Christopher H. Edmonston

Advent Family Worship

December 16, 2007

Howard Memorial Presbyterian Church

 

 

            So much of our lives is determined by family.  Who are parents are or were – or conversely – who our children are or will be.  From the first basic lessons – walking, talking, manners, self-discipline – from those moments onward no one entity plays so big a role in our development, faith stories, or our thinking about God, grace, sin, redemption, love, joy, peace, kindness – all of it really! – as does family.

            Long recognized for its centrality in society as the basic building block of healthy communities, family is becoming increasingly more important to towns, schools, and churches because family is, in spite of the fact that everyone knows how important it is, family is rapidly changing, fraying, and becoming increasingly precious. It is a fact that two parents families are becoming increasingly rare, and the two-parent families we do have are increasingly under strain. I think that there is little doubt that people who have grown-up in stable homes are more likely to live stable lives. As a pastor, I know there is no doubt that families who pray before meals, before bedtimes, read scripture together, and talk and pray about faithful responses to the challenges they are facing, those families are the keystones of their churches and those are the children who grow up to be pastors, missionaries, and great churchmen and churchwomen. Now of course, none of this is guaranteed – time and the vicissitudes of life have a funny way of making the predictable anything but predictable and of changing the course of even the most well-planned lives. Sometimes people struggle when they grow up in the best homes, and sometimes they succeed from the most improbable places. So, I am speaking to some extent in generalities. Regardless of the generalities, I think John Paul II, the most important Christian leader of the last 25 years said it best when he said, “Every effort to make society sensitive to the importance of family is a great service to humanity.”

            Today we have gathered here as a church family.  We have heard the voices of the older and the younger, the song of our most veteran singers and our most inexperienced singers.  In other words – we have seen our church family, embraced their gifts, and celebrated with one another the good news and great joy of Jesus’ coming, his promise, and his birth.

            And the context of our church family allows us to talk about the family of Jesus – or to say that namely the Christmas story is a story about family before it is about anything else.  A young woman who is engaged – that is a story about how families begin.  She is very pregnant and ready to give birth – again, another family event.  They have to travel though, because the emperor orders a census and they must go home to the place of ancestry – no different really than me going home to Louisiana, or somebody here heading to the mountains of Virginia because that is where the family cemetery is and a duty must be performed.  Again, they are traveling because of family.  Even the location of the birth – amongst the cattle and the sheep – in the manger was driven by the needs of family.  They were there because she needed a safe and at least somewhat secluded place for the birth itself – what more pressing need does a young, a new, family have than a properly safe place in order for the child to be born.

            Even the way we talk about Jesus is couched in the terms and vocabulary of family – the dictionary of human relationships.  We call him the Son of God – the Son – a family term for the Savior of the world.

            Christmas is, before it is anything else, a story about a family which becomes for all us our family.  This little family, the family of Joseph and Mary, sees to it that the Son is born and he becomes a brother and a friend to us all.  From the crisis of unexpected pregnancy, to forced travel, to the need to find a place for the birth – from these crises, the crisis of the world – the crisis that tells us that we think far too often of sin and far too little of righteousness; the crisis that tells us that we dwell too much on self and not enough on neighbor; the crisis that death and fear are big and awful and shroud the world in darkness – yes all of these crises are trumped, as the family of Christmas overcomes the crises of the days of Jesus’ birth.  Because that family functioned, because they did their duty, because they were strong in a season that required strength, light shines in darkness and sin is overcome and neighbors can be loved and death and fear are dealt a crushing blow.

            Yes, it is a story about family, but quickly it becomes a story about eternity and joy so special and sweet that the world stops for a season and remembers its details.  And because of this story we might all be claimed by into a larger story – one that provides for all of us a family of faith.  And when we, the church, function like a family there is almost no limit to the fear we can overcome or the crises we can abate.  We help when others mourn; we pray when hope seems lost; we aid those who come to us in need; we stand and walk with those who think they may not walk again; we make a witness that says God is love and God provides a community for recovery no matter how strait the gate or charged with punishment the scroll against us.[1]  This is us, a family, at our best, and we have that first family of faith to thank for it.

            After all – and this should never be lost – the first who ever believed anything about Jesus, or for Jesus, or of Jesus – the first two people who might be called ‘Christians’ were his parents, his family.  Thanks be to God for that family, for our families, and for the family of faith that remembers these things until tomorrow after tomorrow after tomorrow after tomorrow dawns.  Amen. 

 

[1] I couldn’t help myself here – this is lifted from William Ernest Henley’s Invictus. Which is really a poem that I do not agree with – very ‘modern,’ very 19th century, and very misguided in many ways. However, this is a great line, and it was Huey Long’s favorite poem. So, it is often running through my head and I used it on December 16, 2007 to see if anyone in my church might pick up on it. Somebody did and we had a grand laugh over it.

           


[1] I couldn’t help myself here – this is lifted from William Ernest Henley’s Invictus.  Which is really a poem that I do not agree with – very ‘modern,’ very 19th century, and very misguided in many ways.  However, this is a great line, and it was Huey Long’s favorite poem.  So, it is often running through my head and I used it on December 16, 2007 to see if anyone in my church might pick up on it.  Somebody did and we had a grand laugh over it.