FOR BETTER OR WORSE John M,. Buchanan
Ephesians 3:14-19 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
May 10, 1981 Columbus, Ohio

In the late fifties Leonard Bernstein collaborated in a Broadway Musical which
caught the temper of the times with delightful accuracy. One song in particular
satirized the best thinking the culture had done about the institution of the family,
and the test of parenting, and who, ultimately, bears responsibility for the results.

A gang of quasi-delinquents sing it, poking fun at the sociological, psycho-
logical, anthropological jargon with which we explain, deviant, anti-social behavior.
The setting is their imminent arrest at the hands of their old nemesis, Officer
Krupke..."Dear kindly S:t. Krupke you gotta understand it's just our bringin’ up
that gets us outa hand...Our mothers all are junkies, our fathers all are drunics ;
golly Moses, naturally we're punks...We're very upset. We never had the love that
every child ought -to get. We ain't no delirquents; we're misunderstood .P2ep down
inside us there is good..." After they have run through the catalog of sociologi-
cal disciplines, singing the lines of social worker, analyst, physician, finally
they must deal with the blunt reality of the police...They sing:

"QO, Officer Krupke, you've done it again.

This boy don't need a job, he needs a year in the pen.
It ain't just a question of misunderstood:

Deep down inside him, he's no good?

..We're no- good, we're no earthly good.

The best of us is no damn good."

From a Calvinistic point of view, that's a word that needs to be said as well.
But the first part: parents bearing ultimate responsibility for children's behavior,
better represents the way our culture thinks about the subject. With that philo-
sophic basis our culture concluded sometime in the past twenty years that the family
as institution, perhaps even monogamous marriage, was in deep trouble.

We noted dutifully that authoritarianism, in all its expressions, was an
obsolete and ineffective model for twentieth century institutions. We watched
change happen in the role of women in the society in general and in the way society
prescribes the task of mothering and fathering. We watched in dismay as a youth-
counter culture emerged, expressing tragic alienation, propelled by an old reality
with a new name - generation gap. It was not a happy time for the family.

In a recent Christian Century essay, J. Wesley Brown writes:

"The past seventy years have been rather hard for parents in our society.
They have suffered under a misunderstanding fostered by some branches
of psychology which implied that parents were to blame for every
hair-brained thing their children did wrong." Brown tells about
leading child development seminars which inevitably included a
“super mother" - "who has read everything on child psychology she
could get her hands on, has found out that most of them disagree with
each other about a number of things and is immobilized with the fear
that if she frowns at her two year old when he throws his oatmeal on
the cat the child will develop a complex and join Hell's Angels when
he is 17." (Christian Century, 5/6/81. p.513).

The pendulum, apparently, is on the way back. Behaviorists are reassessing
the dynamics which resulted, not particularly in better children, but certainly
more guilty parents, After several generations of assuming that every personal

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flaw in the child reflected a character deficit in the parent, we are happily dis-
covering that sometimes it isn't that simple. Sometimes parents do the right
things and their offspring don't turn out as planned. More importantly we have
rediscovered that parents are human too, with needs of their own; that they are not
failed deities, but flawed human beings.

Beneath it all, the family, which a decade ago appeared moribund, appears to
be reemerging strongly. The Futurist Magazine is a resource one might expect to be
advocating radical social change. The April issue concluded, however, that...
"Despite evidence of increased marital instability, the vast majority of Americans
continue to express great satisfaction with both their marriages and their families."
(The Futurist, April 1981, p.3).

Psychology Today published a Daniel Yankelovich piece, "New Rules in American
Life" which startled me with this. "When experimentation with variations of family
life slows down, as it will, we can expect the idea of the family to revive, at least
in the residual form of the mated couple." (April 1981, p.36).

Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave defines the global future which is emerging.
One would expect his prognostications on the family to be frightening. Listen to
what he says..."The home will assume startling new impor tance...everything points
to the home's reemergence as a central unit*in the society of tomorrow - a unit with
enhanced, rather than diminished, economic, medical, educational and social
functions." (Cultural Information Service, 3/31/81, p.11).

