Untitled Sermon (3)

2.17 Final

Relationship

5 A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling. 6 God sets the lonely in families,  he leads out the prisoners with singing; but the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land. - Psalm 68

Operation Pied Piper

In 1939, at the beginning of Wold War 2, the English government began a nation-wide initiative called Operation Pied Piper.   England was faced with the realities of impending military conflict with Nazi Germany, and they were certain that their cities would suffer military attacks, so the government decided to transport all children out of London and other urban areas and relocate them with foster families in rural England.  The urban parents of these children were told to stay behind and contribute to the war effort and work to maintain the infrastructure of the country. In World War 1, England had lost almost 1.5 million civilians, so the government was doing whatever it could to prevent this from happening again. When this was announced, parents were asked to pack up some basic belongings for their kids, take them to train or bus station, say goodbye, and drop them off.  Here’s a couple of pictures of this in action.  There’s almost a sense of excitement and wonder for these kids as they head out on this adventure, though that’s certainly not the case for the parents.  As you might imagine, some parents refused to do this, and there are stories of mothers dropping their children off and then running back onto the trains to recollect them and bring them back home.  The English government was committed to this course of action and pressured parents not to take their kids back, to let them go and leave them in the countryside. Children would arrive in rural towns, where they would essentially be lined up and chosen for foster adoption.  If you were an adult living in rural England, and you had room or a bed for a child, you were expected to be a wartime foster parent.   World War 2 began in 1939 and ended in 1946 and eventually, the war ended, and kids began to return to their parents and their homes.  But researchers found that there were some unexpected effects to Operation Pied Piper.  After all this was over, a psychologist named Anna Freud, who was the daughter of Sigmund Freud, began studying the effects that Operation Pied Piper had on these relocated children.  She compared these children with the children who stayed with their parents in cities during the war.  So you had one group of children were not exposed to Nazi air raid bombings, but they were separated from their parents.  The other group of children stayed with their parents but were subject to air bombings.  What she found was that the children who stayed behind had significantly less mental health problems than did the children who went to the countryside.  Kids who went to the countryside were at higher risk of depression, anxiety, and even inability to learn than the kids who stayed with their parents. So think about this for a moment, a child will suffer greater internal trauma from being separated from their parents than they will from being exposed to war as long as they’re with their parents while its happening.  This speaks the power of the relational bonds that we create, and it also speaks to what happens when those relational bonds are severed and we lose contact with the people we trust to keep us safe. It was around this time that a shift happened in how researchers began to look at the social and emotional development of children.  They began to see that our social, emotional, and even intellectual development was heavily influenced by the relational bonding that takes place as infants and early childhood.  In fact, one of the few things that infants can do when they are born is bond.  When infants enter into the world, they can do very few things, they can wiggle, they can breath, they can nurse, go to the bathroom, and they bond.  They have the ability to form relationships and bond with other humans.  This relational bonding is something that we all can appreciate on an intuitive level, but its such an abstract thing, right, but let’s look at what is actually happening.  

