Sermon Tone Analysis

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.