“Whole Households of Faith”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Text: Acts 16:25-34
At the moment there seems to be a great fascination with genealogies. In fact, I think with the Internet more and more people are actually going through their backgrounds trying to discover where they came from and who their family might be. It is all very well to be able to hook up with your friends, who are alive through Facebook and other media, but somehow to know where you have come from and who your ancestors are is a tremendously exciting and wonderful thing in many ways. We're fascinated by it. For some people, I am afraid, it has almost become an obsession, but it is a good thing to do.
I certainly know that my uncle in the United Kingdom, before he died, spent a great deal of time in retirement working on my family tree and trying to convey to me my background. We unearthed some marvellous things! One of my great uncles had been Moderator of The Church of Scotland. Another one, who dated back three generations before him, had died in a drunken stupor in Kirkcaldy in a pool of water one Saturday night. Clearly, I have all the credentials to be a minister according to my background, do I not?
There are, I suppose, in our backgrounds closets that we would rather keep closed, and there are doors that we would love to see flung open to show where we have come from. It is important, really. There is a sense of our family and our traditions and we know that families have their own culture; households have their own patterns of behaviour and values. Somehow knowing where we come from gives us a sense of who we are.
It is not an absolute thing. It is often the household that we are in now that really matters more than the history. Often, people are not able to trace their backgrounds because of adoption, or various and sundry problems of record keeping in various countries. It is the household that we belong to, it is the house that we live in, and it is the family that we connect with now that is the most important thing. Households and families are important.
When you look at the creation of the world, God in many ways created households and families. Right from the very beginning, I believe God created the household of the earth. Namely that from the very beginning whenever that beginning was, there was a sense in which the whole of the human family would be connected into one great household under the fatherhood of God. This is what the early books of the Old Testament affirm. This is the theme that is carried through the Torah - that in fact the whole of the earth is the household of the Lord.
Beyond that, the Lord clearly chose even amongst the household of the earth a Covenant people, a household of Israel. There was this unique relationship between God and Israel as a household, as a family, that they might bear witness to him, that they might point to him to let the families of the earth know that He is their God. God's covenant with Israel is a covenant with a household, a covenant with a family.
The early Church picked up on that very same theme. The early Christians gathered in one place at Pentecost really did believe that they were the new Israel, that they were another way of God being able to speak through his Son's family to the earth and to the nations. There was a sense of them being a household, a family, a gathering that was knit and committed to God through Jesus Christ.
It is not only in the great scheme of things that God created households. You can see the importance of family households as a smaller unit from the very earliest days of the Old Testament. One of the oldest books that we know of is The Book of Job, and in this book you have this incredible story of a man who lost everything, and then kept his faith and regained everything at the end. But, there are statements in the last chapter of Job that say so much that his family at the end comforted him, and his family was redeemed and saved.
You see the same thing with another great, old story: Noah and the floods and the Ark, a story most of you are familiar with from the Old Testament. Noah was concerned, not only for the salvation of the animals, not only for the salvation of peoples in the midst of a flood, but for his family, for his household. His heart was with his household and their salvation as well.
Rahab, another character in the Old Testament, similarly wanted her household to be redeemed. You see, right in the Old Testament there is this desire that it is not only a covenant people, it is not only a group of people, it is households, it is families that are to be redeemed and cared for by God.
This brings us to our story this morning. It is an incredible story of two New Testament characters, Paul and Silas, who had been imprisoned because they had converted a woman who was promoting the occult. After her conversion there was an uproar about what these two men were doing and they were put in prison. In prison they prayed and as they prayed, there was an earthquake, which was very common in that part of the world and the walls of the jail came down.
The jailer, who had been responsible for looking after these two men was absolutely terrified to find that the walls were no longer there, that Paul and Silas were walking around in complete freedom. And, the jailer said “Oh, my Gosh” or something like that, “I think I am in trouble! I might even have to take my own life!” - and he wasn't kidding! He was terrified! He was terrified possibly of Paul and Silas. “These guys have power! The walls came down!”
Or, maybe he was terrified of his reputation - that he couldn't go back to other people after having found that the people he was actually supposed to be taking care of were walking free. Or, maybe it was that in Roman tradition, if you were the guard of somebody and that person escaped, you would undergo the same fate that the person that escaped would go through. He was terrified! So, he said to Paul and Silas, who were very nice to this jailer and realized his predicament, “What must I do to be saved? I mean, I am in absolute dire straits.”
Paul and Silas just simply said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. Have faith in the Lord that we worship.”
The story continues, and it is a rather humorous one, that in fact Paul and Silas hung around to make sure that the jailer was okay. Word had come out that these two men could be released. Paul and Silas just said, “Oh, no, no, no, no. Just a minute! We are not going to have this jailer formally release us; we want the powers and the authorities to come and formally escort us out of here. We want the Roman powers to do this, because we are Roman citizens, and we have the right to do this.”
Paul and Silas were a couple of tough cookies! They really were! They were demanding that the Roman authorities actually give credence to their freedom. It is amazing! But, they were also doing it I think, to protect the jailer because the authorities would then be responsible for letting them loose not the jailer. They were caring for him.
As the story goes, the jailer believed in the words of Paul and Silas. His family heard the Word of God proclaimed by Paul and Silas and we are told, and this is really pertinent, particularly for those of you who are with baptismal families this morning, his whole household was saved, his whole household was redeemed - not just the jailer, but the household, the home.