Relationship Chemistry

📷If you remember high school Chemistry class, you’ll know that this is water.  This is a model of the molecular structure of water.  It is two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.  In the center of each atom is the nucleus, and the smaller dots surrounding the nucleus are electrons.  The rings around the nucleus represent electron orbits, and the electrons travel around the nucleus in those orbits.  Each orbit can only have a certain number of electrons.  This first orbit can hold up to two, the second orbit up to 8.  Additionally, each orbit prefers to have the full amount of electrons in any particular orbit.  So, if an atom naturally only has 6 electrons in its second orbit, as is the case with this oxygen atom, it would prefer to find a way to get two more.  If it doesn’t, and if atoms have feelings, they feel unstable.  So, in order to stabilize, they get together with other atoms, and they share their electrons with one another.  And when they share their electrons with one another, they become bonded and in a sense glued together.  In this case, the two Hydrogen atoms have only 1 electron in their first orbit and would prefer 2, and oxygen only has 6 electrons in its second orbit and would prefer 8.  So each Hydrogen atom borrows one electron from Oxygen and stabilizes, and at the same time Oxygen borrows 1 electron from 2 hydrogen atoms and it stabilizes, and when this happens we have water. And water becomes water when these three atoms cease to be isolated atoms and bond with each other to form one structure.  And so when they bond these three separate elements become one thing.  Humans beings are not that different in how we bond and in our desire to bond.  And you can look at all of this human development research that took place in the 20th century, or you can also read the second page of the Bible which was written about 3500 years ago.  In there, we see explicit statements about this.  18 Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone;24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”  1500 years later, in the New Testament, 4 For as in one body we have many members,and the members do not all have the same function, 5 so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.  _Romans 12, 4-5 We have been designed to be relational beings, but it fair to say that it goes beyond that even in that we were designed to form these very real bonds with one another, and when this happens we become a part of something greater than our individual selves.   We don’t necessarily lose our sense of being an individual, but we do gain a sense of being something more.  And this is what Paul is highlighting in this passage.   And we know all of this at an intuitive level.  which is why when we experience the severing of a deep relational bond, we describe it as losing a part of our self - because in a sense that is what’s happening.  Or, it’s also why we talk about wanting to be a part of something bigger than ourselves.  Just like those atoms, we desire to form this type of bond. Last week Pastor Mike talked about love, and our love is the motivation that brings us together. But after a while, as the bond stabilizes in a relationship we begin to develop trust.  Google says that trust is the firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.  We can probably simplify that even further and say that trust means that I can count on you.  And if we condense the Bible way, way down to perhaps its most basic statement, you can argue that, through the Bible, God is saying two things - I love you and you can trust me. If we go back to the beginning of Genesis, and we look at what takes place in the second and third chapters, we see that the serpent, who is somehow the enemy of God and man, gains the trust of Adam and Eve and simultaneously Adam and Eve distrust God.  Adam and Eve stepped outside of a perfect relational integrity, and it wasn’t just between Adam and Eve or Adam and Eve and God, but all of creation and Adam and Eve and God were all bonded together perfectly.  But the moment they stepped outside of that, they brought the whole thing down on themselves.   But when they do, God’s immediate response to them is to pursue them in love and to begin working towards reestablishing their severed bond.  In contrast, Adam and Eve hide.  But God seeks them out, explains what’s happening to them, and provides clothes for them to cover the shame that they were now experiencing because of what they did, and then He gives them a promise to hold onto for the future, that the Serpent Crusher, who is Jesus, is going to come and somehow reconcile everything.   They can still trust God in that terrible moment to the same degree that they could trust Him the moment before all that happened.  Adam and Eve’s behavior and choice did not affect or change God’s character or His disposition towards them.  And the rest of the story of the Bible is a demonstration of this.  It’s one continuous story of God’s unfolding plan for the redemption of humanity.   But this dynamic of turning from God happens over and over.  If you’re not familiar with the Old Testament, it’s largely a story of humanity choosing to trust almost everything other than God.  And throughout the story of the Old Testament we see that we can trust Him and we can see His love for us, but we also see the fickle nature of human beings, that human beings. So we want to keep the historical context of the Old Testament in mind as we begin to ask what all of this means for the iTribe.  We always want to remember that Jesus began his ministry after what the Jews experienced as 400 years of silence from God.  And when He arrives his base message is that in Him, the The Kingdom of God or The Kingdom of Heaven, has arrived on the Earth.  And so Jesus begins calling people to take stock of how they’re living and to eveluate against the backdrop of Heaven, and even if it’s acceptable by the world’s standards, to turn towards a life with God.  He simply calls us to change.  Jesus calls us to leave the world, and He invites us into the Kingdom of Heaven, where He is King. The Kingdom of Heaven is a spiritual dimension full of the glorious presence of God, where everything is relationally harmonious regardless of what has taken place on the Earth.  And so when Jesus arrives, as the King of Heaven He is bringing Heaven with Him to the earth, or at least introducing Heaven into the earth.  That spiritual dimension of life entered into this dimension and began to influence and affect the natural world.  People were healed of diseases and phsyical disabilities, blind people could see, and physical deformities are set right.  Something very real is happening, and Jesus is beginning to draw crowds and attention.  And His message is that The Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven had and has arrived on the earth.   God promised in Chapter 3 of Genesis, that he was going to set things right again and take care of the situation for us.  And now, in Jesus, the final movement of this long broad story of the Old Testament is fulfilled.  