ALL IN THE FAMILY

April 17, 1988
11:00 a.m. Worship Service
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Genesis j1:1-9
Luke 2:4]-51

"and when the feast was ended, as they were returning, the boy Jesus stayed
behind in Jerusalem. His parents did not know it." -Luke 2:43 (RSV)

Revelation and new understanding can come with startling suddenness
and in unlikely circumstances. Recently I learned something new about the
Bible on "family" - and about Jesus' relationship with his mother. On a
visit to the Art Institute we did something innovative. Instead of
heading for the Impressionists like homing pigeons, we walked up the other
stairs and into the wing containing the classics of the Middle Ages.
Aimost all of those great paintings deal with biblical topics, many of them
with Jesus. We stopped in front of one: A Marriage at Cana, by Giuseppe
Maria Cresti, painted in 1686. You know the story: the first miracle in
John's Gospel, when the wine ran out at a wedding party and Mary asked her
son to do something about it, whereupon he changed water into wine. The
‘painting is larger than life, stylized, romanticized. .-It catches the
moment, I think, when Mary is telling Jesus about the ‘sudden. embarrassing.
dilemma of: their -hest and asking if he can't do. something.. He is looking: -
at her with a unique, baleful expression. The person with whom I was’

standing, herself.a mother of grown children, said: "Look -— she's just
said - 'Do something about it' and he's saying... ‘Mother!""
This sermon is about "family." It is based on the premise, which

needs constant reinforcing because it isn't always comforting, that the
Rible is very realistic about the institution of the family.

Until recently my assumption, shared widely, I believe - was that a
focus on family from the pulpit these days, or in church programming, is
not nearly as relevant as it once was. The church in the past decade or so
finally realized that it was not a “family institution," at least in the
way it liked to think of itself. “look at your members," the experts said.
We did. And we were shocked. Most of them, we discovered, were single -
unmarried, widowed, widowers, divorced. Even family churches in the
suburbs were surprised to discover the data - that the majority of their
nembers were single.

The Nuclear Tamily - father, mother and children, living together - is
a fairly small minority of the tetal church constituency. So not wanting
to be irrelevant and wanting to be inclusive (and Presbyterians will do
anything to be relevant and inclusive) many of us stopped making erroneous
assumptions about what the church is ~ a good idea, and stopped talking
about family - a not so good idea, it turns out. Just as we were starting
to ignore the "family" in the name of relevance and inclusiveness,
television was rediscovering its importance. All in the Family was an
important cultural event for many reasons, among them a reminder that
Many, many people are still intrigued by the dynamics of family. That
phenomenon continues -— most recently on The Cosby Show.

Professor Elizabeth Achtemeier wrote in a new book for preachers:

"The persons who face Christian preachers
every Sunday morning. usually have few
principle concerns. They are concerned
about their daily work and they are
concerned about their family relationships."
[Preaching About Family Relationships, p. 9]

Is that true? As I put that book aside I picked up the New York
Times Book Review, April 10, 1988. The lead review was on a book about a
long love affair between the author's parents. I continued leafing through
with Professor Achtemeier's suggestion now moving from back to front
burner. In that one publication, there are at least eight major new books
dealing, in one way or another, with family issues... marriage and death of
a spouse - the lasting impact of a strong father -- Parentcare, a guide for
adult children - feminism.

So just maybe we have overreacted. Maybe family remains a major
issue’ for many, if not all of us: a biological, social, economic and
spiritual issue. Even though the institution has changed, perhaps we have
been -les’s than, attentive “to its remaining significance. :

All of that contributed to a new “understanding of a favorite Bible
story, our lesson today. It is the ‘only incident in the New Testament that
says anything about the time between Jesus! birth and infancy and thirty
years later, when his public ministry begins. When he was twelve Mary and
Joseph teok him to Jerusalem for Passover. When they returned to Nazareth,
Jesus was not with them. They assumed he was with friends or other
relatives. At the end of the day, however, he still wasn't there. They
looked, asked about him, finally turned around and walked all the way back
to Jerusalem. They looked all day, desperate by now. If you have ever
tried to go to sleep at night without knowing where your son or daughter
is, you know how thick the plot has become. After three days of it —
anger, worry, despair, prief - they find him in the Temple, talking with
teachers. Traditionally this story is told to show how smart the twelve
year old Jesus was. This time around I was startled by what I now believe
the point of it is - and the reason Luke telis it... Listen again -

“And when they saw him they were astonished
and his mother said to him, ‘Son, why have you
treated us so? Behold, your father and I have
been looking for you anxiously."

Do you hear that? Not "praise God, our son is safe - doing good
things im church.“ But "Did it ever occur to you, young man, that you're
not the only one in this family? Did it ever occur to you that your father
and I have feelings too? Why, we haven't slept for three nights: we've
worried ourselves sick. Don't you care at all about us?”

And Jesus answered them, "How is it that you sought me? Did you not
know that I must be in my father's house?"

; Can you hear that? “Mother! I'm twelve years old. I can be where I
want to be. Stop smothering me."

Luke concludes: “And (his parents) did not understand."

i'll say! Who ever did understand the wonderful necessities of
adolescence; the emerging autonomy and independence, so much a part of
God's plan and so very painful when it's you - or your teenager? "We don't
understand that at all. What we understand are the rules and the rules are
that you check in with us before you go off like that again."

"and his mother kept all these things

in her heart. And Jesus increased in -
wisdom and in stature, and in favor with
God and man.'

The family has changed - radically. John Updike, who has a finger on
the pulse of our culture, writes about it a lot. In a short story, Still
Of Some Use,.‘a divorced man and woman and their grown son are cleaning out-
the attic of thé house in which they once lived.. ‘They pitch the old

‘games: they used to play, each with a part nissing, out the attic window
into the -back of a pickup truck. When they hit,’ the’ boxes explode and. the.

- parts fly off im every: direction. . At the end the father and son drive off
in the pickup truck to the dump. Family. - parts missing - exploded - ,

discarded. [Trust Me, p. 27]

Futurist Robert Francoeur wrote a very clever essay about the demise

-of the family and the Victorian culture which gave it its shape.. He

borrows the vocabulary of anthropelogy and describes the fading of the
Victi (Victorian) tribe and the emergence of a-new tribe, the Nanus. The
Victis, he says, lived a hard life. They spent most of their time living
in overpopulated cities, in crowded sheds, forty, fifty, sixty stories
above the ground, dressed in curious uniforms characterized by useless
buttons on their collars and peculiar, ornamental pieces of cloth tied
tightly around their necks... The men were breadwinners. Sex roles were
strong and Chere wasn’t much leisure among the Victi.

The emerging tribe, unlike the Victi, espouses sexual equality,
marriage happens much later and they are very open about sex. Young men

and women are sent off to their own “villages" known as colleges, where

they can freely cohabit for four or five years without interference from
their elders. The new culture is not as addicted to work as the Victi -
but both show evidence of heavy drug use.

The Viclis were chemically addicted to tobacco and alcohol], both
fatal substances which killed them with systematic frequency. The new
tribe discovered a grass-like substance and other assorted powders which
kill them with even more frequency. [The Futurist, April 1980, The Sexual]
Revolution |

It helps to laugh at change because much of it, in this case, is not
amusing: the demise of the extended family, for instance. A Friend of
mine, in his mid-fifties, was telling me how empty his life is with the
departure of the last child. “It's deathly quiet. I have leftover love -
lot's of it."

For millennia, “family" has described a social unit consisting of at
least three generations, genetically related, and also geographically
related, sometimes living on the same farm, in the same house. That
changed during our life time. My grandfather ate in our home every Friday
night. I knew my cousins and saw aunts and uncles every week. My children
see theirs every few years. The late Margaret Meade observed that the
"Nuclear Family,” mother and father and children, standing alone, cut off
from extended family, is a recent invention and not a very good one.

