"Families: Getting the Love We Need" Sermon Transcript for March 18, 2001By Dr. Don Joy
Scripture Reading: I John 1:1-7
What a pleasure to be at Grace Church. My wife as well. Stand up back here. We’re working on number 53; so we were married when we were children. We’ve lived to see our children’s children’s children. We have three little great grandsons that show up every week at our house; and one of them all five days after Montessori. So, we’re thriving and we’re delighted to be here.
I want to work with you this morning on just affirming that we are created to be in relationships. You heard it in the I John 1 passage, "If we walk in the light as God is in the light, we have fellowship one with another." Most of us live such busy lives that we’re increasingly isolated. So it takes a special event to remind us how much we need people. If you’ve paid attention to WWII veterans, especially who experienced say the Normandy landing together. And we’ve been at Pearl Harbor and there are these veterans who hang around volunteering their time because they were there on December 7, 1941. When you go through significant experiences together, there’s something that’s absolutely cementing about that experience.
All of us need important relationships. If you pay attention to the news, you must be pained as we are. In Santee, CA just out of San Diego, a 14-year old boy who had moved from New Jersey found himself the object of rejection and humiliation. The theft of his $200 skateboard twice. And he resorted to violence. And part of it had to be that he was in terrible isolation. If you’ve taught in public schools or been able to observe what goes on, it’s very common for one kid to be singled out to be scapegoated and rejected and humiliated by his peers. Robbie has put a whole career in public school teaching. And one year she had a little boy, one of the finest, brightest, kindest boys in her room, was always being humiliated by everybody else. She had to send him on an errand one day so she could talk to everybody else. Because there’s a certain meanness that shows up in rejecting people.
But what we all need is a significant set of relationships. In 1989 we flew to Wichita, Kansas from central Kentucky to be with my parents. They were in their mid-80's and were not able to come visit us. We arrived a little before midnight, the night before Thanksgiving. They met us at the door. And mother said, "Didn’t you know, we’re going home with you?" We had been longing to have them in Kentucky with us and here she presented it to us. And we looked at each other behind the closed bedroom door that night and began to ask ourselves, "How can we do this? It’s a Delta blackout weekend! We can’t get tickets." But, we drove them clear to Kentucky. What we found was over that weekend their phone never rang except when my sister and her husband called from Baltimore or my brother and his wife called from Austin, Texas. They were dangerously out of touch with other people.
So, I just want to affirm that we are created with a deep hunger for significant relationships. And I want to work with you on that. I want to use the symbol of the Holy Trinity as a reminder that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit form the big community. And I show it to you in Genesis, Chapter 1, that we are created like the Holy Trinity to be in significant relationships. So I want you to reflect with me on these deep longings that we have. In Chapter 5 of Genesis, I want you to look at that one first, it’s a curious kind of verse. This is the written account of Adam’s line. "When God created man..." This is the way the NIV reads. Alright, it’s not particularly helpful, but the King James is no better. All of them have used the word "man" and it’s not even in the text. The word is Adam. And watch what happens, I’m putting it up here because in the NIV there’s a footnote on this. If you’ve got one in your lap, you can check it. In most of the editions, it’s a footnote "g". "God created them..." We’re talking plural as we don’t see a masculine or a feminine. "God created them, male and female. At the time they were created, God blessed them and called them "man". And NIV puts quotes around that. Isn’t that interesting? Why did I have to go to Chapter 5 to find the quotation marks around "man"? Why didn’t it show up...did you ever write a term paper? The first time you use the word, you document the meaning of it. So in Genesis 1, they used man repeatedly in the translation. But they waited until Chapter 5 and then they tell us that every time you see "man" in Genesis 1-5, it’s a reference to "them".
So "Adam" is not a bachelor male. I grew up thinking that. It’s hard to believe, but then the text didn’t help me very much. My cousin, Rex, we were six-months apart in age. He and Jean live in Denver, Colorado. We see them occasionally. That’s another thing. It’s important to keep in touch with your cousins or keep in touch with distant kinfolk and then with that network of folks you’re unrelated to that you have access to on a weekly basis. But Rex and I grew up in the same Sunday School class. My Grandma, Joy, was our teacher, and so we listened well obviously. And we got this man idea. So, on hot Sunday afternoons, occasionally, because we almost always...our families had dinner together on Sunday, often at his farm which was closer to the country church than our farm which was 15 miles away. So we were at the Hoffman place and Rex would sometimes lift up his shirt on a hot day and say, "Count my ribs." And so I would count his ribs. And he would count mine. And on our lucky days we had an uneven number. And we had taken literally that second gospel creation about the splitting of "Adam". The opening of "Adam" and the woman, you know, was made out of the kindlier, gentler parts. These better parts of the human. That’s why your great Grandpa always called his wife, "My better half."
