EXODUS 20:1-11 THE FAVILY URDER STEGE MAY 12, 1974

EPHESIANS 6:1-4 BETHANY PRESBYTERIAL! CHURCH

JOHN 13:35 LAFAYETTE, INDIANA
JOHH M. BUCHAWAY

several years ago the Beatles were doing a song that became very
Popular entitied "She's Leaving Home." It was difficult, but if you
listened carefully you could hear the Story of a teen-age girl who got
up one morning at 5:00 A.N., packed her bag and left. The parental
reaction to her leaving is stereotyped:

"We gave her most of her lives.

We gave her everything money could buy

We never thought of ourselves

We struggled hard all our lives to get by."
The social comment comes in the last stanza of tne song:

Wnat did we do that was wrong?

Sile....38 havine fun

tne one tning money can't buy.

Something inside

that was always denicd

For so many years

Bye, Lye"

Now, I'm mot at all certain about the veracity of the punch-line,
namely that fun is the me thing money can't buy. nevertheless, the song
waS very popular because it dealt with something that was happening. A
lot of young/wore simply packing up and leaving. ileot the ordinary run-a-
ways: but am alarming number of young people. Enough se that the estab-
lishment of Rostels, places for them to live, and agencies to provide
job opportunities and counseling became an urgent priority in the social
service structures of all our major cities. It seemed, in the middle and
late sixties, that the American !lome, that most vene rable of institutions,
was coming apart at the seams.

fn a real sense we are still uealing with that deep cultural pheno-

THe FARTLY tiwOEn SiEGe ~2- WAY 12, 1974
menon: the meaning of home and Family is no longer rooted in the safe
traditions of the past, but rather is in the midst of profound and

radical change. Historians ans Sociologists will one day look back on the
decades of the sixties and seventics as the time wnen, for better or worse,
the family unit underwent tremendous stress. Time alone will teil

whether the family emerged as a Strengthened unit - or fatally wounded,

Tha jury is still] out.

In the meantime people who care about the family - and that in-
cludes, I would guess, all of us, are bombarded with more data, more
books, pamphlets and advice than. we can handte, A tot of guilt is in the
air: parents are coming to the conclusion that they are alone responsibla
for what's happening. iiargaret fleade observes that no generation of
teen-agers ever thought their parents were do#ag a good job: this genera-
tion of parents in the first to agree,

All af which makes it rather precarious to preach a Mother's Day
Sermon that applauds motherhood in general: or a family oriented sermon
that simply dredges up all the sentimental over simplifications that
Sounded good yesterday, but are today irrelevant. And yet, this is
Mother's Day: this is Family Week: this is a congregation that has
traditionally seen its mission in terms of dealing with families. And so,
let us look.....

The Bible is astonishingly frank about the family. If you're look-
ing for something simple and rosy, it's far better to read a book of
Norman Vincent Peale sermons than the Bible.

Consider - the Adam and Eve narrative: the primal family which
results in a disaster. The man and woman contribute to each other's
morat downfall: one of their son's murders the other.

fioah was discovered in a drunken Stupor by his sans and cursed one
of them. Abraham - father of the faith, loaned his wife ta Pharoh in

order to buy a little time in Egypt. After a period of tension between

THE FASJILY UNDER SIEGE “3. PAY 12, 1974
the motners of his children, Abraham came precariously close to killing
his son Issac as an ofiering to Sod.

Jacob deceived his father, alienated his bro ther, played his parents
off against each other - and his sons lift their brother Joseph in the
desert to die.

David committed adultry and arranged for a murder to cover his
tracks. His son Solomon was known for his grcat wisdom ~ he had 700
wives.

The Hew Testament is @ery bit as honest, Apparently Jesus chose not
to marry, and he said some things that stop us in our tracks: like his
Way setting father against son, and mother against daughter.

Paul, several decades later, remained a bachelor, and suggested that
Christians ought to marry only if they could not control thetr passion.
In fairness, let it be said that Paul moderated that later in his life.