The Holy Spirit had clearly been at work in the jailer's life and had been worked through Paul and Silas, so here they are: they came to believe. And then, we are told, and this is really significant for baptismal families, the jailer and his whole family were baptized. Here we have then, in a sense an incredible act of grace, where God is bringing a household into his covenant and into his life, and baptism is the sign that this took place.
What does that tell us? What does it say to you who are now trying to bring children up in the Lord and in the faith? Well, there are a couple of things, the first of which is that the Church and baptism go hand-in-hand. As we have brought these children into the Church today, they are entering the family - notice the language that we use - they are entering the household of faith, the very language that is used in the liturgy: they belong, they are part of the community.
You also notice that the symbol of that, the sign, which is another word for sacrament, is baptism. From the very beginning of the early Church, the sign that you belonged to the household of God is baptism. That is the sign! Sure, faith is needed on the part of parents to bring a child forward. Faith is needed on the part of family to support them and encourage that. Faith is needed by the Church to help support you and encourage you, but baptism is the sign of the faith. It is the sign of the redemption.
This does not mean that when you join the household of the Church or the household of the faith your child is always going to like and to admire and to respect every single member of the household that they are joining. A lot of people misunderstand that. They somehow think you have to like every single Christian that you ever meet in order that you may feel good in your household. But, let me ask you this: at times, do you like every member of you own household every single day, all the time, 24-7? Do you like and respect every member of your family if you go back into your genealogy: do I like my great-great-great drunken Uncle John, who ended up in the ditch? No, not really. Probably not! I am not sure we would have had a lot in common. I hope not!
But, you know something? We do have a common bond. As Christians in the household of faith, we have a bond that is greater than anything else. It is the bond that the jailer had with Paul and Silas. When they were asked, “What must I do to be saved?” Paul and Silas said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.” This act of baptism is a symbol of what we believe to be true. And believe you me my friends, there is more power in that covenant of faith with Christ, there is a greater bond in that with whoever one might be within the community of faith than any other bond on earth, because it is a bond that we share with heaven and it is a bond that we share with people all over the world. There is a bond between the Church and baptism, baptism being the sign of our faith and our redemption in Jesus Christ.
There is a second thing, and if there is any message that I want to convey particularly to young families here today, and to the families that are supporting them, and to the whole of the Church, it is this: the Church itself is a family, and because it is a family, it needs to encourage those who are within it. I think from this day on, from the moment a child is baptized, it should be the prerogative of the parents and of the family to help nurture and educate and support and encourage that child in their faith that they may know the love of Jesus Christ and they may experience the bond of love with one another in that great covenant.
We have a challenge today, and I really want to name this, we have a challenge. The challenge is that in former generations the education, the nurturing, the promotion of the faith often went hand-in-hand with the institutions of our culture, namely that our schools would often teach about the Christian faith, often organizations that young people would belong to would have had a Christian foundation, the nurturing of a child in the faith often went hand-in-hand with many of the associations with which they were attached. That is ceasing. We are in a different age.
I love something that was written in a delightful little poem. It is only four lines, and I read it in a Christian magazine while sitting in a bus shelter a few years ago, and I took it down. It says the following:
To our forefathers our faith was an experience
To our fathers our faith was an inheritance
To us our faith is a convenience
To our children our faith is becoming a nuisance
We face a real challenge, and the challenge is that as our culture no longer conveys the essence of the Christian faith in education and in symbols. Who is then going to teach this? Who is going to promote this? In an age where there are so many distractions from doing it, who will speak the Word of God to our children?
I read something in the National Post yesterday and I thought, “This sums up so much of the experience of our culture and any of you who are real estate agents, just a little caveat; don't take this personally. This is what Jonathan Kay wrote in the National Post yesterday, and my ears started to tingle and burn - that is just how truthful it was!
Few of my neighbours go to church, but they do attend Sunday services. The proceedings take place in the early afternoon at shifting locations around the city. Congregants are called to worship with signs proclaiming “Open House.” Inside, real estate agents share The Gospel To While You Were Out. Some of the visitors are looking to buy a roof over their heads, but most are there for what might be loosely described as spiritual reasons: having shunned God's house, modern Yuppies instead worship their own, travelling from open house to open house, proclaiming to one and all the good news of granite
counter tops and imported tile backslashes.
Now, the good news about open houses is that you can go to Church in the morning and go to an open house in the afternoon. But, that gets lost by so many, right? It is not one or the other.
Jonathan Kay is making a point. He is putting a finger on the nerve of culture and that is that there are many distractions, many other things that cause us to turn away from some of the essential things, like providing a spiritual community in which young people can nourish and grow,
Here's my passion. My passion is that as families, as households, like the jailer's, you will help bring to your child the keys of the faith: you will be the instrument of education, you will be the encourager of their little souls, you will be the ones who will show them the beauty of fellowship and the power of love, and that in you they may see Christ's witness and His Spirit.
To the Church also, it seems that even more important than ever before, passionate, joyful, careful, charismatic, spirit-filled, loving, inclusive, helpful witness to young families is what is needed. This is part of our household obligation. This is part of our mission and our call in the day in which we live. You know there is great moment in the Old Testament when Joshua is about to go into the Promised Land. He is called by God to follow on from Moses, and he says the following words: “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” That is what I want to hear rolling off the lips of this Church and its young people and its families always. Amen.