2/4/62

Scripture: Exodus 20: 1-6.

Today, we look forward to a family evening. At 5: 30 PM we shall gather, as families, for potluck supper. Old and young will be in the same room, at the same meal. Then we will give our attention to some aspects of the church’s mission, as we listen to our Conference minister.

We do not have too many of these family occasions. Perhaps there should be more of them. At any rate it is good that we can come together. It is good that whole families can often get to Sunday morning worship together.

Some have remarked that the American family is in trouble. Some do not realize it. But parents who don’t realize it from their own experience soon hear about it. For we are blasted by a steady, hot stream of advice coming out of such mass media as popular magazines, newspapers, books, television and radio. The advice may come from a child guidance "expert;" or it may come from some successful television performer; or from a familiar radio voice. But from whoever or wherever it comes, it usually amounts to the same thing: an attempt to help troubled families to solve their problems by showing how happiness can be achieved. Some of the advice is good. Much of it is! But the very quantity of it may have produced more problems than it solves.

Message-senders include people who represent product Y, or candidate X, or corporation B. Publications, perhaps to enhance their sales success, bring further messages concerning emotional health, child rearing, family happiness, home life. The effort to "break through" to the family often creates a further curtain of distraction. Today’s couples are advised that:

*couples should spend more time doing nothing;

*homes can be painted, wired or rewired, floored, papered, or re-roofed by the man of the house, or his wife, in a few spare-time hours.

*every couple should save money.

*every couple should borrow money.

*couples should read more books instead of always "doing" things.

*parents should take a more active interest in the affairs of the community.

*children suffer from neglect.

*children need more time to themselves.

*children thrive in quiet, non-tension-producing homes.

*children must learn to deal with problems and crises.

and so on!

All of this unceasing noise produces plenty of confusion in the family that listens to it. But most listeners are more profoundly confused because happy, prosperous homes are promised to the family that will heed proper advice. And yet what is promised does not come true, no matter how fully the advice is followed. For the goal itself is wrong! If happiness is an end in itself, it vanishes when approached in this way!

Happiness may come as a by-product of faithful integrity. If citizens are dealing justly with one another; if they are making peace with one another; if, as Christians, they acknowledge the God of goodness, they may find themselves happy. But we live in a land that is, in many respects, unhappy; in a time that is not happy. It is a time of social unease.

A couple may choose to escape some of the unease. If they feel that television, though occasionally offering a good and profitable program is generally so filled with non-essential, even flimsy or cheap programming that they would prefer to avoid it, they can decide not to have a television set. But escape is not as simple as that. They live in a community of neighbors. And their neighbors watch television a staggering number of hours each week. Those neighbors are the couple’s fellow citizens, fellow workers, fellow church members. And the couple’s children go to school with the children of the television-watchers. The influence of television can not be avoided by such deliberate choice.

Neither can we escape racial prejudice, economic disorder, international tensions, or the permanent threat of thermonuclear warfare. Perhaps we are just awakening to the fact that we belong not only to families, but to a people; and, more than that, to the human race as a whole. Our world-wide togetherness is unprecedented in history!

It may be that families can find, in the free advice that comes their way, some means for reducing some emotional tension. But nevertheless families do continue to live in a world with huge tension-producing capacity. And if we are to mature as persons, this becomes not a means for evading our multiple responsibilities, but for accepting them and suffering through them!

Families have to accept their citizenship in their community, nation and world. This is the context in which life has to be lived. The home, therefore, is not exactly an island of happiness existing in isolation from the tumult of the world’s change. The home is in the tumult, feels the tensions, shares the sadness and the anxiety and the hope of the whole world.

For baptized, communicating, believing Christians, it is not enough merely to have a goal of family happiness. For Christians believe that Jesus Christ has restored them to their proper humanity. They take his life as a fitting description of true human life --- not the view of life current in many magazines and papers. For the "pursuit of happiness" as a goal may eclipse major sections of Christian obligation.

Here is an illustration. A midwestern community discovered that a housing development was going to be built with a specific number of houses to be sold to Negro families. Being a dominantly white community, it was outraged by the idea. Many were sure that property values would deteriorate. A plan was quickly proposed to use the land on which the development was to be built for a city park. At the next election, the bond issue for purchase and development of the land into a park was overwhelmingly passed by the voters. The citizens spent half a million dollars for that park which they had no previous notion of acquiring, in order to pursue the happiness of remaining an all-white community.

Will their children, who run through the park, play on the swings, and build in the sand boxes, be really happy when they know the background of their parents’ action? Hardly, when they realize that, from the standpoint of Christian faith, some fundamental human obligations were evaded.

Christians belong to the community of faithful people who exist by faith. They belong to it first of all --- before they belong to each other as husband and wife or as parent and child. Martin Niemoller knew that he belonged there. And, because he would acknowledge no Fuhrer but God, it cost him 8 long years in prison.

