“Marriage is honorable; let us keep it so.”

(Hebrews 13:4)

On this Mother’s Day I think it not inappropriate for us to turn to a paragraph in Pearl Buck’s book, Fighting Angel, and hear what she wrote about her paternal grandmother.  “When my grandmother turned sixty,” wrote Pearl Buck, “she changed completely.  From being the incessantly busy, capable, managing mother of a big household, turning out cheeses and pies and cakes and loaves of bread, for she was a notable cook, she became a woman of complete leisure.  She never so much as made her own bed again.  She sat on the wide porch of the (West Virginia) farmhouse all day long on pleasant days, rocking placidly, and in bad weather sat by the sitting room window that looked out on the road. . .  Her family was amazed and her husband was almost beside himself with rage.  But she lived them all down and for nearly 35 years maintained her complete leisure while, perforce, she was waited upon by one after another of them.”  And then, somewhat cryptically, Pearl Buck adds, at the close of this little vignette of her brittle old grandmother, “If God was preeminent in that household, it was only by a very narrow margin.”

The picture of Pearl Buck’s rocking grandmother bears a sinister spiritual resemblance to the apathetic posture of the average church going adult of our time – both male and female – before the awesome spectacle of the fragmentation of the contemporary American family.  Mothers and fathers, grandparents and other responsible members of the family – not just sixty-ish, but forty-ish and even younger, just sit rocking, while the family – that central and crucial institution of western Christian culture – disintegrates.

One of the forces fragmenting the family in our time is the steady urbanization and industrialization of our culture and the emergence of the “work-family” phenomenon in business and industry.  Last week’s Time magazine, commenting on the effects of this aspect of our society, says:  “Since the 1970’s women have poured into the workplace, compelled by economic necessity and personal ambition, to the point where dual-wage-earner families are the norm.” (Time 5-6-96)

We in America have passed rapidly from rural farm life to industrialized city life.  Whereas the majority of our people once lived and worked as families together on a farm, now we live in cities or suburbs where often both mother and father are employed away from home and in separate commercial establishments.

Dr. Marshall Scott, of McCormick Presbyterian Theological Seminary, remembered the daily routine on the Ohio farm of his Scotch Irish Presbyterian grandfather.  “There,” he wrote, “it was the custom each morning, after the cows had been milked and the livestock had been fed, for the family to gather for breakfast and for family worship.  Grandfather and grandmother, their sons and daughters and sometimes grandchildren, their hired hands, and any visitors within their gates listened while grandfather read from the Bible.  Then they sang a Psalm.  Then they got down on their knees at their chairs while grandfather led them in prayer.  They rose from their knees, went through the door, and were at their daily work.  This was repeated at the close of every day.”

Then Dr. Scott concluded:  “When you have begun each day in praise and prayer and when the whole occupational, economic and social life has been spent together as one family on an area of land separated by distance from other families, it was natural for such families to be conscious of God’s presence all day long and all week long” – and to be knit together in a close family solidarity.

The very nature of our contemporary American culture tends to atomize the family unit instead of drawing the members together.  The demands for work and school and recreation are not only scattering the family in all directions and setting them in unrelated and unknown groups, but the contemporary home is invaded from without by the agents of mass media which fill the family’s leisure hours with a wildly souped up culture’s selling technique, insidiously subverting parental responsibility for fashioning family ideals and values.

One of the most disastrously damaging forces of the invading mass media upon the Christian family is the blatant exploitation of sex in both advertising and entertainment.  The Christian ideal of family life has always included sex. The church has always frankly taught that the family is based upon the sexual relationship of one man and one woman, and in the marriage ceremony the church has proclaimed that these “twain shall become one flesh.”

But our contemporary culture has unleashed on its very young the most savage onslaught of sexual stimulation the world has ever known.  We have gone from ankle length skirts to bikinis; from selling everything from automobiles to deodorants not on the appeal of low cost and high quality, but on sex appeal.

