Yours, Mine and Ours: The Conversation
September 18, 2016
Dr. Tom Pace
Deuteronomy 6:4-9

We’re continuing a sermon series called “Yours, Mine and Ours” on what it means to be a family, a church family together and to shape one another in the faith.
Last week Chap Clark preached for us on Sunday morning and then Sunday evening he spoke at an event in our new student ministry building with a number of parents and other people who were interested in making an impact on the lives of young people. He said, “I’m really tired of preachers preaching about Deuteronomy 6, Deuteronomy 6, Deuteronomy 6...” Well, this morning I’m going to preach about Deuteronomy 6. So I thought, “You could have gone all day without saying that, Chap. Thank you for that.”
But I will note that in your Inside-Out guide it says Deuteronomy 4 all the way through and that’s my mistake, no one else’s. But this is Deuteronomy 6, so please listen to this very really central passage in the Old Testament.


Hear, O Israel: TheLordis our God, theLordalone.You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblemon your forehead,and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:4-9 NRSV)

I want to invite you to pray with me. O God, open us up. Open our eyes that we might see and our ears that we might hear. Open up our hearts, God, that we might feel. And then, O Lord, open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
If you are coming to any or all of these sermons in September I hope you leave with one basic premise in your mind. And that is that we are a family. We are a family. We are a blended family if you will. We are a “yours, mine and ours” family. And we have a responsibility for one another. All of us have a responsibility for our children and our youth, for those who are vulnerable in our community. For our senior adults. We have a responsibility for one another.
I want to begin today by sort of reviewing. Dr. Chap Clark preached last week, and I want to review what he said and then get a running start on what I want to talk about this week in Deuteronomy.
So this idea that we are family is deeply imbedded in the New Testament. Jesus over and over calls the disciples his brothers. His mother comes to visit when he’s teaching, and the disciples come and say, “Your mother and brothers are out there.” He says, “These are my brothers. You people are my family.” It’s such an interesting transformation to realize that we all have been adopted into the family of Christ.
Go back with me to the book of Genesis. I’ve printed this Scripture in your Inside-Out guide if you’d like to read along. But in Genesis 4 Cain kills his brother Abel. You remember the story. The consequence of the murder… Well, let me read it to you. This is the consequence. “And the Lord said, ‘What have you done? Listen, your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground. You will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.’ Cain said to the Lord, ‘My punishment is greater than I can bear.’”
So God puts a mark on Cain to protect him. He says, “Look, they’ll kill me out there. If I’m out there without a herd, without a group, a clan, a family to protect me, they’ll kill me out there.” So God puts a mark on him to protect him – it’s called the Mark of Cain. It says, “No one will mess with you. But you’ll still be alone.”
So fast forward to the New Testament and Paul teaches us this. Listen to Ephesians 2: “And so you are no longer called outcasts and wanderers, but citizens with God’s people, members of God’s holy family and residents of his household.” You are part of God’s family, you have been brought in, no longer do you wander around out on your own. But you are a part of something, a family.
We have recently tweaked our St. Luke’s Mission Statement. It used to be, “We are gathered by Jesus to enact our faith in love, to enact faith in love.” But because we have these multiple communities, we have Gethsemane campus, the Story Houston, Encounter, our contemporary worship, and our traditional worship services; we really wanted to articulate what it means to have these different worshipping communities, but to be together one family.
We really want to focus on that notion of being theologically a family. So now we say, “We are one family in Jesus putting our faith to work in love.” We are connected to one another. We have responsibility for one another.
We talk about our discipleship pathway here - from seeker, to believer, to belonger, to disciple to apostle - this movement from having a relationship with Jesus to then being adopted into understanding ourselves as being adopted into the family of Christ. We are family. When we are family what that means is that we form one another. We shape one another in the faith.
When these boys were baptized this morning you made a commitment to surround them with the community of love and forgiveness that they may grow in their service to others, that we’re going to form them in the faith, that the culture of our community, of our family will be strong enough that they are shaped into the faith.
In northern California there is a beach called Glass Beach. It used to be that from 1947 to 1963 it was a garbage dump. So they would bring all the garbage from San Francisco, and they would dump it on this beach. It’s hard to believe that they did that but they did. They would dump all of the garbage there.
