December 28, 2003 - First Sunday after Christmas
1 Samuel 2:18-20, 26
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Colossians 3:12-17
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Luke 2:41-52
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“Faith – A Family Affair”

“His mother treasured all these things in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.”

The holidays are loaded with memory-laden moments giving us much to treasure in our hearts. The last few weeks my parents, both of whom have been deceased for a number of years, have been very much on my mind. You see, neither of my parents wanted me to become what I have become. My father wanted me to become an ophthalmologist and my mother, as you’ve heard me say on a number of occasions, really thought I should go into the practice of law. Yet, I recall very clearly how supportive they were – after the initial parental, “are you absolutely sure?” – when I announced to them that I was going to enter the monastery.

When my father’s friends would ask, “Your son is going to be a priest?” My father would chuckle in response, “It’s a case of do as I say, not do as I do.”  While he was off a bit on the “not do as I do,” there is the point of faith as a family affair. Hannah and Elkanah modeled the faith for Samuel and gave him to God. Paul was raised in faith that nourished him and grounded him so that he could be opened to God’s new work in Christ. Mary and Joseph saw the fruit of their faith each time they looked upon Jesus. There is no question in my mind that faith, even in my case is a family affair. Let me explain.

First, let’s talk about faith. Max Thurian, a member of the Protestant Taize community and prolific spiritual writer, comments: “’Faith means being sure of what we hope for, convinced that realities we cannot see, exist.’ This simple definition is amply sufficient to understand what faith is.” [Our Faith, p. 15] Thurian is working from the Letter to the Hebrews here and makes a good point. Faith is an assurance. Thus, we can talk about faith in a politician, or a fact, or a scientific principle as really as we do faith in God. What sets religious faith apart, and I believe this to be particularly true for Christian faith, is that it is a gift of relationship, of communion if you will, with God.

Faith, as the gift of God’s Spirit, builds upon our human experience. Reason, intellect, and experience all are brought into play in the development of faith. As Thomas Aquinas put so beautifully, “Grace builds on nature.” God works with the human person and allows us to be brought into relationship using the means that are directly available to us. God’s revelation comes to us through persons, through relationships in community, and is continued as the community makes a record of those experiences.

I like what Thurian has said about the means by which we come to faith. He writes: “The Christian faith is not a religion founded on myths, poetic but non-historic explanations of the mysteries concerning divinity and humanity. It is not based upon rites, rituals of initiation which lead to knowledge of these mysteries. It is not based upon a philosophy, a body of metaphysical ideas explaining the mysteries of God and the destiny of many. It is not based on mysticism, a scheme of contemplative asceticism which gradually brings man under the influence of the divinity.

Certainly because of its humanity, because the word of God is expressed in human language, there are in the Christian faith, myths, rites, philosophy, and mysticism; but these are secondary elements, religious instruments which do not fully express the essential meaning of the Christian faith: essential and basically it is a relationship between man and God, initiated by God alone – God who spoke and still speaks to man, God who lived and still lives with man; it is based, then, on a history, the sacred history of the relationship between God and man, attested by written documents, the Holy Scriptures.” [p. 22-23] Thurian’s point is well-made and, I believe, true.

 However, it is important for us not to do as many have come to do, to worship the Bible to the point that we forget the One by whom the Bible exists and Who alone is worthy of our adoration. For Christians, the Word is not confined to a page, but is God’s creative force, took flesh and lived among us, and continues among us through the work of the Holy Spirit. The Bible is the record of that reality. The Scriptures are, then, a Divinely-human work and become for us the touch-point for our growth in the faith.

And what do we find throughout the Bible? Relationships: God seeking us; humanity seeking God; people seeking one another….no, I won’t say anything about “people who need people.” Faith comes to us through relationships and, like relationships, our faith grows and develops. Thus, the early church could look at Samuel as a ‘type’ of Christ because for both it was said that they grew in “wisdom, stature and favor with God and man” – there is assurance in that potential for growth.

Now, let’s talk about family. As I tried to describe faith for you by what it does – at least I hope I did – I want to do the same for family. For most of us family immediately means ‘blood,’ that is the traditional genetic relationship of parents and children. But our understanding of family is, has been, and ought to be stretched – just like our understanding of faith.  Families can be conceived of as more than just two parents and two point five children. I came across the story of Jim and Suzie Izatt, who appear a bit more like the traditional nuclear family, but I think you’ll soon see the difference. Suzie had a hysterectomy when she was 25 and never thought she’d have children – now she has three, all adopted. The last two, Joey and Dennis, they took in initially as foster parents.

