LiMember - Body and Family

Children’s Sermon

Scars tell stories…as kids, you probably share about your scars…kids sign your cast, etc. For some reason, we stop doing that as adults…and we learn to hide our scars. Jesus shows his scars to Thomas, even in his glorified body. We’re designed to connect to one another through our scars…great scene from Jaws!

Scripture

Proverbs 17:17 - Friends love through all times and families are created to persevere through adversity together.

Engage

I’ll spend the next couple of Sundays examining how we remember through family. Family is our strongest natural tie to memory. Starting next week, we’ll look in depth at the family of David and how it illustrates the blessings, the difficulties, and the recoveries of families…and how God can redeem family through his love and grace.

One of the great writings in human history is The Odyssey, by Homer. It was written in around 700 BC but it’s really our story too and ties directly to our culture…and likely any culture past, present, or future. Odysseus, the main character, finds himself at the end of a long war but doesn’t return home. Instead, he goes on an epic journey…constantly reinventing himself, seeking and finding all sorts of adventure. Even when he finally returns home after many years, nobody recognizes him…until his old nanny/nurse feels a scar on him she recognizes. His homeland, though, is in chaos. Ultimately, though, he reveals himself, regains control, and rejoins his family.

Much like in our culture, there is a battle in the Odyssey between roots and adventure. In our world, as in Homer’s world nearly 3K years ago, adventure is assumed to be the highest form of pleasure. Now, I love adventure and it can be quite pleasurable…but God has created us to be in the long game not in a bunch of short games. Have you ever waited hours and hours in a line only to experience a minute or minute and a half roller coaster? The highest pleasures God has designed us for are rocky, turbulent, long developing, but ultimately give the most sustained, eternal even, joys. Family is foremost among these we get to experience.

Encounter

Friends, family ties us to who we are and can help save us from who we want to be! Nobody on earth, save from the Spirit of God, knows us like our family, in whatever form it takes. Even if not family by blood, family can be made by choice and action....Through adoption, guardianship, or simply out of loving kindness. Family watches us take our first steps, feeds us our first foods, hears our first laughs, patches our first ouchies, remembers things for us we cannot possibly even remember.

I seem to be noticing a lot of Odysseus types these days, particularly some younger folks, but not only them. Traveling all over the place…seeking something, adventure, trying to fill an emptiness they can’t seem to fill at home. Again, I love traveling, about as much as anyone…but not as a means of salvation. Even those too poor or too tied to their homes to pursue adventure in its most common forms might create it by changing themselves, adopting, as Odysseus often did, a new and different story or identity. Sound familiar? Often such behavior gets loud applause in our culture…People leaving behind, they think, who they are to assume new identities of some sort. But it’s a lie. People become chameleons…changing again and again to regain the applause they so desire…and they think will lead them to salvation, wholeness, and fulfillment. People regard loyalties as chains and throw them off.

Our Scripture today…family and friends are designed for us to survive life. But family and friends are not quick things, they play the long game. They’re in for the long haul.

When it comes to remembering family, I’m not saying, God does not say, that sentimentality is best. Sentimentality is remembering scrubbed. Cleaned, purified. Only God will do that perfectly in eternity, perhaps. No, we are called to remember the good, the bad, and the ugly. Sentimentality might make us remember our families as perfect. No family is perfect. There is perhaps no clearer illustration of this principle than the Bible. We’ll look at David and his family in weeks to come. Really, though, the whole Bible tells all…it tells of good, bad, ugly, everything. It doesn’t scrub, clean, or purify memories. God’s command to remember is a good antidote to destructive sentimentality if followed.

Sadly, families are VERY skilled at sentimentality and at scrubbing the past to serve, so they think, the best interests of the family. Many families have the family SECRET, or secrets. Perhaps many of you don’t even know the full story of your families. One of the best sources for truth comes from the fringes. Perhaps that slightly crazy aunt or uncle. Or a grandparent as they age and just don’t care as much about maintaining images any longer. Or perhaps long-time friends who remember and share true histories of families they’re connected to.

I believe I’ve shared before that one of my great, or 2x great as I recall, grandfathers just skipped out on his first family, as near as we can tell. You wouldn’t know it by his first wife (my grandmother’s) obituary. But by his, it becomes clear. He had a whole other family. She tried to scrub the truth but it came out anyway. In olden days, it was not uncommon for men, most often, to succumb to the pressures of providing or whatever and just skip out, leave town, go a couple of counties, states, or countries away and start a new life. They think they’re escaping but they really aren’t. Wherever they go, there they are. Them and their pasts.

