The Second Sunday after Pentecost-The Rev Melanie Lemburg
2nd Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 5B
June 6, 2021
As a spin-off of my work on family
systems theory for my continuing education this year, I’ve been reading the
book Friedman’s Fables by Edwin Friedman. Friedman was a Jewish rabbi, who used the
psychological system of Bowen Family Systems theory (developed by Murray Bowen)
and expanded it to think about how organizations, groups, churches, react in the
similar predictable patterns through which families interact.
In Friedman’s Fables, Friedman
draws upon his knowledge of family systems theory and Jewish midrash (the
process of taking a story from scripture and embellishing it or expanding upon
it through imaginative interpretation), and he has written a series of stories
to help the reader more playfully engage some of the principals that lead to
deeper personal development through self-differentiation.
This week, as I was reading, I came upon
the story that is titled Raising Cain: A Case History of the First Family. It is, fortuitously enough for this preacher,
Friedman’s form of midrash on our Old Testament reading for today. The basis of
the story is that an angelic messenger has written a psychological case study
of the first family—Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel.
The case study says that they family came in for counseling because “the
sons have been quarrelling a good deal, and both mother and father appear quite
helpless to do anything about it. Most
of the focus is on the older brother, who broods a lot, is extremely sullen,
and is very jealous of his far more successful younger brother.” The story continues by looking at the parents
(Adam and Eve) and their relationship: “At the beginning of their marriage,
both husband and wife seemed to have lived in a very blissful state, naïve, it
appears, about what was happening all around them. Something, we’re not sure what, changed that,
and things have never been the same since.
The husband growls continuously about his lot and why life has to be so
difficult, whereas the wife never fails to remind him of how much pain she went
through to bear him sons. But it is more
than their discontent that seems to be seeping down, particularly to their
elder son. More pernicious still may be
their attitude toward their discontent. Neither husband or wife seems
capable of accepting responsibility for their own destiny. Both are always claiming that their lives
would be far different were it not for how the other behaved. The man tends to blame his wife, and the wife
tend to blame the environment….Neither seems capable of taking responsibility
for personal desires, loves, or hates.
Each sees the other as causing his or her own pain. Ironically, they thus each give their partner
great power to guilt the other.” [i]
After focusing on the parents, the case
study moves on to look at the children-Cain and Abel. The narrator reports: “There seems to be no
strength in the family at all, by which I mean the capacity of some member to
say, I am me, this is where I stand.
I end here and you begin there, etc. It may be this constant
expectation that the other should be his keeper that prevents each from taking
responsibility for himself. And as long
as this attitude persists in the parents, we can hardly expect the boys to act
more pleasantly toward each another, still less at times to be watchful over
the other. This situation will certainly
leave a ‘mark’ on one of them.”
He
concludes, “In a family like this, with no one able to tolerate his own
solitariness, or, for that matter, anyone else’s, I fear the weakness in the
children will never be corrected. Actually,
my fantasies are worse. For, if the
current inability each parent manifests to deal with his or her own pain
continues, I fear that Cain’s view of life will never truly focus on himself
and, perceiving the source of all his problems in his brother, he may one day
up and kill him.”[ii]
In his commentary on this fable, Friedman
cuts straight to the heart of it by inviting the reader to “suppose the human
family’s original sin is blaming others,” and then asks, “How can the members
of any generation modify that transmitted attitude?”[iii]
“Suppose the human family’s original sin
is blaming others.” It’s certainly in
evidence in the Genesis reading. It
starts with a simple question from God to Adam and Eve: “where are you?” and then devolves into Adam blaming Eve and
Eve blaming the snake.
We see rampant blame at work in the
gospel reading for today. It starts with
Jesus’s family’s anxiety about what he is up to and their attempts to restrain
him because they believe he has gone crazy and then escalates into a full on
blame-game name calling by the Scribes who accuse Jesus of being possessed by
Beelzebub. All of these groups are
reacting to change which naturally brings anxiety, but as opposed to dwelling
with their own discomfort, they are quick to try to pass that discomfort on to
others by blaming.
“Suppose the human family’s original sin
is blaming others.” Does that give us more
of an explanation of the state of the world, the state of our country, or the
problems that we see in our families, in our churches? How does Jesus offer the antidote to blame in
his person, in his teachings? What role
does blame play in your life on a regular basis? Who do you find your blame directed most
frequently toward?
Your
invitation this week is this. To pay
attention to the very first taste of blame that you feel on the tip of your
tongue or in your heart, and to draw back from it. Before speaking or acting, be curious about
what pain your blame is springing from, pay attention to where you end and the other
begins, and then speak or act out of that space.
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