Like most homes, growing up in our house, Mom was the most frequent witness to misdeeds and normally the first person to give advice or discipline my brother and me. Many times, I’ve shared with you advice of my father, who was a fund of aphorisms. This does not mean that Mom was not without her favorite proverbs. One of her favorites was “To whom much is given, much is expected.” The first proverb I heard every time I made a bad grade. (Mom, like my teachers, was of the opinion that I failed to live up to my potential as a student.) As often as I heard that saying, even more often I heard the saying, “Be careful who your friends are.” Mom used this proverb if either Tim or I had a friend she did not think was a good influence.
Tim and I were especially blessed with a best friend, Mark Schmidt. The Schmidt family moved to Springfield a short time after the Scruggs family. Mark was my best friend. He was Tim’s big brother in their college fraternity. He was in our wedding. He was in Tim’s wedding. Tim and I were part of his marriage. Bob Schmidt, Mark’s Dad, was my Dad’s best friend. Pat, Mark’s mother, Pat, was my Mom’s best friend. We were in church together, Boy Scouts together, school together, and in the case of Tim and Mark, in engineering school together.
This is not to say that there were not bad elements in Springfield. One particular little boy, who thought of himself as the local Tom Sawyer, was known to be the source of endless pranks, snowball fights, war games, attempts to derail trains, and other activities in which the property and health of others might be injured. I can remember my mother calling in my brother to tell him to be careful who his friends were while all the time looking directly at me! I am sure Mrs. Schmidt did the same thing.
In this blog, I am talking about relationships. Healthy relationships of many, many kinds are essential to human health and human happiness. The text is the first in Proverbs to speak of the importance of healthy relationships. It comes from Proverbs 1:
Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction and do not forsake your mother’s teaching. They are a garland to grace your head and a chain to adorn your neck. My son, if sinful men entice you, do not give in to them. If they say, “Come along with us; let’s lie in wait for innocent blood, let’s ambush some harmless soul; let’s swallow them alive, like the grave, and whole, like those who go down to the pit; we will get all sorts of valuable things and fill our houses with plunder; cast lots with us; we will all share the loot”—my son, do not go along with them, do not set foot on their paths; for their feet rush into evil, they are swift to shed blood. How useless to spread a net where every bird can see it! These men lie in wait for their own blood; they ambush only themselves! Such are the paths of all who go after ill-gotten gain; it takes away the life of those who get it (Proverbs 1:8-19).
The God of Healthy Relationships
It cannot be said too often that Christians believe in One God in Three Persons. The Three Persons exist in a relationship of self-giving love. Since love is a relation, it can be said that God exists in relationship. [1] It is not surprising that a God who exists in relationship would create a being in his own likeness that is also constituted by relationships. And, that is exactly what psychology tells us: Human beings develop as a result of loving relationships with significant people, especially parents and family. When human beings are denied loving relationships, they fail to develop normally. [2] God, it seems, implanted in us the same capacity and need for self-giving relationships as characterizes God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Our relationships are also important because, like the choices we make, our relationships determine the person we are and will be. If we have healthy relationships, we will become healthy people. If we have unhealthy relationships, we will become unhealthy people. If our family and friends are violent, rebels, immoral, and the like, we are in trouble. If we have relationships with the God of wisdom and with wise, moral and emotionally healthy people, we will likely become wise, moral and emotionally healthy. If we have a healthy vertical relationship with the God of Love and healthy horizontal relationships with loving people, we will become loving people. If we have relationships with people who are on the Path of Life, we will remain on the Path of Life. Relationships are important.
Family: The Basic Relationship
Wisdom literature assumes that there is a place where wisdom grows first and best—a place that must be created, protected and treasured. That place is the family. It is within a family that children are conceived, born, loved, and raised until they achieve adulthood. They will belong to that family when their parents have grown old, and they are the family leaders. The family is not just the place where wisdom is learned. It is the first and primary place where it is practiced during all of life. [3]
Over and over again, Proverbs begins with an exhortation using the narrative voice of a concerned and loving parent. For example in Proverbs 4,
Listen, children, to a father’s instruction, and be attentive, that you may gain insight; for I give you good precepts: do not forsake my teaching. When I was a son with my father, tender, and my mother’s favorite, he taught me, and said to me, “Let your heart hold fast my words; keep my commandments, and live. Get wisdom; get insight: do not forget, nor turn away from the words of my mouth. Do not forsake her, and she will keep you; love her, and she will guard you (Proverbs 4:1-6, NRSV).
Throughout wisdom literature, wisdom speaks as a parent attempting to impart wisdom to her children. Often, there is a sense of urgency—the resolve of one who deeply desires to impart a most important lesson to a beloved child. The representative parent is desperately attempting to see that the child has the wisdom and life skills to meet the difficulties of life.