But there were lots of colored bottles and that sort of thing. But in 1963 they stopped, but the old garbage was still all there. So over the years the waves have thrown those bottles into one another and onto the beach and bashed on them. Now if you go there Glass Beach is tiny little beautifully colored stones that have all been formed, shaped by the waves throwing them against one another and rubbing off their sharp edges.
I’ve often thought that is a really great image for the church. The Holy Spirit hurls us against one another, and we shape one another, we form one another. We rub the sharp edges off one another. We even use that phrase, don’t we? Sometimes if it’s uncomfortable we say, “Boy, he really rubs me the wrong way.” It’s saying, “It bothers me.” But somehow as we learn to live together, we shape each other. That’s what it means to be family.
With that as sort of our core principle over all these four weeks, I want to specifically talk today about how we talk to our families about faith. To give you a running start, this series is based on some research that was done at Fuller Seminary in California. A book was written called Sticky Faith: Everyday Ideas To Build Lasting Faith in Your Kids by Kara E. Powell. And what the book did was that it looked at what were the characteristics when young people, once they went away from home, kept their faith. So that’s why they call it “sticky faith.” It’s faith that stuck, that would last their lifetimes.
And they found that there were a number of characteristics. One was they were part of an intergenerational church: they were integrated into that church, that they had relationships not just with youth counselors and other youth, with children and children’s teachers, but they had relationships with all sorts of different kinds of people who loved them and cared for them.
Last week someone saw me out in the hallway and told me the story of her granddaughter who was in a church where the youth program fell apart. She and her best friend decided to go to the senior adult Sunday School class. She said it was the best thing ever. She said, “They took great care of us, they brought us food, and they’d do all sorts of things for us.” But when she went away to college, she went to A&M, and she didn’t have a very good experience and had a difficult freshman year. But she went to A&M United Methodist Church and there was an elderly couple there that adopted her. They’d take her to lunch everyday and shepherd her through all those challenges.
It’s about us having these relationships that cross intergenerational boundaries so that as we grow older we understand what faith looks like in various stages of our lives. That’s so important. So that’s the first one.
The second one is they have a grace-based theology, and I’ll talk more about that next week. That means that they understand faith to be a living relationship with Jesus rather than a “follow the rules and be a good person” theology, that you really do have this living faith. We’ll talk more next week.
But today the third principle comes to play and that’s that these young people have families of origin where the parents claim responsibility for sharing faith with their children. The alternative view is what they call a “dry cleaner mentality” where the parents drop their kids off at the church and come back at the end to pick them up and they’re clean. You just pick them up, and they’re all wrapped in plastic and ready to go home, all shiny and clean. And we say, “Thank you for doing that,” where we outsource faith development to the church rather than involve ourselves in talking with our children about our faith, in talking to other members of our family about faith.
So I want us to look at this passage from Deuteronomy 6, because I think it teaches us a lot. I’m going to start with verse 4: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.”
This is called the Shema, and it’s probably the central teaching of the Jewish tradition. Every young Jewish boy or girl before they have their Bar or Bat Mitzvah will be able to recite this in Hebrew. “Hear O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is one.”
I always understood this to mean that we are to keep the words of the Law, the Ten Commandments, in our hearts and recite them and teach them to our children. But I realize as I was preparing for this sermon, that it’s not what it says. It doesn’t talk about the law. It doesn’t talk about the Ten Commandments. What is it we’re to teach to our children? “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength.” Jesus takes this same passage and he adds to it: “… and love your neighbor as yourself.”
Matt Chandler who’s the pastor of the Village Church in Dallas really spoke to me when he spoke about this. Let me read to you what he said, “It’s fascinating to me that the Scripture doesn’t say, ‘Do the Ten Commandments and teach your kids to do the Ten Commandments.’ He doesn’t say, ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is one, here’s the code you must submit to and obey in order to teach the next generation how to be my people.’”
No, he says, “Love. Why? Because you do not do by what you understand to be right and wrong. You do by what you love.”
Sometimes I hear people talk about “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength and love your neighbor as yourself” as sort of the two principles of the faith. That if we’ll just follow these two principles of love everything is okay. It’s all about love.
I do think it’s about love, but I don’t think it’s that simple and gooey. What he’s saying here is that, “What drives your actions, what drives your life, every decision you make is not what you believe, not what you think but what you love. And you’re going to model your life based on what you love.”
