Becoming Family
Your life has a spiritual journey. You’re on it right now. Anyone who has ever done anything magnificent for mankind has at some point stood in the river of their own spiritual maturity. Such is the case, as the man who saved Chrysler Automobiles—the inventor of the mustang. Now, hang with me here for a minute. I know for some of you that might not mean a lot these days, who are used to seeing nice and fast cars everywhere. The Mustang sold a million of its kind in the first year. It was all from a man named Lee Iacocca. A name of yesteryear. The name came to be synonymous with integrity, know-how, discipline, and leadership. He was an Italian from the east coast. He rose with power to the top of the Ford Motor Company. When he became the leader of the Ford Motor Company, he designed the Mustang and Ford took off. Through a technical maneuver, Mr. Henry Ford found a way to vote him down and dismiss him. He didn’t get mad he says in his autobiography, “I got even the good ole way.” He became the President of Chrysler. He then designed a whole new fleet of cars, took on a 1 billion dollar loan from the federal government, and paid it back so fast that Washington didn’t know how to cash the check. He became an icon of his generation for how to live life with integrity, know-how, discipline, and leadership. When he was asked how did he get to this point, he started to reflect upon his childhood. He says that his parents, Catholics in his upbringing, taught him to make “good confessions before he took Holy Communion.”
Confession and its practice may be foreign to you. Confession was a practice Catholics held before they took communion. They sat before a priest and confessed their sins. Lee said he hated it. He hated having to think upon and reflect upon his wrongs and his rights. But, after a while, he began to see the sense in it. He came to appreciate having to weigh the good and the bad in his life. Having to think about where he wronged his friends. When he was aggressive and he should have been passive. When he was passive and he should have been assertive. It developed a kind of therapy in his life. He said, “It became the best therapy he ever had and made him the man he is today.” Here is a man who saved hundreds of thousands of jobs and redeemed a leg of the industry. And when they asked him what made him, he referred to a Christian pattern and practice of weighing right and wrong in his own mind and sharing the word—confession. While we do not practice confession in the Catholic sense, we do encourage confession in the communal sense. Every week before we take communion, the practice of reflecting on your life is necessary, as we respond to God. Confession admits when we do not reflect the character and priorities of our Father God and reorients our heart to the profound love he has for us so that we can then live in response to this love.
I bring it up because some of you had parents who taught you how to do the right thing. In fact, some of you are here this morning, not because you loved church when you first started going, but because your momma or grandma made you go to church. The service was long and boring service. You listened to someone drone on. And you said to yourself, as soon as I am of accountable age, I’m not going, yet here you are. No one made you come. You are hereby your own free will.
You came because you have come to discover what your mom, dad, grandparents, friends were trying to teach you—that prayer works, that God responds, and God steps into our condition. Your momma and daddy gone…but you can thank God that they drug your butt to church and gave you a foundation on which to stand.
I know some of you here that is not your story at all. Your mom and dad were such heathens that it’s a miracle you even made it out of that house with some version of sanity. You shock yourself when you show up to a gathering like this. You are saying, “I cannot believe I’m here. How did my life take these twists and turns.” So you may not have a familial heritage in the faith, but you have a Christian heritage in the faith. There are people who came before. Who prayed. Who gave. Who labored. Who sacrificed. Now, you join in with people who for hundreds of years have faithfully served God to the best of their ability. You stand on their shoulders. You join in with them. None of us come to faith on our own. None of us start faith and none of us end faith. You and I are the continuum in between.
This is Timothy’s story when we come to 2 Timothy. This is one of the last letters the Apostle Paul will write. He writing to his young disciple in the ministry. Paul’s first letter is about technical matters of managing a church. When we come to his second letter, near the end of his life, he’s thinking of relational matters. His love for his son in the faith is leaking through the ink.
In these last moments, Paul teaches us something about the new family we have in Christ. There are other texts within the Bible that say that statement flat out. In this text, there is a beauty that I find irresistible. He teaches us that formation into Christlikeness is more personal than pragmatic. It’s more relational than it is tactical. It’s more intimate than it is instructive. More is caught than taught. That your family of origin does affect your life, but your family of origin is not the only family you have.
So, yes, there is some teaching, some instruction. BUT, you catch the way of the family more by the people you hang out with. You learn how to pray, not by reading a book, but by being with someone who knows how to pray. This is why it’s so important that Christians act as if the new has come. You will pass on not what you want to be, but what you are.
