God’s Family Values
January 25, 20916
By: James L. Brewer-Calvert
Singer songwriter Graham Nash was moved by a photograph taken by Diane Arbus that she entitled Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, New York City (1962). Nash recognized a spiritual correlation between Diana Arbus’ photo of a child playing with a violent toy and Nash’s own hope that parents become mindful of the values we model.
Inspired, Graham Nash wrote a song called “Teach Your Children” that serves as a contemporary spiritual psalm for passing on ethical values. His song is a prayer for peaceful means and ends; it’s an affirmation that our dreams are to be shared with the next generation down as well as up. Nash recognized that parents have a social responsibility to emulate, instruct and inform young people what it means to be love incarnate. Nash wrote these timeless words that resonate from Berkeley to Baltimore to Baghdad:
You, who are on the road must have a code that you can live by.
And so become yourself because the past is just a good bye.
Teach your children well, their father’s hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams, the one they fix, the one you’ll know by.
Don’t you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.
The Apostle Paul speaks of what is to be valued and embodied in families, in church, in the wider community. At the center of all that we do and hold dear and are called to become is love. He writes in Colossians 3: 12-14, “As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.”
Clothe yourself with love. Be bound to everything and everyone in every land in perfect harmony. Sounds like a Coca-Cola jingle from the early 1970s, yet in fact there is much truth here. The love of Christ has already broken down the walls that divide and the sin that separates and the darkness that stymies our vision. Love has already won the day. All that is left is for us to live into our true calling to practice God’s family values. We can do this; we can be this. May our story be transformed into God’s story.
One Sunday morning elder Yolanda Lewellyn prayed at the Communion Table for the Bread. Yolanda Lewellyn said – and here I paraphrase: “God, help us to love one another. Remind us that we don’t get to pick and choose the individuals or groups that we love.” The Good News of the Gospel is and should be infuriating! Jesus teaches his children that the greatest family value is to love one another, to love our enemies, to love even those people and groups whom we don’t pick and choose to love.
A buddy shared a story about way back when his son was a rebellious teenager. He wanted to give his boy a piece of his mind, and was on the way to do so when he bumped into a wise mother in his church. She listened to him rant and rave as he got heated up for the confrontation. Then she said, “I wonder what God is trying to teach you through your son.” Her wisdom and prayerful pondering gave him reason to pause and reflect. He prayed for God to show him a lesson he needed to learn, rather than trying to teach his son a lesson. Today the father reflects and recognizes how much he and his son are alike. He knows now that Jesus opened his mind to see how sometimes the folks whom we perceive to be the most difficult to deal with might actually be very much just like us.
He admits today what he could not in the heat of the moment: sometimes we react so strongly to particular people because deep down inside we can see in them the ugly side of our self, the side we ignore and keep in the shadow places. I wonder if this is what keeps us from loving our enemies, from loving those individuals and groups whom we might not pick and choose to love. I wonder if we fear that they might be more like us than we care to admit or recognize or confess. And what happens when we ask ourselves the wise mother’s question, the woman who was clothed in love, who gently pondered, “I wonder what God is trying to teach you through your relationship.”
During premarital counseling I go over core family values that enhance marriages and relationships, values that can only take root through the discipline of practice. For example:
Go out at least one evening a month.
Pick your battles.
Hold doors open for other people.
Don’t let the sun set on your anger.
Work with whomever God sends.
Pick up the tab for men and women in uniform.
Connect with a cause greater than yourself.
Don’t pull up the drawbridge after you are across (in other words, look around and help those who get left behind or left out).
In all circumstances, give God thanks.
When I was in high school I returned home with a story to share. My mother started to spread fresh sheets on a bed while I prattled on. When I finally paused to take a breath she said, “James, there are three kinds of men. One will make the bed himself. The second will make the bed with his spouse. The third will watch while someone else makes the bed. Which one do you want to be?” I got the hint and pitched in. Family values like pitching in, working as a team, not airing one’s dirty laundry in the street or on social media, have shaped us, hopefully for the better.
I imagine that you have stories of teachable moments and life lessons that altered daily behaviors and roads you travelled. Odds are high that we could (and should) sit around and share a story or two about how we learned the code we live by, thanks to God and the tough love and tender mercies of those who helped form us. Family values that have depth and breadth, that resonate with meaning and purpose, that share an ethical core and practical application, share one thing in common: love.
As always, First Christian Church of Decatur, I am delighted to be your pastor. Shalom, James