Psalm 98
John 15:9-17

Any Sunday reminds us of our indebtedness. Every time we gather here in church, we join our praise with the voices of the saints in heaven and on earth. Faith is a gift. We believe only because someone lived the faith before us and told us the story in a manner that was worthy of our imitation. These are people Glenn Hinson has identified as “ordinary saints.”  We all have examples of them in our lives—family members, neighbors, teachers—people who cared for us, encouraged us, believed in us when no one else did or in a way no one else believed in us. Then, there are the saints who are our great, great grandparents and we are their children in the faith. None of us is a self-made believer.
           
If you’ve done a little serious reading of the Bible and its stories of these saints, you may not be pleased to have a Samson, David, or a Sarah as your grandparents. They may look saintly when they are now safely tucked between the covers of a leather bound Bible. But in their day, few called them saints. People seem saintly after they've been dead a thousand years. But if you had to live with them, had to stare at them across the breakfast table rather than across a gothic church, well . . . Which reminds me that one thing that unites these biblical saints in an odd sort of way – all of them had a lousy family life. I mentioned Samson and David - the mess they made of their marriages and families is legendary. Not many of the biblical characters were model parents. Sarah, grandmother of a whole nation, was a conniving schemer who managed to pass on most of her psychoses to her children. If you knew their stories, as the Bible tells them, you might question why they are our saints. Of course, we don't choose our saints. They are given to us by the tradition of the synagogue and the church.
           
"Aw, leave them alone," you say. "It's bad taste for us to speak ill of our grandparents in faith." And that pinpoints a major difference between us and the Bible. Today, when we speak of family, parents, and children, we're apt to speak rather sentimentally, unrealistically, if not downright deceitfully. Ours is the happy family - Ozzie, Harriet, June, Ward, Wally, and the Beaver. When the Bible speaks about parents and children in faith, it speaks honestly - Sarah, Samson, David, and Bathsheba.
           
Our dishonesty about our families is surprising, considering the state of the family in our nation. Never has the divorce rate been higher, never have we had more problems with spouse-child-elder abuse. In the name of freedom, we in the United States created something called the individual. Nothing is more important, to people of the political right or left, than maintaining the sovereignty of the individual and his or her options, freedom, and independence. As a result, relations between spouses and partners become a contract between two individuals who jealously guard their rights and prerogatives.  The covenant idea is long forgotten by many in relationships.  Family relations come to resemble the rest of our society - a conglomeration of friendly strangers. We've created a world where privacy is sought more than community, where no one is asked to suffer for anybody else, and where we want both to be intimate and still to be able to shake hands, say goodbye, with no bad feelings. Such thinking makes relations between parents and children incomprehensible. The odd factor that makes being a child or a parent so unusual in our society is this: We didn't choose our parents and they didn't choose us.
           
Think about it. You don't choose relatives; they are given.  As parents and children in a modern world that worships individual rights and freedom, nothing is odder than learning to love someone whom we didn't choose.
           
To a surprising degree, this lack of choice extends even to the person whom we marry or to the person who becomes a close friend. Most people think that the toughest part of marriage is deciding whom we ought to marry, making the right choice. We say we are deciding whether or not we are in love with this person; that is, are we emotionally attached?
           
We think that the toughest part of getting married is choosing the right person. Well, for most of the church's history, marriage occurred among persons who hardly knew one another before the wedding. You are no doubt grateful that we have progressed to where, at least in our society, arranged marriages are passé. Or are they? Although they would loathe to admit it, one reason parents send their children to prestigious universities is so that they will meet prestigious people with whom to associate and develop relationships. We all know that it's helpful for people to marry people or choose life partners with a similar social, economic, and religious background. Through piano lessons, summer camp, and a B.A. degree, parents give their children the illusion that the choice of someone to marry is not being arranged. I'm not being cynical here. Cultures that still practice arranged marriages (and are upfront about it) have much lower divorce rates than ours. ("Who should be entrusted with such important matters?" asks a friend from India of William Willimon. "Someone who has actually been married and has fifty years of life experience, or someone who has never been married and has had no experience except school?" Willimon didn't have a ready answer.)
           
I think we should be more open about the arranged, unchosen aspects of our marriages because it enables us to think clearly about the peculiar ethical demands placed upon us in families as spouses, partners, parents, and children. We probably are conditioned to think that some action isn't ethical unless we have freedom of choice, unless we decide for ourselves that this is right for us. The trouble with that point of view is that marriage requires, just as parenting, that we find some means of making sense out of being stuck with certain people for no good reason or justification. Most of us learn to make the best of it. Right there is a glimpse of us at our best. For right there is where we learn to be faithful, learn the meaning of commitment, learn to love strangers even though we did not choose them as someone we might have liked to love.
             
One of the joys of my work is spending time with couples who are preparing to marry.  A small portion of time is spent planning the wedding ceremony.  The majority of the time is spent getting to know them as a couple and how they relate. Part of my task is to help prepare the couple for marriage but can anybody ever be prepared for marriage?  Forty years ago next week Peggy and I said our vows and we thought we were prepared for marriage.  Were we ever wrong!
           
What I didn’t know was that I was making a lifetime commitment to someone who is always changing. How can you prepare for how frustrating another person can be when her concept of time is so different from yours? How can you prepare for all the ways that you are different from each other?
           
We can't. And because we can't, what we need is some means of being part of an adventure, which we can't control, the end result of which we do not fully understand. Morally, we move into the future on the basis of the commitments that we made without knowing what we were getting into.
           
