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2008-04-01 issue:

Blood ties and kin-dom

Real Families

by Regina Shands Stoltzfus

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On an April evening 14 years ago, I got a phone call telling me the news of my father’s sudden, unexpected death; he had had a massive heart attack while on the road, alone. I was at home when the phone call came; that night we were hosting the youth group in our home. While I listened to the terrible news from a friend of the family, happy teenagers were romping in our back yard.



Although I was an adult when my father died, I had only known him for 10 years. Perhaps we are never ready to lose a parent, but this felt especially premature. My relationship with my father could be measured in several, distinct stages. For many years he was a mystery to me; I was aware of his existence but not a part of his life. I got to know him when I was a young adult, before I became a parent myself. I was apprehensive of him, shy. I didn’t know if I wanted to like him, but I really wanted him to like me. Eventually we developed a relationship, and I grew to love him. I saw the ways I was like him. I knew why my mother loved him. I married and had children, and he loved my family.

Remembering my father and our relationship makes me think about the families we are born into, the ones that we create, the many shapes each of those categories falls into and whether the distinctions we make are as important as we think they are.

Because I was raised by a stepfather and lived with stepsiblings (although we never referred to each other in that way—we were and are simply family), I have always been suspicious, even dismissive of the importance of blood ties. Maybe I am too dismissive. It may be a defensive posture, a request for the acknowledgement of legitimacy for family structures that show evidence of fragility, brokenness.

Genealogies are important in the biblical narratives. In the context of ancient Israel’s kinship structures, these genealogies show how the bloodlines flow, who belongs to whom and to what land families belonged. They tell us how individual families are shaped and how they operate, not as individual units unto themselves but as part of a larger context, part of a people. Along the way are disjunctures and fractures that we who have inherited these texts do well to pay attention to. Even in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus we are introduced to people—women—who fall outside what a proper family is supposed to be and do.

I find this comforting. There is room in the family of God for all kinds of families and all kinds of people. There is room in the family of God for families who don’t fit the mold we hold up as perfection—God loves and uses those families. And perhaps through our human families—the families we see and live in—we are able to access the yet and not yet of the kingdom of God.

Or, shall we say, the kin-dom of God. Theologian Ada Maria Isasi Diaz notes that the metaphor of the kingdom of God is less than helpful in today’s world because the reality the metaphor springs from—actual kingdoms—do not exist in the abundance they once did. For many of us, that point of reference does not have meaning. The concept of a kingdom also brings to mind an elitist, hierarchical structure that supports oppressive systems—not the inbreaking of a new thing that the prophets foretold and Jesus initiated. So she suggests the word kindom to move the political metaphor to a personal one, one we understand intimately.

Further, the kindom is not a family that has to do with exclusive blood ties but with the ties of love, care and community. This is something all God’s children are invited to, however we may come, in all our strength and joy, as well as in our brokenness and fragility.

On that lovely April evening 14 years ago, I heard the terrible news that someone I had to learn to love was no longer part of my earthly existence. I think about it every spring. I am grateful for the 10 years I had knowing my father, though it was much too short a time. But I am also grateful that my family, my kin, stretch far beyond those to whom I can include on a genealogical chart. On that night, I was well aware that it was another part of my family that stopped their play to embrace and comfort me.

Regina Shands Stoltzfus is a dissertation fellow at Goshen (Ind.) College during this academic year. She is working on a doctorate in theology and ethics at ChicagoTheological Seminary.

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Additional Notes

Regina Shands Stoltzfus is a dissertation fellow at Goshen (Ind.) College during this academic year. She is working on a doctorate in theology and ethics at ChicagoTheological Seminary.

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