(firecracker pops) (pipe organ music) 

- The Bible contains a number of passages which reassure parents. Passages, such as the Fifth Commandment, which emphasize on the parts of children, obedience and honor, and respect. The Bible also has a way of getting under our skin. And so it is not surprising that we find a number of parentally disturbing passages. In "Matthew", for example, Jesus says, "I have not come to bring peace, but a sword." Or, "I have come to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and a man's clothes will be those of his own household." I came across a cartoon recently of a young man introducing his fiance to his mother. And she greeted them at the door saying, "How do you do? My son has told me so much about you that I feel I dislike you already." However, we do not do justice to this quotation from "Matthew" if we take it out of context. In the quotation, Jesus emphasizes that blood relationships are of secondary importance to the relationship of discipleship. He asserts that commitment to him and his way of life is to be above every other tie, even that of family. So this passage, taken out of context, may remind us of, but cannot be taken to justify the antagonisms within contemporary family which set member against member. We do need to rediscover the family. There is an awareness that the emotional health of our nation depends upon the emotional health of its families, just as the personal maturity is dependent upon the quality of family life. The family is faced today with loss of its geographical roots. The average American family moves once every five years. The hometown is no longer the psychological anchor point that it once was. Many families consequently live as if we're in a foreign land, nostalgic for the mountains, or the planes, or the shores of its home. The family is faced today with the loss of its interpersonal roots. Frequent moves mean that people must repeatedly give up friendships, and are therefore reluctant to establish strong ties. Moves away from parents and grandparents cut children off from family tradition and family continuity. The family is also faced today with being cut off from its moral and spiritual roots, with transient church membership, with an ever-widening gap between the values of one generation and those of the next. And with conflicting value systems within any one generation. This concern for the significance of family relationships is shared by our colleges and universities. Charles Frankel in a publication entitled "The College and the Student" points out that the family of a student normally regarded a college as its surrogate. Responsible, not only for the student's education, but for his or her physical and moral security. A large part of what the American college has done is unintelligible unless we recognize that it has served and has been asked to serve as stand-in parents. We need help to rediscover the family, but before we can be helped, we need to admit that something is wrong, and it is not easy to admit that all is not well in our families. Harry Sullivan, an outstanding psychiatrist, has written, "If a person tells me his home life is perfect, I take off my glasses, which means that I cannot see him, and I gaze at him and say, extraordinary. I then pass on to some other topic, but I return to this later." Now not every family has a skeleton in its closet. Rather, it may be the routine of the kitchen or the dinner table or the family room, which shames us. Small facets of our family life which do not fit in with a picture that we want to give. But in little ways, our secrets get out, through the kindergarten child who says that daddy makes mommy cry, or through the children's friends who stay overnight and hear our angry words. Those with the highest ideals and the best education are usually the ones most ashamed of their secret behavior, because they are the ones who most expect that they should be able to do better. Sometimes it can be a lifting of a considerable burden to know that no family is faultless. We all have our faults. My colleague and I understood this when he came by my office early on a Saturday morning and said to me with tongue-in-cheek, "Isn't it nice to be able to escape domestic tranquility?" We erect walls not only to keep outsiders from looking in on our family life, we erect walls among members of the family. No man is a hero to his valet, and few are heroes to others within the family. They know us too well. We grow afraid of those with whom we live most closely, and upon whom we depend most deeply. We do not often realize how afraid we are of one another, parents afraid of their children, children afraid of their parents, husbands and wives afraid of each other, children tyrannized their parents with their punishing words, "I don't love you," or the equally devastating indictment, "You don't love me." Children are also afraid of their parents, afraid they won't care, afraid they won't support them, afraid they won't keep their promises. Husbands and wives are afraid of each other. And each tries to hide the fear behind irritation or cover up irritation with exaggerated expressions of affection. Sometimes we know that our anger hides fear, and that fear points to hurt. And the bitterest anger may hide the deepest hurt. It indicates that we've been most hurt by those we most need. Now, every one of us has difficulty expressing his feelings, and this difficulty robs the family of some of life's most satisfying experiences. We're particularly awkward with our intimate feelings of tenderness and love. To be an adult to a last means to be unemotional, display of affection is all right for young lovers who are not expected to know any better, or made nance for whom everyone feels sorry. And grandmothers who are usually harmless. Paul Tournier in his book, "The Meaning of Persons", says how many married couples no longer know how to tell each other quite simply that they love each other? Even joy is smothered. "Yesterday evening," he writes, "A mother announced to me the engagement of her daughter. You approve of the young man, I ask. Oh, absolutely. Then I hope you flung your arms around her neck and told her so. No, I didn't dare to. I told her it was getting late and she had better go to bed and that we would talk about it some other time. We seemed so afraid of what is most real and deepest within us, yet as more than one psychotherapist has discovered, if one can understand what is most real within his own experience at the deepest personal level of feeling and understanding, it is likely that it is the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others. But we leave unexpressed and unshared our deepest feelings. And the feelings we most regret leaving unexpressed and unshared are those of love. Grief seems most agonizing for those who have lost someone at a time when the last word spoken were those of anger. We cling to so many relationships in the past because some of our deepest feelings were left unexpressed, unshared. Bound as it were to past relationships, we are unable to live freely in the present. Jesus knew how difficult yet how necessary it is to transfer loyalties, to set aside past relationships of child