Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
Matthew 12:46-50
Last Sunday I made a passing reference to how Christ was expanding our understanding of who our family is when he said in Matthew chapter 25, verse 40:
'Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.'
Today I’d like to revisit that.
46 While he was still speaking to the crowds, his mother and his brothers were standing outside, wanting to speak to him. 47 Someone told him, "Look, your mother and your brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you." 48 But to the one who had told him this, Jesus replied, "Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?" 49 And pointing to his disciples, he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! 50 For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother."
September 23rd, 1989 is a day that I will mark, consciously or not, as a watershed date in my life. On that day, the woman whom I’d been dating for the previous year and a half, with whom I had planned to spend the rest of my life, asked to end our relationship. Though I had dated briefly in college, I’d never been in what you could call a ‘serious’ relationship. This one had been, in a word, serious.
I was undone.
It was up to that point, the single most devastating event of my life.
I spiraled into a deep, dark, depression. I was attending classes at Southern Seminary, but stopped. I’d been attending Crescent Hill Baptist Church, but stopped. I stopped talking to my hall-mates, and would come back to my room from my part-time job and curl up on my bed and sleep until nighttime, when I’d wake up and cry until the next morning, when I had to get up and do it all over again. I stopped eating, lost weight, and finally decided to withdraw from Seminary altogether.
I remember tearfully talking to my father, who was back in the States on a short trip, and asking him if he’d understand if I withdrew “for a while”, little suspecting that the “while” would turn out to be 12 years.
In February or March of that year, I had been invited over to a friend’s house for dinner. At the time, Claude was more a friend of my sister’s than of mine, and ten years my senior. We hit it off. Claude had graduated from Southern in 1980, and was a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, a trained counselor, and the director of a program that assisted clients with chronic mental illness manage their illness and try to live as normal a life as possible. In the course of the evening, he offered to let me rent a room from him. It didn’t hurt that he was an audiophile, and had a ‘music & video room’ with several thousand dollars’ worth of music and video equipment in it. But that was the least of my concerns in agreeing to move in to the house on Field Avenue.
Jim and Janet, Stacey and Kim, Sue, Jim and Nanci Carol, Jay and Kay, and Claude. When I was at the lowest point in my life, they became family to me, and more. I can honestly say that if it weren’t for them, I would most likely not be here today. There were other friends, David Johnson, who at the time was studying at Golden Gate Seminary, north of San Francisco, and Phil Brown, who was living and working in Little Rock, AR. If you’ve ever spent any time on the phone with someone who is depressed, it is not an enjoyable experience, and certainly not an energizing one.
One comment stands out from a conversation with Sue, my friend whom I mentioned a few Sundays ago, who is hoping to adopt the teenage brother of the two girls she and her husband have already adopted. She looked at me and said “Kenny, we are here for you, always. But there are things that no one can go through with you, things that you are meant to go through alone.”
We have biblical examples of similar friends. Jonathan and David, in the Old Testament, Jonathan risking his life to warn David of HIS father’s coming attempt to murder him. In Luke, chapter 4, we have the paralytic and his four friends who lowered him down through a hole in the roof so he could get to Jesus. What is striking about the encounter is that the passage reads ‘when he saw their faith’ (v 20) he spoke the healing of the man who was paralyzed. It wasn’t based on the paralyzed man’s faith, but on that of his friends, that seems to have prompted Jesus’ act of healing.
Last night Jerusalem witnessed something like that. We hosted a fundraiser for Sylvia Jones. Chances are, there were more people here who knew Sylvia than didn’t, and after the evening was over, I hope we could all claim to be her friends, besides being sisters and brothers in Christ.
There are people who come into our lives who are there by divine appointment. Perhaps unknown to them, but apparent to us, in their presence, we are made that much more aware of the presence of God in a real, physical way in our lives.
I’ve lived it. I suspect that, if we paused a moment and thought about it, most of us in this room have experienced it.
I’ve shared this before, on a Wednesday night, but in reference to my family of friends that rallied around me through those dark times, I can truthfuly say that they were my salvation. I don’t mean I was saved through them, per se, but Christ’s love reached me through them, in that they were Jesus to me. They lifted the roof off the cave I’d crawled into and instead of lowering me INTO it, they pulled me OUT of it.
This is what we mean when we say that you cannot be a Christian and not live in community – in communion – with a fellowship of believers. There is, of course, an individual element to faith. Each person has to come to that saving knowledge of Jesus, the Holy Spirit steps in and acts on a person’s heart uniquely, in ways that no one else can relate to, and in that, the transforming of the mind takes place- the internal changing of direction of one’s life, from moving away from God to moving towards God. The Holy Spirit redirects, or redefines our lives. Our reason for being changes from trying to live our lives for ourselves to living them for Christ.
Jesus was in the habit of redefining. He redefined the law in the sermon on the mount. He turned ‘thou shalt not kill’ into ‘if you are angry with your neighbor you’ve as much as killed them’. He turned ‘thou shalt not commit adultery’ into ‘if you look on someone with lust, you’ve already committed adultery in your heart.’ He said ‘you’ve heard it said, ‘love your neighbor and hate your enemy’, and turned it into ‘love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’ With this last example, we have a very real opportunity to respond. A couple of weeks ago, someone broke into the Church. Our response needs to first be to pray for whomever it was that did it.
Though Jesus redefines ‘family’ in the text, he does not do it in an exclusionary way. In other words, he does not cancel out what defines immediate family. Though my friends became my family in my time of crisis, my family was no less a family to me because of it. There were distance issues involved – my parents were still serving in Chile at the time, and my middle sister Becky and brother Jimmy were the only ones that were nearby. The redefinition that Jesus embarked on was to broaden the meaning of the term.
‘Whoever does the will of my Father in Heaven.’
There’s no secondary qualifier. Whoever does the will of my father in heaven and speaks my language. Whoever does the will of my father in heaven and looks like me. Whoever does the will of my father in heaven and shares my political views. No. It is a very simple statement: WHOEVER.
We live in a broken world. We’ve lost what it means to be true family. As many of you know, October is Domestic Abuse Awareness month. There is no better example of what it means to be fallen than to see what happens when abuse is present in a home. Whether physical or emotional or sexual, domestic abuse tears at the heart of the family. Trust that should under gird the foundations of a family is broken. I’ve known too many close friends who are still as adults learning to rebuild their trust … sometimes not in their human parents, but in God and Christ. That is why I always thank God on Mother’s day and Father’s day for parents who make it easy for us to understand God as our HEAVENLY parent.
We come then to our time of invitation.
If you are here today and are longing to be able to trust someone with your life as you’ve never trusted anyone before with it, your invitation is simple: come to trust Jesus as your Savior. Though there may be an instant change in your heart, this may just as well be a first step towards learning to fully trust not only him, but to again trust your earthly family.
If you are here and are looking for a place where you can join friends who are willing to tear up a roof to bring a friend to Jesus, we would welcome you.
If you are here and are already a member of this extended family, you invitation is to break out of the mold. To breath in what the spirit of God has made your family and to live out that broadness – that directly reflects how broad and deep, and powerful the love of God is.
Lets pray.
No comments:
Post a Comment