Father’s Day: A Letter To My Sons circa 2012

Posted on June 12, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

On Father’s Day 2012, I shared the following letter to my sons, for them when they turned eighteen. It was one of my favorite sermons, but it was six months before I’d launch this blog. So, I share it with you now, and tomorrow I’ll share with “A Letter to My Sons 2.0.” Consider who you should be writing such a letter to.

Now that you’ve turned 18 and are preparing to head out on your own, here are a few things I want to remind you of. I’m proud of you and who you are becoming, and hope that these things, which I’ve tried to teach you as you’ve grown, will stick to you and guide you as you enter adulthood.

First, speak softly and carry a big stick. No, wait. Speak softly and allow for God’s voice to guide your words. Words carry so much power, and yet we fail to use them well. Compliment others, be kind to others, and help them to be affirmed that God loves them and you, so much. Someone’s mom, might’ve been Eve, said a long time ago that if you didn’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. It’s still true.

Remember that God has a plan for you. In Jeremiah 29:11-14, it says that if we seek God with our whole heart, we will find him. I hope that you will always seek after God and see that the plan God has for your life is awesome!

Be yourself. You are a child of God and made in His image. Don’t obsess over how you look. Don’t worry about what other people say. You know who and whose you are.

Whatever you do, do it well. Find something you love to do and embrace it. Make it your calling, not a job, and you will go to work happy more days than not. Your mom and dad will be proud of you regardless of what job you take, so do it well.

Form relationships, not connections. The world is full of people who are either givers or takers. Break the mold. Be compassionate and gracious, and show others that they are important. Your Pepaw taught me that it was important to recognize every person’s worth, regardless of their place in the world—from those serving you, or taking out your trash, or your bosses, or your enemies—God loves us all the same.

Be a good friend. Find people who will challenge you and support you. Don’t worry about who looks cool but who is full of the things you know you want to be. Speaking of cool, don’t sweat that either. It changes. Remind me to tell you about the white neon pants I had in the eighth grade.

Be trustworthy, honest, patient. With your friends AND your enemies. Hopefully you got your Mom’s personality.

Remember who you are, and whose you are. You are my sons, and you are God’s sons. I have prayed over you since you were little, “Mommy loves you, Daddy loves you, and God loves you. May you grow up to be a man after God’s own heart. You’re a good boy buddy.” No matter how big you get or where you go, I will be praying that over you.

Speaking of which, call your mom. She misses you.

Don’t be afraid to say you’re sorry. You’re not always right. I’m not either.

Know that God loves you so much that he sent Jesus to die on the cross for you, and raised him up three days later. Treat others like Jesus died for them too—he did! All that other stuff? Worry about it later.

Eat your vegetables. Drink lots of water. Try to not get addicted to caffeine. It’ll save you money and health later.

Exercise. They told me my metabolism would slow down. I didn’t believe them. They were right. Get up off your keister and go play something. Just not yet… I’m not done.

No matter what happens, love your brother. He’s your family, and you guys should always have each other. I know you guys want to wrestle all the time, but remember that when push comes to shove, he’s got your back.

Read something. Sports Illustrated is fine, but try a book sometime! Yes, it’s okay to read comic books—let the story move you.

Read your Bible. Pray. When you don’t know what words to say, SING! If you can’t sing, hum.

Find a church where you can hear the word of God, and know that you are loved by the people there. Don’t worry about finding the perfect church- none of them are- but find a church where you know God is there and you get fed. Get involved with church- serve in whatever way you can. Don’t just be a taker!

Speaking of getting involved: don’t just coast. Whether you’re in school or working now, get involved. Make your world better. Your Memaw always said I was happier when I was pouring my life into other people, and she was right. This life isn’t about you, or me, or someone else. It’s for all of us to share together.

Wash your clothes. Don’t put the red clothes in with the whites. You’ll end up pink. It’s no good.

Get a haircut. Take frequent showers. Don’t forget to brush your teeth. I’m supposed to tell you to floss…

Give more than you get. You know your dear old dad has been obsessed with Christmas Jars for a long time, but seriously, give away money. Give away time. Give away clothes. You will always have what you need, and if you don’t, your mom will buy it for you.

Say thank you. Hold the door.

Speaking of which. Call your mom. She misses you.

Be a good listener. People want to know you care. Listening shows them. Your dad is trying to learn to talk less—he’s been trying for 30 years.

Don’t let the sun go down on your anger. I know that’s tough, but aim for never holding a grudge. Never lose a friend over something dumb, even if it was their fault.

When you get a job, be friends with the secretary. They know what’s really going on. If you don’t believe me, ask Gram what she knows.

Have fun. Enjoy being outside, playing games, being on a team. Have what everyone else thinks is a bad sense of humor—you got that from your mom.

Laugh a lot, just not at other people. Laughing at yourself is still the best. It’ll keep you humble, and you’ll always be entertained.

Don’t be afraid to say no. Sometimes, not doing something is the best answer. I’m still working on that.

When you get a job, tithe. God gave you the gifts and skills and opportunity you have, and it’s the right thing to do to give back what’s His already.

When you get a job, save. Your dad wishes he would’ve started earlier. You’re going to want to do something and need the money, and you’ll have it if you saved up. By the time you read this, your mom will probably have already reminded you five times… and used me as an example.

Tip big. Someone worked hard to bring you that meal.

I hope you find a woman who you love as much as I love your Mom, and that she loves you back. Don’t force it. Your dad took plenty of wrong turns—but in the long run, they all led to your Mom. Be okay with getting it wrong, but guard your heart for the right time. You’ll know. And if you have any questions, ask your Mom. (Just kidding.) Don’t worry about finding the perfect woman, but find the perfect person FOR YOU. And when you find that person, make sure that you tell her what she means to you.

Remember that hope never fails. I’ve always told you that the good guys always win. It’s true. Sometimes it just takes awhile. Go watch Star Wars or The Princess Bride. Maybe Spiderman (the Tobey Maguire one). We know already how our story ends—Jesus already won.

You will be someone else’s example, somebody’s hero. Are you setting an example you’d want them to follow? No pressure.

Live to please an audience of one. I don’t mean me or your mom. But you should be living to please God with who you are and what you do.

Speaking of being an example: I did my best. I’m sorry for the times that I failed at that, days I didn’t have enough patience, or didn’t show you the best way I should have. I thank God for the gift of you, and pray that we’ll continue to grow up together as you enter into your own.

I’ll never get tired of saying this: I love you. You are a great son and a wonderful person. I will always be proud of you, and I am always here—a phone call or car ride away. Don’t be afraid to tell people that you love them. Ever.

And one last thing: call your mom. She misses you. It’ll be on speaker phone. Because I miss you too.

Love,

Dad

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Ten Words #7: From Fickle To Faithful (Sunday’s Sermon Today)

Posted on June 11, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

“You shall not commit adultery.”–Exodus 20:14

The joke goes something like this.  Moses comes down the mountain to the people who are waiting to hear a word from God. “Well,” says Moses, “the good news is I got him down to ten.”

“The bad news is that adultery is still one of them.”

Every time I’ve ever heard the Ten Commandments as a subject of a sermon, there’s a collective holding of the breath when it gets to the sixth word. It makes us uncomfortable somehow, maybe because we’ve been told since we were small children that sex wasn’t something you talked about, especially in church.