Steven Hartman, a CBS reporter described them as a “Norman Rockwell painting come to life.” He told their story like this:
"They love us, and they snuggle us," answered the kids when they were asked why they liked living there.
"We fell in love with these kids. It's obvious why we did," said Suzie Izatt.
Dennis and Joey used to live in the old steel mill town of McKeesport, Pa. About three years ago they were placed in foster care, because of neglect. When Suzie Izatt first met them, they had almost animal-like behavior.
They would claw at people. They weren't properly toilet trained, and they didn't know how to use silverware.
"They have come incredibly far," she noted.
Not only do they now know how to use silverware, they even know how to use chopsticks!
And the boys have scrapbooks full of new adventures.
"This is the first tree I climbed in my life," said Dennis. "I love this page!"
When Suzie Izatt first found out she couldn't have kids, she told herself God must have a better plan. Now 15 years later, she said she knows what it is.
"The love...in our family is...so fulfilling....It's so good," she noted.   [from the Internet/dated December 1999]

We’re discovering, then, that family comes in many varieties. Family is the nurturing environment that allows us to attain the growth that we need to mature as persons. The bond that draws a family together, ultimately, is more than genetics, more than “flesh and blood,” it’s a love relationship that draws us and holds us and helps us to grow. We can talk about ‘family’ and mean our relatives or friends – how many of us have ‘uncles’ and ‘aunts’ who were simply family friends, but closer than blood relatives? We can also talk about the ‘faith family’ of our church and it is not mistake that early Christians, and some communities still do, referred to each other as ‘brother’ and ‘sister.’ Being family is all about being able to fall in love, live it out, and realize, as Suzie Izatt did, “it is so fulfilling, so good.”

Finally, why is faith a family affair? Well, I think you might have got the point early on. If faith is about relationship and families are relationships, the two just seem to go hand-in-hand. Yes?  I think the story from Luke makes the point wonderfully clear. There is a situation that every parent – so I’ve been told – has been through: lost child. Why was the child lost? Because the child was beginning to assert his own identity and wasn’t ‘lost,’ just off doing his own thing. Confronted by parents the child makes a response that almost seems demeaning – but I bet that parents through the centuries have simply found it normal. What went on that day in Jerusalem goes on for everyone who has children – and it involves the hundreds of little goodbyes that parents say as their children become adults.

Faith as a family affair is about providing the sort of environment that allows children to explore, to test, to question, yes, even to doubt, their faith. Why? Because, the only way it becomes your faith is for you to test it. Otherwise, it’s always someone else’s faith. Today we baptized two little ones who are the children of children of this church – say that three times fast! Did their parents wander off for a while? I would bet that they did. Did they come back? I think so. Why? Because they had been given the freedom to grow and the roots of faith relationship that allowed the freedom to flower and bear fruit.

You see, sometimes losing allows us to find in a new way. When Mary and Joseph ‘find’ Jesus in the temple, they find someone new, they see more than just the newly bar mitvahed boy who come up with them to the temple. Just like the disciples thought they had lost their companion and friend Jesus to death, and found, instead, the Risen Lord. There are times we have to lose our old ideas, our old notions of what our faith is and who God is in order to find out what it really means and who God really is. And, this is true of spouses, colleagues, friends, and children too; sometimes we have to lose them as we have known them so that we can find them in new ways again.

It’s almost like the story Mark Twain used to tell about his father. Twain said, “When I was 16 I thought my father the stupidest man on the face of the earth. When I turned 21 I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in five years.” We need sometimes to head off to discover what really matters. Faith and family are both alike in that way – we often find out how important they are only after we’ve wandered away from them for a while.   

Faith and family are also alike in that they are best lived, rather than simply theorized. Let me turn to Max Thurian one more time when he says, “Christian faith is not the religion of a book but of a life of prayer, hope and charity lived in community around the Lord whose Word is heard in Holy Scripture. So, the truth which comes to us from Scripture, is received by the community of the Church, in the milieu prepared by the Holy Spirit in which this truth can be understood, proclaimed and believed most authentically.” [p. 30] What Thurian is describing is the family of faith and goes hand-in-hand with what Paul tells those early Christians in Colossae.

Paul uses some wonderfully evocative language when he tells his hearers to clothe themselves with “compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.” He’s talking about living out the essence of our faith, helping us to realize that ethics grows out of faithful behavior. One commentator likened it to “the layered look” and notes, “Such layering is healthier and prevents the wearer from being subjected to the elements. Paul’s advice to the Colossians is similar to this seasonal maxim. He also notes the layers of word and deed that most characterize the true Christian life and also that final outer garment that pulls it all together – love!” [Susan K. Hedahl, New Proclamation, p. 53] God has loved us and we respond to God’s love by living appropriately. The “word of Christ” is to dwell in us richly and it is to make a difference. Paul’s parting thought in this passage is powerful, “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” In short – love God, love your neighbor and live like it – love is the difference.

The faith family and the family of faith are going to show likeness after likeness, but it is that final layer that makes the difference – love. God’s love draws us, holds us, and opens us to become people who can grow, as did Jesus, in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor. Faith is a family affair that gives us nourishment, provides us boundaries, and gives us the freedom to grow beyond them as we enter more and more into a loving relationship with God and those with whom we share life. And here is where the faith family is another similar layer to our human family – no matter how far we may roam, that family is always waiting for us with arms opened to receive us. Faith is a family affair – God is Father and Mother to us, Christ is our brother, the Spirit is our teacher, and the Church is not a building, but a family. Here we find not only memories to treasure, but the heart to hold them. Welcome home.

Let us pray: