The Fourth Church Pulpit
WHOSE FAMILY VALUES?

May 8, 1994

John M. Buchanan

126 East Chestnut St. Chicago, IL 60611-2094
Phone: 312.787.4570
John M. Buchanan, Pastor

Scripture : John 1:5-6, Matthew 10:34-39

“T have come to set a: man against his father, and a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law:against her mother-in- law.” Matthew 10:35 (NRSV)

It happened again last week. Country singer Garth Brooks witnessed the birth of his second child rather than
attend the Academy of Country Musie Awards ceremony where he was named Country Music Entertainer Of The
Year. He could be my hero too, but I don’t know much about him and I like football more than I like country music.
But he did get his priorities straight last Tuesday night,

Jay Leno cracked, “If Garth thinks being with his wife when she’s having a baby is more important than a piece of
plastic and metal, I don’t know where his values are.”

Whose Family Values? is what I've called this sermon for what the church calendars try to call the Sixth Sunday
f Easter, or the Festival of the Christian Home, or Family Sunday. ‘But we all know what Sunday it reaily is... the

~~one that prompts people to sidle up to the minister the week before and say things like, “I’m bringing my mother to
church next Sunday, so it better be good.”

The only thing we know about Jesus’ family life is a single incident when he was twelve, when he disobeyed his
parents, left them during a trip to Jerusalem and made them crazy with worry.

And then, when he began to preach and teach, he launches what seems to be a persistent, strange attack on the
institution of the family. What's that all about?

It helps to know that there is no word in the ancient language for the family we know — two parents and their
children, Rather the word family meant “household” and included three generations of blood relatives;
grandparents, parents, children, as weil as a number of others: servants, slaves, household workers. The Romans, in
" ‘ose culture the Christian church began, defined family as everybody who lived under the authority of a pater

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In its absolute male dominance and social rigidity, the ancient family was society in miniature, Professor John
Dominick Crossan says. It was hierarchical, absolutely fixed. The structure of the family controlled who a man or
woman was and would be, or could be, for as long as they lived.

In stark contrast to society and its basic family structure God's Kingdom, he said, was characterized by openness
inclusiveness and a radical egalitarianism. All were welcome. All were equal in God's sight — social outcasts,
lepers, women, children, gentiles, pagans, old people. “The patriarchal chauvinism of the day was negated by Jesus
in favor of blessedness open to anyone who wanted it, without distinction,” Professor Crossan observes.

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But one day, when he was preaching and arguing with the scribes, his mother and brothers and sisters came for
him, to take him home and he said something that sounds almost cruel.

“Who are my mother and my brothers? Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister
and mother.” [Mark 3:33, 35]

He was saying that God’s Kingdom frees men and women from all that restricts and oppresses, even sometimes
their own families. It has taken many centuries but we know now that sometimes families are oppressive and
restrictive. In our text this morning, he suggests that he will divide families along generational lines and sometimes
that is exactly what happens. Sometimes families have to be understood clearly — sometimes broken apart for life to

Did you see the Jules Feiffer cartoon last week? One of those painful satires that feels to me like running
fingernails across a blackboard. An older and younger woman, mother and daughter, are talking. The daughter says,

“When I was little and got in trouble, you always took the other side. . . - When I won prizes in
Sports you told me I look too muscular... . When I got engaged you told him I'd be a lousy
mother. ... When he walked out on me seven months later, you told me I provoked it... .

Ma, just once can’t you be there for me?” -

The older woman, who has been glaring, finally speaks.

“You make me wait forty years to hear this?” and then with angry tears... “And I thought I could
trust you.”

calling the church a family — everybody’s favorite church metaphor — “the Presbyterian family” — because most
people's experience of family is of dysfunction, pain, guilt, anger.

' The late Margaret Mead located the problem, namely the nuclear family; two parents and their children, living far
away from their relatives. It didn’t even exist in the ancient world. There is no word for it in ancient language. The
nuclear family, she said, is a modern invention and not a particularly good one. Cornel West, speaking at Rockefeller
Chapel recently about his experience in the African-American Christian Church, commented that we are having a
crisis in this country in all “the contexts of nurture.” Nobody is tending the children. Everybody has abandoned
them. Two parent families, on their own, have never worked, he said. When you see a nuclear family that looks like
it's working, you can count on the fact that there are others, probably lots of others involved: grandparents — who

are the real moral models — aunts, uncles, almost surely a church full of surrogate aunts and uncles and
grandparents.

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“Without Deacon Jones and my basketball coach and my Sunday School teachers, in addition ta”

two good parents, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” said Dr. Cornel West, Department head at:
Princeton University.

There aré particular challenges today. One of them is economic. Ellen Goodman’s editorial in the Tribune last
Tuesday was on the mark.