And so our folklore is more theologically accurate than some of the ways we read these things. But it’s about that simple. And we believe that God even then had the woman in process for us and that our rib was somehow connected. Piaget’ calls that "concrete operations". You can think concretely and if it says rib then that means your rib is going to make your wife. It’s an interesting idea.
Well, here it is then in Chapter 1. God said, "Let us make..." So God created "them" in God’s own image. In the image of God, male and female, God created them." I want you to notice the pronouns about God. "Then God said let us make "Adam" in our image, in our likeness." Isn’t that interesting? Plural pronoun. And it clearly sets us up to realize that God, who lives in community, creates the humans in community. Now this is the engineer’s version, you know, Chapter 1 of Genesis is that first gospel of creation and it is orderly and linear and just marvelous. Not much detail here. But, they’re created, male and female in the image of God. So, if we only have that text, image of God has to refer to the plural, the us, our...our...in the community. So we are created for intimate community, quality community.
The larger passage from which those words were taken begin with that statement and then says, "Let them rule over the fish, the birds, the livestock and over everything that moves along the ground. So God created "Adam" in His own image, the image of God, He created "them", male and female. God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number. Fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over all of this creation.’" We read this morning together out of Psalm, Chapter 8, where the very language of this text shows up in that great anthem that we get from the book of Psalms. So "they" had dominion. "They" rule. It’s a community. And the marvelous thing... and I read your bulletin and I read that back page, and I just have a sense that there’s some kind of community here in which it’s not a solo performance around here. There’s a sense that "we" own all the things that happen here and "we’re" participants. The bottom line of the staff strikes me. It’s the entire congregation that’s doing the ministry here.
And so we are present to each other in the kind of connections that reflect the character of God. So image of God is to be potentially in the character of God. Jesus was once asked a question about paying taxes. We’re just a few weeks away from mailing something off to the IRS. But the Pharisees asked, "Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?" Jesus said, "Show me the money." He was the first one, maybe, who said that. And they brought Him a denarius. And He said to them, "Whose image and inscription is this?" This is called interactive teaching. They said to Him, "Caesars". Then Jesus said to them, "Render therefore to Caesar the things that have Caesar’s picture on it, and render to God the things that have God’s image on it." It’s a powerful response. So, since you have to use U.S. government-issued currency, don’t complain too much that you pay taxes for the use of that currency. But remember that your life, your body, all that you are is issued by God. Therefore, return to God what has God’s image upon it.
Well, the good news is that we are all created in the image of God. I put the mirror up there to just suggest that it’s worth looking at the mirror, making piece with the mirror. Your teenagers, if you have them around the house, are doing it and you bang on the door and ask, "What are you doing in there?" Well, I hope you have another bedroom in the house because it takes some doing to reconcile with this changing face and asking the questions about who am I and what am I for and will any one ever respect me? And it’s a painful thing. Many of us had to struggle with that. And as time passes and surgery leaves us something less than we were. But the cure for wrinkles, of course, is to take off your glasses. But you have to realize that this person you see in the mirror is not the young and vital person that you feel like on the inside. Sometimes there’s that kind of reconciliation. It’s...I grew up without mirrors I could see until about I was about ten. You know, our homes don’t have full length mirrors always. And I grew up in a home without a full length mirror. And so, it’s amazing to see the eagerness with which a child will look at itself in the mirror and is fascinated with that.
Now, there’s another gospel creation, and I wanted to wind down with you on that one this morning. It’s in Genesis, Chapter 2. The thing that these two gospels of creation have in common is both of them are clearly in oral tradition long before they got written down and collected by Moses. You can tell that by just reading and see how they are organized. And they’re organized for easy remembering and telling. Chapter 1, with that logical, linear "the evening and the morning were the day." And you can just kind of hear that refrain going through it so it would be easy to remember and recite as a rap or as a poem. Chapter 2 is a story. It has direct quotation. It has a plot line. Has a little humor in it. I won’t open it all up for you here. But, it’s quite different. It’s so different that...well, look at the text. "The Lord God formed Adam from the dust of the earth." The word for "earth" looks very much like the word for "Adam".
And then God breathed into Adam’s nostrils "the breath of life", and Adam became a living "nepesh". So here it is that the human is alive to the fingertips, is full of senses, and the breath that goes in...Nike is not the first one to pump up. Here is this amazing, breathing and pumping up and becomes a living "nephesh". But unlike other animals, within "Adam" there is a hunger to be filled filled with God’s Spirit. So St. Paul will write in Ephesians, "Don’t be drunk with wine, but be filled with the Spirit." Everybody’s got to have something at the hunger spot. So this second gospel makes that kind of point about those deep hungers.
This God-given hunger for "relationships" is at the center of what we will be looking at in next week’s Family Life Conference. Robbie and I look forward to being with you then.
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