For Better or Worse marriage and family will be around for a long time in
something very near the forms in which we now know them. We can claim, or course,
that in our better moments, we knew it all along. Those of us blessed by a 3,500-
year-old Judeo-Christian heritage stand in a long line of people who regard the re-
lationship of men to women, parents to children, and the society in general to the
home as part of God's economy, the divine plan. When the church gets into the act
we use words like these..."Let us reverently remember that God has established and
sanctified marriage for the welfare and happiness of humankind."

St. Paul, bachelor, certainly no advocate for the home, or marriage, neverthe-~
less made an important assumption when he wrote: "For this reason, I bow my knees
before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.,."Family
is built into the fundamental order of things. God is source, creator, upholder,
strengthener of family...nuclear family, extended family, church family, and that
wider network of caring relationships we experience as human family...God is in the
family business.

May I suggest very briefly three ideas that are important for the health of
the institution? They are not new, but they are, it seems to me, newly important.
The first idea is limits, the voluntary limitation of one's own possibilities be-
cause of the relationship. Feminists will never forgive St. Paul for "wives, submit
yourselves to your husbands." He wrote that two thousand years ago, of course, but
more importantly, first he wrote, "Husbands and wives, submit yourselves to each
other."

Joseph Sittler observes..."Without limitation there is no expansion. Without
the risk of promise there is really no joy...The problem with the temporary, ad hoc
relationships which many people enter into today is that when there is a way out,
the couple deprive themselves of going all the way in." (Christian Century, 9/26/79,
p.916).

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The second idea is loyalty. The more I think about it, the more loyalty
becomes a synonym for love - in marriage, family, friendship, church. Try it on
for a moment. To love someone - is to be loyal to her, him, them, To love is to
stand with, protect, defend, advocate, cheer for, through thick and thin to be with,
and to pray for someone. To love, I have concluded, has more to do with loyalty
than feeling mushy inside. ‘

Grace, finally. Amazing grace - undeserved, unmerited love that reaches out
and accepts and embraces at the very moment we are most unlovable. Amazing grace
that loves the child when he or she is most socially unacceptable and therefore needs
love most urgently. Grace that loves the husband when he is most thoughtless and the
wife at the very moment she is most insensitive. Grace that forgives and accepts
and in that forgiveness and acceptance creates an environment of freedom so blessed
some would call it salvation. Yankelovich reported what I thought was a very funny
episode in the journalism business. Playboy Magazine retained Lewis Harris to
conduct a national survey to discover "what people seek in an ideal lover" assuming,
of course, that the answers would provide tantalizing material, To the magazine's
dismay, however, twenty percent said something about physical attributes. Fifty-
three percent said an ideal lover is "someone to be totally honest and open with".
Needless to say that won't sell magazines. What it means is freedom, acceptance,
at-one-ness - words which point to that special Christian word we learn from Jesus -
Grace.

Grace makes the difference. Grace is what Christians have to contribute to
the cause. Grace is what can make a family of people who are unrelated to one
another. Grace makes something special out of the ordinary; grace made a cross the
symbol of love.

Professor Sittler includes, in one of his essays:

",..a story by Flannery O'Connor in which she tells about an old
couple who had lived in the Appalachians all their lives in a
little cabin overlooking the opposite mountain. They were sitting
there - both very aged people - in their rocking chairs on a spring
day. The man said, 'Well, Sarah, I see there's still some snow

up there on the mountain.' Now he knew there was snow on the
mountain every year, She knew there was snow every year. So why
does he have to say it?" Sittler concludes: "In marriage you

say the same things over and over, you inquire about the same
people; and this is ho-hum in one way. But it is breathtaking in
another. (Marriage and Snow on the Mountain, p.17-19, Grace Notes
and Other Fragments),

It is of God, we believe. Invested with a little grace, it is life-giving,
beautiful, bearing something of the love of God itself.
Amen.

God of love, the human family takes its name from you. You have been
mother and father to us. You have accepted, forgiven, held us in love, and
given us gifts of courage, strength, and hope. Bless us: bless the families of
this congregation; and grant us grace to enjoy one another in Your love: through
Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.