Moses viewed adultery as so dangerous to the social framework of the Israelite nation that he later shared in Leviticus 20:10, that if a man “commits adultery with another man’s wife—with the wife of his neighbor—both the adulterer and the adulteress are to be put to death.” Pretty serious stuff, no?

A simple search on adultery through the rest of the Old Testament finds God using it as an illustration of the way that Israel has behaved toward God: unfaithfully, fickly, without thought toward their relationship. Sure, David commits adultery, and God punishes him for it in II Samuel 11, but Ezekial and Jeremiah, two prophetic paragons of virtue, rebuke the nation for failing to worship God and instead chasing other gods. God takes it a step further in Hosea, telling that prophet to marry a prostitute and then take her back, because that’s the way that God loves Israel. And us.

Maybe if we recognize, that family and relationships are at the root of what God wants for the recently freed Israelite slaves, and for us, then somehow, this seventh word makes sense. Maybe we need to focus on what it means to be faithful, then we can wrap our minds around the bigger picture.

Take this example, for instance: Growing up in Rhode Island, the Red Sox were the regional team of choice. They had some good players, but they seemed to practice losing more than they actually won. Some people defaulted to teams like the Atlanta Braves (who were dominate in the 1990s), which seemed slightly traitorous, but at least they were in the ‘other’ league, the National League. What was worse, there were so-called fans who chose to root for the New York Yankees, even though they were (and are) the absolute rivals and antithesis of Boston. This is tragic unfaithfulness, not in marriage, but in heart, in allegiance.

In the Old Testament, God sees adultery as a breaking up of the marriage covenant that is the building block of family and community; God sees adultery as a breaking up of the covenant between God and God’s people, when they fail to be who they’re supposed to be, when they worship things other than God, when they fail to honor their side of the covenant. God knows the Israelites have been told that relationships are only physical, that slaves die and are replaced, that there is no covenant that stands higher than any other. God knows that the people who see life as meaningless ditch marriage, leave friendship, and worship things that ultimately can’t fulfill them, from idols to pleasure to ‘stuff.’

When we get to the New Testament, we see that the Pharisees, the religious leaders and teachers of God’s law, have made adultery all about a problem in marriage that a) must be avoided and b) defines a person’s worth. They have elevated sex to the point where it is an idol for them, the earmark of what it means to be faithful, even while they are gluttonous, greedy, cruel, and judgmental. They’ve also bought into a patriarchal, sexist view of adultery: it’s always the woman’s fault. It’s one more way that the Pharisees have raised themselves up on a pedestal- “look at us, we’re great, we don’t commit adultery!”– and pushed everyone else, especially women, down.

Wait until they get a hold of Jesus!

We understand that Jesus has already preached on adultery, from Matthew 5:27-32, as part of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:27-32). Jesus told the men, the people gathered there, that they had been told not to commit adultery, but that he was telling them not to even look at a woman with lust; he told them that rather than keep sinning, they might as well cut out the body part that was causing them to sin… he suggested an eye… rather than be unfaithful. Jesus told them that unless a woman had been unfaithful, that the man had no right to divorce her.

You can imagine this didn’t sit well with everyone. When we get to our Scripture today, from Mark 10:2-12, we see that they’ve come looking for Jesus, that they want to trap or test him. So they ask him if it’s lawful (legal, acceptable) for a man to divorce his wife?

Jesus asks them what Moses said? They reply with the legal answer about divorce, and Jesus responds that Moses gave them that law because they couldn’t handle relationships, that God had intended the sacrament of marriage for the union of a man and a woman to be united forever. He later tells his disciples that if a man or woman remarried, for reasons outside of infidelity, they were committing adultery.

It doesn’t say that Jesus blasted people for getting divorced, or even committing adultery, but that he recognized that they were not God’s first choice for his people. God knew that broken relationships hurt, that broken people in broken relationships lead to broken communities. God wanted them (and us) to practice faithfulness in a world that wasn’t faithful to God, or relationships.

That goes in the face of what we hear from society, doesn’t it?

Statistics say that one out of every five Americans will have an affair. Did you know there’s even a dating community for people who are already married? That website, Ashley Madison, promotes itself as being the leader in infidelity and married dating, with a tagline that says, “Life is short, have an affair.”

Is that really what we’ve come to?

Society tells us, thanks to the latest in films, TV shows, books, and socialite gossip that boredom, unmet needs, longing, age, etc. are all reasons enough for unfaithfulness. Society tells us that our vows are like goals: they’re meant to be broken. Society tells us that as long as we don’t have sex, it’s not adultery. Society tells us that the ache we feel in our souls for more is something that we can artificially fill, instead of chasing God.

We can’t be too surprised because we switch churches when the preacher says something we don’t like or the parking lot gets full; we move our kids to new schools when we don’t like the teachers or don’t think our kid is the central focus; we act like college football coaches who just flip one job into a better one, regardless of how we’ve treated our team.

We put the instant gratification before the relationship.

This Seventh Word demands that we protect our own family line, but also that of our neighbor’s family. It puts an explicit claim on sexual activity between a man and a woman as central to the community. And it fights against the claim that “it’s okay as long as no one gets hurt,” because Jesus says it’s damaging to the man, to the woman, and to the community.

And then we keep coming back to situations with Jesus that tell us that it’s not just about sex. That a hobby, a job, an addiction, an emotional entanglement, could all be the cause of our unfaithfulness to God or our spouse in a world that continues to grow more and more commitment-phobic. That it’s not just about male-female relationships but our way of doing life.

Mother Theresa put it this way: “We are called upon not to be successful but faithful.”

(You know, it’s sad, when marriages break up before your two-year Verizon contract.)

God wants us to consider how we are unfaithful to our churches, our families, our friendships. God wants us to move past our self-centered focus to an other-centered focus. God wants us to be like the elder Peter Pan played by Robin Williams in Hook who says, “My word is my bond.” God knows that in those kinds of relationships, we can be fully vulnerable to each other, that we can know as we are fully known.

God knows that we buy into the need advertised and ingrained in us to “feel alive,” to believe that the grass is really greener on the other side. God knows that we think we’re freeing ourselves from a weight that holds us down, when we’re really just trading a situation we haven’t sorted out and becoming enslaved to something else.

God knows that we need friendships we can be faithful to, marriages we can be faithful in, churches we can learn faithfulness from because we are not meant to live this life alone. From a Methodist standpoint, broadly accepted by many Christians, we believe in a Trinitarian God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) who wants to be in community with us, and wants us to be in community with each other.

To live in faithfulness is to not exploit, misuse, abuse, manipulate, or patronize someone; to live in faithfulness is to love our spouse, our children, our parents, our friends, our brothers and sisters in Christ like they are ourselves.

I’ve learned in twelve years of marriage that “for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and health” takes time to learn and understand. I didn’t get it right away; I didn’t even get it early on; I still don’t completely get it. But I’m learning.

I realize, pardon the sports metaphor, that this whole “long term relationship” thing is about followthrough like shooting a basketball. Everyone shoots but not everyone scores. Anyone can pick up an orange basketball and shoot it, but it takes followthrough, the completion of the shot, to make it go in. Anyone can have sex, but it takes a parent to raise a child. Anyone can get married with the right credentials, but it takes hard work, determination, and forgiveness to make the marriage work.

Simon Signoret wrote that “Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years.” I’ve seen the threads grow in my marriage and the marriage of others. I’ve seen the commitment rise, the friendships deepen, the fabric of life grow softer with each struggle and each success.