Now, I confess, I’m not a music person. What I know about music I have learned from others. One instrument of particular that comes to mind is the Stradivarius Violin. It’s considered the best violin in the world. In 2011, a Stradivarius sold for 9.8 million pounds. Mr. Stradivari was known for his ability to find the perfect tree. He would go knocking on trees. As he would go knocking on trees, he would listen for the perfect echo in the woods. The BBC caught up with a Mr. Lorenzo Pelligrini.1 He was walking through the woods knocking on trees. They asked him what are you doing. He said, “I’m going to build a Stradivarius” He had built many of them before. The challenge was that even the best of American factories cannot recreate the pure sound of a Stradivarius violin. The wood has to sit for so long. The knots have to come together. It has to sit under the right condition. It has to sit under the right gravity of moonlight so that sap moves through the wood correctly. There is no manual for how to find a tree that can produce a violin. You have just got to be able to thump the tree and hear the echo.
Violins that cost millions of dollars and are studied with millions of dollars cannot be replicated. You just have to be able to walk with a man who knows how to thump a tree. If a violin that costs millions of dollars and makes that pure of a sound and cannot be taught by a textbook, but has to be followed by a man who can thump a tree…
how much more does it take for you to learn not to kill your spouse…
how to raise your kids…
how to fall on your knees in prayer…
how to be a good steward…
how to work for the Lord when you are done working for the man…
You can go to schools, and read books, and believe me, I’m pro-education and reading…but you better learn how to get next to a wiser and more mature Christian who can teach you how to thump a tree.
Here’s some of my burden. I’m concerned that many of us have gotten so impersonal with the faith. That we want the passing of faith to be without conflict and so without uncertainty that we chase and chase something better. We complain and we critique, and yet neglect the very family God makes in his church.
Some of you have best friends outside the church and they know you go to church, but that’s all they know. I want Jesus to permeate every aspect of our lives so that the next generation can come to our elders and not fear a lecture of politics of policy, but experience the practice of the faith. I long for a church where the elders of the church can look to the young and say…it’s in good hands. Where they don’t have next…to use a sports metaphor, but that they are the church of now. I want people to be able to look forward to something that’s bigger than a house and more costly than a car— life that’s drenched in grace.
I’m so thankful for Timothy’s story. That faith can be passed down from grandparent to parent to child to provide a firm foundation. You can change your lineage through walking with God. But I’m also thankful for Timothy’s story because he has a Father figure in Paul who wasn’t his actual dad to mentor him.
Church…we need spiritual parents…not based on a certain age..but based on a relentless appetite to see others walk with the Holy Spirit in every aspect of life. This is what Paul gives to Timothy. Faith in Christ gives us a new family. We cannot escape the reality of our earthly family. We must learn to live and express our new family values.
I know we live in a day where people are making up spirituality. Where people are deconstructing their faith. They are demystifying the faith. Think critically about the faith. Investigate the truth claims of scriptures. Do not relegate your faith to a podcast. A motivational speaker. A walk on the beach. The moment we succumb to you do your faith we start missing out of the faith that was born out of the context of the community called the Father, Son, and Spirit. That language is not accidental.
God has entrusted us to pass on the faith, not through osmosis, but through reflecting his character and priories in the context of relationships with others who differ from us. In the context of the new family, the new person comes to the most friction and the most fruition. Jesus might be in your heart, but grandpa is in your bones.
We all have a family of origin. When you sync with your family of origin instead of Jesus, we actually cause more harm and trauma for others. I’m not interested in organized religion. I’m not either, but I am interested in oriented faith where every day in re-centering on Jesus.
We need people who fight not for our rights, but to fight for the people they call family…which means we must pray more than we post. We must spend time with people who don’t fake like they got it all together online and spend more time with people who have life proof that faith works. Meaning, when things get tough and they get stressed what oozes out of them is the jelly made from the fruit of the Spirit. As Paul puts it, not a spirit of fear, power, love, and sound judgment. Meaning, God’s way will push you beyond your comforts. We know that we have to settle for our judgment over God’s judgment when our decisions are made by our prosperity over suffering.
We serve a Savior who sacrificed himself, his comforts, his life, to make us brothers and sisters in God’s forever family. For some of you, he’s calling you to come home…to leave the house of the wicked. To leave the house of relying on yourself. To leave the house that makes you think you are the smartest person in the room and you don’t need anyone else.
He’s saying come home to a house that holds power, love, and sound judgment…to play by our Father’s house rules. Paul is exhorting Timothy to own the faith…to rekindle the faith, not to simply play by the rules because they are the house rules.
It’s not conservative to believe the bible speaks. It’s not progressive to say we should love our neighbors by listening to their hurts and pains. It’s not conservative to say the parents have greater influence over a child than the state. It’s not liberal to progressive to say you give up some of your freedom for your family. It’s Christian family heritage.
Practice the faith with others. Just because that faith is in their hearts doesn’t mean it’s going to take over. Paul doesn’t command. He reminds Timothy of the gift of faith. You have got to use that gift within the family of God.
Look at your everyday faith Jesus cards.
So that the people in my orbit also get a better understanding of what drives my life.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22094279
https://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2014/12/05/368718313/in-the-italian-alps-stradivaris-trees-live-on