On family fights & religious condemnation: a sermon for Pride Sunday
Preached at Christ Lutheran Church in Blaine for their Pride service on June 22, 2025, which also included a baptism <3
The crowd came together again, so that Jesus and the disciples could not even eat. When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, "He has gone out of his mind." And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, "He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons."
And Jesus called them to him and spoke to them in parables: "How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come. But no one can enter a strong man's house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered. Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin," for they had said, "He has an unclean spirit."
Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him. A crowd was sitting around Jesus, and they said to him, "Your mother and your brothers and your sisters are outside asking for you." He replied, "Who are my mother and my brothers?" Looking at those who sat around him, he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and my sister and mother." - Mark 3:20-35
Nothing like a nice, straightforward, fluffy passage for a Sunday in the midst of turmoil, right? We couldn't have picked "The King of Love My Shepherd Is" for today, done some Psalm 23, really relaxed back into it. No, the scripture is calling us to pay attention to these two debates that Jesus is navigating. And as much as we might want to come to scripture and to Jesus for comfort and protection and a way to escape the world outside, the world breaks in on us all too often, does it not?
Church is not a place to hide from the trials of the world, whether it be worldwide and global political issues, whether it be fears and concerns about politics here in our own state and city, whether it be politics and concerns here in our own families. The world does not stay away from us, and Jesus does not hide us away from the world.
Jesus is navigating two debates in this conversation in the early gospel, early part of the gospel of Mark. He's been going around preaching and teaching, healing, casting out demons, and for some reason everyone's upset. Now that might be because he is doing this without proper authority from the religious authorities in Jerusalem. It might be because the proclamation of the kingdom is not one that everyone wants to hear. The idea that we might even welcome in those who have not been welcomed is not always fun for those who have been working hard on the inside first.
So Jesus is navigating two debates: one with his family, and one with the religious authorities coming down from Jerusalem, the holy city. He is navigating these questions: What is real family, and who is on God's side?
Now I find myself grateful this morning that, of course, these are questions that only mattered 2,000 years ago and have no bearing or concern for us, that we have long resolved. [laughter] No, I'm just kidding. These are questions that press on us too. Jesus knows what it's like to be in a family fight. And so do we. I know there are too many in this room who could tell stories of tense Thanksgiving dinners or of seats left unfilled at family gatherings, of angry fights on phone or text or Facebook. I remember a time without Facebook. I'm 40 this year, so I remember a time without Facebook, and I miss it, I really do. I think there were many gifts that came from it, but many trials, and particularly the way we've learned to fight, to snip and snipe at each other from the distance of a screen. But Jesus knows what this is like too.
Jesus knows what it's like to be in a fight with your family because his family shows up to restrain him because the crowd is saying he's gone out of his mind. Jesus knows what it's like to be fighting with his family. They do not understand what he is doing. They are not sitting at home saying to those who are worried about who and who and what Jesus is claiming to be, they are not saying, "We are proud of him. That's my son, that's my brother." Mary is not singing the Magnificat back at those who are attacking Jesus and saying, "This is the one whom the angel proclaimed to me." His mother and brothers and sisters have shown up to try to at least slow him down, to constrain him, to hem him in.
So Jesus knows family fights -- and Jesus knows religious condemnation. The scribes from Jerusalem -- people who have studied deeply the law of God that is given to us and how we understand in the first five books of the Old Testament -- those people, people who have carefully tended and kept the Jewish community alive through centuries, millennia of oppression and pressure from outside, of differing empires taking over their lands, those people have come to say, "You are possessed by a demon." And Jesus says, "I'm possessed by a demon and I'm casting out demons? Y'all don't even know your own logic." And still, this is not going to silence the religious condemnation, the fights that Jesus will have with the religious leaders of his day. It's not as if the scribes will go back to Jerusalem and say, "You know, we had a really good chat, nice long council meeting, but I think we came to a unanimous vote." No, Jesus and the scribes and the Pharisees, the representatives and leaders of the Jewish community in and around Jerusalem and in the communities around it, will continue to fight --
I mean, I would say until the day of his death. But religious leaders, we've kept fighting with Jesus every now and then, haven't we? We can trace that back through centuries of the Christian church, of ways that the church has strayed from the call of Jesus. Within the Lutheran tradition, we love to hearken back to the 1500s and the glory days of Martin Luther standing up against the oppressions of the Catholic Church. In America, we might look back to the 1850s and 40s, 60s, when people were still certain, absolutely certain, that they had not only a legal but a divine right gifted by them in Scripture to own and enslave other people.
It is not uncommon for the Christian church to find itself fighting with Christ.
Jesus knows religious condemnation. And my LGBTQ family knows these things, these family fights and this religious condemnation. I had the privilege to serve for six years as a pastor at Grace Lutheran Church in Northeast Minneapolis. If you're familiar at all with Northeast, we're tucked in the big old elementary school building that looks like a brick fortification because it was built in the 1960s. And we had the incredible gift during that time to host a community that became to be called the Queer Grace Community, of LGBTQ+ Christians from around the Twin Cities who came together for worship, for prayer, for Bible study, and for community. And so many of the people who came through that door were coming back to church for the first time in a long time, or would only come to activities that we held outside the church building because of the painful stories they could tell about family fights and religious condemnation. So many people within the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer community can tell these awful stories of how the gift of Scripture and Jesus has been used as a weapon against us.
My family knows these family fights and this religious condemnation.
But as I mentioned, I don't think that we're unique in that. I think there are many of you in this room who can tell stories of family fights and of religious condemnation, of arguing out what it means to be a person on God's side, always a risky place to think you have put yourself. And what it means to be fighting over how we worship, what church looks like, what the Bible means, and how our lives should be formed by our faith in Christ. I think so many of you in this room know that when we start to tell the truth about ourselves, about our own life, about what God has done for us -- that can cause family fights and religious condemnation.
So here are the promises that I hear for you, if that is the place you find yourself in today. If you have come carrying the baggage of family fights and religious condemnation, whether those wounds are old or new, if you have come with tension in your heart or fear in your steps, here are the promises that I
hear for you in the stories of Scripture offered to us today.
First: you are undeniably, unequivocally, loved.
You are undeniably and unequivocally loved.
Not for what you do, not for how good you are at anything, not even despite how bad you are at whatever list of things you just came up with -- but because you are. Because you are God's. Because just like we will soon let Scarlett-Katlynn and her moms claim the promises of baptism for her at the font where God marks us with the cross of Christ forever.
You are claimed and loved by God not because of what you have done but because you are -- simply out of your existence God has chosen to love you.
And particularly if you are finding yourself with baggage this morning around family fights and
religious condemnation, I want you to hear the way that Jesus chose to be with you. When the God who made the universe became incarnate, when God put on skin and walked among the people of the earth whom God had created, God chose to be poor; God chose to be in suffering; God chose to put on brown skin and be part of a family that would not understand the work of Jesus Christ, part of a religious a religious structure that would fight against him for all the work that he did. Jesus looked at the world and said, "Where people feel that they are being pushed out, where people feel that they are told that they do not belong, that is where I choose to be. That is where I choose to be.”
And it is my conviction -- as a queer woman, as a mom of two, as a pastor and as a child of God -- that Jesus is choosing us over and over and over again. Choosing to be with us, choosing to be alongside us, and choosing to send the church out to find all those scattered people -- everyone still afraid to put their toes on the threshold of a church door -- and proclaim that promise again: you are loved. You are loved. You are loved.
Amen.