It’s like our covenantal vows of membership, the words we’ll celebrate with new members today, and remember from our own vows. We will stand up and say together that “we will faithfully participate in the ministries of the church by our prayers, our presence, our gifts, our service, and our witness, that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ.” But we don’t always get it right! We aren’t always terrific at praying, at showing up at church, at giving back to God a tithe of what he has already given us, at using what God has given us for the community’s good, at sharing the good news of Jesus Christ with the people we meet.

Our unfaithfulness happens with our time, our spending, our emotions, our bodies, our love.

And yet, the most important story of Jesus and his “take” on adultery comes in John 8:1-11, to remind us of all manners of faithfulness, and God’s grace toward us when we are unfaithful.

“Jesus went across to Mount Olives, but he was soon back in the Temple again. Swarms of people came to him. He sat down and taught them.

The religion scholars and Pharisees led in a woman who had been caught in an act of adultery. They stood her in plain sight of everyone and said, ‘Teacher, this woman was caught red-handed in the act of adultery. Moses, in the Law, gives orders to stone such persons. What do you say?’ They were trying to trap him into saying something incriminating so they could bring charges against him.

Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger in the dirt. They kept at him, badgering him. He straightened up and said, ‘The sinless one among you, go first: Throw the stone.’ Bending down again, he wrote some more in the dirt.

Hearing that, they walked away, one after another, beginning with the oldest. The woman was left alone. Jesus stood up and spoke to her. ‘Woman, where are they? Does no one condemn you?’

‘No one, Master.’

‘Neither do I,’ said Jesus. ‘Go on your way. From now on, don’t sin.'”

In John 8, Jesus encounters the Pharisees. No, let’s be direct: the Pharisees show up again to try and trap Jesus in some inappropriate teaching or behavior. So, they bring a woman who has been caught in adultery to Jesus. It’s not just that they knew she had but that they caught her red…handed.  

Now, I don’t know exactly when I learned this, but I do know that it takes two to tango. So, where’s the man? And I do know that most people don’t do it publicly, so this implies that these religious leaders were so sure of their own lack of sin that they went places they shouldn’t go to find people sinning!

Again, patriarchal, sexist society here. The Pharisees think they came to trap Jesus, bringing this woman, and asking if Jesus still thinks stoning is appropriate for her crime?

But Jesus just draws in the dirt with his finger. We don’t know what he was doing: was he writing another God-quote? Was he doodling a funny picture of Peter fishing? Was he thinking about what was for dinner?

It says that they kept questioning him, that they were pestering him for an answer, and he finally stood up and said, “Whichever one of you has no sin, go ahead and throw the first stone.” And then he goes back to doodling, or writing, or…

Slowly, one by one, the men start to melt into the background: John writes that the older ones left first, until suddenly, Jesus was alone with the woman. He’s still drawing. He stands up again, looks around, and asks the woman where everyone else went?

Like Jesus didn’t know. Like he didn’t sense them leave. Like he didn’t know that there was no way they could throw a stone when he’d advised the sinless ones to throw stones.

Jesus makes the woman participate. He demands she answer, that she say that no one has condemned her. So that he can say back, “I don’t condemn you either. Go now and don’t sin anymore.”

Jesus doesn’t condone her adultery, or ours. Jesus doesn’t say it’s okay to be unfaithful in marriage or in church life or in loving other people. Jesus doesn’t say that sin is okay. In fact, he tells her, “don’t do it again!”

But Jesus does acknowledge that we all sin, that we’ve all been knocked down and that we all need help getting back up. Jesus chooses not to blast or to judge or to condemn but to respond with grace and love. Jesus tells this woman that she’s forgiven, and he wants us to know it, too.

Maybe you’ve been unfaithful in marriage. You’re forgiven, go and sin no more!

Maybe you have been unfaithful in your relationship with God. You’re forgiven, go and sin no more!

Maybe you have been unfaithful at living your life to the glory of God. You’re forgiven, go and sin no more!

Maybe you’ll hear our baptismal vows for the first time or the fifty-first time today and realize that you are called not to commit one form of adultery but to love the Lord your God with your whole heart and strength and mind. You are forgiven. Now go and sin no more!

You who were abandoned, and who did the abandoning; you who were lost and is now found; you who have been angry, and you who have been abused; you who have been addicted, and you who have been enabled– in the name of Jesus and in his holy church,

You are forgiven, no go and sin no more!

 

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Edge of Tomorrow: Dying To Live (Movie Review)

Posted on June 6, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

Doug Liman knows a thing or two about directing an action flick. Having served behind the camera for The Bourne Identity (the best of the series), Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and Jumper, he has that under his belt (he’s up for the Tom Clancy-inspired Splinter Cell next). But he also directed the verbally swervy, sarcastic Swingers, reminding us that he can do funny. Those trademarks lend themselves to the adaptation of Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s All You Need Is Kill, that finds soldiers fighting off aliens in Robotech/Pacific Rim-like suits, visually appealing to the Halo crowd. But this is a film that’s aware of its predecessors, willing to swing for the fences, and poke fun, all at the same time.

Edge of Tomorrow is Oblivion-meets-Groundhog Day. If you like either of those premises, then you’re good. (Unfortunately, several folks told me they weren’t interested just because of Tom Cruise, but for an actor who is that annoying in real life, his films are right up my alley!)

Communications officer Major William Cage (Cruise) tries to avoid active duty on the front line of the alien-human conflict, and ends up sent to serve under Bill Paxton’s Master Sergeant Bartolome. In Cage’s first excursion to beaches of France (hello, D-Day), Cage’s crew is wiped out, but he kills one of the “mimics” before he dies, and its blood enters his bloodstream. He begins to relive each day, finally hooking up with another ‘jumper,’ Emily Blunt’s Rita, who is the only other person to believe his story. She realizes they can use his ‘gift’ to find the mimics’ source of power, destroy it, and end the war.

Things get interesting as Cage progresses through each day, making it a little farther, trying different ways to discover ways around the mimics, like a kid reading a Choose Your Own Adventure. There’s plenty of thought about fate put into this one (from Bartolome’s monologue to the actual lives of Rita and Cage). But there’s also a question about what we would die for, fight for, suffer for, and live for. Cage is the only one who can see the truth of the future, making him prophetic, but his compulsion to change the future, to save the lives of those around him, makes him a Christ-figure in the process. He doesn’t just prophesy about the future of destruction, but he tries to avert it.

The visuals are stunning, like Saving Private Ryan with aliens, and Cruise and Blunt work well together in a story that doesn’t stress the romance but works their chemistry. The round-and-round days gets a little old by the end, but the overall vibe is both fun and thought-provoking (it’s certainly better than Godzilla!) Even if Cruise isn’t your cup ‘o tea, you should give this sci-fi mind bender a chance.

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Ten Words #6: To The Dark Side… (Sunday’s Sermon Today)

Posted on June 5, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

“You shall not murder.”- Exodus 20:13

The ways that different translations express Exodus 20:13 are fascinating. At the root of them are the ways we’ve taken the ancient Hebrew text and wrapped it around how we want to hear it.

“Don’t murder.” ‘Okay, got it. So as long as it’s defensively violent, it’s okay. But doing it just to do it is wrong.’

“You are not to murder.” ‘Okay, check. I will not plan out the death of another human being. But it’s probably okay if I kill them on the spot…’

“You shall not kill.” ‘Okay, so you’re saying I’m supposed to be a vegan? Maybe not….’

