Show Notes
Genesis 21:8-21 | Psalm 86:1-10, 16-17 | Romans 6:1b-11 | Matthew 10:24-39
Chapters
- (00:00:00) - Family and the Questions of Father's Day
- (00:09:30) - When Parents Curate a Little Religion
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Lord christ.
[00:00:11] Alright, so we have a story from Genesis about Father Abraham abandoning one of his children to die in the wilderness.
[00:00:21] And then we have our Lord Jesus saying he has not come to bring peace, but a sword.
[00:00:30] He has come to divide man against his father.
[00:00:36] So happy Father's Day everybody.
[00:00:40] The church is here to just lift your spirits and trigger all of us with father related trauma.
[00:00:51] What's the deal?
[00:00:53] What's going on here?
[00:00:56] What does Jesus have against families? Aren't families pretty good generally speaking? I mean, I don't know, they can be a mixed bag, I guess.
[00:01:04] But isn't family like the thing that we hold the most dear in life? You know, whenever you go and talk to people at the end of their life, what do they always say? They always say, you know what I give, what I'm most grateful for is my family. I wish I would have spent more time with my family. Isn't. Isn't family the kind of loyalty that we feel the most deeply? Isn't it the kind of bedrock of our identity?
[00:01:31] Jesus kind of says no. It seems like Jesus is kind of calling that into question. And that can be a little bit hard for us to hear.
[00:01:44] Maybe especially on days like Father's Day.
[00:01:50] Jesus is in some sense saying that the gospel is something, if you let it, if you let that seed be planted in your heart, it is planted in a place that is deeper than any of your other loyalties or identity markers.
[00:02:13] That our identity as followers of Jesus is actually the thing at the very center of us.
[00:02:24] You know, if each of our lives are kind of the rings of the tree.
[00:02:29] I think Jesus is challenging us to consider that that innermost ring is determined by him.
[00:02:37] You know, when we baptize somebody, this is true kind of across denominations. When we baptize somebody, you know, we're taught as pastors that you're not supposed to say the person's last name because God doesn't care what family you come from.
[00:02:58] Not in that way, but actually part of being a follower of Jesus is to come into a different family.
[00:03:08] It's not necessarily to leave the one that you started with, but it is at least also to become part of a different family. You know, the Christians from the very first century made this very bizarre decision.
[00:03:19] They made the decision to start calling one another brothers and sisters. We have these great kind of ancient documents from the first and second century of kind of Roman imperial reporter people reporting back to the Emperor, trying to make sense of what this new sect called Christianity is.
[00:03:40] And one of the things that they Say is that they think. I think that these people that call themselves Jesus followers, I think they're really into incest because I hear them all call each other brothers and sisters. I think they all might be related.
[00:03:59] It was a really bizarre decision. But it is a tradition that has continued into today that we call one another brothers and sisters. When I'm preparing young kids to be baptized, something that I often tell them is that if they're ever in a. If they're ever lost in a foreign city, if they ever. Even if they get into a time machine and they go a thousand years in the future or in the past and they feel scared and they don't know what to do, the best thing that they can do is to go find a church, because there are people there that are your brothers and sisters, people there that are bound to you through baptism and have already promised to help you.
[00:04:38] When we baptize people, what we are saying is that we are now giving this person their most fundamental identity. You know that reading from Romans, following Christ is not for the faint of heart. Following Christ is about dying and rising again. That's how dramatic that identity shift can be.
[00:05:03] It's a real challenge.
[00:05:05] It's a real challenge.
[00:05:07] It's something that, if we let that seed grow, has the risk of changing absolutely everything about us.
[00:05:15] Think for a second about how that kind of teaching would land on the ancient worldview. So think about the family unit in the ancient world. What is a family for? If you're living in the first century, what is the point of it? The point of it is mainly to secure economic stability into the future through the male line.
[00:05:42] So if you were not born, if you were not the firstborn male, you are kind of living and said from your early years that you don't matter. You don't matter as much as. Sorry, Second four.
[00:05:58] I see the older brother hitting her.
[00:06:02] Typical older brother. I'm one, too.
[00:06:04] I was there.
