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For those of a certain age,
Norman Rockwell was the artist who captured our American way
of life. Beginning in 1916, he painted over 300 covers for
the Saturday Evening Post which have become classics
in American art—everything from childhood adventures in the
old swimming hole to moving tributes to war heroes, gentle
laughter and deep sentiments. He imaged what we imagined
life was, or could be, like in those days of my growing up.
Along the way he also challenged
some of the narrow attitudes and prejudices of the era and
called us to a broader vision:
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His
well-known “Freedom of Worship” is one of the “Four
Freedoms” which he painted during the Second World War.
All four hang in our hallway. It shows not just
Christians, but the broad variety of religious
traditions, all part of the American dream, with the
words “each according to the dictates of his own
conscience.”
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His
glorious vision of the multi-racial, multi-cultural
world in which we live includes over thirty distinct
faces, nationalities and costumes, and the words “do
unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
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And who
can forget the powerful image of a brave little black
girl in a white dress walking to school amid Federal
agents, Rockwell’s statement against the evil of
segregation and racial prejudice. Unfortunately, the
title for that painting is still all too true and still
present tense. He called it “The Problem We All Live
With.”
I haven’t found one of his works
specifically for Mother’s Day, but images of family abound,
and the loving mothers imaged in his work come through as a
tribute to all our moms. Today, I’m thinking of another of
the Four Freedoms, “Freedom from Want.” It shows a warm
image of a family joyfully gathered around the Thanksgiving
table with Grandma presenting the turkey to Grandfather for
carving. As I say, I’ve never figured out how you could
carve the bird at the table without making a huge mess! The
image was an icon of family life, right up there with
Ozzie and Harriet, I Love Lucy and Father
Knows Best.
So
what ever happened to Norman Rockwell?
The truth is, the world has
changed and our experience of family has changed with it.
The other truth is that even Rockwell’s world wasn’t as
perfect as we wanted it to be. Ozzie, as we later learned,
ruled the Nelson family like a tyrant, Ricky and Lucy’s
marriage ended in divorce, and we learned that father didn’t
always know best.
What ever happened to
Norman Rockwell?
What ever happened to “family”?
Today, if your extended family
network is anything like mine, it includes:
Single parent families
Multiple parent families
Childless families
Singles in families
Co-habitating families
Long-distance extended families
Multi-racial, multi-cultural and international adoptive
families
Families which have been broken by divorce or struggle with
grief
It’s all
there, around today’s family table.
It’s also a time when we are
willing to acknowledge that Mother’s Day can bring pain as
well as joy. Some years ago in one of my former churches, I
preached the traditional Mother’s Day sermon on traditional
family life. Not a bad sermon, but in response I received
this e-mail:
I am sure you meant well in your
sermon today, but did you consider those in the congregation
who want children but can’t have them, or my daughter who
suffered a miscarriage, or the couple who adopted a child
but then the birth mother took him back?
What about single persons, or
those who choose to remain childless? We had difficulty
having children and always ran into the same thing on
Mother’s Day. I realize this is something you can’t fully
appreciate, but I ask for more sensitivity in the future.
No, Norman Rockwell
doesn’t live here anymore.
And for that matter, neither does St. Paul.
Which brings us to the reading
of the morning. This text and its parallel in Ephesians can
be troublesome for those of us who want to take scripture
seriously, so we might as well begin with the toughest
paragraph, the third paragraph, and St. Paul’s vision of
relationships: wives and husbands, parents and children,
slaves and masters.
It’s really a set of three
parallel couplets which need to be read together. The first
part of each couplet acknowledges the realities of his world
and gives advice to wives, children and slaves on how to
live in it:
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And
slavery was a way of life. N.T. Wright says slavery was
to Rome what electricity is to us. Even for St. Paul,
freeing the slaves overnight was unthinkable. (N.T.
Wright, Paul for Everyone: The Prison Letters,
page 186) The best a slave could do was do their best
in their work, trying to please God, not just their
masters, by the quality of their labor.
The first half of the three
couplets was Paul’s way of saying, “This is reality and this
is how to make it in the world as we know it for now, for
the time being…”
BUT…the second half of
each couplet lifts up the first glimmers of an entirely new
vision. The second half of each couplet is the radical,
unexpected word, the earth-shaking word, the word which, if
taken seriously, has the potential to transform
relationships:
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“Husbands, love your wives,” and to the
Ephesians, St. Paul adds to love them “as Christ
loved the church and gave himself for it.”
(Ephesians 5:22) What a shocking, revolutionary concept.
The very notion of sacrificial, self-giving love as the
pattern for marriage was unheard of. It is, in fact,
the new word, the word which will reshape the marriage
covenant.
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“Fathers, don’t provoke your children to anger.” The
very idea that fathers should care about their
children’s feelings and treat them with any degree of
respect as human beings of worth was unheard of, but it
has the potential to reshape the entire family.
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“Masters, treat your slaves with justice.” Justice
for slaves? No one had ever considered such a thing.
“Remember,” he tells the masters, “you also have a
Master and that Master shows no partiality.” Now, if you
begin to take that seriously, it will undermine the
entire framework of ethnic superiority and racial
prejudice.
It is as if Paul is saying, “I
know what it’s like in the real world, but here are the
seeds of a vision which ultimately will create a new world
of relationships, marriage and family, parents and children,
masters and slaves, race and nation.” Here is the word which
will create a whole new community where, as he tells them
earlier, there can no longer be Greek or Jew, circumcised or
uncircumcised, barbarian or Scythian, slave or free, male or
female, young or old, urban or suburban, Groves or Seaholm,
Methodist or Baptist, Michigan or Michigan State, rich or
poor, black or white, red state or blue state (I added some
of that)…but Christ must be all, and in all. Or as
Eugene Peterson translates it: “From now on, everyone is
defined by Christ, and everyone is included in Christ.”
