Perfect families, holy families

This is my homily for yesterday, the Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Cycle B.  The readings for last Sunday are here.  

The Catholic church designates the Sunday after Christmas every year as the Feast of the Holy Family.  Of course, the original Holy Family is Joseph, Mary and the child Jesus.  We have a wonderful statue of them back there in our Narthex.  The Catholic church holds up to all of us today that historical Holy Family as a model for our own families.    

I would guess that many of us have pre-existing notions or assumptions of what an ideal family should be like.  These notions and assumptions arise from our own experiences, as all of us come from a family, one way or another.  These notions also are fed to us by the larger culture, and they are reinforced in the media and social media.  These notions and assumptions tend to come to the fore during this holiday season, when family gatherings can be a great source of joy, but also, for some of us, a source of stress.  There even are people who dread having to gather as a family during this time of year.  We have these ideas, or even aspirations, of what an ideal family should consist of, and we see that our own families don’t always measure up to our ideal.

Having lived in this community for several decades now, and having helped to rear a family here, I’ll describe what I think is a common set of family aspirations in our community.  I think the ideal looks something like this: mom and dad are married and have two or three children together.  Dad and mom both have college degrees.  They both work in professional careers and have achieved a good balance between family and career.  They are financially comfortable and stay physically active and fit.  They own their home, which they maintain well, inside and out.  They stay out of serious debt trouble.  The children are healthy, get along with one another, do well in school, and play sports.  When the children graduate from high school, they’ll go on to college and then postgraduate school and become career professionals themselves.  Nobody is greatly inconvenienced by mental illness.  

That’s my attempt to paint our culture’s picture of an ideal family.  To be sure, the reality for some of us may be little or nothing like what I’ve just described.  For some of us, what I’ve described might be close to our lived reality, in some if not all respects.  And let me hasten to add: there is nothing particularly wrong with the picture I’ve tried to sketch.  We should make good use of our gifts, and live loving, healthy and hard-working lives, and often that approach leads to prosperity, peace and stability in our families.  Those are all good and desirable things.  If that is your family reality, then those are things for which we should offer thanks and praise to God, every day.

And yet – what I’ve described is hardly a portrait of the original Holy Family.

The first thing to note about the Holy Family is that they are a stepfamily.  What I mean by that is: Mary is the child’s biological mother, but Joseph is not the biological father.  He is a stepfather.  One of the reasons we esteem St. Joseph so highly in the Catholic church is that he was willing to marry this woman who had a child, seemingly with someone else.  To be sure: that sort of thing happens today as well: according to the Pew Research Center, over ten million children in the United States have at least one stepparent. 

But if you think that every man who is single is willing to do what St. Joseph did and marry a woman who already is a mom, I encourage you to speak with some young single moms who would like to meet a marriageable man.  I’m told that many single men are upfront about not wishing to meet or date a woman with children.  I really think we need more St. Josephs in our contemporary society.  It seems one possible mark of a holy family is the parents’ willingness to accept, and love, children who are not biologically their own.  By the way, there are families here at St. Edna who have done this: who have adopted children, or who have served as foster parents.  Some day I hope to give one or two of them a chance to speak with us.  I firmly believe they are leading holy lives.

The next thing to note about the Holy Family that deviates from the ideal family I described is that apparently they were not very prosperous.  In fact, they were poor.  The story of Jesus’s birth, in a barn or stable because the parents had no other shelter, is one of poverty.   Today’s Gospel suggests that Mary offered two birds – pigeons or turtledoves – in sacrifice for her burnt offering and purification offering after giving birth to a son.  The Law of Moses actually stipulates that a year-old lamb be offered for the burnt offering; but families who couldn’t afford a lamb could offer a second bird instead.  Apparently, that was the case for the Holy Family: a bird was all they could afford.  These details in scripture suggest the Holy Family was poor.

One more thing to note about the Holy Family, in comparison to our picture of the ideal family: the Holy Family became refugees when King Herod slaughtered all the male babies two years old and younger.  Joseph and his family fled to Egypt and stayed there until Herod died.  If you follow the news, you may have seen news items in recent days of a large walking caravan of migrants, a thousand or more people, in Mexico.  The caravan crossed Mexico’s southern border some days ago and has been walking northward since, toward our southern border.  We might picture Jesus, Mary and Joseph as being in such a caravan of walkers, seeking asylum so they can be protected from political violence in their own country.  That’s not quite the picture of the ideal family I had described a few minutes ago.

So whatever a holy family consists of, it seems it needn’t be a secure, prosperous biologically unified family.

What is required for us to be a holy family?  First and foremost, it requires that our families love and worship God, just as the Holy Family loved and worshiped God.  As the Holy Family took time to go to the Temple we must make room for God in our family life.  We must carve out time, each week, to come to church to worship as a family.  We must ensure our children receive sacramental grace by achieving the sacramental milestones of Baptism, Reconciliation, Eucharist and Confirmation.  And we must pray as a family, not only at church, but also in our homes, at mealtimes, or bedtimes, or in the mornings, or whatever times are suitable to our family’s daily rhythms. 

Second, we must follow the rules for living which Jesus taught us, just as the Holy Family obeyed the Law of Moses.  It is in our families that we learn to serve one another.  Parents serve their children by caring for them.  Grandparents do the same.  Children also serve their parents and one another by doing their chores and fulfilling their family responsibilities.  It’s also in our families that we learn to forgive one another, and where we learn to bear with one another in patience and compassion.  Serving and forgiving are things that Jesus commanded us to do.  It’s only when we learn them in our family life that we can take these holy habits out into the world.

We don’t need to be perfect families – in fact, it’s impossible for our families to be perfect.  There is too much sin, too much mental illness, too many imperfections in ourselves and in our family members.  But with God’s help, it’s possible for us to be holy families.  Let us make a New Year’s resolution that we’ll spend less emotional energy on wishing for our families be ideal families; instead, let us resolve that we’ll continue to welcome God into our family life; and let us pray that God continue to bless our families by making them holy families.