[00:06:07] If you're born a woman, if you're born a slave in the ancient world, the world around you is telling you that your identity doesn't matter.
[00:06:17] Think about what this teaching says to those people. It's saying, what if I told you that there is something about you that is actually more important, more fundamental than the fact that you don't matter in that world?
[00:06:28] What if I'm telling you that the core of your identity is actually that you have been clothed with Christ, that you are beloved of God even more than the sparrows?
[00:06:40] Think about saying that to the oldest male.
[00:06:44] What if there's something more fundamental, more important about you than that. Everybody thinks that you do matter.
[00:06:51] You know, think about the other eras in which what was the family for? The family was for becoming a kind of unit of production. You know, the more kids you have, the more hands you have to help on the farm.
[00:07:04] Kind of saying to everybody, like, you are worth according to what you can help us produce.
[00:07:11] Think about what it feels like to say to that person, what if I told you that you are worth dignity, that you have an inherent dignity completely aside from what you can produce, completely aside from what you add to the world?
[00:07:28] What if there is a piece of you that goes deeper than that?
[00:07:37] How does this kind of teaching land on our modern world? Be well, you know, we don't have kids so they can help us on the farm anymore.
[00:07:43] We don't have kids so that we can secure economic stability through the male line.
[00:07:53] How does that land on us?
[00:07:56] I mean, think about, think about this room right here. You all don't really know each other.
[00:08:01] At least half of you are here. Some of you do, but at least half of you are here as tourists. You've never met one another in your lives.
[00:08:10] But actually, you strangers have in common the deepest thing that you can possibly have in common with another human being.
[00:08:22] Think about if by some accident of nuclear misfiring, this room ended up being the only humans left in the world.
[00:08:32] Guess what? We're already part of the same family.
[00:08:36] We're already brothers and sisters. We're already bound to one another.
[00:08:41] We would figure it out.
[00:08:43] We would go from strangers to friends and strangers to family, and we would carry this song into the future.
[00:08:56] Go back to Father's Day for a second.
[00:09:01] I don't really feel a lot of, like, pressure to, yeah, make my family some unit of production or to like, secure the financial stability into the future. What I feel like as a parent in this world, as my 5 year old is about to come in late.
[00:09:15] Not alone.
[00:09:20] I feel like to be a parent in this era is more like to be like the CEO of a retreat center than it is to be like a dad in the way of my. You know what I mean? Like, my job is to not tell my kids what to do or what they can be, but to like, curate the right kind of experience and institutions and caretakers so that they can then grow up and decide for themselves. I'm like this, let's make this home like a place of like, retreat and rest. But, like, I'm gonna find you the right school so you can get into Harvard I'm gonna send you the right camp so you can be better than Charlie at soccer when we start in the fall. You know, like, I'm gonn to find the right babysitter so you can be safe and all these types of things. Like, I'm just here as, like, the CEO kind of curator thing.
[00:10:06] And what I realized when I read things like this is that actually.
[00:10:11] Hi, sweetheart.
[00:10:16] I'm kind of running some kind of risk.
[00:10:21] If part of what I'm trying to do as a parent is to add a little bit of religion into that, to just, like, curate a little religion for my kids on the side of, like, soccer practice and the right school and the right babysitter and things like that.
[00:10:35] Is what I'm running the risk of, is that my kids will figure out that this following Jesus thing is actually the deepest thing about them.
[00:10:48] That there is something about them actually, that is deeper and more fundamental than that. They are my own kids.
[00:11:03] If all I'm trying to do is just have the sprinkle a little religion in amongst the other things that I'm curating for them, like, being part of the church is actually a little bit risky.
[00:11:13] Like, what if your kids actually believe the stuff that we say?
[00:11:18] What if they actually decide to run deep?
[00:11:24] What if they decide to call other people brothers and sisters that are not their biological brothers and sisters?
[00:11:31] What if they start to feel bound to serving and sacrificing for this community?
[00:11:44] And by being part of this community, maybe they go further.
[00:11:47] Maybe they feel they have some responsibility to help the person, to help the people in trouble.
[00:11:54] Being a Christian can take you to some dangerous, crazy places in this world, but there's nothing else I'd rather be.
[00:12:03] Amen.
