Family Relationships: Think Orange

Family Relationships: Think Orange

(Deuteronomy 6:4-9; Mark 10:1-16)

10:30 am,  Sunday, July 21, 2013, Windsor UBC, J G White

The other morning, at my home, two families of birds visited.  Pheasants - wandering in the yard together.  Hen and seven youngsters.  :-)  Learning the cautious grazing lifestyle.
Starlings - down the chimney into the clean out and the woodstove - again!  :-(  Simply exploring nesting places!
They have  instincts to stay together, explore, and learn.  The young ones will, one day soon, be adult, out on their own, raising their own brood.
As a congregation of believers, we have family values, and covenant together about our family relationships.  We seek to grow faith in people of all ages.  And we send them out.
We may well ask “Will Our Children Have Faith?” (John Westerhoff III) or “Will our Faith have children?”  And how shall family values be passed on to our families, and our “church family”?
Sh'ma Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Eḥad
Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.
Deuteronomy 6:4-9 (NRSV)
Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. 5 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. 6 Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. 7 Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. 8 Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, 9 and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
What we call Christian education - with pillars like Sunday School and Youth Group - did not always exist.  Before Church buildings and programs there was the family - the centre of discipleship to God.  Day-to-day life is where life-with-God begins and ends.
Reggie McNeal (The Present Future, 2003)...
Churches are so busy getting people involved in the church that they’ve neglected this fundamental agenda of spiritual formation.  What if churches cut down on church activities so people could have some conversations within their own families?  What if parents spent as much time with the children’s minister as the children do?  What if student ministers spent as much time with the students’ parents as they did with the students?  We typically hire children’s and student ministers to run programs for children and young people.  In fact, this approach by the church may do more to decimate the home as a spiritual centre than anything coming into the home on television or the Internet.
As you look at our ministry description for Pastor of Family Life, consider with your Lord how you understand this person working?  With the whole family, or, programs for the young?
Reggie McNeal wrote that ten years ago, before Reggie Joiner’s book, Think Orange, came out in 2009.
Think Orange = Yellow (Church light) + Red (Family heart)
We learn how to be family, imperfect, yet redeemed.
Reggie Joiner...
God is at work telling a story of restoration and redemption through your family.  Never buy into the myth that you need to become the “right” kind of parent before God can use you in your children’s lives.  Instead, learn to cooperate with whatever God desires to do in your heart today so your children will have a front-row seat to the grace and goodness of God.  (p. 48)
As the Shema says, talk about the ways of life with God everywhere: at home, traveling, arising, settling down for the night.  Talk about the ways of life you are following, living.
Many of you know about some of those Old Covenant people, and what their family lives were like.  Not perfect!  God was gracious and faithful.  So God will be today.
Parents must show them what it is like to pursue a better relationship with God.  Show them how it looks to prioritize Jesus above anything else.  Show them what it is like to reject the materialism and consumerism of this world.  If parents want their children to have it in them, they have to see it demonstrated.
Kids need to see their parents
struggle with answers,
face their weaknesses,
deal with real problems,
admit when they are wrong,
fight for their marriage,
resolve personal conflict.  (p. 63)
So it is for us who are grandparents, aunts, neighbours.
What a congregation (church) is called upon to do is support this: team up with families, couples, singles, neighbourhoods.
Was visiting my brother the other day.  A fellow military chaplain was there.  Interesting to hear them chat, and get a glimpse of the lives of military folk.  They have their own joys and challenges.  Steve and family just moved to NS, after four years in North Bay, ON.  The Lord is blessing and teaching Steve, Cathy, Jessika and Timothy in this transition.  Ministry, discipleship among those with the special challenges and sacrifices of their work.  A big group who was overseas just returned home this past weekend.  What a powerful homecoming.  Think about what being a disciples of Jesus in a military family is like. Some of what they learn is how to settle in fast, and how to move on well... how to deal with danger and disaster... how to be a team.
The challenges of being a child and a teen in this era is great for all, I think.  “Someone” pointed out that youth in school and university don’t know how to prepare and study for jobs that are not even invented yet!  So with disciples of Jesus Christ: what forms Christian fellowship and ministry will take are being reinvented as we speak.  We are preparing children to be young adults in an uncertain spiritual landscape... around the world.
The Lord uses our experience to teach us.  How did we, Windsor Baptist, and you their parents, prepare Andrew and Patricia, Jason and Jonathan, Jennifer and Jason and Gillian, Ryan and Sara, Elizabeth and Paul, and the others, to go out from us, and live elsewhere for the Lord?  We invested a great deal in those teens of 15 years ago.  We sent them out... and we also grown through the experience, praise God!
Some simple things I know to do are these...
1. Take God lessons to the home.  Make home the centre of discipleship to Jesus, not this place and our programs.
2. Take life lessons, family lessons, to God.  Interpret life in the context of the Lord.
3. Develop rites of passage, rituals, celebrations: in families, in neighbourhoods, in small groups, etc.  Together.
4. Be inclusive of couples and singles.
5. Be inclusive of families and children where all are not practicing Christians.
Deuteronomy 6:4-9 (Msg) Attention[, Israel]!
God, our God! God the one and only!
5 Love God, your God, with your whole heart: love him with all that’s in you, love him with all you’ve got!
6-8 Write these commandments that I’ve given you today on your hearts. Get them inside of you and then get them inside your children. Talk about them wherever you are, sitting at home or walking in the street; talk about them from the time you get up in the morning to when you fall into bed at night.
God’s laboratory and classroom for developing our family relationships is in our families, in our neighbourhoods.  As a Church, we must partner with families, we must Think Orange.  As families, we must partner with the congregation, Think Orange.
Some of our little chicks are very much in the nest.  Some are fledging.  Some are full size but still sticking close to home.  Some are just now out on their own, near or far.  Some are raising their brood now.  Many of us have empty nests.  Many of us are grandparents.
We are all still part of the team, the family, the flock.  Together, with God, life is good.
Jesus wept for his beloved Jerusalem one day. Oh, that I could gather you under my wings!
Now, let us focus on being His family.