One Christian theologian observes that, “We have fashioned for unmarried young adults a particularly unfortunate combination of emotional environments.  They are constantly bombarded – through clothing styles, entertainment, advertising and courtship moves – with perhaps the most skillfully contrived array of erotic stimulants ever amassed.  Their sexual fears and fantasies are studied by motivational researchers and then ruthlessly exploited by mass media hucksters, while we provide our boys and girls with more privacy and permissiveness in dating than ever before. . .  Yet we pass on to our youth unaltered, a set of Victorian and Puritanical taboos that in a sex saturated society seem diabolically created to produce a high level of duplicity and desperation.”  (Harvey Cox – Christianity and Crisis)

A judge of the Superior Court of the State of Massachuettets, observed from her own court experience that “the tragic consequences from our ostrich-like attitude can be seen. . . in illicit relations leading to out of wedlock pregnancies, hasty marriages, divorces, emotional illness, cutting short of educational careers, and on and on and on in individual and family catastrophes.”

What is the solution to this progressive fragmentation of the family under the onslaught of our contemporary culture’s changes in life styles at work and play, in moral values, and all the strains and stresses of the last quarter of the 20^th century?  More freedom or less?  Liberation from a Puritan conscience? Radical revision of moral and ethical codes?

Certainly we are not so naive as to suppose that something good might come of our continual drifting – of our sitting rocking and doing nothing to preserve the unity and sanctity of the family.

From the beginning of the first century, Christian teaching has held marriage as an honorable, holy estate, and the family as ordained of God.  The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed that the first century Jewish community at Qumran exalted celibacy and did not have too high a regard for marriage – not because of the institution of marriage – but because of the low regard in which members of the Qumran sect held women – “as selfish, jealous, and hypocritical creatures.”

One New Testament scholar, John Wych Bowman, suggests that the Epistle to the Hebrews was written in the first century to Christians who were tempted to forsake some aspects of their distinctly Christian faith and embrace some teachings of a religious community like the Qumran sect.  The writer of Hebrews injunction: “Marriage is honorable; let us keep it so,” is therefore directed to those who were tempted to slip from the Christian high ideal of the marriage relationship as the highest and holiest state for men and women.

The Christian teaching regarding sex is not that it is either evil or good in itself; but rather that sex is one of life’s neutral materials which can be used either for the degradation of men and women and the corruption of society or to the glory of God and the greater blessedness of human life.  Both Puritan ethics and Victorian morality erred in not measuring adequately the tremendous power of the sex drive.  “The great power of sexual desire comes from the fact that it combines desire for the other with desire to gratify self . . . No sexual ethic, including the Christian one, can be valid if it does not recognize the sex force as a power in its own right, and in both its other-directed and self-directed aspects.” (Tom Driver – Christianity and Crises)

It is the Christian gospel rather than Christian law that brings family salvation in our time.  It is not the, “Thou shalt nots” or “Thou shall be damned,” which need to be sounded, so much as the “good news” of the Christian gospel of family love: “The thou shalls” of purity and respect for others, in order that “the Thous” and “the Theys” may enter into the blessedness of family bliss.

The family offers, as Reinheld Niebuhr held, “the supreme example of a community of “I-Thou” personal relationships, where, in spite of human sinfulness, there is genuine self-giving and forgiving love.”

In the maturing family relationships we find the best school for character and society.  “The Hindus held that most men and women have four central desires; and these basic desires correspond to the stages of maturing human development.  First, there is the desire for pleasure which is predominant in a child but grows less and less important with advancing years.  Then, there is the desire for success, which can drive men and women through early adulthood and produce great work; but alas, success does not completely satisfy.  The third desire, which takes over, is the desire to do one’s duty, even at the cost of some lack of pleasure, even sometimes to a lessening of financial success.  As Bismark said: ‘We are not in this world for pleasure, but to do our damned duty.’ Yet, even this desire to do one’s duty, though necessary, is not sufficient for human kind.  The last and culminating desire is to understand, to find philosophical and, or religious meaning for one’s own existence and the existence of the world: to understand each other in the miracle and pathos of human existence:  To seek something that is worth dying for, so that we have something worth living for.” (Rev. Father John McCall, S.J. – The Place of Values in a Mature Personality)

So, in the maturing process of the individual there is an ascent in the ladder of values, and at the summit is the desire to understand and to be understood by other people and by God.

