Sermon Notes, Second Sunday of Lent

INTRODUCTION
This week, we start a brief topical series on the family. This being Lent, we want to look at family life from the perspective of the cross.

THE TEXT
“Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church . . . .” (Ephesians 5:22-6:4).

FAMILY IN GOD’S PLAN
Ephesians is an overview of history from predestination before the foundation of the world (1:3-14), through Christ’s union of Jew and Gentile (2:11-22), and to instructions about how Christians are to take up God’s armor to stand against Satan (6:10-20). On the way, Paul describes the impact of the gospel on the family. Gentiles are brought near by the blood of Jesus (2:13), and Jew and Gentile are united by the cross (2:16). That same cross transforms wives and husbands, parents and children. But the cross is not merely a past event for Christians and Christian families; the cross is a continuing experience for every believer.

LIFE ON THE CROSS
How is this true? There are many ways to express this, but Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy has summarized it neatly in what he calls the “Cross of Reality.” He says that every human being is stretched out simultaneously in various directions. We are obligated to the past, but also must aim for the future. We have duties toward our inside group, but must interact with those outside our group. The family is torn by these pressures and demands, which are often all legitimate yet incompatible with one another. Do we protect our children from outside influences, or do we train them by exposing them to the outside world? In answering questions like these, timing is everything. There is a time to build walls around our family, but there is also a time to let the world in and push the family out. A family that remains enclosed in its protective walls is bound to be an unbalanced family. When we try to escape the challenge of balancing these demands, we are torn. As we are torn, we mature.

FAMILY HERITAGE
One demand on families is the necessity of carrying on a heritage, honoring the past. Within the nuclear family, the past is represented by parents, and children are commanded to obey and honor parents (Ephesians 6:1-2). But the past comes into the family in all kinds of other ways as well: Parents have parents, whose lives stretch further into the past and whom they are supposed to honor; each parent comes with a family and personal history that affects how the family works; and each parent comes with a set of traditions and habits from their own families. Parents should strive to pass on this heritage to their children, telling their own family histories, doing what they can to help children to know their grandparents, memorializing the past in family holidays (e.g., birthdays) and ceremonies. Families will be unhealthy if parents attempt a revolutionary break with the past.

But families cannot live in the past. Every marriage creates a new family, with a new future, a new variation on the families’ themes, and a family is created by an overlap of past and future. Families ought to honor the past, but they also necessarily break with the past, and this break is as right and proper as continuity with the past. Conflict arises when parents will not allow their adult children and their families to create a future.