But there’s something about this “you shall not murder” that grabs my attention. ‘You’ the subject of the sentence are God’s people assembled at the foot of Mount Sinai; ‘you’ as God’s people are all of us sitting here; ‘you’ as God’s people is differentiated from ‘those people’ out there who don’t necessarily get it or agree.

“You” as in, not the I AM, not God. God decides who lives or dies. Not you. Not the you who is petty and fickle and frustrated and temperamental. Not the you who hasn’t had a Snickers yet and acts like a diva.

There’s a difference that God is making in how he sets it up. “Honor your father and mother” comes across like a universal rule (‘hey, it makes sense to take care of your parents’) while “you (my people) shall not murder,” tells us that God is calling his people, his followers, his folks, to something that will stand out from the way that the rest of the world works.

But, of course, Jesus shows up in Matthew 5:21-26 and he takes it to a whole other level…

In Matthew 5:21-26, he drops one of those “you have heard it said..” which always follows with a “but I tell you.” It’s the equivalent of ‘so you think you have it worked out, but…’ or ‘I don’t want you getting cocky about how awesome you are, so…”

Jesus says that the people know they aren’t supposed to murder anyone, but he’s telling them that they aren’t supposed to be angry with a brother or sister. Jesus says that anyone who says, “raca” or ‘you’re worthless, go to hell’ is in fact in danger of going to hell!

Last week, I asked us to consider if we’d still be alive based on the Old Testament law that said anyone who cursed or ‘hit’ his/her parents would be put to death. Many of us wouldn’t have made it out of our teenage years! But have you ever stopped and considered that Jesus held being angry with a brother or sister, biologically or in the body of Christ, that he held that equivalent to bringing hell into the equation?

“It’s getting hot in herrrrrrre….” but I don’t think that’s what Nelly meant!

Jesus says that instead of being angry, we should be about peace. He told us to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us.

Do I love my enemies, both known by name because they’re in relationship with me? Do I pray for those who persecute me, whether they are here or across the ocean, whether they are personal or nationally-related?

Do I recognize the power of my words in my interactions with others?

Tobymac, a Christian musician, has a great song called “Speak Life” that gets stuck in my head.

Some days, life feels perfect.
Other days it just ain’t workin.
The good, the bad, the right, the wrong
And everything in between.

Its crazy, amazing
We can turn a heart with the words we say.
Mountains crumble with every syllable.
Hope can live or die

So speak Life, speak Life.
To the deadest darkest night.
Speak life, speak Life.
When the sun wont shine and you don’t know why.
Look into the eyes of the brokenhearted;
Watch them come alive as soon as you speak hope,
You speak love, You speak Life.

Do we see that? Do we recognize how our lives impact others, for good or for bad, how our words can bring peace or violence, how it’s not just in the moment when the bullet fires that life is affected?

Jesus urges us to think ahead of time!

Jesus said, “Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. Do it while you are still together on the way, or your adversary may hand you over to the judge, and the judge may hand you over to the officer, and you may be thrown into prison.” That sounds like the DirecTV commercial! “You have cable so you stay at home. Because you stay at home, squirrels dig into your attic to get your trash. Because squirrels dig in, the electrical wiring gets chewed. Because the electrical wiring gets chewed, your house catches on fire. Because your house catches on fire…” Well, you get it.

Jesus doesn’t just say we should forgive the person we’re taking to court. He says we should forgive the person who is taking us to court. Whether we’ve done anything wrong or not, it doesn’t matter. But Jesus has pulled the rug back the whole way, past murder and actual physical violence, to the way we relate to other people when we’re settling conflict.

The truth is, we make excuses for why killing is okay. We have a ‘just war theology’ thanks to some of the writings of St. Augustine. We call things by different names, like “the war of Northern Aggression,” or announce that there are WMDs… but I’m getting sidetracked.

The truth is, that since there have been people, there has been murder. Cain killed Abel because he was jealous of the attention Abel got from God. It’s the first family unit on Earth, and we’ve already seen a murder. Jerry Springer rejoices!

Would it have been justifiable for Adam to kill Cain? Our capital punishment proponents think so. They’re still living under lex talionis from the Babylonian law of 1725 B.C.! That’s what Jesus was expressing when he said again, “you’ve heard it said an eye for an eye… but I say, But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.”

Whoa! Jesus is going up against thousands of years of tradition, and dare I say, the way that we as human beings are wired. We want justice. We watch movies to see the bad guy get his due. We want to be avenged when we are wronged.

But we imagine slights that aren’t there. We see stories about people beaten down over a traffic incident, and kids shot for a pair of shoes.

Jesus isn’t talking about not murdering, he’s talking about not letting it get to that point. He knows that the truth is that killing brings more killing. He knows that soldiers go off to war, trained to kill, and come home without support or an understanding of what to do next- just look at Fort Hood. Jesus knows that laws and judges don’t always get it right and that sometimes, that the system is racial, economic, and broken, that the system executes the wrong man.

Let that one sit there and percolate a little bit.

The same man who preached that we should turn the other cheek, that we shouldn’t murder, ends up the victim of capital punishment gone wrong…He’s killed instead of the terrorist Barabbas because people were politically opposed to him, he dies for our sins that he didn’t commit because he’s sinless, he suffers an agonizing death for no good reason.

But rather than fighting back, Jesus walks that lonely road because evil can’t stop evil, because two wrongs don’t make a right, because the only way violence will ever stop is if we choose to give life, to live in peace.

From the United Methodist Church’s Social Principles:

“Content, representations, pictures, scenes, [in the media] are often in a stark contrast to human and Christian values. We express disdain of dehumanizing portrayals, sensationalized through mass media ‘entertainment’ and ‘news.’ These practices degrade humankind and violate the teachings of Christ and the Bible… Instead of encouraging, motivating, and inspiring its audiences to adopt lifestyles based on the sanctity of life, the entertainment industry often advocates the opposite, painting a cynical picture of violence, abuse, greed, profanity, and a constant denigration of the family. For the sake of our human family, Christians must work together to halt this erosion of moral and ethical values in the world community. We reject the implicit message that conflicts can be resolved and just peace can be established by violence.”

And,

“We believe war is incompatible with the teachings and example of Christ. We therefore reject war as an instrument of national foreign policy. We oppose unilateral first/preemptive strike actions and strategies on the part of any government. As disciples of Christ, we are called to love our enemies, seek justice, and serve as reconcilers of conflict.”

We’re back to images of family, of love, of bearing peace into the world. Two of our current Methodist theologians, Stanley Hauerwas & Will Willimon, wrote, in The Truth about God: “Our time might be better spent wondering how we might change the church to be the sort of place that produces and supports nonviolent people.”

Am I nonviolent? Are you nonviolent? Can we take it a step further and say that we are actively making peace? Not avoiding conflict, or minimizing it, but actually moving toward peace? Can we claim that our words, our financial choices, our nonverbal behavior, our actions all breathe peace?

That we act loving toward our enemies?

That we share the good news of Jesus Christ?

Nowhere in the New Testament does it condone killing. No. Where.

Instead, it focuses on those images of family and “loving your neighbor” that are echoed in the Old Testament but which Jesus hammered home. Or rather, were hammered into him.

What is the opposite of “to kill”? It’s to make live, to bring to life.