The fragmentation of the family in our time, therefore, calls us to the attack on two fronts: First, we must offer resourceful resistance against all forces which, for profit, exploit sex and violence and indecency, and attack all religion and morality, and put our young people under unbearable pressures.

Who is responsible for public taste?  I am.  You are.  We can leave the obscene show.  We can withhold our patronage from persistently perverted performances or from merchandisers who sabotage souls in order to sell.  We can hit all degrading things every chance we get.  We can click off the TV when its pornographic and violent demonstrations invade our homes.

The newspapers last week broke the story of some angry mothers in Bedford, Massachusetts, who mounted a campaign they called “TV Turn Off Week,” and “through the work of ten thousand volunteers persuaded tens of thousands of Americans nation-wide to kick the TV habit for at least seven days.” (The Commercial Appeal 5-1-96)

A congressman in explaining the motivation of the angry “Bedford Moms” said: “People are angry because they cannot sit down to watch TV with their children without fearing that they will be embarrassed or demeaned.  And they are angry because they feel our culture has been hijacked and replaced with something alien to their lives, something that openly rejects the values they seek to instill in their families.  In the world they see on TV, sex is a recreational pastime, indecency is a cause for laughter, and humans are killed as casually as bugs.” (Senator Joseph Lieberman, Dem. Conn.)

So, the TV, Bedford based, “Free American Campaign” did not just attack a specific program’s content, it indicted the machine that carries the pollution into the family living room.  And furthermore, the “TV turnoff” participants reported that their liberation from the video gormandizing resulted in such positive and enjoyable things as families reading together, playing together, and frankly discussing personal problems and Christian virtues.

In the second place we must attack with more vigorous and intelligent teaching, in the family and the church, that deals realistically with the power of the sex drive and helps our young people understand the nature of this power and how it can act on our human weaknesses, but at the same time sets our sexuality in the larger context of the highest personal values, inculcating in our young people the desire to understand, to serve and to ennoble all others rather than prey upon and use them.

So shall the family, thus defended, rather than suffer further enfeebling and deterioration, be stabilized and strengthened in our time, to the glory of God and the blessedness of our human society.

PASTORAL PRAYER:

We come together today, O Lord our God, as travelers from many places, along different routes, to this holy place and hour.  Though we have our differences, Lord, we are all alike in our experience of undeserved blessings and unexpected deliverances from dangers and misfortunes.  And on this Mother’s Day, O Lord, we are gratefully aware that we are all alike in that we, each one, have the gift of life through the love and sacrifice of our Mother.  May we all be numbered, Lord, among those who say with gratitude: “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.”

We praise thee, Gracious God, for the privilege to grasp the fair adventure of today; for the restoring of our souls through the ministry of music; for the grandeur of this sanctuary making credible to our human sense the glory and steadfastness of eternal verities; for family and friends and this household of faith which cheer and encourage and ennoble our daily round; for the presence of the blessed Comforter Jesus promised who is closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet, and never leaves us though all others depart.  For all these unspeakable mercies we give our grateful thanks, O Lord our God.

Hear us as we pray for the children of our families and youth of our congregation.  Watch over them.  Lead them by whatever fiery pillar or moving cloud they will follow through the wilderness of this world to the land of eternal promise.  We confess our failings in the church.  Our teaching and preaching has not always been clear and challenging to our youth.  They have found our example ambiguous and even repugnant.  Our patience has been short and our love has not reached unto the uttermost.

We pray for our youth, O Lord our God, that nothing in heaven or earth may deaden their perception of the infinite love of the Father God.

We lift up to Thee on the arms of our intercession our sick and sorrowing dear ones.  Heal and comfort them we pray, and may Thy Holy Spirit incline their minds and hearts, and ours, to a true understanding of the divine will, and to a glad obedience to the divine purpose in our time, through Jesus Christ, Our Lord. Amen.