The great Judge John Hill who’s a member of our congregation – Supreme Court Justice in Texas – he used to get hold of you and put both of his hands on your shoulders and look you in the eye and say, “What do you love?” I’d stutter around without any good answer.
What do you love? The essence here is that if you really want to share faith with the people around you, with your family with the people you love, with your friends, don’t focus on what you’re going to say to them. Look inside. Say, “What do I love?” Because here’s the truth – your witness will be driven by what you love. The people who know you best, which is your family and your friends, they’re going to know what you love. They’re going to be able to tell what really matters to you. So if you want others to know the faith, get clear in your own mind, do you really love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your strength? What do you love?
Okay, the passage goes on in verse 7: “Recite them to your children, talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.”
I stand up here every Sunday, and I talk about my faith with all of you people. It doesn’t bother me in the least. Easy. Easy. I lead a small group, and I talk to the people in that small group and share stuff about my faith with them all the time. Why is it so hard when it comes to talking to my family about it that the words get stuck in my throat?
Why is it so hard for us to talk to our families about our faith, to talk to our spouses, to talk to our children? Is it because they saw us in traffic yesterday, and we know that when we look at them and say, “You should be kind” they go, “Yeah, right…” Because they know what we really love, they see it, and so we’re afraid to talk about it because the contrast, the dissonance that’s there will bother us.
Look, I want to challenge you to have the courage, to challenge myself, to have the courage to talk about faith at home, to talk about it with your children, with your parents. I can’t tell you how many times over the years parents have come to me and said, “My child led me to Jesus,” or “My teenager got involved in Young Life and came home and said, ‘Why don’t we go to church, Mom and Dad?’ So we began to talk about faith at home.”
Talk to your grown siblings or your grown children or your grown parents if you’re grown yourself. Talk to the people closest to you about your faith.
Now I want you to note that it does not say, “Schedule a devotional time for your family every Tuesday night at 8:30 and take fifteen minutes and talk about your faith, and then as long as you’ve done that just go on about your business.”
No, it doesn’t say that at all. It says, “Talk about it when you lie down and when you get up and when you go out, when you come in, when you’re driving in the mini-van, when you’re sitting in traffic, when you’re on your way to the soccer game.” Whatever it is that you’re spending your time doing, talk about it then.”
One of my most significant faith conversations was with one of my sons-in-law who lives in California. He’s not a regular church-goer. We had a great conversation sitting in a golf cart. Boy, you can talk a lot sitting there. We were behind some slow players, and they had to be really slow if they were slower than us, because we were really slow. We were sitting in the golf cart, and he said, “How’s it going at the church?” And I said, “It’s going fine. We’re starting a new community for people who are unchurched. Who don’t go to church and maybe have resisted going to church, a new faith community for them.” Then I realized that that described him.
He said, “Oh, really?” And I said, “So what do you think we ought to do?” We started a great conversation about why it’s hard for him to be drawn to a faith community, to have this casual conversation.
Let me also say there’s a big difference between a conversation and a lecture. John Wolman in 1742 wrote a bill of sale for a slave. He was a Quaker, and as he did it he realized it was wrong. So he spent the rest of his life going up and down the eastern seaboard talking to other Quakers about slavery. He would ask them questions, saying, “Do you think it fits with our Quaker faith to own slaves? Do you have any discomfort about that? Let’s talk about it.” They were just conversations, no public policy, not anything but conversations, and no sermons. When he died in 1772 slavery was all but abolished among the Quakers on the eastern seaboards, all based on conversations to just have a discussion.
Not self-righteous, because the truth is that once we take away our sense of self-righteousness it’s much easier to have the conversation. Once we realize we don’t really know the right answers, then we can talk. But as long as the people think what we’re really trying to do is trick them into something, they’re not going to want to have that conversation.
Start with some easy questions, like “Why did God invent mosquitoes?” Now that’s a pretty innocuous question. Nobody’s going to get all defensive about that. Why did God invent mosquitoes? I have found no good reason for that. Someone else said, “Well, there are certain birds that eat mosquitoes. They’d die if there weren’t mosquitoes.” Then I say, “Ahhh. Now we’re having a good conversation about mosquitoes.”