What we need, when we marry or have a child or are joined together as congregation and minister, is some means of turning our fate into our destiny. Our faith provides us the means to live together as parents, children, spouses, or partners. Just as we didn't choose Samson or Sarah to be our grandparents in faith, so we didn't choose Jesus to show us what it means to be loved by God. He came to us, not the other way around. John's Gospel makes this explicit: Jesus says to his disciples, in this morning's gospel, "You did not choose me. I chose you so that you might bear fruit" (15:16). Life cannot be mainly about our choice and our decision since the Bible says that God chooses us. The Bible, its stories of folk who were commandeered by God for God's work, is a long story of God's continued determination to love us even when we are unloving and unlovable.
           
The gospel is also the story of God's continued commitment to make us into people who can be depended upon to love even strangers since we have learned, in Christ, what it's like to be a stranger and to be loved, even when we didn't deserve it.  
           
"How did you decide to marry your wife," a man asked his friend.
           
"Well, to be frank, I had asked a number of women to marry me and she was the only one who ever said yes."
           
What kind of romance is that? And yet, our great, free choices in life are probably not as free as we like to think. We live in a culture that seems to think of choice as the defining characteristic of a human being.
           
"I choose, therefore I am." Therefore, a human being without choice, without the ability to decide, is not considered a full human being.
           
All the while, increasing numbers of people complain that their lives are in the grip of forces over which they have no control - the economy, the government, ecological disasters, and health problems. We enjoy thinking of ourselves as people who are in control. "I choose, therefore I determine the course of my life."
           
In our more honest moments we must admit that we are more constrained than we know.  Perhaps, in this life, the issue is not, "Will my life be led by some external determination? The issue is, "Will the external determination that overwhelmingly influences my life be worth it or not?"
           
Stanley Hauerwas has a wonderful essay in which he argues that we always marry the wrong person. That is, we never marry the one we thought we were marrying because marriage changes us. So you wake up one day and realize that the person next to you is not the person you committed your life to five years ago. But, of course, you are not the same person either. So what do you do then? If marriage is the correct choice of the right person to whom you are emotionally attached, you are in big trouble. The person has changed and so have your emotions. Nobody ever chose to marry a person who is addicted to alcohol, or who develops a terminal illness. But lots of times you wake up in a committed relationship and that is the person you've got.
           
Being a parent is much like that. Parents never quite get the children they thought they were giving birth to or adopting. That's why Hauerwas says he is unhappy with the term, Planned Parenthood, as if it's only good to have children if you have planned them, if you have chosen them. Who plans to have a severely retarded child, or a rebellious child, or a child who plays the drums in a rock band? Sometimes we get such a child. And what then? We can choose an automobile, but we can't choose a child. We must receive a child. The Bible says a child is a gift, not a possession or a project. (See: Stanley Hauerwas, "The Family As a School for Character," The Journal of Religious Education, vol. 80, No. 2, Spring 1985, pp. 272-285. Also, A Community of Character, University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, Chs. 89.)
           
Life is not so much about the choices we make as it is about how the choices and decisions we make change us and alter our lives. Fred Craddock tells a powerful story about change although the change was not planned, intended, and certainly not chosen.  A family is out for a drive on a Sunday afternoon. It is a pleasant afternoon, and they relax at a leisurely pace down the highway. Suddenly, the two children begin to beat their father in the back: "Daddy, Daddy, stop the car! There's a kitten back there on the side of the road!"
            The father says, "So there's a kitten on the side of the road. We're having a drive."
            "But Daddy, you must stop and pick it up."
            "I don't have to stop and pick it up."
            "But Daddy, if you don't it will die."
            "Well then, it will have to die. We don't have room for another animal. We have a zoo already at the house. No more animals."
            "But Daddy, are you going to just let it die?"
            "Be quiet, children; we're trying to have a pleasant drive."
            "We never thought our Daddy would be so mean and cruel as to let a kitten die."
           
Finally the children’s mother turns to their dad and days, "You'll have to stop." He turns the car around, returns to the spot, and pulls off to the side of the road. "You kids stay in the car. I'll see about it." He goes out to pick up the little kitten, who is just skin and bones, sore-eyed, and full of fleas. When he reaches down to pick it up, with its last bit of energy the kitten bristles, baring teeth and claws. Hiss! He picked up the kitten by the loose skin at the neck, brings it over to the car, and says, "Don't touch it. It's probably got leprosy."
           
Back home they go. When they get to the house the children give the kitten several baths, about a gallon of warm milk, and intercede: "Can we let it stay in the house just tonight? Tomorrow we'll fix it a place in the garage."
           
The father says, "Sure, take my bedroom; the whole house is already a zoo." They fix a comfortable bed, fit for a pharaoh. Several weeks pass. Then one day the father walks in, feels something rub against his leg, looks down, and there is a cat. He reaches down toward the cat, carefully checking to see that no one is watching. When the cat sees his hand, it does not bare its claws and hiss; instead it arches its back to receive a caress. Is this the same cat?
           
Couldn't be the same cat. It's not the same as that frightened, hurt, hissing kitten on the side of the road. Of course not, and you know as well as I what makes the difference. (Fred B. Craddock, Craddock Stories, Mike Graves & Richard F. Ward, eds., St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2002, pp. 24-25.)

*Pulpit Resource, William H. Willimon, ed., vol. 34, No. 2, April, May, June 2006, pp. 38-40 was a primary resource for this sermon.