God knew that the sanctity of life had been destroyed for the Israelites. They’d been slaves. They couldn’t get it. But we’ve been slaves, too. Slaves to our passion, our irritation, our belief in our own self-importance.

We need to pour water on fires, not more gasoline. We need more of the peace of Christ, the love of Jesus, the kingdom of God!

In I John 3:15-18, the writer explained his motivation for loving. First, he says, “Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him.” But then he gives his explanation of love: “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.”

It’s not enough to just not hit back, we’re supposed to act in love even when we don’t feel it. 

We’re supposed to go the extra mile. We’re supposed to love in the truth that we were loved first, that Jesus put his life where his words were, that we’re only trying to follow our leader. 

We know what the world expects, what our friends would do, what we feel like or want to do. But Jesus came to drive home the message, to remind us of the “You” God was speaking to in Exodus.

You, the redeemed, the created in the image of God, the loved, the children of, the ones who are called to bring on the kingdom of God.

You.

You, the next time someone cuts you off, pray that they and those around them would be kept safe by their driving.

You, the next time the waitress messes up your order, pray that she would make enough money to take care of her family, and then tip her like she’d done a great job.

You, the next time you go to call someone a fool or to “rip them a new one,” stop and pray for their wellbeing, consider their heart, recognize that you don’t know what they’re going through.

It sure beats the flames of hell.

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Laura McBride’s We Are Called To Rise: Facing Tragedy (Book Review)

Posted on June 4, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

Call it Crash with housewives and PTSD. Call it melodrama with politics and family dynamics mixed in. Call it whatever you want: Laura McBride delivers a stunning, compelling, soul-search-invoking debut about four disparate stories that collide in one explosive moment.

First, we meet Avis, a fiftyish woman who decides to rejuvenate her marriage just moments before her husband announces that he’s in love with a coworker. The social worker Roberta follows, who has a knack for seeking out the real hard cases and loving on them, motherly. Next up is the Albanian youth Bashkim, who lives with his grandparents, working in their ice cream-selling business and making the most of school. And finally, we meet Luis, the Mexican-American veteran of the war in Afghanistan, recuperating from wounds received.

For those of you who don’t get the Crash reference (the 2004 film starring Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Sandra Bullock, Terrence Howard, etc. about a group of L.A. folks representing the diverse population, know that these stories, while diverse and apparently unrelated, will suddenly come together in a way that demands we sit up and pay attention. All of them have pain to work through, in their immediate circles and in their growing community, but they will not deal with that pain in the same way. Some of them will talk it out; some of them will live it out; some of them will fight it out.

There are three kinds of people in the book, not limited to the four ‘main’ characters: the kind who ignore their pain, the kind who take their pain out on others, the kind who give up, and the kind who… rise. Have you heard the Dwayne Wade commercial about getting knocked down seven times, and getting up eight? The heroes of our story today are those who keep being punched in the face by life, at their own fault and at the fault of someone else’s free will, and refuse to not get up.

To be honest, McBride’s book is not my normal cup of tea (it’s neither a thriller nor a violent murder mystery!) But I am better for having read a testimony to the pain we wrestle with, the way we respond, and beauty of what happens when humanity shows the image in which it was made.

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Jonathan Holt’s The Abduction: The Rules Of War (Book Review)

Posted on June 3, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

Finishing a novel about a kidnapping, I found it disturbing to see the news stories play out about President Obama’s involvement in the trade of an American P.O.W. for Taliban prisoners, and the potential for Gitmo’s closing. A novel that may entertain, this is one of those books that will leave you questioning bigger issues that police investigations, more substantially than a Dan Brown fantasy. This is fiction than may just cause you to think.

A British advertising executive, Jonathan Holt delivers the second in his Carnivia Trilogy, The Abduction, a thriller with political implications that impact the whole world. Here, a young woman is kidnapped and subjected to CIA protocol interrogation/torture methods, shown over the internet to everyone in Italy, as part of a protest over the construction of a new American Army base. Holt’s characters, the U.S. Army’s Holly Boland and Carabinieri captain Kat Tapo, lead the investigation, but the ramifications of their investigation threaten the security of various political figures and military excursions.

Unfortunately, the characters that Holt uses to tell his story aren’t as interesting as the sum of their parts. We care about the kidnapped teenager, Mia, but we’re drowned with different players within the Catholic Church, the Italian government, the United States Army, the local Italian Carbinieri. We aren’t sure who exactly we should care about. But we care about the process, the freeing of Mia and the reasons behind the strange CIA-related messages and exploration.

All of that comes to a head quite sufficiently, even as we’ve wrapped the story and see that it has become a real-life topic again. But we don’t get enough of the Carnivia. We don’t see enough of these people to know what they’re really dealing with. It plays then like a movie script that we would expect to be fleshed out by the acting. For that, it suffers some aspects of writing there, but the political questions kept me involved.

What comes out is a question about “treating others as you want to be treated” or loving your neighbor as yourself. Is it okay to treat certain people, known terrorists or expected terrorists, with the brutal methods of the CIA? Would it be okay to treat a potential murder that way (a la Prisoners)? Who gets to decide who is treated that way or not? Or is it unacceptable to treat anyone that way, because it’s not okay (and very creepy) to treat a sixteen-year-old girl that way? Those are serious questions that Holt leaves us with, and challenges us to consider, long after our reading is done and the book has been put aside.

That’s the mark of a solid novel.

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@JohnePattison and @ERBKs Slow Church: Practice Sabbath In Church @Slowchurches

Posted on June 2, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

“Slow is the opposite [of fast, etc.]: calm, careful, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity”– C. Christopher Smith and John Pattison

Fighting what George Ritzer called the “McDonaldization” of society and church, pastors C. Christopher Smith and John Pattison deliver a look into what counterculture church might look like, as reflected in their home communities in Indianapolis and Portland. They quote sources from Pope Francis to Walter Bruggemann, sharing examples from coffee beans to local church life. Most of the book provides an overview of examples until they lock in on some practical ways in the end that churches can adapt.

Focusing on incarnational church over attractional church, they recognize that churches in communities can follow some of the same principles but can’t blueprint copy when it comes to experiencing healthy church in different areas. (One of the best quotes they use is from Warren Wiersbe: “You can never franchise the blessings of God.”) In fact, they flip The Prayer of Jabez (via Paul Sparks): “God, shrink our territory, and narrow our boundaries, that we might be a blessing to all.” It’s revolutionary stuff, right? But somehow, it’s as old as… Jesus.

The authors encourage us to examine questions that relate to our settings and our communities. What are barriers or causes of growth? What factors have we seen work elsewhere and what can we reproduce? Many of their examples are grassroots that grow, from sharing supper to the Eucharist in community– many of their examples are about food! One example highlights how you can’t enjoy coffee as a just a bean (it must be roasted, ground, and boiled), and compares it to the Eucharist, as stomped grapes and grinding/baking of wheat.

While much of this is practical, I appreciated the story vignettes most. My clear favorite is from Phil Kenneson’s church, from a Christmas Eve where a nearby fire caused his congregation to abandon actual worship services, and be church by opening itself up to firefighters, medics, those displaced and killed, etc. They went to work being the church, rather than just sitting back and watching the community around them. What would happen if we were more like that?

Overall, Slow Church plays out well for pastors and highly involved volunteers, but it may be too heady and detailed at times for just a Bible study. Andy Stanley’s book Deep and Wide may be more approachable, but you can’t pass on the opportunity to stop and consider what it would be like if we’d actually practice Sabbath and stop just talking about it.

