, or church. However, the only true element of that claim is the first word, “Blood.”
While blood or genetics create irrevocable linkages between people born from sexual unions, true family requires more than mere blood bonds. Family requires intentional relational action and practice over time.
No family is a better example of that than the Trevisan’s. Our involvement in each other’s lives (over generations in fact) makes us who we are to ourselves as well as to anyone associated with any of us.
You would think God vehemently rejects this “Blood thicker than water” idea. He exists outside physical reality. By his mere word, universes arise. In God, the unseen trumps the seen. The power of word alone creates and obliterates all matter, nature, galaxies, mountains, seas and kingdoms.
Yet God is the maker of humanity and all our elements of flesh and blood. Physicality and physiology all emanate from him. Sex too. Actually, the “Blood thicker than water” idea has elements of God in it.
In God’s design, family flourishes with the blending of the physical and the spiritual. Love and sexual union births the physical while love, vows and relational intentionality frames the spiritual dimension. The two parts flourish together.
However, societies past and present seem bent on altering that blend by prying the two apart and forcing a separate but equal model – each standing alone, not dependent on the other but joined or divided again as the whims of the parties deem.
Making Ravioli, 2008
I “get” that many may refute my view that our tampering is failing. I submit that the Scriptural pronouncement included in many marital ceremonies, “What God has joined, let no man separate” turns out to be both a unifying and a foiling truism. When we mess with God’s principles, we mess ourselves up as well.
I could go on and on but I must step off my soapbox because God insists I do so. You see, God is fully in all of this stuff with us – the blood, family, vows, sex, and the whole mess1 – even our tampering. Nothing escapes his notice and nothing we do in any way foils his plan (although it may foil our plan….!).
Look at all the genealogies2 in the Bible. The mere inclusion of them indicates that people and their manner matter to God – our heritages, where we come from, who we belong to and sleep with. God affirms our sense of family and belonging, even the errant expressions of family that we create by our rejection of his ways.
The Bible is less about God’s commands to us than his how he is with us. Family is important to God. Jesus is God’s Son, after all! That we humans are his “children” is a designation of endearment used throughout Scripture.
And blood is important too. The key relationship that we can have with God is made possible by the blood sacrifice of Jesus on a Roman cross. But again, it’s not just blood but also covenant – a vow and actions emanating from that vow that seals the deal3.
This Saturday, the Trevisan’s will gather for ravioli-making that will kick off of the 2012 Christmas holidays. I am thankful for them and my marital families but even more so for my spiritual one.
My bond to the people of my physical and marital families is time-limited, ending at death but my bond with those in my spiritual family is eternal. My prayer is for my physical and marital family members to say yes and “marry into” my spiritual one.
Then we can all enjoy ravioli forever! Woo-hoooo!!!
Notes:
- Jesus’ own family history was rather messy in fact. Look at the “non-traditional” relationships in his family tree: Tamar & Judah (her father-in-law), Bathsheba & David (which with her adulterous tryst with David followed by an arranged death for her former husband on the battlefield ), Rahab (a Canaanite and former prostitute) & Salmon. Jesus himself was conceived prior to his parents’ marriage!
- Here’s a link to 14 genealogy lists in the Bible: http://www.biblegateway.com/topical/Genealogy/Nave/
- In this case, God pops the question and awaits our acceptance followed by our obedient submission.
