Hilton Head Island, SC – November 15, 2020
The Chapel Without Walls
Proverbs 3:1-4,4:1-5; Luke 12:49-53
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division; for henceforth in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three.”
Luke 12:51-52 (RSV)
Sometimes it is harder “to get down to brass tacks” (as we say) with family members than with almost everyone else. Saying what we really think or expressing how we really feel can be much more difficult with an adult child or grandchild or sister or brother or nephew or niece or cousin than with a best friend, a neighbor, or a mere acquaintance. We acquire friends and neighbors as we go along, but from the day we are born we always have our relatives, and somehow that puts them into a different category when we really want to talk about the most important issues facing us - - - and them.
Take the 2020 presidential election, for example. Probably many Americans could talk freely about what they truly thought of each of the candidates with every single relative they have. But for others, as Jesus said in Matthew 10 and Luke 25, “They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against her mother in law” (Luke 12:53). I have two children. With one of them I was in complete sync about this election, but with the other, early into the campaign we tried talking sensibly about it and then gave up in utter frustration. I have only one brother left, and he thinks I am so far to the left that I should be left adrift somewhere outside this world. With almost none of my relatives in Wisconsin could I discuss anything political in the last four years, and with my relatives in Kansas I could and did discuss everything in the last four years. But I was happy with my Kansas relatives about what happened in Wisconsin, and sad with them about what happened in Kansas.
What do those closest to us think about the Affordable Care Act or about the latest three members of the Supreme Court or about the immigration policies of the last four years? But quite apart from things like that, what do they think about how Dad and Mom raised us, or the way we tried to raise our children, or the way our children chose to try to raise their children? Did we give full approval to the person our daughter or son chose to marry, or did we express what we thought was a necessarily strong note of caution? And if they got married anyway, how did it turn out?
The Book of Proverbs consists of thirty-one chapters of pointed observations and advice. The opening verse of the first chapter says that Proverbs was written by King Solomon, but probably many Israelite sages over several centuries contributed to this compendium of practical advice for all kinds of occasions in life. In that male dominated society, a father in the Book of Proverbs offers many suggestions to his son, but he never says a peep to his daughter. “My son, do not forget my teaching, but let your heart keep my commandments….Let not your loyalty and faithfulness forsake you; bind them about your neck, write them on the tablets of your heart….When I was a son with my father, tender, the only one in the sight of my mother, he taught me, and said to me, ‘Let your heart hold fast my words…do not forget, do not turn away….Get wisdom, get insight’” (Proverbs 3&4; selected verses).
All of us were born at least two centuries too late to get advice like that from our parents. Both they and we were too busy with life to say or hear anything like that. Furthermore, very few of us grew up with an extended family, all the relatives living together in one place. It was probably more harmonious then than now because they all knew they were stuck with one another for the rest of their lives, and therefore they’d better do the best they could to get along with one another. But few of us ever had every relative in one place, and all of us eventually moved away from wherever we grew up. Now almost everyone in most families is probably scattered to the four winds.
In addition, even if everyone in every family all lived in the same community, it is much less likely to occur that younger generations follow the advice of older generations. As younger generations became more educated in certain particulars than older generations, especially in technological matters, respect for elders has diminished. We likely respected our elders less than our grandparents respected their elders, and they respected their elders less than their grandparents did. That is a widespread tendency of the past couple of centuries. In addition, few older whites who live on Hilton Head Island have children or grandchildren who also live on the island. Therefore the younger generations don’t see the oldest generation nearly as much as if they all lived together somewhere on the actual continent of North America.
In the contemporary USA, if younger people now disagree with their parents, wherever they live, they are more apt to express it. I’m not saying this is good or bad, although depending on what the older generation says it could be either good or bad, but I am saying that acquiescence to the purported wisdom of older people is diminishing in contemporary American society.
Democracy itself may be a primary factor in the erosion of traditional biblical paternalism. It also may have weakened the Fifth Commandment, which says, “Honor your father and your mother.” Some variety of monarchy was almost the universal form of government until the end of the eighteenth century. But with the evolution of democracy in many nations since then, citizens were urged to think for themselves. Under those circumstances they did not necessarily agree with their elders on the most important issues in their lives.
If you’re old, and you’re feeling that your views are not being granted the value that you think they should be given by your children, you may need to get used to it. But disagreements need not automatically become disagreeable. Speaking truth to relatives need not be painful if there is high regard for one another regardless of the issues over which we might disagree. Disagreements should not be perceived in terms of victory or defeat, but rather as the honest sharing of thoughts and feelings.
However, generational differences may now surprise us. Fifty or seventy-five years ago, if the older generation became upset by the younger generation, it was usually because the younger folks were becoming too liberal religiously or politically for the older folks. Now it may be the reverse; the young- or middle-aged adult children may have become too conservative for some seventy-, eighty-, or ninety-year-old liberal parents. Who anyone becomes may be more determined by when and where that person grew up or by where they moved as young adults than by who their parents were. And that may be a hard adjustment for the parents to make.
