Family Values.

An excerpt from Know My Name: A Gay Liberation Theology, by Richard Cleaver

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It is worth asking ourselves what kind of movement Jesus tried to build. Where did he begin? Matthew 4:18-22 tells one version:

As [Jesus] walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea--for they were fishermen. And he said to them, "Follow me, and I will make you fish for people." Immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.

Notice that they drop everything. We know (because Jesus heals Peter's mother-in-law) that Peter is married. There is no mention here of Peter arranging to take care of his family. We are told explicitly that James and John just walk out on their father, to whom presumably they have both business and family obligations. Elsewhere we hear similar advice for other followers of Jesus. In Matt. 8:18-22, we read:

Now when Jesus saw great crowds around him, he gave orders to go over to the other side. A scribe then approached and said, "Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go." And Jesus said to him, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." Another of his disciples said to him, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father." But Jesus said to him, "Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead."

This is not a movement for family values. It is not built on a husband, a wife, and 2.3 children in the suburbs; ... Jesus' movement cut through even the most important relations in society, such as the duty to bury one's father. In Matt. 12:46-50, Jesus himself sets the example:

While he was still speaking to the crowds, his mother and his brothers were standing outside, wanting to speak to him. Someone told him, "Look, your mother and your brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you." But to the one who had told him this, Jesus replied, "Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?"

Remember, Matthew is the evangelist who devotes his whole first chapter to "begats," all the way back to Adam, so that we can know precisely who Jesus' mother and brothers were. But here he tells us that Jesus, "pointing to his disciples,...said, 'Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.'"

The Jesus movement is not a workplace from which we go home to our families for emotional support. It constructs a new family not defined by blood or by marriage. It is the family of hearers and doers of the Word.

For lesbians and gay men, this is good news indeed. Many of us have been thrown out of our families. All of hear those with power in the church and in the state preach that such bourgeois families are the basic unit of society and the church. This is why they say we must be cast out: we are a threat to the family. But their kind of family, if we believe Matthew, does not seem to be the basic unit of the community that Jesus built. Indeed, it could not be, because such forms of family did not exist in the society where Jesus worked. If we put the bourgeois family at the heart of Jesus' message instead fo the assembly of hearers and doers, we worship an idol.

Some will object that we must be prepared to accept the reality of social change in history. They are right. But we must also be able to accept the social changes that have forged new forms of family amoung lesbians and gay men. Underlying the debate over family values is an assumption that "families" and "lesbians and gay men" are two separate groups, without overlap. In fact, we are all part of the families we grew up in. We may not always get along well with them, but a lot of straight people do not either. Many of us get along fine. Often we are heads of families ourselves--lesbians especially, if they have been allowed to keep their children. The bourgeois family is not necessarily any more foreign to lesbians and gay men than to others. We, too, may be guilty of worshiping that idol.

Framing the debate on the family in terms of an all-or-nothing choice between some well-defined unity unchanged throughout history, on the one hand, and the liberation of lesbians and gay men, on the other, is a kind of shell game. It diverts our attention from the uncertain place of families in a changing society, for good and for ill, and from how a changing society in turn molds families, also for good or for ill. These are issues for theologians along with everyone else, and lesbians and gay men, being, so to speak, both inside and outside the institution, have valuable insights. In this, as in so many aspects of U.S. culture that are so familiar as to be opaque to their beneficiaries, Ethan Mordden, the chronicler of New York gay life in the 1970s and 1980s, aptly observes: "We have to know more than the straights know: have to understand what we are as well as what they are--have to find our unique place in their culture."

Idols are false gods that we worship because they are easier to manage than the real thing. We have made the bourgeois family into an idol because it, unlike the living God, gives us permission to confine our concern only to our own kin and kind. It tells us it is OK to worry above all about keeping our families safe from the resto fo society.

That is precisely the kind of family Jesus tells us to reject.