“Everybody knows it takes two incomes to maintain a middle-class life style,” so Goodman
proposes three parent families. “The arrangement would allow one parent to be between jobs
at any time without forcing the whole family to face foreclosure.” She claimed theological
justification. “If God had meant babies to have only two parents, would he have made it a three
shift job? If there were three,” she reasoned, “one could be the designated driver, worrier, and
emergency back-up system.”

She declined to say what would happen at bedtime but allowed as how she might have to revise her plan and
have four parent families.

The Atlantic Monthly published a feature length article by Barbara DeFoe Whitehead last April with the
eye-catching title, “Dan Quayle Was Right” in which the author suggests that while the Republican party was wrong
to use the issue in the way it did by appearing to be attacking single mothers, and the use of one of television’s most
popular stars and shows was a colossal blunder; the vice-president was essentially right in raising the issue. Now let
it be said that there are many single mothers doing a magnificent and loving and devoted job of parenting. And there
are couples who are selfish, greedy, cruel and abusive. The fact remains that children with single parents are six
times more likely to be poor and in trouble physically and emotionally than children with two parents. It is largely
economic. Television glamorized Murphy Brown, The fact is that only one tenth of one percent of single mothers
look like Murphy Brown: glamorous, single women with incomes over $50,000 per year. In a scholarly article in The
Christian Century Vanderbilt political scientist Jean Bethke Elshtain comes to the point bluntly:

“To mutter nostrums about ‘choice’ and ‘independence’ to a fourteen-year-old crack addicted,
undereducated pregnant girl living in a disintegrating and violent neighborhood is both cruel
and contemptuous, although it is sometimes regarded as the liberal thing to do.”

(The Christian Century, July 14, 1993]

Neither liberal nor conservative solutions are working. We have helped create a system that seems to excuse

everyone, but particularly men from responsibility. Popular alternatives would punish the children for the failure of
their parents, and fill the jails with absentee fathers.

What we need is an honest discussion, a public conversation about some assumptions we made a few years ago.
For instance, those of us in helping professions knew the pain and destructiveness which occurred when terribly
unhappy parents stayed together for the sake of the children, the family. That wasn’t good, we said, because we
meant it and it is true, that children sometimes suffer more in families when parents are always fighting, than they do
when parents separate and divorce. And so an assumption shifted. Kids, we assumed, could cope with separation of
parents easily. Well, they don’t cope easily. They suffer a lot. They are affected and they need a lot of support.

We need to stop the silliness about divorce. Of course it is a better option than continued and destructive conflict.
Every minister, counselor, psychiatrist I know has advised and stood with clients whose choice to be divorced was
strong and good and liberating. But it is not simple and easy and without ramifications. Barbara DeFoe Whitehead

takes the Hallmark Card Company to task for a greeting card that celebrates divarce as a liberation a little too
flippantly.

“Think of your former marriage as a record album. It was full of music — both happy and sad.
But what is important now is — You! the recently released hot new single! You're going to the
top of the charts.”

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We need to stop the silliness... the trivialization of the whole topic by the media, by television, by Hollywood.

youngsters and children died last year from firearms?

that we learned much of what we know about grace, community, about the possibilities and the dangers of life
together in intimacy: that it was in a family that-we learned most of what we know about loving and being loved...
about forgiveness, and acceptance, about failing and getting up and trying again. It was ina family that we learned

about unconditional love, perhaps indirectly, perhaps painfully because it was not unconditional but, perhaps
wonderfully and openly,

And so perhaps the public conversation begins with each of us as we give thanks for our family, whatever it was,
aS we accept and forgive our parents, and make peace with our parents whether they are alive or gone. Someone said
we become fully adult when we can forgive our parents.

And then as we learn to tell one another about our love, as we say “I love you” to them, often, and if we never got
around to it earlier, we start making up for lost time today. ,

And as we acknowledge that this is a very important matter, by actually doing something about the family crisis in
our culture: vote, write letters, donate money, volunteer time, tutor, teach, care for a child, become an outspoken
advocate for this most basic and precious of human institutions.

My friend Joanna Adams, pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, tells a story that I'd like to borrow asa
conclusion. It's a southern story and not an urban setting, and she could tell it much better than I. It’s about the day
the children of Trinity Church got lost. There was some children’s event at the church. Lots of children were there
and the time came for their parents to pick them up. They drove around the building, around to the back; no
children anywhere, They came into the building; no children, They became“a little uneasy.:Turns out all the

children were sitting up in a big magnolia tree in the center of the circle in tha driveway, watching and waiting for
their parents to come: waiting for them to find them: hoping they would find them.

Joanna says she wonders if the children are not watching and waiting to see if we're going to raise them right.

And I think that’s exactly where to end this — with the children watching and waiting to see if we're going to figure
out how to be families again.

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