and parent if one is to be free to live as an adult. To rediscover our own families, we must, in the words of Saint Paul, "Put away childish things." Husbands and wives discover that they do not want to give up the protection which a mother or a father affords. Adults discover that they do not want to put away childish images, but that they want to retain the image of a dominating parent or an indulging parent, or I protecting parent, or a tyrannical parent. And parents discover that even if they put away the childish relationships of earlier years, yet they cling nevertheless to certain myths, which prevent their children from becoming parents to themselves. There are three such myths, which are particularly binding, the myth of innocence forever, the myth of obedience forever, and the myth of intimacy forever. The myth of innocence forever says that children can be protected forever. The same is to be a favorite myth of parents who have found life difficult, even cruel, so they want to raise hot house children, but hot house children like hot house plants must be sheltered forever. The myth of innocence forever is the myth of the Garden of Eden, with Adam and Eve living within the bosom of God with no cares, but with no freedom and responsibility. Thank heaven for the fall. My fall was upward, not downward, for it marked the movement towards freedom and what is freedom except the capacity for choice? And the movement toward responsibility, for what is responsibility except the ability to anticipate and live with the consequences of one's choices? The myth of obedience forever says that children can be guided forever, but only parents who expect to live forever should have perfectly obedient children. Disobedience is a normal part of childhood. I do not mean disobedience as a persistent, angry, destructive disregard for rules and regulations. I mean disobedience which represents the child's assertion of his strength and individuality. Grab an infant by the arm and hold him so he cannot move and you will feel him struggle, and rightfully so, against restraint. And you will hear his cries of rage. Hold on to him and keep him from going where he is able to go, and you will arouse his resentment and not his obedience. Likewise, demands for obedience may overshadow the more important lessons in personal responsibility. Only the person who is free to disobey his parents can become his own parent. Psychologically, the passage referred to earlier is sound, to become a parent to yourself may mean you must be at odds if you're a mother and father. The myth of intimacy forever says that we will never be separated from others. The family is the place for the first experience of intimacy. Intimacy is the deepest human need, the need to have a genuine, warm, responsive relationship. And what a thrill it is to see the infant's first response in affection to affection. But parents cannot hold on to their children forever. The child must widen his range of intimacy to include other children and other adults. And the intimacy gained in infancy and childhood seems to be lost for a time between parents and child in early adolescence. Perhaps it is because parents' efforts to discipline the adolescent for adulthood, which is approaching rapidly, leaves little room for intimacy. Clean up your room, do your homework. Perhaps it is because adolescence is a time of rebellion if individuality and uniqueness is to be protected. Perhaps it is because adolescence is a time for developing sexuality with its secrets. But then intimacy is regained in dating, and courtship and marriage, when suddenly walls of isolation are broken down and love is heightened by a new sense of shared experience. And the intimacy lost with one's parents may be regained through one's children and their grandchildren. How parents and husbands and wives might envy the young adults' ability and opportunity to fall in love. Unfortunately, parents and husbands and wives have arrived at two fatal assumptions. One is that they know all there is to know about one another, there's nothing left to discover, and many a married person imagines that he knows all there is to know about his mate. He has lost the loving curiosity he had while he was still only engaged to be married. The other fatal assumption is that the decision to be married was made once and for all. So now married couples feel trapped. The truth of the matter is that probably nine out of 10 couples would make the same decision again, and should be making that decision every day. The decision to be married is a process, with repeated opportunities to propose and to accept. But we're more apt to be heard saying no in order to retaliate when we're hurt. What we really want to say is yes. Otis Maxfield, former pastor of First Community Church in Columbus, Ohio, and now director of the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry tells the case of a young married graduate student who became disenchanted with his wife and fell in love with another girl. But the love affair soon blew up, and the young man came to himself and realized that his marital problem had at its basis his conflicting needs for his wife to be both a wife and a mother to him. When he got in touch with his wife who had, in the meantime, gone home to her parents, she told him tearfully that she couldn't come back, that it was all over. And that furthermore, having been terribly hurt and feeling quite helpless and worthless, she had had a casual affair with an older man and was now four months pregnant. Determined to save his marriage, the young man took his wife with him to the church counseling center. And together they discovered that neither of them was blameless, that each had been disloyal to the other. And that the love once possible was possible again. When the baby was born, the couple brought him to First Community Church to be baptized. The young man asked to offer the prayer after the baptizing, and three of the sentences used in the prayer stand out. Dear Lord, we are so glad that in spite of our wickedness, all of us have a possibility for goodness. I'm so glad that parenthood is a set of relationships, more than the accident of flesh and blood. I am so glad that love reveals and does not conceal. Perhaps these sentences from the young man's prayer may help you rediscover your family. Innocence forever is a myth. Neither we nor others are perfect or without fault. Obedience forever is a myth. We do not always love, honor, and cherish. Intimacy, forever, is a myth. We know the isolation of fear and anger. But may those in our families hear us say quite simply, I know we have our faults. Forgive me as I forgive you. I know we have our moments of fear and anger, but let us know also our moments of love. Dear Lord, we are so glad that in spite of our wickedness, all of us have a possibility for goodness. I'm so glad that parenthood is a set of relationships more than the accident of flesh and blood. I am so glad that love reveals and does not conceal. And now may the trust, which is faith abide, may the anticipation which is hope abide. May the affection which is love abide. May these three abide in our families this day, and always. (inspiring Gospel music)