Faith and Complicated Family Legacies (Father’s Day: Gunn Park Service)

Romans 5:1-5

There are a series of Geico commercials about people horrified that they are becoming like their parents.  Stephanie and I often joke that our kids are going to need a good therapist to work through our shoddy parenting.  Of course we hope that our kids have caught some healthy habits and values from us.  But we also know that, as parents, we have blind spots and limitations.  Let me give you an example.

 

I am not very good at building and fixing things.  It’s not that I’ve never tried.  It’s just that my brain doesn’t work that way.  I have a hard time reading technical instructions.  When a machine breaks, I immediately become angry (because I usually don’t understand how it works nor how to fix it).  But about some things I am extremely curious.  So I wound up staying in graduate school for a very long time.  My wife also happens to have multiple graduate degrees.

So when we had children, of course we said the right things.  “They can do whatever they want.  They can become whoever they want to become.  They can follow whatever interests them.”  And then we had Henry.  Henry didn’t like anything that I like.  Henry never wanted to learn anything from me.  And he didn’t want a life like mine.  It’s almost as if he could sense, from a very young age, how he could develop a life that was the opposite of mine.

Henry took things apart, burned things, ruined things, rewired things.  By fourteen he had taught himself to weld from watching Youtube videos.  We tried to be patient.  We tried to encourage him.  We even ceded our garage to him as a welding shop.  We weren’t perfect parents, of course.  But all our efforts to understand him and to provide him what he needed didn’t do much to help our relationship.  He resented us and constantly told us that he couldn’t wait to get away from us. 

Now I don’t think college is for everyone.  I just assumed that any kids I had would want to go to college.  Henry didn’t want to go to college.  We accepted that.  But we encouraged him to make at least one visit just to make sure.  So he agreed to visit K-State and talk to people in the engineering department.  They gave him their best sales-effort.  And at the end of the day when they asked if he had any questions, he said, “I just want to build stuff.  Can I do that here?”  The Engineering Professor, a bit thrown, said, “Well, we do build stuff.  But to be honest, more of our time is spent learning the academic disciplines of engineering.”  And Henry said, “Ok.  I don’t want to do that.”  So he went to welding school and now works as a welder.  And he’s very good.

Now why did I tell you this little story?  I want you to think about family systems, about family legacies.  All of us inherit certain values and perspectives from the families in which we grow up.  All families have weaknesses and imbalances, fears and expectations.  Some of our family’s tensions showed up in my relationship with Henry.  My grandmother and grandfather on my mother’s side were working class folks with very little formal education.  Of course they were brilliant in many ways, and had a range of amazing skills.  They just didn’t get them in school.  My grandpa Roy left home at 14 and wound up owning an auto-body shop.  He was also an accomplished carpenter.  His two sons, my uncles, inherited a good bit of his no-nonsense practicality.  One uncle was a civil engineer whose work involved making sure soils were stable enough for bridges and buildings.  My other uncle was a truck driver and is now a truck-driving instructor.

In a way, Henry embodies many elements from our family history that have dropped away in his immediate family.  Whether he realizes it or not, he is rebalancing our connections to our extended family.  He is recovering a way of life that was lost to me.  He is developing strengths where I have weaknesses.  He is slightly less resentful towards us now than he was a year or two ago.  But he remains very different from us.  And so God’s Spirit has been at work in our family relationships to invite us to let go of our assumptions and expectations of what our children should be like.  God’s Spirit is working in us to help us adopt a more flexible and nimble view of education, work, life-style, status, spirituality, family, and money.

Most people never fully identify the blessings and challenges they inherited from their families. And often, those of us who go to church never allow God’s Spirit to rearrange our deepest values, especially the ones we absorb from the dynamics of our family systems.  Much more common is for people like us to simply add “faith” as a layer that sits awkwardly on top of the messy and confused set of family assumptions and inheritances that we carry with us.  We may have experienced some first level of conversion, but we move deeper into the mystery of God’s love only when we offer ourselves to God as people who carry the weaknesses and imbalances of our families. 

Jesus once said, “Unless you love me more than your mother, father, brothers, and sisters, you cannot be my disciple” (Matthew 10:37).  Life with God offers, among other things, some freedom from the unhealthy influences and distorted values we received from our families.

Since we’re worshiping in the park today, we’re going to do something a little different.  We’re handing out three case studies that involve complicated situations regarding how we integrate our faith and our family systems.  So get in a group with the people around you and discuss these case studies together.