Here’s another one. So you’re riding in the car with your child who’s going to play in a soccer game. I don’t know how many hours I spent over my life taking kids to soccer games and such. So ask, “Before the soccer game is it okay, do you think, to pray to win the game? I don’t know. What do you think the answer is?”
See that’s a good conversation. I think the answer is that it’s okay to pray to win the game. Personally, I think that if I prayed to God, “I just hope everyone’s safe…” That’s not what I really think. I don’t care that everyone’s safe – I want to win! I may pray that even more Kansas City players get hurt today against the Texans so that we win. They won’t be hurt very long, just for the game, maybe short-term.
No, really. Here’s what I’m saying to you. If we’re going to be honest in our prayers that’s a great conversation to have. Then maybe after you begin to get good at this conversing about faith issues you can ask some more difficult questions. Like, what do you think the Christian’s responsibility is in the refugee crisis we have in our world today? Or do you think that God has an opinion about who should be the next president of the United States and who we should vote for? Or do you think that we always claim that God is on our side no matter what? That’s a good question. Maybe have that conversation with people you love.
Andy Nixon, who’s the pastor down at First UMC Houston, and who’s been there just a few months, told me recently that he got a call from a friend. He answered the phone, and his friend said, “Would you talk to my son right now, and tell him that we don’t have to give money to every homeless person we pass?” Then he handed him the phone.
See these are issues we are wrestling with. The question is, why don’t you talk about it with your family? Why don’t you talk about the nitty-gritty of faith? Share your doubts.
Kara Powell in Sticky Faith tells this story. “As a young boy Steve Jobs attended a Lutheran church with his parents. At age 13 he asked the pastor, ‘If I raise my finger will God know which one I’m going raise even before I do it?’ The pastor answered, ‘Yes, God knows everything.’ Jobs then pulled out a “Life” magazine cover depicting starving children in Biafra. He asked his pastor, ‘Does God know about this and what’s going to happen to those children?’ The well-intentioned pastor said, ‘Steve, I know you don’t understand but, yes, God knows about that.’ Jobs declared that he didn’t want to worship such a God and walked out of the church and never went back.”
Now, that’s a hard question. What does God think about starving children? The pastor wasn’t mistaken with his answer except that his answer said to Steve, “Don’t worry about that,” kind of patted him on the head and said, “Quit wrestling with that question. I know you can’t understand it but that’s okay.” Instead of saying something like, “Boy, that makes me mad, too, I don’t get that.” Or “What do you think, Steve?”
You see, that’s a conversation. What the pastor did was to say, “I don’t know the answer to this, so I’m going to shut it down right now.” How can we be in this place and really have conversations together about faith?
So one, love the Lord with all your heart and what you love matters most. Second, talk about it. And the third thing is this: “Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”
A member of the church a few months ago was telling me about a meeting he had with his financial advisor. And his financial advisor asked him to get all his family together. So he had grown children, and had grandchildren. They all came. They had this big family meeting. Then the financial advisor came with this stack of cards and on there were these words that were values. He distributed them all and said, “I want you all to work till you find three cards that are your top three values. Each one of you individually.” There were multiples of each kind of card.
After they got the cards and worked through them together they all went around and shared what their top three values were. Then he said, “So let’s talk together about what you think the top three values of this family are.” Then he said, “Let’s talk about now how we can put the financial resources of this family behind those values.” Now that’s an awesome financial advisor. Mine just says, “Just trust me and don’t pull your money out.”
What would it be like to have that conversation? Steven Covey says that we should all have family mission statements. This is what matters. That’s what it means when it says, “Put these on the doorposts of your house.” What does your family stand for? What are your family’s values? What does it stand for? What’s it all about?
So here’s how I’ll close today. If you can answer those three questions, if you can address those three issues, then don’t worry about your conversation about whether your children hear what you say or not. Three questions: What or whom do you love? What do you talk about? And what do you stand for?
If you can answer clearly those three questions let God handle the rest of it.
Let’s pray together. Lord God, we pray that you would become so real to us that we would love you with all of our heart, all our soul, and with all our might, that we would love you so fully that others would see in us that love. Enable us to have the courage to talk about faith with the people we love, with our families. And God, make clear to us what our families stand for. Clarify our family values in such a way that the whole world might see our witness. We pray all this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.