(Colossians 3:10)
St. Paul’s words on marriage and
family are set in the context of the two preceding
paragraphs where he tells us what it takes to build healthy
families, homes, human relationships, community. He tells
us what to take up and what to leave behind. Put to death
infidelity, promiscuity, evil desires, selfishness. Put away
anger, gossip, foul talk, lying. Instead put on compassion,
kindness, meekness, patience, forgiveness, and above all,
put on love which binds everything together. And then he
builds to this beautiful benediction, a word of blessing and
promise for the family and home, nation and world:
Let the peace of Christ rule in
your hearts, and be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell
in you richly. Teach one another in wisdom, and sing psalms
and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your
hearts to God.
And whatever you do, in word or
deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving
thanks to God the Father through him. (Colossians 3:12-17)
In the face of all the
changes in the make-up of “family,” here are truly lasting
“family values” which can make all the difference.
In 36 years as a pastor, I have
been humbled and privileged to be welcomed into the homes of
the congregations I have served. And in the process, I’ve
seen too many homes (and may I add, churches) where
infidelity, anger, lying, gossip or bad-mouthing each other
has undermined even the possibility of healthy
relationships. St. Paul says, “Put all that to death. Get
rid of it.”
And in 36 years of ministry, I
have also been blessed to be invited into countless homes
filled with compassion, kindness, forgiveness, patience and
forbearance (that means putting up with each other)—homes
where people sing songs and tell stories, where the home was
filled with laughter and thankfulness (even common
courtesies like saying “thank you”), homes where whatever
they do, they try to do it as if they were doing it in the
name of the Lord. Certainly not perfect homes—there is no
such thing—but homes where the peace of Christ has a chance
to thrive and the word of Christ can richly dwell, where
love binds everything together. Here’s a model for family
and home—regardless of its configuration—that even Norman
Rockwell would like.
Well, I started with the image
of Norman Rockwell’s Thanksgiving table. And let me say, I
firmly believe in the importance of the family dinner table,
but that’s another sermon for another Mother’s Day. Here’s
another image of another table, maybe not as picture perfect
as Norman Rockwell’s, but perhaps more like the families
most of us live in. It comes from Robert Capon’s book on
marriage and family called Bed and Board. The last
chapter is entitled “Dinner at Our House”:
I look down the table over which
I preside. I feel like God partway through creation. Before
me stretches a chaos only half turned into a world. Self,
wife, sons, daughters, dishes, silver, food. Where is the
Holy City in all of this? Why is it so long in forming among
us? My carving tools rest on an intractable leg of lamb.
Unfortunately, others are already talking. Creating is
hurling back a flood of caveats and non placets at its
creator. My first-born must have no gravy. The third-born
begs off mushrooms. “This piece is all fat.” “I can’t eat
that many carrots.”
“Quiet!” I shout. It’s pretty
negative, but it works, and in the shuffling stillness the
kind of order comes again. I quote to them St. Paul on the
subject of pots talking back to potters. I remind them that
we are the children of God, not a mob. The oldest one
agrees. My heart lifts.
But just about that time, the
youngest one knocks over her milk. Down toward me it races
like a flood across the land. I jump up and back, but over
the edge it pours and I am hit; right trouser leg, below the
knee. It’s the third time this meal, and the thousandth
today. My largesse is as nothing next to the cataract of
milk she has produced in three short years. She has spilt it
backhand, side arm, forehand and elbow first. She has upset
glasses with her head, her feet, her shoulders and knees;
with her rump, her belly and the middle of her back. And
with endless variety of time and circumstances. Upon thick
tablecloths, yielding a white swamp which spreads ominously
toward us all; or upon plastic tablecloths for a
high-velocity attack. (I can remember only one successful
escape from milk spilled on plastic. I nearly broke the
chair to do it.)
At that moment someone yells,
“Michael hit me!” In all my years with them, I have never
actually seen it happen—how they manage the surreptitious
right to the ribs, or the invisible elbows in the solar
plexus. All I see is the mayhem which follows. Two are
arguing and three are talking at once. The city has
collapsed again and the jungle returns.
Finally my wife serves the
chocolate soufflé with whipped cream, which draws us all
together in praise.
It’s not quite the heavenly
city, but neither is it chaos. We are the solitary set in
family, and I love them all—their faces, their voices, their
bodies, their minds; and I thank them for their company
during these long short years together.
(Robert Farrar Capon, Bed and Board,
page 167)
May it be
so at our tables and around this table.
May it be so in our marriages, our families and in our
church family.
May the peace of Christ rule in our hearts.
May the word of Christ dwell in you richly.
And may love bind everything together.
* * * * * * *
Notes: There are numerous
websites on the work of Norman Rockwell, including the
Norman Rockwell Museum in Vermont, www.normanrockwellvt.com.
Prints of the “Four Freedoms” hang in the hallway outside
Runkel Chapel.
The sermon includes a quotation
from one of my favorite books on family life, Robert Farrar
Capon’s Bed and Board. I have included a longer
version of the passage here than I used in the actual
preaching of the sermon. The book is out of print, but you
can find copies available through www.alibris.com, a used
book site.
For a further discussion of a
contemporary understanding of St. Paul’s advice on human
relations, see Paul for Everyone: The Prison Letters
by Tom Wright, available in paperback through the virtual
bookstore on our website, www.fumcbirmingham.org. (JEH)
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