All the weight which was once born by ail the relatives now rests on
two people and increasingly one person, often living in a strange place
with few close friends. We are asking the nuclear family to stand alone
and it wasn't designed for that.

There are even more serious consequences. In a sense American
culture has always been a kind of conspiracy against black families. With
a few exceptions, the two hundred year institution of slavery was
determined to destroy the family bonds of those who were brought over in
chains. ‘One hundred years of segregation, humiliation and -legal | —
‘discrimination was a focused assault on the. institution of marriage and the-
personhood of black men, particularly. We legalized the removal of pride, -
autonomy and power of man, then have the audacity to wonder what happened ,
to the family. And a quarter of a century under a welfare -system that
further encourages the demise of family and marriage has virtually
completed the tragic assault. 20% of the white babies and 60% of the black
babies born this year will enter life without the stability of. married
parents; the vast majority of fathers will not be around... There is no
scandal that even approaches this one in terms of cost and human pain.

Here is how Time Magazine describes the prospects for those 60% of
all black babies born to unmarried, teen-age mothers:

"As infants, they have high rates of
illness and mortality. Later in life they
often experience educationa} and emotional
problems. Many are victims of child abuse
at the hands of parents too immature to
understand why their baby is crying or how

their doll--like plaything has suddenly
developed a will of its own. Finally,

these children of children are prone to
dropping out and becoming teen-age parents
themselves." [see op. cit. Achtemeier, p. 24]

We are paying and will pay an enormous price for racism and for the
demise of the family in the subculture of poverty. The tragedy is that we
know at least part of the resolution, but our ideological zeal prevents us
from implementing it. {Or is it simply selfishness?) We know that
providing pre-natal care, pediatric health care, nutritional assistance
guidance counseling, day care - saves money, lots of money. We know that
we are the only nation in the Western world without public support of Day
Care Centers. We know that public schools are, for many youngsters, the
only structure, the only hope and we don't want to support them if it will
cost us more money.

What saves me from despair, and you really need to know this part
too, is that the human spirit somehow keeps emerging out of that demonic
and self-perpetuating system we have created, with courage and love and
grace. It happens here three times a week at least. Parents love their
children and care about them and keep trying. Children keep coming to
Tutoring. Do you have any idea how difficult it is and how brave they have
to be... walking, many of them ten blocks, hoping not to be hassled, beat
up, shot, - through the crowds and traffic of Division Street and Rush
Street, over gang boundaries - just to spend time with a tutor.

When I despair, I take a walk through the Tutoring Program. I
commend it to you. It will lift your spirit.

Also, good therapy for despair over the family is an honest look at
the Bible on the topic. We labor, I think, under the illusion of a
Victorian ideal. Family was never what we thought it should be. What a

'. relief it was.te, discover that. yours. wasn't the only family. where: devotions.

never really worked; that: as soon as-you tried to read Scripture at the .
_ table, someone stuck a finger in the gravy, or poured.sait in the little
_brether's milk, or for fio redson.- began to ‘giggle. Erma Bombeck is good
therapy for romantics about family. But so is the Bible.

The primal. family, after all, is a disaster area. Adam and Eve
contribute to each other's moral downfall. One of their sons murders his
brother. Noah was discovered in a drunken stupor by his sons and cursed
one of them. Abraham loaned his wife to Pharoh for a while to buy a. little
time for himself in Egypt. Jacob deceives his father, defrauds his brother
and his sens leave their brother, Joseph, to die in the desert. David commits
adultery and arranges a murder to cover his tracks. His children are
guilty of incest, betrayal and his commander-in-chief assassinates his
beloved son Absalom - who was leading a political insurrection against his
father. David's cry "O my son, Absalom, my son, my son Absalom,"
penetrates the heart of everyone who ever had - or ever was - a son or
daugbter.