This is not to say that the Bible is anti Marriage and family and
unconcerned about the home. The sixth commandment elevates the relation-
ship between parents and children to the hignest etnical plain. One of
the last things Jesus said, let us remember, had to do with providing for
his mother. When he called God "Father", and taught his disciples to do
the same he was certainly using his own experience in a home as a model
which everyone would understand. The Bible is Simply very realistic
about families: it takes seriously the frustrations and pitfatis. It
does not, as we are inclined to do, hold up the family as something
inherently sacred and holy. Rather the Bible portrays the family as a
matrix of relationships that can be powerfully creative or powerfully
destructive. Families, in the Bible, can be hotly - or demonic. Which
Suggests that contemporary Christians ought to stop assuming that a
Family in which all the members go to Church is automatically a goad and
Christian home, and begin to amine, with the greatest care, the tensions

and problems that are particular to our age, and to deal with them honestly

THE FANILY UNDER SIEGE -4- MAY 12, 1974
and lovingly.

I believe that there are three major tensions particular to the
family matrix today. I am sure you know what they are: let's touch each
one briefly and see how they intersect.

The first is the emergence in our generation of a new model called
the "Nuclear Family": Father, fiother, children, period. Urbanization and
mobility have totally destroyed for most people, a structure that has
been common to mankind from the beginning - namely, the extended family
that includes Grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. When you taik
about the traditional family - you are talking about this extended variety,
and not the compact, single unit called the nuclear family. Margaret
Meade calls that a new invention and a bad one. Suddenly, in our time,
all the weight that had been shared before by a small community of peopte
fell squarely on the shoulders of two individuals ~ a mother and a father -
who, in turn - more often than not - found themeelves living in a new-
and strange community.

Several illustrations: - wien Mary and Elizabeth found themselves
pregnant they got gether and shared what it meant to them. They were
Kinswomen ~- relatives. That's a function of an extended family. A young
wife today may have no one with whom to share ~ except her husband.

linen IT was a boy, one of the Buchanan cousins was a little rambunctious:
not bad, Just very lively. And when his own father couldn't deal with
the situation it fell to my father or my grandfather to take him aside
for a Tittle chat. That's a function of an extended family: parenting
igs, many times, shared or at least supported by others.

Alistaire Cooke, in his excellent book America, discusses the
unique: role played in our history by the frentier mother: pillar of
Strength, courage and piety: the one who brought gentleness and culture
to the wilderness. But, Cooke jis honest enough to add, the one - who in

alarming numbers went mad ~ because of the enforced isolation and the

THE FACELY UNSER SIEGE +o- HAY 12, 1974
necessity of halding a family together apart from that extended model out
of which she, herself, had come.

In any case, that is where we are, and it is important 60 know it
and to deal with it. At the same time two other tensions are afflicting
the family.

Alone, dependent only on each other, the contemporary family is
afflicted with a plague of busyness that I am prepared now to call lunatic
even though I am part of it and contributeto it.

There simply are no times, except on vacation, when families simply
allow themselves to be. We are so obsessed with busyness and activity
that parents are fortunate if they see their children for more than ten
minutes at a time. Good and meaningful relationships aren't about to
develop when the only time the family is together is a meal hurriedly
squeezed in between the after school activity and the wening activity.
Parents must bear the burden of allowing that to happen - for throwing
out the bait. And other institutions, primarily the Public Schals, must
also share part of it ~ the part that makes normative an extra-curricular
schedule so demanding that an adolescent feels like a Social outcast if
he or she isn't spending twelve hours a day at school,

The third tension is a product of that discovery made rather recently
that women are persons: that while the old model which cast women in the
role of mothers - and men as protectors and providers worked in an
agrarian society, it ts no longer working very well. For the fact is
that in an urban, technological culture - women became parents - and men
professionals. The United Church of Canada recently published a report
that observed that the average housewife works 99.6 hours a week at her
job, and that if she were paid at current wage rates for her services as
Nursemaid, dietitian, food buyer, housekeeper, gardener, chauffer and
cook her yearly income would be well over $20,000 a year.

That needs saying, and Women's Liberation has said it. In addition

THE FAHILY UNDER SIEGE -6- MAY Te, 1974
it needs to be affirmed clearly that there are no sexual distinctions
when it comes/ intellectual and professional competence. 8B ut the more
frantic fringes of the movement said something else - namely that mother-
hood is essentially a drag: Sotiething to do onty if you can't do anything
else. Langdon Gilkey, a theologian at the University of Chicago observes
(Naming the Whirlwind P.338) that the extremist variety of the movement
ends up selling sut to the very male mentality from which it wants to be
liberated. The meaning and worth of individuals is not established in
the market place, Gilkey observes. That idea - that success model - is
the idolatry of our age, from which men and women both need liberated.
Meaning and integrity and worth come from within: they are given to us as
gifts by others - by those who matter most ta us: they cannot be earned:
they are not won in the battle of life.

