5/9/54

Scripture: Matthew 7: 15-29

Text: Matthew 7: 25; .... “It fell not, for it was founded upon a rock.”

The proclamation of Mother’s Day is recent, as history goes. It started in the imagination of one woman who wished to honor her mother. She thought that others might like to do so, in a special way, on a special day. The idea swiftly caught fire in other imaginations until it received national recognition in this country. For the past forty years, since 1914, it has been marked each year by presidential proclamation on the second Sunday of May.

More recently still, the day has been expanded, in the thinking of many, into a “Festival of the Christian Family.” For there are no mothers unless there are children; and there are no wives unless there are husbands. And when a mother has any very significant recognition, it usually comes from her family.

The true Christian Mother is no self-centered individual. And many is the mother who has known rebellion in her heart over the sentimental surge of some Mother’s Day themes. She does not want to be put up on some emotional pedestal. She usually prefers to have the circle widened to embrace the whole family. An excellent way, then, to remember Mother’s Day, and to do honor to good mothers, is to recognize the holiness of all family life. The survival of the race depends upon the family. And the survival of our way of life depends on the religious quality of family life. We Christians must be Christian families! If homes are sound there is hope for our culture. If homes are unsound, there is very little hope.

This past week, I heard a Moravian minister who had escaped from Communist Russia, say that the communist training of Russian children begins at the age of 28 days. On the 28th day after her child is born, said he, the Russian mother must go back to her work in the Russian industrial life, leaving the baby in a communist nursery. And there, the very way a baby is wrapped and put in the same bed with several other babies in a pattern of strict conformity, submerges the individual and begins the process of making him part of the social machine.

Our way of life calls for a kind of responsible individuality that must be fostered chiefly in the home. It is tremendously important that our boys and girls learn to say “yes” and to go ahead with initiative and willingness. It is equally important for them to learn to say “no,” and to say it on solid grounds. Loyalty to decency and truth is emotionally and spiritually grown in the home as it can be fostered nowhere else. Character is not grown on “give-away” programs. The need of our time, or of any time, is not the kind of education that merely informs the mind about right behavior, but fathers and mothers whose practice exhibits right behavior.

In that delightful play, “The Green Pastures,” which was expanded from Roark Bradford’s “Ole Man Adam and All His Children,” the Lord is heard to remark: “Being parents ain’t no bed of roses.” The principles of right living have to be as constantly cultivated in growing lives as has any garden to be cultivated. If the gardener is lazy or ineffective, there will be weeds and stunted flowers as sure as the sun shines. If the gardener is industrious and effective, working with firmness and with a love for his growing things, the plants cultivated will bloom and come to bountifully-satisfying fruition.

Family life needs be built on some firm foundations. One of Jesus’ finest stories likens one who hears his words, and does their meaning, to a man who built his house on solid rock. And one who pays no attention for Jesus’ words is likened to a man who builds upon sand. The two builders of Jesus’ short, pointed story, each built in a water course, that is a place that could be flooded, as many river bottoms are. One built without foundations -- just set the house on the sand. One dug deep until he could set the foundation on solid rock. When flood waters came, the house built on sand was washed away. The house which rested deep upon the rock withstood the flood. [Matthew 7: 24-27].

Every house is tested. Every life is tested. Things may go along quite easily for a while. But storms inevitably come. Summer gives place to rugged winter. The house had better be well built, of good materials, of the finest workmanship, on solid foundation. Jesus had served long enough as a carpenter to know whereof he spoke.

There is a story told of an eccentric rich man who engaged a builder to erect a house. It was to be the finest house the builder had ever dreamed of building. No expense was to be spared. As the house was finished, the builder was well pleased with his work, until the rich man said to him, “The house is yours, but you must live in it.” Then the builder, staring at him, realized how much better he could have built. A family must live in what the members build together. It ought to be good.

A family ought to originate in more than just mutual attraction. Young man and young woman meet. After each has met countless others, this particular pair fall in love with each other. They like to be in each other’s presence. The decide to be married. They are thrilled with the sheer ecstasy of being husband and wife. All of that has its proper place in the scheme of life.

(1) But they need to build a sense of togetherness as they plan to accomplish something together. The love that really holds a home together is not al all dependent on physical attractiveness. It is not dependent on the age, or financial competence of the family. It is not even dependent on complete agreement in judgment or opinion. But it does depend on being together in mind and spirit. The failure to be together shows up sharply in explosions that reveal nothing deeper than self-interest. A fellow was hailed into court on a charge of deserting his wife. When the judge confronted him with the charge, he replied: “Your honor, if you knew that woman as I do, you wouldn’t call me a deserter. I’m a refugee.” No compulsion could make a home out of those ingredients!

Homes are not held together by romance alone. The love depicted by many a conventional movie is altogether false -- as are the lives of some of the actors. One writer remarked: “It is easy to make twenty men fall in love with you in one year.” Well, that is a form of attraction, but it is not real love. That same female writer received this answer to her remark when a friend replied: “That is nothing. But to have the love of one man for twenty years --- that is achievement!”

It is the kind of love that likes to be together, facing forward, that builds a home.