The Bible is honest and realistic about the human family, including
the Holy Family. From the perspective of family issues, the Jesus story

an

includes an unmarried pregnancy, a rebellious adolescent, a single parent
home, an adull male living a single life, a continuing relationship with a
mother and at the last, a son taking care of and making provisions for an
aging parent. [See "What Is A Christian Family," Willie S. Teague, in
Weavings, Jan.-Feb. 1988]

It is, that is to say, an incarnational issue... a God in the human
flesh issue. We have locked at it this morning from the bottom up, as
it were; from the vantage point of family. But the central Christian
affirmation is that God is the major actor. God is choosing to reveal, to
disclose himself in this story. God is choosing the human family to reveal
life-giving, life-enhancing and life-saving truth.

It was Martin Luther who rediscovered that. The Middle Ages were
convinced that God is more involved and more accurately seen in monastic
life, cloistered life, celibate life. It was Luther who married, first of
all in order to prove a point about the sanctity of home and family; and
then, happily, he fell in love with the woman he married. It was Luther
who chided a friend for placing a cherry bough in his dining room to remind
him of God's blessings. “Why don't you think of your children," Luther
said. "They are in front of you all the time, and you will learn from
them, more than a cherry bough." [Roland Bainton, “Here I Stand," p. 236 -
in Weavings, Jan./Feb. 88, p. 2, John Mugabgab]

; Family - the family we once were, or still are - is where we learn
the human and spiritual essentials. We learn them there, either because of
their presence or their absence.

In family, we learn about the absolute centrality of grace. Family
is a reminder that we didn't create ourselves, or work our way into
existence: two people, in God's gift of human love, conceived us. Grace,
we learned early, means life. Someone carried us for nine months, bore us, ©
tended to us, fed us, protected us, taught us.

In family we learned about community, yife together: that with
growth comes demand, that’ there is law and gospel, rules to follow and
-expectations to meet. ‘In family we learned that we are in debt to -
obligated to — something other. than ourselves; and that we are not the only
human being in any picture.

In family we learned that absolute necessity of acceptance and’ ;
forgiveness. We learned by making mistakes, breaking rules, falling short
“of parental hopes ~— that our failurcs do not. condemn us; that there is love
ever ready to grant us the benefit of the doubt, another chance.

We know now that one of the adult tasks for each of.us - is to love
our parents and as adults, learn to accept them and extend grace to them
and... to forgive them. Someone has said that you are not an adult until
you can forgive your parents; forgive them for being human... until you can
be realistic about your expectations of them - as they were about you,
Fortunately. It-is never too late for that, by the way; and it is one.of
Che most. important tasks each of us has to do

G

Your family is part of the legacy of life. You never will leave it.
It is a part of who you are. You and I spend the rest of our lives either
affirming the grace, demand and forgiveness we were given - or struggling
with its absence. Your first thought and your last thought will probably
be about your family.

Familiy is where our humanity is celebrated at its best and exposed at
its worst. Family is where human love is strongest and where human
betrayal is most painful.

So -

- Be grateful for your family, whatever it was, or is. Know
that God intends human life to be conceived and nurtured in a family -
your life.

- Forgive your parents, whether they are alive or not, in the sanctuary
of your soul, make peace with them. Forgive them.

~ And then, if they are alive, tell them you love then. Say it. “ft
love you." Say it often. Don't wait till its too late. If it is,
say it to whoever is family to you.

~ Do something about the family crisis in our culture. Vote, write
letters, donate money, care, change, become a brave advocate for this
precious and endangered thing - family.

~ Become family with those God gives you - related to you biologically,
or not. See this church as potential family. See people here as
brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents.

One of my teachers, Ross Snyder, once said: "a family is a center of
healing, a place where you. can see that everybody else is on your side, a
group of people -whe actively. approve of each. other...'

-We are all in the family... God's family.
“The shape of things to come is not altogether clear.

What is clear is God's. love, God's investment in this dear
institution.. God's grace toward us. and our privilege — our opportunity -

our responsibility - of extending that grace to one. another..,

God bless us on our Way... Amen.

=)