In any ase, added to the emergence of the nuclear family and the
plague of busyness - there is today, tne vague suspicion that it's not
really very important to be a mother.

Now, what does the person doa - who knows all that and wants to deal
with it? |

I think some answers are abvious. Find an extended family - you can't
go it alone. Do something about your frantic schedule. Don't allow
your life to be determined by forces over which you have no control.
Husbands ~ become parents again: do the dishes - keep the children: be
sensitive to the fact that while your 50 hour work week is driving you to
distraction, your wife is putting in twice as many hours as you. Laugh
at Archie Bunker when he orders Edith to bring a beer - but if you love
your mate don't do it.

Beyond that I think ali cf us need to be consciously aware that
being families today is more demanding than ever before. One commentator
put it this way: “It is the height of irony that for all our society's

compulsiveness about expertise in every field, marriage and the raising

TRE FAMILY UNBEL StEGE a7 MAY 72, 1974
of children is one of the last areas we b lithely entrust to abject

amateurs, Help and support is available: an excedlent program called
"Parent Effectiveness Training" is going on in this Church right now.
And there are pe eaple in the Commun t ty whose job, it is to assist - aot
just in @ses of seven ruptures - but tn situations wher families simply
want their relationships to be more creat ive and life diving.

I believe that the family + rather than decreasing in significance
is more important today than at any time in history. I believe that the
family may be the Tast bastion of healing, hunanizing, affirming human
relationships in a culture that seins bent on becoming depersonalized.

And J believe, Fina YW 5 tha t the greatest resource you and I have going
for US. is a reality basic in our faith as Christians - namely Grace. T
believe that the intimacy of family relationships is the place where Grace
can happen in our lives.

The Graco of God is his unmented love for us given in Jesus Christ.
We don't earn God‘s Tove: ya don't deserve his approval: he has given it.
And our highest calling as Christiaas is to convey that Grace in relatton-~
ships with others. Jesus cailed it a new commandment: “Love each other,"

Hy suggestion is a rather simple one,rtally. Namely, that we see
our families as the place we are first called to jove each other - te be

Ful. In dur relationships with each other, husbands - wives -

tp
—

grac

aa

children - we have opportunities daily to affirm another human being: to
vail another person that he or she matters: that he or she is OK: that
our love and appreciation and approval is contingent on nothing. tn the
complex of relationships that is called a family we have daily oppor~
tunity to forgive and acc ent and trust.

Rost of what -esus taleed aadut es Lifsa-giving - life affirming - can
happen best, [ beiteve, in families: things like loving .human beings
into secure, confident persons: providing the trust necessary while one

Tearns how to take decisions: being there when life tumbles in and the

THE FAMILY UNDER SIEGE -§8- MAY 12, 1974
most urgent priority is the safety in which to cry or be angry.

I would conelude by sharing with you several paragraphs of an essay
fT read recently: it was written by Ross Snyder, a man who has given his
Tife to study and teaching how to be total and free human beings.

"A family is a group of People who actively approve of each other.
To be sure, there are arguments and conflicts going on. But nevertheless
there is delight in each other.....

You are fundamentally sure that the rest of the family are on your
side: they are for you.

A prevailing atmosphere of blaming and of suspicion that the others
feel that you are not what you ought to be ....i$8 not a family climate

A family is a center of healing... a place where you can be real.
You can drop your stuffed shirt and false front. The family knows you
as you really are... and they're still for you..

A family is an association of growers ~ a power center - where
biology becomes tove - a communicated experience,

All this is possible only when a family is looking together in the
same direction...toward God. For Tove and creativeness come not from
merely looking at each other, but Teoking together toward a greater - than -
any ~ of - us.

This is the enduring silhouete of a real family." (Alive Now, May/

June ‘74, P.61-62) AMEN

Father, help us to affirm md love each other - even as you have toved and

affirmed us. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. AMER