We can now clearly see that God was always independently motivated by His love for us and His goal was always to bring us back and to restore what was lost.  Sometimes we think of it reverse - that we’re the ones going to get God back, but that’s not the case, it’s God’s love that initiates this restoration.  The Christian faith isn’t about accomplishing something so that God will respond to us, and we will be reconciled.  It’s about trusting in God’s love for us and we change as a result of that love but not to earn it because He has never withheld it.  But when we look at with iTribe in sight, we can also see that there’s something more to it, because He doesn’t want just you or just me as individuals to come back to Him.  He wants a family back.   5 A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling. 6 God sets the lonely in families,  he leads out the prisoners with singing; but the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land. - Psalm 68 Pastor Mike mentioned that this iTribe series is meant to be a different type of series in the sense he wants it to be more of an introduction to a new season of the Journey when we begin to be more intentional about cultivating relationships.  And there’s a lot of common sense reasons to do this.  Stanford University’s Psychiatry Department has an entire field of study called the Belonging Project because they have recognized so many benefits to our well-being when have a sense of belonging to something bigger than us.  But the most important reason for us is that this is what we’ve been called to do.  Jesus had and continues to have a vision for His Church, and that vision is laid out for us in the Bible.   By all means, Jesus was a radical man.  He grabbed a handful of clay, spit in it, rubbed it together, put it on a blind man’s eyes, and then that man recovered his sight.  He wasn’t holding back, he put it all out there.   His vision for the Church was just as radical as His living ministry was.  It was radical for Jews living during His lifetime and immediately after relative to their culture, but it’s also radical for us to consider today relative to our culture.  His vision challenged Jews during His lifetime because he was asking them to change their allegiance and loyalty from their natural family to His family.  He was saying, if you follow me, this is your new family.  Other Jesus followers come with the package.  And this is not just a just a figure of speech.  The New Testament authors refer to the Christians as what, brothers and sisters.  And I will share personally, even if I don’t know you which is possible to do in a church this size, that I still feel a kinship with you, I feel this sense of being a part of the same family that goes well beyond someone standing up here and saying everyone’s welcome be a part of our family.   I feel that.   This challenging for us to consider too, but we have an added challenge in that our culture promotes radical individualism.  The challenge isn’t about how much time has gone by since then or how much technology has changed, but it’s because we live in a fundamentally different type of society.  Jews during that time were a collectivist culture, and we are an individualist culture.  And what that means is that they identified with their group first and did what was best for the group first and the individual was expected to meet the needs of the group.  For us, it’s the opposite.  I identify with me, I consider what’s best for me first and maybe my immediate family, and I expect the group to meet my needs.  That type of thinking, that way of processing relationships would have made no sense to Jews during that time.   So what does this look like? Let’s make this super practical.  There are going to be opportunities coming up to be a part of smaller groups or to attend smaller events that allow for the chance to develop deeper relationships.  And we might process those opportunities like this.  Do I feel like going?  Is it going to be fun, or is it going to be awkward and uncomfortable?  What am I going to get out of it?  But another way of processing these opportunities can look like this.  Will it be good for the church?  Will people be glad when I show up?  Can I help to make it less awkward by my participating there?    Right, so in the context of the church, this isn’t about doing things that we think are going to make us feel good.  It’s about doing what we see Jesus calling us to do, regardless of how we feel about it, but we can trust that we’re probably going to feel pretty good about it once we’ve accomplished what we’ve set to accomplish. I want to close with this thought -   Often we think about our relationship with Jesus in terms of being forgiven of sin and wrongdoing.  But the reality is that for many people, though the message of repentance is clear, we tend to decide to follow Jesus because we don’t have much hope anywhere else, and we recognize that in Jesus he offers us genuine hope.  And we see the same thing throughout the Gospels.  We see Jesus coming in contact with people who need help, who are isolated from fulfilling relationships, who want something different, and who don’t have anywhere else to turn.  And Jesus offers a new life, and a new family and we’re figuring out how to do both of those things.  And not just an opportunity to become a better version of who you are, it’s an opportunity to become a totally new person, a new creation. All of this, all of our Christian lives takes place in the context of our relationships.  Nothing happens in isolation.  Imagine that video that we saw of the actress singing.  What would it have been like if there were no other people present.  She said something to the effect of this is who I am, but if there was no one there to listen to her and respond.  What happens?  That experience was about her, but it was also about them.  You could see in that video the other people excited to be participating in her life. she’s only granted that opportunity because of her relationships with the other people in that room.  It’ no different for our Christian lives, and for the life of our church. 19 Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. 21 In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. 22 And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.  Simply knowing the commands and prohibitions of Scripture has proven to be an insufficient defense against the powerful socializing influence of radical individualism in the lives of American Christians. p 84 Bible knowledge is not enough.  A more thoroughgoing resocialization is necessary.  Until we truly begin to understand and embrace the strong-group model of the church as a family, we will have neither the theological foundation nor the social capital necessary to act in a manner diametrically opposed to the dominant culture of radical individualism.  We will successfully swim upstream against the raging river of personal sin and slefishness only in the ocntext of community as God intends it. p. 85

The End