Genesis 37, Ruth 1

During our Hawaiian Sunday series we have looked at the largest circle of respect for the land known as malama ka ‘aina and to a smaller circle of the people and how they treat each other by looking at the Hawaiian concept of pono.  In today’s message an even smaller circle is the family, the ohana.   I have chosen two passages from the Old Testament as a counterpoint of our examination of Hawaiian culture.  Genesis tells us of the resentment, jealousy, the grief, the arrogance, the anger and the betrayal (and eventually the reconciliation) of the Hebrew family in its early days.  Ruth tells us about a cross-cultural family torn apart by grief that comes and sticks together across the bonds of culture.

Friends, let me say first that the Hawaiian family isn’t any different really from our family, it’s just that everything we are experiencing, they have been experiencing longer: economic pressures and house prices are pushing families into the same house together. So in a way they are going back to the old days, where families stayed in the same area.  At the same time children are moving to the mainland, away from their families.  The local Hawaiians are facing the prospect of doing with less, less money, less land, less good food, less space.  At the same time the people that are partly responsible for that, the tourists, are also the people they need to survive. In addition, Intermarriage has been going on for a long time between races and cultures so what our state will look like is what Hawaii looks like already. Hawaiians have been leading the way in that area too.

The story we get in Genesis is of an old family that wants to stay together, but is torn apart.  It is in a way a modern family, because it is blended.  Jacob has sons from different wives, even though he was married to them at the same time at one point.  The sons from the first wife resent the sons of the second, more beloved, wife who has passed away.  The resentment and the jealousy find a climax in a terrible crime: the beloved son, Joseph, being sold to a group of nomads after being put in a well.  It is a terrible betrayal which will not be redeemed until the brothers come begging Joseph for food in Egypt.  But then on the other side is Ruth, the Moabite woman and widow of a Hebrew man.  They must leave Moab to return to mother-in-law’s Naomi’s homeland.  Orpah, one daughter in law decides not turn back to Moab while Ruth is bonded to her mother-in-law.  So something magical happens:  the bonds of the new family are stronger than the ties of the homeland.  Friends, in these two stories we find much of what we face in real families: resentment and bitterness on one hand and big-heartedness and love on the other.  In Genesis we learn several things about the family: first, that when there is no real trust, the family starts withering on the vine; second, when you hide unspeakable acts, unspeakable history, it has a way of floating to the surface; we learn that when you put yourself above others as Joseph did and forget humility, it backfires on you.  In Ruth we learn that the idea of family is what you make of it.  Ruth followed a woman who was not of her land or her ethnicity to that woman’s homeland because she decided she was her family and that that mattered above all.  So in Genesis we see a real family rooted in the land with blood ties and ties of history rotting at the core while in Ruth we see a family being created.  This brings us to the idea of Ohana and Hui in Hawaiian cultures.  Ohana can refer to blood ties, but also to other types of family, but generally ohana means blood relatives. Jacob has a huge ohana.  Then there is the idea of Hui, a family that is intentional, that is created.  So your family would be ohana, but your church would be a hui.  Now friends, earlier we talked about all the forces that put today’s family under pressure.  The ohana is under stress.   So more than ever there is a need for the hui, the family that is intentional.  In today’s society we need to be open to move back and forth between hui and ohana to stay healthy.  Sometimes our ohana is unhealthy and our hui healthy.  Sometimes our hui is unhealthy and our ohana healthy.  In this day and age, whether it is in Hawaii or here in California, we need to be open to new ways of being family.  Ruth, although she was married to Naomi, really is already pointing the way.  She moves, in a way, from Hui to Ohana.  Ironically, Josephs’ new hui in Egypt becomes his ohana also and he winds up reconciling with his old ohana because of it.  But for either one of those families and other we may have, we need to learn the lessons that no family can operate without trust, no family, including church, will be healthy if unspeakable acts are hidden in a deep well somewhere, no family can thrive if some are more important than others. Friends, God in Christ has made us part of a new family, a family with its own potential and its own flaws.  Yet like the Hawaiian family, it has to be open to all who want to enter and it must really try to be not just hui, but ohana in every sense of the word. May God help us.