What all this is suggesting is that intergenerational relationships are much more complex now than they were in biblical times. Individual geographical mobility hardly existed two or three thousand years ago. Nearly everyone permanently stayed where they were born. Because extended families lived in close proximity to one another, they all conversed with one another on a daily basis. Few of us ever did that. In fact many people today have completely lost track of some of their relatives. When offspring live in places with names like London and Singapore, that happens.
In two passages in two of the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus indicated that his ministry would create problems in many families, making it hard for them to speak truth to one another as they perceived what was true. In Matthew, he opens this “hard saying” with these words: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have come not to bring peace, but a sword” (10:34). Of course he is speaking figuratively, not literally. In Luke the opening words to the essence of the passage are as follows: “I came to cast fire upon the earth, and would that it were already kindled! …Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division” (12:49,51). Then Jesus launched into the sayings about various family members being divided because of him.
Over the past two thousand years, sadly that surely happened in many families. Despite what both of these passages seem to imply, Jesus did not intend family animosity to arise because of him. Instead, he anticipated that inevitably it was bound to happen. Until Christianity became widespread in innumerable communities and nations, many families no doubt were torn apart because of the tension between paganism and the new religion. For dozens of generations, however, it was probably the younger generations who were gravitating to Christianity while the older generations were holding fast to the old religions.
Now I want to address an issue which is becoming more prevalent in more families than ever before, and it will affect increasing numbers of people in this congregation. It is obvious to everyone who is even tangentially aware of what is going on in the world that people are living longer. That reality prompts many occasions which necessitate speaking truth by and to relatives which did not occur with such frequency in years gone by.
More than half of us in this congregation live in retirement homes. If we have lived there for as few as two or three years, we have been in a position closely to observe the slow or rapid physical or mental decline of some of our fellow residents. We are aware that the children of some of those folks want their parents either to move to an assisted living facility on Hilton Head Island, or to a facility in the community where the children live. And we have seen many of these people resist or refuse what their children think they should do.
Here is a sobering chronological reality. Many, but by no means all, elderly people are afflicted with impaired thinking as they get older. At present there are no medical procedures to prevent that process, and there may never be anything to stop it. Furthermore, many older people become quite impaired physically as well.
During the racial unrest this year which erupted when police killed or injured several Blacks around the country, those of us who are white heard about something we may never have known about before. It is a conversation that virtually all Black parents have with their teenage children, and it is called “The Talk.” In “The Talk,” Black parents tell their children that if they are ever stopped by the police when they are driving, they must keep their hands on top of the steering wheel. If they are asked to get out of the car, they must get out slowly with their hands raised in the air so that the police can see them. If they are stopped by police as pedestrians, they must not talk back to the officers, and do whatever they are told to do. And why do Blacks parents engage their children in “The Talk?” It is because they know that Blacks are much more likely to receive harsher treatment from the police than whites. To avoid that, they must acquiesce. It is a result of what we so quaintly --- and cynically --- call “the peculiar institution.”
Someday your children may feel compelled to engage in a different kind of “Talk” with you. If so, it will be a major generational role-reversal. Because they love you and respect you, they will be giving you what they believe is the best advice they can offer you. “Mom (or Dad),” they may say, “we think the time has come for you to stop driving,” or “We think it is best if you move out of the house to a retirement home,” or “We think you need to move out of the retirement home to an assisted living facility or to a nursing home.” Speaking truth to relatives doesn’t get any harder for them to have “Their Talk” with you, nor has it ever been harder for you to participate in “The Talk.” And if you think perhaps you need to have “The Talk,” and you suspect they don’t have the courage to initiate it, you may have to start it yourself, just to hear what they are thinking.
An old song lyric says, “We only hurt the ones we love.” Such conversations are never intended to hurt; they are only intended to help. But when we have “The Talk” with our children, we are the only ones who can determine whether it ends up hurting or helping us.
No one in the younger or the older generation wants to have a talk like that, but for many older people there comes a time when that kind of discussion must occur. The folk aphorism of the past fifty years is so true: Old age is really not for sissies. But when old age has seized us in its implacable grip, we must face that reality, and take advice that we may have strongly resisted for so long. Otherwise it may be father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother. In such circumstances everyone is striving to do what is right and what is best, but there may be powerful disagreement over precisely what that is.
In the first congregation I served over fifty years ago, there was a wonderful old man who told me he was an only-child. When I first stopped to visit him, he said his parents had both died by the time he was ten years old. I was thunderstruck to hear that, so I asked who raised him. With a wistful smile on his face, “There wasn’t no one. I jest growed up.” He did what he had to do to survive. Whatever he did to raise himself, he did an excellent job of it, because he was one of the finest people I ever knew in over half a century of pastoral ministry.
Thank heaven most of us grew up with parents and brothers or sisters, and to one extent or another with grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. It wasn’t always easy, and we didn’t always agree with one another, but they were there, and we talked, and laughed, and cried, and agreed, and disagreed. Then most of us had our own wives or husbands and children and grandchildren, and we spoke truth to one another as wisely and as civilly as we could. It wasn’t always easy, and it isn’t always easy, but we did it and do it, because it needs to be done.
Now some of us may be in a new chapter of our lives. And how are we doing with everyone in our family now? Are we speaking truth to relatives, or when we talk to them, do we just casually pass the time of day?