Honoring Our Tradition and Growing Beyond It

Transcribed from the Sermon preached June 19, 2005

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

Scripture Readings:  Gen 21: 8-21, Rom 6:1-11, Mt 10:32-39

I don’t know about you, but this passage in Matthew always makes me a little nervous. If there is one thing we want to claim about Christianity, it is that it supports the family. Here we are trying to develop family ministry. Indeed the Religious Right think they have swung a couple of elections on the issue of “family values.” And Jesus is talking about turning family members against one another. To make matters worse, Jesus says that he came “not to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

Yet, I believe the point Jesus is making is that being faithful requires commitment and courage. It is not for the wimpy or half-hearted. Just mixing in a little religion with our lives that look like everyone else’s is not what Jesus has in mind.

We know that when there is a truth that wants to break into the world, it is seldom accepted easily. Jim Wallis reminds us in God’s Politics that the abolitionist movement, the struggle for safe and just labor laws, women’s suffrage, and the civil rights movement all took years of faithful struggle, and the conflict divided the nation, family by family.

It can be a great testimony to our parents that we are willing to grow beyond them. Someone said that we want our children to grow up, but not too much. We want them to leave home, but not go too far. This truth can reflect both a healthy and unhealthy connection. I suppose it is part of our weakness, our sinful humanity that we give our children our faults and weaknesses. I wish it wasn’t so. My prayer for Father’s Day is that my children do in fact love the God of truth and health more than they love me. As the saying goes, I hope they say “Do as I say, not as I do.” More than that, more deeply, I hope they see what I don’t see, and sand and do what I cannot. I pray their faith is deeper and more courageous than mine.

I mean that in both a psychological sense and in the social sense. Family systems theory in psychology holds that one of the laws of family and social systems is balance or homeostasis. All pushes and pulls equal zero. If you remove or alter the behavior of one of the positions it throws the whole system out of balance. Even if the alteration is objectively good or unavoidable, the system will try to reestablish balance the way it was. Allison is a young woman, the oldest of several kids with alcoholic parents. Like so many first born she is the responsible one, the one who, unlike her parents, is taking responsibility for her brothers and sisters. Irresponsible parents, hyper responsible first daughter; balance is established in one way or the other. Allison is having a hard time committing to college because she is so committed to coming to the aid of her family every time they have a crisis. The crises seem to come one after another. Her family is afraid she will abandon them. Allison sometimes senses that the crises have a greater likelihood of happening when she is doing particularly well. Her pastor and wise friends try to help he see that if she does well in school and is able to get a good job, this will be better for her family in the long run. Allowing God’s love to lead you in new directions will benefit your life and connection for your family in the long run. Being a leader can help you establish a new kind of balance in the family.

The same idea applies to social systems. The I Ching, the Confucian book of numbers and wisdom, says “The object of a great revolution is the attainment of clarified, secure conditions ensuring a general stabilization on the basis of what is possible at the moment.” There are several things helpful about this piece of wisdom. First, a revolution is supposed to stir things up. It is supposed to upset an unjust or unhealthy balance. The truth, justice and grace Jesus brings are not simply accepted with no hassles. It is something that we have to fight for, and we should expect resistance. Yet revolutionaries also have the responsibility to reestablish a balance. Constant change and revolution doesn’t work. Not everything is possible in any given moment. Society must move one step at a time. Jim Wallis in God’s Politics points out that it is not enough to just protest everything we don’t like. We have to help come up with solutions too - one solution at a time.

We are subject to the historical and cultural context that we live in, and so were those who came before us. What this means is, among other things, is that we can honor people of History for their good qualities even as we acknowledge their imperfections. And so we look back at the story of Abraham and his family not because that is the way God wanted families to be until the end of time. Some of us men, in our weaker moments, might wish we could go back to the days of multiple wives and concubines at our service. But in our stronger, more decent moments we are appalled at the inequality and injustice of this story. Besides if we were to return to such a time we would probably come back as a peasant slave with no wife. Abraham in conjunction with Sarah casts Hagar and Ishmael out so that Isaac, the second son, will be able to take his inheritance. Two interesting twists leave a hole in the ancient patriarchal culture through which justice may find a wedge in the future. First, the blessing of God doesn’t follow the first born son. In ancient patriarchal culture the first born son got everything. Not in David’s rendition of Israelite History. And second, though Hagar and Ishmael are forced to leave, God comes to their aid and they find a well of fresh water to keep them alive. God has big plans for them too. They will also make a great nation. Through this very flawed culture and their view of the divine, we find that God cares for the second, not just those who come first; God also cares for the outcast and the marginalized. The woman left by the father of her child will not be left by God. We can honor the past and still move into the future.

We honor Abraham and Sarah’s faith, even as we acknowledge the need to move beyond patriarchy and slavery. We can honor Paul even though he backs off on some of the radical, liberating power of the Gospel. We can acknowledge Luther for his courage and theological mind in his stand against the corrupt Catholic Church of the middle ages, and also recognize the limit to his courage with regard to the peasant war and the blindness of his anti-Semitism. We can recognize founding fathers of the United States, the ancient Hawaiians and African cultures for great things, even as we desire to move beyond slavery and infanticide. We can honor Gandhi without joining him in his unhealthy asceticism that he took on after the trauma of the death of his father. We can honor the hard work and courage of the WWII generation and still thank God we were called beyond their prejudice and simplistic trust in government. We can honor Martin Luther King Jr. even though he could have used a little of Gandhi’s sexual restraint. We can honor Mother Teresa even though we wish she would have taken political stands or recognized the value of birth control for women and the poor. We can honor the great accomplishments of the sixties toward equality and mutual respect and admit that drug addiction and sex out of wedlock leaves too many American women in much the same position as Hagar in ancient patriarchy. We can be proud of our Presbyterian tradition of democracy and grace, even as we work to expand that democracy and grace to include gays and lesbians who often have a more wholesome and just relationship and life that the fundamentalists who hate them. We ought to honor our fathers and mothers, but we ought to love and honor God more.

The theologian, Keen, writes about the traditions of those who have come before us: “These images, exemplary types, elemental virtues had their heyday. Each was a creative response to its time. Each reached a point of paradoxical counter productivity; a moment when its produced result was the opposite of what was intended.

“Together, the responses men made to the circumstances of their times form the history that under girds our present condition. We listen to those elders whose voices are still within us, not because they give us answers to our questions, but because they give us courage to respond to the vocation of our moment in history.”

That is what Paul is talking about this morning in Romans. Are we going to step up to the plate and answer God’s call for us in our time. Or are we just playing with our religion, just hoping to feel a little better without putting in effort? Are we praying for change in our lives while we are afraid and unwilling to help God answer our prayer? We can do it, says Paul; with the grace of God we have what it takes to meet our moment in history, in our family. Allow God to take away those behaviors, addictions and prejudices that don’t do us or anyone else any good. It may feel like death, like we will die, like we will be killed if we let them go. But God promises a new life so much better than the one we are afraid to leave. Even if we suffer, and there is often suffering involved with change, even good change… even if we suffer, our joy and integrity will be greater. By the grace of God through Christ, we are going to win this battle in history, in our hearts and minds and souls. We are going to move forward in time one way or the other. Let us do so with a new life in Christ.