Pentecost 19B - "Family Stories"

Genesis 1:24-31

Psalm 8

Genesis 2:19-20

Saint Matthew 6:25-33

Every family has a story.

I was reminded of this while worshipping last Sunday at Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London in a very fine sermon preached by Dr. Naggi Dawn, who surprisingly was visiting from Rhode Island where she serves the Episcopal Diocese there as Resident Theologian.  

Her story was of a long road-trip her family made on the usual tour high school seniors make to visit colleges. 

She told of deep, heart-to-heart conversations about all sorts of matters from sports to spirituality.  Personally I thought, in a age where young and old seem to be welded to their tablets and i-phones, this was a gigantic feet unto itself.

They must have tucked all the electronic devises in the trunk because she also talked of them playing Scrabble, the license plate game, and “slug-bug” where the first person who spotted a Volkswagen Beatle got to punch the person next to them.

She was honest because she also reminded the rest of us, who were beginning to think that she came from a family of saints, that there were disagreements aplenty.

Every road-trip has the potential to become a family story the begins with the words “Remember When...”

Remember when there was a time before car seats and seatbelts, and you could let your child ride in the front seat propped up on just enough pillows for him or her to see out the front window.  Remember when the only passenger restraint device was, in my case, my uncle's right arm, thrust out and stiff-arming me to prevent me from hurting into the unpadded dashboard or front window at a sudden stop. This was usually followed by someone in the backseat yelling: “Watch where you are going!”

Lowell’s family had a different approach.  Mom and Dad always had the front seat and the four children road in the back.  In order to give his siblings more room they placed Lowell on the shelf of the back window.  (I’m not making that up! Ask him yourself at coffee hour.)

Surprisingly enough this was preferable to being seated directly behind his father where the slightest brush of a foot against his seat would bring forth a scolding.

Road trips can be the fodder for a great many family stories as ours was last week when we rented a car to drive from Penzance to a place called Port Isaac.  For those of you who are fans of the “Doc Martin” television series Port Issac is better known as Portwenn the home of the grumpy doctor and his eccentric neighbours.

Lowell did a masterful job driving stick-shift for the first time in years and keeping to the left side of the road.  It was my job as navigator to look out for traffic that seemed to be coming at us in all directions and also remind him, sometimes gently but often sternly, “Left side! Left side!”  To which he would reply, sometimes gently and sometimes sternly, “I know! I know!”

Thus, we managed to avoid those moments when “two pieces if moving metal were about to bang together in a very big way.” And the face of the driver in the oncoming car seems frozen “as if in a candid photograph, looking ... with a mixture of bewilderment and apology.”1

That we are both standing here today is our testament that our road-trip had a happy ending and therefore contribute to our little family story.  Some road-trips do not especially if they are forced.

When the story of Genesis was transmitted to the people the Children of Israel were captives, strangers in a strange land. In a psalm that was a part of this family story they would say of this time: 

“By the rivers of Babylon, There we sat down, yea, we wept When we remembered Zion. We hung our harps Upon the willows in the midst of it. For there those who carried us away captive asked of us a song, And those who plundered us requested mirth, Saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ How shall we sing the Lord’s song In a foreign land?’”2

 They needed a new family story.  And so, they remembered one.  It came from their oral history but it was not history it was more like pastoral care.  They needed to know that at the centre of their family story there was a creator that, in the beginning, made everything good, beautiful, lovely.  They needed to know that they were children of that creator and that no matter how tough times seemed they still belonged to them.

The temptation now is to wax grand eloquent of nature’s beauty and how good and gracious everything is, but the events of the last two days would make it seem like this preacher, or any preacher, has lost touch with reality.

Nature is not benign as posts from Facebook friends who live in the south has brought home in stark and saddening ways.  Pictures from the area in which they have a house, serve a parish, and attended conferences at the Montreat Conference Centre in North Carolina show washed out roads where as my Pastor friend Shannon Kershner, remembered she used to go for her regular runs.  A town square that she and her husband used to visit completely gone.  And one heartbreaking post from her: “Does anyone know if our house is still standing?”  Thankfully it was but there were many others that were not.

Nature can be cruel.  And sometimes the creatures that were given charge over the good world that was created can be even crueler.  The question: “Does anyone know if our house is still standing?” can be asked by countless thousands of innocent civilians in Gaza caught in a middle of a war they did not start.  It can be asked by the innocent men and woman of Somalia who are caught in the midst of marauders on both side seeming bent more on destruction than anything else.

All this may want us to hang our harps and our heads by the waters of Zion as we think of what is and what might be.

At such a time as this is is well that we take a moment to remember the Saint whose feast day we celebrate this day.  Saint Francis of Assisi is best known for being the patron saint of animals.  Many of us have statues of him in our yards honouring him for that but there is more to his family story.

Part of his family story included all of creation.  As Barbara Brown Taylor points out in her book An Altar in the World: Saint Francis of Assisi “loved singing hymns with his brothers and sisters that included not only Brother Bernard and Sister Claire but also brother sun and sister moon.  For him . . .  a single bird was as much a messenger of God as a cloud full of angels.”3

But so was every other human being Francis came in contact with and this was were his family story got him into trouble with the head of his family, his father, who intended his son to inherit all the wealth the family had amassed:

Taking the Bible quite literally, picking up whatever Jesus said or did and putting it on his to-do list for the day, Francis divested himself of his advantages, including his exquisite, fashionable clothing, which he gave away to the poor. His father, Pietro, a churchgoing, upstanding citizen, took exception, locked his son up for a time, and then sued him in the city square.4

It wasn’t a very nice thing for a churchgoing father to do to his bible-practicing son but that too was a part of his family story and can a part of ours, too.

When Jesus took his extended family out into the fields and invited them to look at the birds of the air and the flowers of the field he was reminding them of the creators care.  That’s a feel good message if there ever was one but it also comes with the charge St. Francis heard, to care for “the least, the last and the lost.”

When we do that “care for the least, the last, and the lost” we’ll be honouring the good creation that the creator has given us and our family story will be complete.

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1. Bill Bryson, In A Sunburned Country (Toronto, , ONT: Anchor Canada, 2012), 158.

2. Psalm 137:1-4. (NKJV) [NKJV=The New King James Version]

3. Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2010).

4. James Howell. “What Can We Say March 8? Lent 2A.” James Howell's Weekly Preaching Notions. Myers Park Presbyterian Church, January 1, 2019.