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Maleficent: Man Is Evil (Movie Review)

Posted on May 30, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

Angelina Jolie is spectacular as the misunderstood fairy/witch, Maleficent, and the special effects provide some dazzling visuals, but the overall package fails to replace or even compete with the original Walt Disney film Sleeping Beauty (1959). To be fair, the original is my favorite “classic” Disney tale, but I left the theater today wondering, “what was the point?” That can never be a good thing when it comes to any work of art, remake or not.

In naive adolescence, the fairy Maleficent (Ella Purnell) lives at peace in the moors, where all of the magical creatures live in harmony (think Shrek’s swamp). In the neighboring land of the humans, the greedy king first attempts to wrestle Maleficent’s power away, and then places a bounty on her head. Her one-time friend and true love, Stefan (Sharlto Copley as an adult), grows up to be king, only after robbing her of her most special gift. This betrayal leads to the famous curse on Princess Aurora (Elle Fanning), “on her sixteenth birthday, she will prick her finger and fall into a deep sleep like death.”

The film doesn’t just provide us with a view of Maleficent’s motivation but it paints her as the victim of mankind’s (stress on the man) greed and avarice. She’s not really critiqued for the fact that the response to her betrayal is to curse a baby, or that she doesn’t intervene at times when she could to save lives. She’s the hero here, even when turning her pet raven/man, Diaval (Sam Riley), into the dragon from the end of the original story. To be clear, Stefan’s betrayal and descent into madness (caused by grief, shame) drives him farther from his daughter (Innocence, for this paradigm) and proves that he is the Evil that Maleficent warned Aurora of while she was living in the forest with the three, haplessly-overwhelmed fairies (yes, they’re color-coded here, too).

Again, there’s an agenda but not a point: Man is evil, and the older, more experienced woman must educate, protect, and nurture the younger woman. It deconstructs the family, breaks up the fairy tale ending (but not in the same reconstructive way as Frozen, which argues for female independence in a positive way), and tells a story that seems founded in bitterness and pain. I knew it would be different, but I found myself disturbed by the PG rating and agenda. This one isn’t family friendly (and you can take that several ways). It looks good but what’s lurking underneath isn’t anything I find admirable.

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A Million Ways To Die In The West: UndaunTED McFarlane Goes West

Posted on May 30, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

Seth McFarlane is a highly intelligent, clever, and often hilarious comedian, creator, and artist. Sure, he’s also crude, profane, and, at times, socially unacceptable, but if you’ve seen Ted (about Mark Wahlberg’s talking teddy bear friend) or the cartoon Family Guy, you’re aware. So, a western comedy called A Million Ways to Die in the West, produced by, directed by, written by, and starring McFarlane would seem to be all of the above, right? Unfortunately, it is most of the above, with the exception of… funny.

Sheepherder Albert Stark (McFarlane) isn’t particularly good at his job in 1882, and he doesn’t seem to have any of the normal characteristics you’d expect in a resilient westerner. In fact, he is, to quote Back to the Future III, “yella.” But when the Woman with No Name (she has a name, it’s Anna) (Charlize Theron) rides into town, escaping momentarily her good-for-nothing, bloodthirsty outlaw husband, Clinch (Liam Neeson), Stark’s life changes. For too long, Stark has hung onto a meaningless relationship with Louise (Amanda Seyfried, who seems to have been cast solely because of the size of her eyes), who “allowed him” to be happy, but who has now cast him off for the mustached Foy (an underused Neil Patrick Harris). The film’s intent seems to be to wind us up to the showdown between Stark and Foy, and finally Stark and Clinch, but along the way, it meanders back to the same three or four jokes, in effect beating an already dead horse.

Just to be clear: I have seen every western that’s arrived in theaters over the last thirtyish years, because I love the genre. There is something remarkably clever about McFarlane’s commentary on things like the medicinal outlook in 1882, the way that he critiques the interaction between the Native Americans and the European settlers, the shooting gallery featuring images of runaway slaves (a bit that provides the best gasp, and humor, of the film), the western genre itself. But these are way too few and far between in a film that drags on, and seems to hone in on gross out gags with sheep body parts and diarrhea. McFarlane knows funny and clever but he here plays to the lowest common denominator, and ends up doing neither western melodrama nor twenty-first century Blazing Saddles well.

There were several ‘religious’ moments that struck me as insightful, mostly because I think people of faith should learn from how others see them. I’ll lay them out below, and I don’t think they’ll steal much from the film (if I haven’t already begged you enough to save your money and go see X-Men: DOFP or even Godzilla or …anything.)

In the first, Stark talks about the town preacher who gunned down two men. The first man took offense and had to be put down, but the second was his son, who the preacher killed to keep from exacting revenge. Then he preached a sermon about ‘following through,’ that used his killing the two men as a significant example. We see McFarlane’s humor in the western ways of the world circa 1882, but we also understand that he’s saying that Christians can justify anything they want to if it’s expedient to their needs. Are we guilty as charged?

An ongoing conversation occurs between Stark’s friend Edward (Giovanni Ribisi) and the love of his life, Ruth (Sarah Silverman), who is a prostitute. There are side comments made about how Edward feels about Sarah’s occupation that are insightful/humorous the first two to three times, but become annoying by the eighth. But both Edward and Ruth are ‘professed Christians,’ and Ruth won’t have ‘relations’ with him until they’re married because God doesn’t want that. He continues to pressure her, she continues to demure. Take it out of the west, and you have a conversation between a bunch of young adult Christians about sex. There’s hypocrisy to go around, and it begs the question, “what has the church made sex about anyway?”

At one point in another ‘bit’ (because this seems to be a group of McFarlane sketches just sewn together around a western narrative), McFarlane’s Stark references a man having Parkinson’s. “What’s that?” Louise asks. “Oh, just another way God shows us that he loves us,” Stark replies. It’s noticeable in two ways I can see now: the first is that McFarlane perceives Christians as having a rose-colored view of suffering that doesn’t let them evaluate pain in a way that speaks to others, the second is that because there is suffering in the world, McFarlane dismisses that there could be a loving god. It’s an age-old argument, but one that seems much deeper (and more intimate) than most of the other jokes we get from him throughout the movie.

Overall, McFarlane fails to deliver but it begs the question: if you’re writing, producing, directing, and providing the majority of the acting, who’s going to pull you aside and say, “hey man, we should try this” or “that’s not really working”? In the end, maybe he tried too hard, did too much. Whatever the reason, he ends up with a giant mess of sheep…

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Ten Words #5: Family Matters

Posted on May 28, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

“Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.”–Exodus 20:12

“All stories come back to fathers and sons.” I read the quote somewhere in an exploration of narrative storytelling. For my purposes, I’ll realign it as “all stories have to do with parents and children,” but the point is still the same. We wrestle with those relationships, we grow out of them and into them, and learn them in new ways. We want to figure out our story.

This would have made a great Father’s Day sermon, but in the formation of the Ten Commandments, this fifth word came here and now, in between keeping the Sabbath holy (#4) and the order not to kill. It takes us from the words intended to help the Israelites, the recently freed slaves and all of us, to figure out how to follow God by loving him… to figuring out how to love God by loving others.

Honor your parents. It sounds so easy, so small, so minuscule- how could it matter enough to God to be one of “the Ten”?