One might suppose that a home was breaking up when such a tragedy as this appeared to one couple. Hans and Gertrude Hornbostel stood in the flower-decorated room of an isolation ward in a San Francisco hospital. They knew then that Gertrude had contracted leprosy. Major Hornbostel was a veteran of two wars and had survived the Bataan Death March. He did not have leprosy. But he planned to enter the leprosarium himself, he said, so that he and his wife might end their days on earth together. No dread disease was breaking up that home! They were together in spirit, and they planned to continue together.

There is many a heavy load to be carried together by husband and wife, by parents and children.

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Do you remember the tale, told by Rufus Jones, about a blacksmith in a Maine town of a couple of generations ago? The smith, though very strong, was very short of stature and very humble-minded. He fell deeply in love with the fairest and tallest girl in town, but for months on end kept his secret locked in his heart. One day the girl herself came to his shop to have something made. He pounded it out upon his anvil. She was so appreciative that he threw caution to the winds and proposed to her then and there. She accepted him on the spot. Whereupon he leaped up on his anvil and kissed her. Then he asked her to walk with him, which she did. After a while, he asked her if he might kiss her again, but she refused. “Not right out here in public,” she said. “Well, then,” he remarked, “if there isn’t going to be any more kissing, I am not going to carry this anvil any farther!”

There’s many an anvil to be carried in the average home -- daily tasks, weekly chores, illness, the crippling of age, bereavement, worries and frets and cares. If the family carries those together there will be no dropping of an anvil, but a rewarding sharing in life that is not jealous nor boastful, not arrogant or proud, not irritable or resentful, but rejoicing in the right. The love that grows out of planning and acting together, out of working together and playing together, out of praying and serving together -- that love will bear all things; believe in, hope in, endure all things. That love never fails. [I Corinthians 13]. It holds a home together. The family that learns the joy of being together needs more than the determination to be that kind of family.

(2) Its members need the reminder that “What God has joined together: no man is to put asunder.” There is food for thought and hope in some studies made that show that couples who attend church regularly rate themselves about 60% above the general average of all marriages in their happiness. And a survey of 12,000 folk in Maryland disclosed that non-religious couples were three times as likely to end up in divorce as religious couples.

Some homes have a weekly struggle in making up their minds to go to church, or not to go. It’s too easy to lose that kind of struggle! It is far better to say, as one mother wrote of her household, “Our family always goes to church.” They did -- and do! And they are a happy, balanced, socially effective family. The love of God, revealed in Jesus Christ, about which we are repeatedly reminded, and in which we are continually nourished in church, holds homes together. It is the stuff of which solid foundations are made.

(3) And then there is prayer. We take prayer for granted -- or we don’t -- until we are reminded by some deep or great soul how necessary is prayer and what a power it is. Judge Harold Medina became nationally known as the man who presided over the communist trial in 1949. He is deservedly known as author of numerous books and articles on jurisprudence. He might also well be known as the kind of man who could and did give up a $100,000-a-year private practice as a trial lawyer for a post as Federal Judge paying $15,000 a year. The judge believes that justice has a deeply spiritual quality; that no judge should be ashamed to seek guidance and strength from the Almighty; nor should he be abashed at acknowledging such a source of strength. He affirms that he prays regularly. He says that he remembers only once in his life that he forgot his prayers at bed time, and that was in the confusion of his first day at boarding school. He relies on prayer very earnestly and practically.

A woman was brought before him charged with rifling someone’s security checks from a mail box. She was obviously with child. She burst out with a tongue-lashing that was a work of art! Would not anyone sitting on the bench be justified in holding her in contempt, or in adding to the severity of her sentence? Judge Medina made up his mind that it would not be right to sentence her in his frame of mind on that day. So he delayed sentence, over her vigorous protest, for a week. Sunday, he sat in church, where he is a devout Episcopal layman. The rector paused in the services so that every person present could offer his own prayer for what concerned himself most deeply. Judge Medina prayed for that woman prisoner, fervently, earnestly. A day or two later, he faced her again from his bench, told her that he had prayed for her in church, and gave her a suspended sentence. He is sure that he was restrained from personal harshness, that he was guided in his decision; and that there is very little chance that woman will be in his court, or any other, again.

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During the trial of the Communists, when it took him a long time to realize what they were trying to do to him in wearing him down to a point where he might make a legal mistake, he relied on prayer for guidance and strength. He was calm and firm in dangerous situations, restrained under sever provocation, determined when sentences for contempt were necessary. One day, when the trial had gone on for months, he left the courtroom to lie down, not knowing for sure if he could ever go back. But, after ten or fifteen minutes, he did go back, refreshed and renewed for the task. And he gained in strength from that time on, as a result of the help that came to him through prayer.

What prayer can do for one person, it can do for families that will pray together at meal times and on other occasions, as well as in their individual lives. A Christian home is best founded upon the bed rock of fellowship, of depending upon God, and of prayer.

[editor’s note: this seems an abrupt ending to this sermon; also, the date below is added in pencil (the text is in ink) and has a question mark with it.]

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?Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, May 9, 1954.