This is harder to do these days with public records, social media, dna, what have you. You all may have seen the story recently of a law enforcement person north of here who got busted trying to create multiple families with multiple women, all while still married to his original wife. His lies were pierced and he’s being prosecuted.

So how are we called to sustain with family? The key is to stay connected even if you’re not close. A blessing of technology is the enhanced ability for us to do this. It’s not as good as in person, but it’s far better than nothing. Cutoff is dangerous. Odysseus was cutoff from his family for a long time. It didn’t go well. Cutoff is like a ship, a current, that comes unhooked from it’s anchor or where it’s tied. That ship will float about, to and fro, driven by the winds and the currents, and most often end up shipwrecked. The story of the prodigal son also illustrates this…and I have no doubt many prodigal sons have lived in history…it is our story, the story of God and humanity.

Family ties us to who we are and can help save us from the destruction of who we think we want to be!

Empower

I was blessed to grow up on a street where most everyone knew everyone and got along…even doing things together fairly often. Camping, what have you. Two strong memories I have are one, a 4th of July block party we once had at Hedrick’s house. Another was watching game 7 of the 1985 world series with most of our street, and some others, in our driveway. Now, I suppose I could reinvent my past and my stories here in Texas or wherever I went. I could say the scar on my stomach was from a knife fight at a convenience store (as I once jokingly sold to a friend I was playing sand volleyball with) instead of from hernia surgery. Or, I could say the long scar on my left forearm was from a dog attack I valiantly fought off rather than from a stupid moped accident that was totally my fault. But if I spun these lies, or others, I’d have to be careful. Because if people connected to my family, they would likely learn the truth. They know my scars, they know my stories.

From Jack Byron, a gallery artist and illustrator:

“Another Glorious Year”

Looking at the card, I understood the significance after all these years. Aunt Anna had laminated it as a gift to my mother, a tribute to surviving tough times. It was mom’s fiftieth birthday party, and the house was filled with relatives and friends who had come to wish her well and acknowledge that survival. Everyone knew that many of those fifty years would have tested the endurance of a superhero. But mom had survived them all—years of a bad marriage followed by the struggle of being a single mother raising five sons; the death of one of my brothers at age 21; and subsequent loss of his young son, her grandchild, who was taken away and withheld from the family. For nearly two decades, the pain and struggle were addressed in the simple dime-store card I was now holding. And, in truth, this card was something mysterious, a legend spoken of for ages in our family. However, until that moment, I’d never actually seen proof of the legend. But there it was, a worn card of fairly heavy cardboard. Opening the card, I saw the magic words that I had been told about so often: “Here’s to another glorious year.”

Underneath those words, years were marked in pen, counting down the 1960s and 1970s. This card had traveled between Aunt Anna and mom during those years of hardship, dark humor shared between them, a tradition continued annually until the year that mom remarried - this time a good marriage to a good man. Anna, who happened to have the card in her possession then, decided that this tradition could safely end. These two sisters relied on each other. It was the 1960s, and we were fairly poor, but I never knew that or of the sacrifices that my mom and Anna made for the rest of us. Only later did I hear about the meals they skipped so that we kids could eat. “I’m on a diet,” mom would say. Being so young, it never occurred to me that my bone-thin mom really didn’t need one. Occasionally, my father would breeze in just to taunt my mother about having to struggle so hard financially. I have crystal clear memories of the hundred-dollar bills he would flaunt and the twisted look of triumph in his eyes - the cruelty of a person with a very small heart who felt pleasure in hurting others. Mom would send him on his way with a defiant faith that God would take care of us without help from this man. She made sure we were well-provided for. Aunt Anna had her own dark times. She had married Uncle Aaron, a man who was good as gold and everything that my father was not. But he had been called up to serve in Vietnam, and those years in the jungle and return to civilian life were their own journey through the dark - one which he and Anna walked with the same faith that sustained mom.

I was engrossed in the card at the party… “What are you looking at?” Mom asked. “Oh, the card,” she said with a nod. “Isn’t it nice of Anna to have it laminated? That card means a lot to me.” We studied the card, lost in thought. And then, looking up at each other, the emotion caught us both, and we could not speak.

The little card was an unlikely bearer of a message of hope, family, and God. But, most of all, it was an annual reminder of love. The bag lady and simple message showed that genius springs as much from the heart as from the mind. Another glorious year? Yes, another glorious year.