This week, I read a great commencement speech. Maybe the best I’ve ever read, by a Navy Seal-turned-Admiral. This was his opening:

“The University’s slogan is, ‘What starts here changes the world.’

I have to admit—I kinda like it.

‘What starts here changes the world.’

Tonight there are almost 8,000 students graduating from UT.

That great paragon of analytical rigor, Ask.Com says that the average American will meet 10,000 people in their lifetime.

That’s a lot of folks.

But, if every one of you changed the lives of just ten people—and each one of those folks changed the lives of another ten people—just ten—then in five generations—125 years—the class of 2014 will have changed the lives of 800 million people.

800 million people—think of it—over twice the population of the United States. Go one more generation and you can change the entire population of the world—8 billion people.

If you think it’s hard to change the lives of ten people—change their lives forever—you’re wrong.

I saw it happen every day in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A young Army officer makes a decision to go left instead of right down a road in Baghdad and the ten soldiers in his squad are saved from close-in ambush.

In Kandahar province, Afghanistan, a non-commissioned officer from the Female Engagement Team senses something isn’t right and directs the infantry platoon away from a 500 pound IED, saving the lives of a dozen soldiers.

But, if you think about it, not only were these soldiers saved by the decisions of one person, but their children yet unborn—were also saved. And their children’s children—were saved.

Generations were saved by one decision—by one person.

But changing the world can happen anywhere and anyone can do it.”

The Admiral, William H. McRaven, went on to talk about how his instructors, all Vietnam vets, would inspect his bed making skills at SEAL camp. His bed making skills! He said that if it was done correctly, “the corners would be square, the covers pulled tight, the pillow centered just under the headboard and the extra blanket folded neatly at the foot of the rack—rack—that’s Navy talk for bed.”

An amazingly simple thing but it was required by these hardened instructors for their students. It was the first thing they completed each day, the first of the many little things that would add up to a single day of SEAL training, of a week of SEAL training, of not ringing the bell that signaled you were giving up, of becoming a Navy SEAL. Because, Admiral McRaven says, “If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.”

Maybe that’s why the Word about parents comes shoehorned in between Sabbath and “thou shall not kill.” Maybe it’s because the family unit is defined by the family, the most crucial building block of society, whether it’s the Jewish one or ours. Maybe it’s because if we can’t figure out where we come from then we can’t figure out where we’re going. Maybe because if we can’t do the seemingly “little” thing of honoring our parents, then we can’t get any of the other things done.

Let’s begin with “where do we come from?” I know, relatively speaking, where I came from.

I was born in Lancaster, PA, to Robert and Christine Sahms. For much of my adolescence, my dad was a biology teacher and my mom was a stay-at-home mom. But do those things define who they were or where I’m from?

No, I mean something more. I think our parents provide the nurture part of where we come from. I think the fact that the fact that if the church was open, we were there, provided me with an understanding of what my parents felt and thought about church. I think that the fact that we read the Bible before breakfast every day impacted the way I looked at the Bible, in community and as stories that mattered. I think that the fact that my parents saw taking care of shutins as what they should do opened my eyes to others in need.

I know our nature, who we are knit together biologically, matters, too, but our nurture, wow, our nurture matters for sure. But what happens when we get older? Do we continue along the way that we’ve been shown, or do we divert from it?

I know that there are decisions we have to make to follow or to change, but our decisions honor or dishonor our parents.

Honor. It’s a funny word. We talk about as an adjective- an honor guard or an honorary member. But honor is a word that means “to make heavy” or “weighty.” To honor our parents means to hold them in esteem, to give them a special place where we will hold them dear.

We often say that Jesus took the Ten Commandments farther, as we’ll see when we look at the Beatitudes starting in July. But Moses words just a chapter later, in Exodus 21:15-17, elaborate on these ideas about how the new nation of Israel was intent on creating a different view of taking care of ones elders: “Anyone who attacks their father or mother is to be put to death,” and “Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.” That makes the weightiness of the parents so much more: if you attack your parent (physical implied) or curse them (verbal abuse) you would be put to death in ancient Israel.

Do we value our parents that much?

Before the parents sit up a little straighter and take notes to pass on to their children (I see you grinning over there!): it’s not just children to parents. Malachi 4:6: “He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children.” Ephesians quotes the fifth word, right before 6:4, “Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.” The parents have the responsibility in following God to make sure that their example is worthy of being honored.

I heard the story of a little boy who sobbed on the way home after the baptism of his kid brother in church. His mom and dad asked him three times what was wrong, getting no reply, only more sobbing.  Finally, the boy replied: The preacher said he wanted us to be brought up in a Christian home, but I wanted to stay with you guys!” It seems they do actually pick up more than we think. That goes for the whole ‘cloud of witnesses’ that is the nature of adults who surround children in church.

Too often, we think it’s someone else’s time, someone else’s turn to lead. We think that we’ve paid our dues and now it’s someone else’s turn. Another story went like this.  Martin had just received his brand new drivers license. The family troops out to the driveway, and climbs in the car, where he is going to take them for a ride for the first time. Dad immediately heads for the back seat, directly behind the newly minted driver. “I’ll bet you’re back there to get a change of scenery after all those months of sitting in the front passenger seat teaching me how to drive,” says the beaming boy to his father. “Nope,” comes dad’s reply, “I’m gonna sit here and kick the back of your seat as you drive, just like you’ve been doing to me all these years.”

We don’t ever get to turn off the responsibility of being fathers and mothers, biologically or within our church family.

The fifth word doesn’t just say, “honor your dear old dad,” or “honor them until you’re grown.” It’s like my dad told me a long time ago: I’m always going to be your dad and you’re always going to be my son. It seems so simple but we sometimes lose sight of the depth of that relationship, of that mentoring, of that growth from caregiver/provider to fellow road-traveler and friend. (Although, you know, my dad still pays for dinner…)

It can’t be overstated. From a Biblical perspective, the family unit, as we’ll see again in the seventh word, is paramount to the understanding of a community’s survival. To love God is to be a family man or woman. To love God and love your family is to help build the kingdom of God on Earth. We see the flipside, the consequences of failure from Ezekiel’s perspective in Ezekiel 22:7-8: “In you they have treated father and mother with contempt; in you they have oppressed the foreigner and mistreated the fatherless and the widow. You have despised my holy things and desecrated my Sabbaths.” You may not be a parent but you are someone’s child!

Everything, everything, boils back to that relationship between parents and children. But boy, do we have a lot to learn about our kids! We have to learn what it means to teach them, what it means for them to hear us, and what it means when we actually listen to them. Here’s a typical interaction you might hear in my house, or any house with little boys…

My youngest is sent to bed. Five minutes later….

“Da-ad….”
“What?”
“I’m thirsty. Can you bring me a drink of water?”
“No. You had your chance. Lights out..”
Five minutes later:
“Da-aaaad…..”
“WHAT?”
“I’m THIRSTY. Can I have a drink of water??”
“I told you NO!” If you ask again, I’ll have to spank you!!”
Five minutes later……
“Daaa-aad…..”
“WHAT!”
“When you come in to spank me, can you bring a drink of water?”

My mother tells me any stubbornness I see in my children is just a reflection back at me. But I digress…

Before we go any further, I need to note that not all parent-child situations are the same. How do we relate to a parent who walked out on us when we were a child? Or drank too much? Or abused us verbally and tore us down? How do we honor that kind of relationship?