Scholars are almost unanimous in their evaluation of the American family: it is extraordinarily weak. [4] If in ancient Israel families lived in large, intergenerational groupings, today the basic family unit is a mother, father and children. Many children in America will spend at least a part of their lives in a family unit lacking one of their biological parents. An increasing number of children may live with neither of their biological parents but with grandparents or other relatives. Grandparents seldom occupy the same home as their grandchildren, and many live a long distance away and are seldom seen by the children. Children are not regularly exposed to the wisdom of the eldest and most experienced members of the family. This is a great loss to children and grandchildren as well as to the elderly. This statement is not meant to shame anyone. It is meant to alert us to the need as a church and as individuals to find ways to impart wisdom to children in our own day and time.
Marriage: The Key to Family
The main reason that families are weak in America today is that marriages are weak in our society. In our society, people marry for love—what we call “soul-mate marriage.” We take this for granted. We also think that somehow it is wrong to marry for other reasons, though a lot of people do. It is helpful to observe that people in traditional cultures did not always or even often marry for love. Marriage was a family affair. Frequently, parents chose the spouse for their children. In almost every case, a spouse was someone who lived fairly close by because people did not travel.
Some people ask the question, “Does the Bible approve of love, and especially the love of a man and a woman?” A complete answer to this question is beyond the scope of this Blog. In Path of Life, I devote en entire chapter to Song of Solomon and God’s endorsement of human love. It is fair to say that the Bible clearly teaches that love is important; that families are important; that God created human beings, male and female, with families in mind; and that sex is important as that biological way in which we human beings continue our existence and reflect our love in our physical relationship with a spouse. Marriage is especially important because family is the way in which the moral, spiritual, and practical part of our human nature can best be developed.
Just outside of Fithian Illinois there is a cemetery at the edge of my great grandfather’s farm. On my mother’s side, I am related to almost everyone in that little cemetery, all of whom married into our family in some way. This happened because all those people farmed little farms around that cemetery. One of the people buried there was a very difficult person. I think that today the spouse would have divorced that person. At the time they lived, divorce was unknown and the marriage survived. I am personally glad it did, because if it had not, I would not be here.
Friendship: The Key to a Full Life
My parents are now both dead. My Dad’s friend, Bob Schmidt, is now dead. Only Pat is still alive. Three times now, Tim, Mark, and Chris have made the long trip to Springfield, longer for Tim and Mark than for me, to attend a funeral service at the little church in which we grew up, say goodbye to one of our parents, go to the veterans cemetery for a burial, and share a meal. Someday, you will come to church and find that I am not here because I must make one last trip to Springfield to say goodbye to the last of the generation before ours. The friendship of Bob, Pat, George, and Betsey, and the friendship of Tim, Chris, Mark, and Mark’s sisters, continues to this day. This friendship, which is now half a century old, has been important and continues to be important, even though we do not see each other very often. I would certainly not be who I am without my family and this essential friendship from the past.
Proverbs 24 contains a verse that reads like this, “A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother” (Proverbs 18:24). It is good to have a lot of friends. I admire people who do. Friends are great. However, we all need a few friends who are as close as family. We need friends who will warn us when we go astray, who will rally to our side when we are hurting, and who will be with us through thick and thin. The philosopher Aristotle said that there was no truly good life without friends, and my experience is that Aristotle is right.
The great British missionary theologian, Leslie Newbigin, famously and frequently commented that when Christ came to earth to dwell among us, “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14), he did not write a book. He created a community. [5] It When the God of Relationships desired to save the world, he did so not through power, politics, or intellectual intimidation, but through friendship. He came among us and loved us in the form of specific people he met on his earthly sojourn. In particular, he called out a small group of people who were to be the church, his special body to witness to his grace and truth after he was gone.
During his last night on earth, Jesus made the following incredible statement to his disciples:
My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. This is my command: Love each other (John 15:9-17).
God, when he came to be with us, made friends with us. God, today, wants to gather around himself a group of friends—people he calls the “Family of God.” He wants this group of friends to show the world just how important healthy relationships are. He wants us to show this in our families, in our marriages, and in our friendships and other relationships with people.
Copyright, 2014, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved
[1] See, john D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion (Crestwood NY: St. Vladimir’s, 1985).
[2] There is a vast body of literature on this subject. See for example a fine article, Richard Boyd, How Early Life Attachment Affects Adult Intimacy and Relationships Energetics Institute, Perth, West Australia at www.energeticsinstitute.com (2011).
[3] As is often the case in this series, a large part of this sermon is from G. Christopher Scruggs, Path of Life (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2014).
[4] See, Barbara Defoe Whitehead & David Popenoe, The State of our Unions: Social Health of marriage in America in Theology Matters vol. 10. no. 2 (March April, 2003), 1-8.
[5] Newbigin frequently repeated the following observation: “It is surely a fact of inexhaustible significance that what our Lord left behind Him was not a book, nor a creed, nor a system of thought, nor a rule of life, but a visible community. He committed the entire work of salvation to that community. It was not that a community gathered round an idea, so that the idea was primary and the community secondary. It was that a community called together by the deliberate choice of the Lord Himself, and re-created in Him, gradually sought – and is seeking – to make explicit who He is and what He has done. The actual community is primary; the understanding of what it is comes second.” Leslie Newbigin, The Household of God (New York, Friendship Press, 1954), 20-21.