One’s very loyalty to God can be a prime source of tension in the kind of world in which we live. "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me." [Exodus 20: 2-3]. This is the way the God of the Biblical community addressed his people. He identifies himself as the Deliverer of His people, and the Teacher of the community He has delivered.

The Christians know that God alone is God. The Christian can not acknowledge local idols as God. The Christian takes his place in the community of faith -- often against the community of many faiths in many gods. And this is not necessarily any way to win popularity or to achieve what is popularly called the "good life."

Far too much attention has been given to the family and its ills. Its problems are too widely advertised; its secret frustrations too often publicly uncovered. It is true that people need some insight into the unconscious nature by which they act. This kind of knowledge can be imparted by specialists. But being alerted all the time makes husbands and wives dependent on the answer-makers and the problem-solvers. With so much living to accomplish, and so many pressures to withstand, they are forced by modern culture to take on the additional burden of knowing how to "solve emotional problems." They and their children become looked at, analyzed, inspected, thought about. And the introspective self examination continues to their hurt.

If the energies of the whole country be mobilized to "solidify family life," the efforts are self-defeating because family life can not be ordered around that way. The more the pressure is applied, the less stable the family becomes. Christians live among a people which honors many goals. And in this idolatrous culture the radical character of the Biblical faith is diluted. Secularism may triumph over, and wipe out, faith in God.

But to the Christian, there is one God --- not "a" God; not "my" God; but God. Elton Trueblood underlines this priority. There is no such thing as a "Nordic God." No "Nordic God" exists, or could exist. There is no such thing as a "white man’s God" or the "American God." There is only God. And any possessive pronoun is out of order. A man does not worship his God. Trueblood finds offensive the popular question, "Do you believe there is a God?" Why the article? To talk about a God is to be a million miles away from the brave men and women who believe in God and worship him in trust and without reservation.

The real believer in God has a basis for living which is outside his subjective standards. Living is dangerous without God! John Bennett has said that "Nothing in the world is more dangerous or more false than a situation where a thing comes to be regarded as true or right if only a dictator or minister of propaganda says it often enough."

The most dangerous of all philosophical ideas in our time is that of ethical subjectivism, according to which right is merely our own human creation and not part of the objective order. This is popularly expressed and supposedly upheld by the banal quotation: "There’s nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." The adherent of this philosophy has no logical defense against tyranny. But the believer in God does have such a defense. For, to him, the whole world of experience is subject to the regulation of God. Cruelty to a child, then, is not evil because the mores of today says it is evil. It is evil because this is God’s world, and every child, made in His image, is infinitely precious.

The close connection between the doctrine of human rights, especially the doctrine of human equality, and ultimate therein is well illustrated in the ancient account of Naboth’s vineyard. This is the story of a poor man whose ancestral land is coveted by King Ahab. Ahab wanted Naboth’s land and tried to buy it. But Naboth declined to sell it or barter it. Ahab was naturally much frustrated. Then Queen Jezebel took a hand. She arranged a false accusation against Naboth, with a farcical trial, and had him stoned to death. That, supposedly, took care of him.

Then Ahab, supposing all barriers had been removed, went to Naboth’s vineyard to take possession of the land. But he was mistaken in supposing that his acquiescence in his wife’s deceit and cruelty had solved the problem. To his amazement and discomfiture, he found the prophet, Elijah, coming to meet him in the vineyard. King Ahab asked: "Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?" And Elijah answered, "I have found thee." [I Kings 21: 1-20].

Actually this is the foundation of the democracy we claim to prize. There was a limitation on the wanton power of the sovereign because there was something superior to the king! And that "something" was the objective moral law which the government could not make nor unmake. It was the holy will of God, which the prophet sought courageously to represent. The prophet was the natural enemy of the oppressor. As soon as this was recognized, a limit was set upon the dominion of man over man.

This story explains the fundamental basis of our democracy, because it shows the valid sense in which people are equal. Ahab and Naboth were not equal in wealth or power. But they were equal before the objective moral law, and both accountable to it.

It is true that even in our wonderful land, people are not equal in most ways! We are not equal in size, color, sex, language, abilities. Apart from God, there is no equality at all. But in God there is equality in a truly profound sense. For, before God, people are equal in that all are equally accountable. God is Gatherer of the humble and of the proud; the well-known and the unknown. Before one God, all are equally accountable.

Therefore, parents are first of all people; and if Christians, Christian people. Likewise children. As, individually, one by one, they hear the summons of faith and respond moment by moment to the Lord of the faithful community, they come to themselves and to their true life.

True men and women become great lovers and great parents not because they work so hard at it, but because they are primarily committed to the life of faith. In this way happiness and internal security just happen -- like a gift and as a matter of course, rather than like something to be sought and seized.

So let every member of every Christian family seek the good news about all else --- good news that God the Creator is God the Deliverer. And He is interested in nothing quite so much as the peace and joy of all His creatures. Knowing this, a family can be ready for anything.

Amen.

-----------------------

Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, February 4, 1962.