During the America’s Got Talent premiere for this season, a young man played the guitar and sang John Mayer’s “Waiting On The World To Change.” He talked about being shuffled from foster home to foster home, begging people to adopt him. He talked about how his parents ultimately stopped coming to their visitation periods at all, about how he felt like someone’s luggage. Sure, he’d been adopted by now and was clearly loved, but what does the Scripture say to him about honoring his birth parents?

Maybe it’s in forgiving them but in refusing to allow them to poorly treat us again.

Maybe it’s by being who we wish they would’ve been.

Maybe it’s in making sure that we care for those who lack the mothers and fathers that we wished we would have had.

I know I’ve had several conversations with grown children who longed to have that relationship restored. Several of college students met my dad over my years in campus ministry, and they wanted to know how to develop the kind of relationship I had with my dad. They wanted to know how to start the conversation with men who had never been the kind of father that they knew they should honor. And they came to understand that their faith was what could ultimately give them the foundation level to create a new family paradigm out of their old family structure.

It’s the way to healing built on the teachings of Jesus, underscored by the reliance on God’s words.

Jesus recognized that in God, our families are bigger than blood, as he says in Mark 3:33-35: “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked. Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.” Jesus held onto honoring his parents, the whole way to the cross, when he instructed John to watch after his mother upon Jesus’ death. He wasn’t booting his family to curb, but he was pointing toward a new family, founded in God’s love. His death was that seal that adopted us into the family of God, that claimed us as his brothers and sisters in God’s sight.

Stop and think about that adoption metaphor for what Jesus did on the cross. I’ve been thinking a lot about adoption lately. I have a good friend from high school who adopted and whose kids I watch grow up… through Facebook. Another minister in the conference and his wife just returned from China with their new baby boy. His wife blogs (my high school friend has ongoing commentary) about their experience: I see how what was rejected has been made new, has been claimed, has been restored, renewed, returned to the kind of family God had intended in the first place. Adoption: the metaphor for the way God loves you– he would pay any price, travel anywhere, endure anything, to bring you back.

God likes family metaphors for understanding love.

Jesus comes back to the parent relationship again in Mark 7:1-13. The Pharisees are stalking Jesus, trying to find a way to trick him into saying or doing something that goes against the law. They want to find a way that he messes up so that they can discredit him and the way that has gained popular attention. Today, they hop up and down and clap their hands because the disciples are, gasp, eating without washing their hands first!

Jesus doesn’t even bother responding to their question about “living according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with defiled hands?” He just quotes Isaiah back to them: “These people honor me with their lips,
 but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain;
 their teachings are merely human rules.’ You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions. You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions!”

Jesus is talking about the fifth word, about the fact that Moses handed down the strict consequences about what would happen to someone who disrespected their parents. But he also references Corban, a word for giving over some of their money or possessions to God, a status that likely was the equivalent of being ‘not taxable.’

So, if a son said that this amount of money was ‘corban,’ then it couldn’t be used to say, support his ailing parents, to pay for medicine or provide them with food. It was using the ‘holy,’ putting it on being obedient to God so that they wouldn’t actually have to spend the money to take care of their parents.

The Pharisees were taking their interpretation of something, their tradition, and making it more important than the other, original word handed down by God through Moses. They were encouraging grown children to pay into the synagogue coffers rather than care for their own families. They were allowing the elderly, those considered to be less worthy or valuable, to fend for themselves so that the synagogue itself would survive. Traditions can be dangerous, can’t they?

So can the insidious whisper that people are valuable as much as they can produce, put out, work hard, provide. Think about the way we ward off old age, the skin crèmes, the regimens, the anti-aging drugs, operations, and fixes that come along. It’s tied up in our mortality, and our understanding of self. We fear that we too might be “put out to pasture,” forgotten, or left behind.

That’s the situation that the newly freed Israelites found themselves in. A slave is only as good as his or her work abilities. The old, the weak, the infirm, they are cast off so that the resources necessary to care for those who can produce are maintained.

If we’re realistic, we can see that those ideas circulate through society in cycles. We can see that in our own communities. And the Ten Words show up and say, “you matter regardless of how old you are.” And Jesus echoes, “Respect your parents. Respect your children.”

And then Jesus, who refers to God, the Creator of the Universe, goes to the cross and says, “Daddy, Papa, Father, your will and not my will be done.” And he takes on the mission that his dad gives him, and he stays nailed to the cross when he could’ve gotten down, and he dies for you and me. In that moment, Jesus honored his Father.

So we return to the question: what can we do to honor our father and our mother?

-Recognize that we honor our parents by what we are and what we are not. It’s nature and nurture, versus nature and nurture, and some combination of all of the above. We, and our parents, are made in God’s image but fall into sin; no one is perfect. But what we learn from our parents’ example can help us to become who we’re supposed to be.

-Protect the independence of the aging. See things from their point of view. Refuse to look down on those with lost economic value. Visit those who can’t get out. Embrace our Methodist heritage of being “the priesthood of all believers” and carry the light of Christ into the homes of those who can’t seek it for themselves.

-Intentionally model and example what we believe for our children. Recognize that as parents, we should make sure we are honoring our children.

-Treat others as you would want to be treated if you were them. Complete the mission. Follow through with the best your parents have taught, and what your Heavenly Father has taught.

-Recognize that it’s not too late to get it right.

The Brothers Grimm always seem to be able to get to the heart of the matter. I want to share with you the parable of an old man and his grandson.

There was once a very old man, whose eyes had become dim, his ears dull of hearing, his knees trembled, and when he sat at table he could hardly hold the spoon, and spilt the broth upon the table-cloth or let it run out of his mouth. His son and his son’s wife were disgusted at this, so the old grandfather at last had to sit in the corner behind the stove, and they gave him his food in an earthenware bowl, and not even enough of it. And he used to look towards the table with his eyes full of tears. Once, too, his trembling hands could not hold the bowl, and it fell to the ground and broke. The young wife scolded him, but he said nothing and only sighed. Then they brought him a wooden bowl for a few half-pence, out of which he had to eat.

They were once sitting thus when the little grandson of four years old began to gather together some bits of wood upon the ground. ’What are you doing there?’ asked the father. ’I am making a little trough,’ answered the child, ’for father and mother to eat out of when I am big.’

The man and his wife looked at each other for a while, and presently began to cry. Then they took the old grandfather to the table, and henceforth always let him eat with them, and likewise said nothing if he did spill a little of anything.

There’s a word of peace there, wrapped in the Brothers Grimm wisdom for those of us who have not always been the children that we wanted to be. We haven’t always respected our parents, regardless of what kind of role models they were; we haven’t always honored our Heavenly Father either. But the thing about this parable, about our lives in general, is that there’s always a chance to change.

If Jesus died on the cross for our sins, if the second thief could turn to Jesus on the cross to repent, if the death of Jesus on the cross is part of our final adoption into God’s family, then mixed up in this glorious mystery is one final truth: what we do next matters the most.

Honor your father and mother today.

Forgive them for their mistakes.

Care for them in their need.

Care for the elders of the church.

Lift high those who have been neglected by others, who are left to fend for themselves.

Carry your family name, that of your earthly parents and your heavenly one.

May your parents be ‘heavy’ to you as you grow into the person you have always been intended to be.

For more on the Ten Commandments, check out Sean Gladding’s book, Ten.

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