(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Family Values?, originally shared on March 4, 2021. It was the ninety-fifth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
What are Christian family
values, and how have we flipped them upside down? Today we will consider how
Christians define “family” and learn how we live as one (a family) by living as
one (in a living relationship with the one true living God).
Sally and I have had they typical side-effects
from the Pfizer vaccine doses we received at the Pomona Fairplex. We are
grateful for all who made this possible, and we look forward to the day when everyone
will be prepared to enter the new normal. That day is not here yet, however.
We are not yet even close to the inelegantly
designated “herd immunity”.
Yet Texas and Mississippi have removed all
restrictions anyway. Or, as the satire site, The Onion” headlined yesterday,
"Texas Governor Announces State’s Morgues Now Allowed To Operate At 100%
Capacity”.
Well, every level of human cooperation has
its challenges.
Now, I’ve mentioned in sermons that there
comes a time as we’re growing up and becoming aware of where we are, as an
emerging adult, and we look around and ask, “How did a person like me wind up
in a crazy family like this.” And, every time, I could see the light go in in
some teenager’s head, the recognition of something that they surmised that only
they had thought. Sometimes they’d look at their parents and smile and nod
like, “Yeah. That’s right.”
The Director of College Guidance at our
son’s high school once reflected on peer influence and observed at a meeting
for parents, “There comes a time when most teenagers fire their parents. The
best that they can hope for is that they have a good enough relationship so
that, someday, they hire them back in an advisory capacity”.
That happens. But, even if is does, it’s
usually developmental. The family itself is still solid.
We all belong to various groups from whom we
derive benefits and to whom we have responsibilities. It’s a social exchange.
For some people that is all the family is.
You give something and you get something in return. A social exchange.
For others, the family is a place for shared
memories, ancestry, experience and identity. It is the building block of
cultures, the place for stability and safety, for gender and role
modeling, for strength and support of every kind. It’s a place to love one
another.
Everybody loves their family, well everybody
in a normal, healthy family does, everywhere in the world.
For Christians, and those parts of the world
in which the Church has had a cultural influence, however, the family is
something different.
I’ve mentioned before that, when Mother
Theresa was asked by a reporter what she thought was the world’s biggest
challenge her reply wasn’t poverty or ignorance or war. It was that people
didn’t define “family” broadly enough.
This
is a uniquely Christian answer.
The gospels according to Matthew, Mark, and Luke in the New Testament of
the Bible all recall the same incident in the early ministry of Jesus. I’m
going to read just the one from Mark, the 3rd chapter, starting with
the 31st verse:
*Mark 3:31-35 (also, Matthew
12:46–50; Luke 8:19–21)
Sometimes, one hears the value, “Family
First”. That is not a Christian value. The family does not come first in the
Christian life at all.
God does not come first. God is not my
co-pilot. God is not my pilot. God is not the most important thing in my life.
God defines me and therefore everything else
in my life.
God is everything.
Paul describes the Christian life in these
terms, in his letter to the Colossians, the 3rd chapter, the
eleventh verse:
*Colossians
3:11
“In that renewal there is no
longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave
and free; but Christ is all and in all!”
There’s even an exclamation point at the end of it.
That’s not to say that the care for our
biological families is not important in the Christian life.
In Paul’s first letter to Timothy, a young
pastor and fellow evangelist with Paul, the 5th chapter, the 8th
verse, Paul says:
*1 Timothy 5:8 “And whoever does not provide for relatives, and especially
for family members, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”
These are pretty strong words, but what do they say? Caring for your
family flows from your faith.
When God is everything about you, everything you do is first produced by
that reality.
Our relationship with others flows from our
relationship with God, not the other way around.
Families can
be places where we are tempted to conform, to go along to get along. Even
families can be a source of mixed allegiances. And sometimes a choice has to be
made. The tensions were so high in the early Church that families were
rejecting members who became Christians. I’ve known families right now who
place obstacles in the path of family members who are starting to consider Christianity,
and who are resistant to family members who start to take their faith
seriously.
This has
ever been so. Look at the words of Jesus to Peter in Luke, chapter 18, starting
at the 28th verse:
*Luke 18:28-30 28 Then Peter said, “Look, we have left our homes
and followed you.” 29 And he said to them, “Truly I
tell you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or
children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, 30 who
will not get back very much more in this age, and in the age to come eternal
life.”
Is “Family
First” a Christian value. No. there is no other God but God, everything about
us is given by our relationship with the one true living God. This is living in
the already and not yet Kingdom of God. We care for our families, we love them,
and we are committed to them because we are Christians and we are defined by
our relationship with the one true living God first, last, in everything.
Christians define “family” to include all baptized
believers of every race and place and nation, and we extend our love and care
to all people. We live as one (a family) by living as one (in a living
relationship with the one true living God).
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