This is tornado season.  Every year at this time we’re treated to more and more dramatic footage – especially with the proliferation of video cameras in the hands of more and more storm chasers.  There are even storm chasing travel companies.   For a paltry $1900-$3000 Storm Chasing Adventure Tours will take you on a guided tornado hunting vacation.  Just in case you don’t already have enough trouble in your life they’ll help you go looking for more.  No guarantees, of course, but, they’ll do their best to get you as close to trouble as possible without totally getting you in the worst twist of your life.

But, for nothing more than the cost of cable TV, we were recently treated to some of the most dramatic footage ever recorded of a twister on the plains of South Dakota.  Perhaps you saw it.  At a distance of only about a mile or so, an amateur photographer caught a wicked tornado swooping down on farm house out in the middle of nowhere.  As the swirling clouds of dirt grew closer and closer, pieces of the roof began to fly away and then, suddenly, like a scene from The Wizard of Oz, the whole house, in mostly one piece, just lifted off the ground and was swept into oblivion.

As I watched that scene over and over, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of sadness.  It wasn’t because I knew the people who owned the house, who thankfully were not in it at the time.  It was because it seemed to represent an experience I’ve had over and over and over again as a pastor, as a friend and as the member of a very human family myself.  The experience of having to stand at a helpless distance and watch some kind of family storm, up to and including divorce, sweep one home after another away.  A family is there one minute and then, as though a giant vacuum cleaner appeared out of nowhere, it’s just sucked away never to be seen or heard from again.

I realize, of course, that I have no more control over those situations than scientists do of preventing tornados.  However, just like meteorologists can do with greater and greater precision, there is something we can all do to predict what causes family storms and some things we can do to avoid them.  In that sense, we have a leg up on meteorologists.  The best they can do is predict and it’s still a roll of the dice.  They know that one in one thousand thunderstorms become super cells.  They also know that one in five super cells will produce a tornado.  But, that’s all they know.  What they don’t know is why one storm produces a tornado and another does not.  Mother nature has a mind of her own and the best we can do is see what she was thinking after she speaks.  Ted Fujita of University of Chicago is credited with developing the Fujita scale.  It is a scientific system for measuring the power of tornados on a scale of zero to five, F-0 - F-5.  It determines the ferocity of a tornado by measuring the damage done after the fact.  But, it is only after the fact, when it’s too late for anything but to count the cost.

In our case, we don’t have to sit by and helplessly wait until family wrecking storms develop in our marriages and families.  We can actually do something to help prevent the storm from ever developing in the first place.  All of which goes to debunk one of the greatest myths still propagated in ever greater proportions.

With rarest exception, when a marriage begins to come apart, someone will invariably say, “It just wasn’t meant to be” or “I should have never married that person in the first place.”  Not that some of that isn’t true.  But, the further and further I go down this road, the more I believe that most people, though not all, most people don’t so much make a bad choice about who they marry as they do make even poorer choices about how to build a marriage after they say, “I do.”  They wake up one day not so much to the marriage they should have never had as they do the marriage they’ve built that no one could live with.

This morning I begin a three part sermon series on marriage and family entitled, “Family Factors.”  Though there are scores of factors that are related to developing healthy marriages, I have selected three that I believe to be indispensable, using 1 Corinthians 13 as my guide.  Today, we will discuss the forgiveness factor.  The next two weeks we will discuss the friendship factor and the faith factor.

Three “f’s,” you see.  You know that I’m not prone to alliteration.  I think those who alliterate every time they alight the pulpit are bound to biblical boredom.  In this case, I’m thinking of something like the Fujita scale in reverse.  The Fujita scale can only measure damage after the fact.  These factors of family enrichment will be meant to help us think proactively of things we can do to prevent family wrecking storms in the first place, things we can do starting right now, no matter where we are in our family experience, to build healthier families.

Of course, there are all kinds of families.  There are married couples without children.  There are couples with children.  There are many, many people for whom family is a single affair.  And, all families need help becoming stronger and healthier. 

I once heard someone say that a dysfunctional family is any family with two or more people in it.  When I told Nancy about it, she said that she had discovered that a dysfunctional family was any family with one or more people in it.  We can all admit to our dysfunctions. The question is, what are the factors, over which we do have control, that go into building healthy families?

Again, for this series, 1 Corinthians 13 will be our scriptural guide in answering that question.  The first thing we learn from what is known as the love chapter is that love comes in many forms.  In none of them 1 Corinthians describes does love have anything to do with feeling and everything to do with choices and actions.  Even in the original Greek there are words that describe what we might know of as MTV love or Girls Gone Wild love.  In this case, this is none of those.  This is agape love.  Self-sacrificial for the sake of others love.  Among its many descriptions of that kind of love is what we will describe as the forgiveness factor.  In short, love is a choice not to keep a diary of the failures of others, no record of wrongs.  This is one place where we are actually helped by looking at different translations of this text, especially verse five. 

The New International Version (NIV) translates the last part of this verse to read that love “keeps no record of wrongs.”  The New American Standard Version (NASV) translates them to read that love “does not take into account a wrong suffered.”  The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) translates them to read that love is “not . . . resentful.”

Just prior to that, the NIV translates the words to read that love is “not easily angered.”  The NRSV reads that love is “not irritable” and the King James Version (KJV) reads that love is “not easily provoked.”  Any way you put it, each of these translations reinforces this one simple fact.  People who love keep no journal of failures and don’t practice the rehearsing of those failures for themselves or others. 

It is well known that people do not thrive well in environments where they are constantly reminded of what they do wrong more than what they do right.  Does that mean we overlook wrongdoing?  No!  As we are instructed in Ephesians 4:15, we are to speak the truth to each other in loving ways.  In fact, the fourth chapter of Ephesians defines maturity not as avoiding truth but learning to come to face the truth and live with the truth and speak the truth.  Healthy families are good at telling the truth, about themselves and to each other.  Healthy families aren’t perfectly healthy.  Health has as much to do with how we face our illness as it does anything. 

Before we were called to Cliff Temple, Nancy and I were members of Wilshire Baptist Church.  Wilshire was entering a capital campaign and families all over the city were hosting cottage meetings to discuss and pray about their giving.  Nancy and I hosted a meeting in our home and several people from the church, including the pastor, participated one Sunday evening.  We were so proud to have people from the church into our new home and we formed a circle in our living room for discussion and prayer.  About halfway into the pastor’s presentation our cat, Alex, wandered into the middle of the circle and began horking up his lunch.  To say the least, I wish our cat could have found someplace else to get sick.  But, Alex must have figured that was his home, too.  If he couldn’t get sick at home, where could he get sick?

When we are part of a family, we bring our sickness right into the middle of it.  Loving families also bring their forgiveness right into the middle of it, too.  C.S. Lewis puts it this way.  “Real forgiveness means looking steadily at the sin, the sin that is left over without any excuse, after all allowances have been made, and seeing it in all its horror, dirt, meanness and malice, and nevertheless being wholly reconciled to the” person “who has done it” (C.S. Lewis, “On Forgiveness,” as quoted in Fern Seed and Elephants, author/publisher unknown).  Forgiving each other within our families when the sickness of others has wounded or harmed us may involve any one of a number of things. 

It may mean finding a new starting point for forgiveness by asking how we’d like for God to deal with us if the sin we’re being asked to forgive in someone else were ours to be forgiven.  Again, C.S. Lewis says that “to be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable (in others) because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you” (Ibid.).

Forgiving each other may involve reframing the pain by asking if there is there another way of seeing what has happened.  By asking if there something good God can bring from this?

Forgiving each other may also mean making sure our business with God is up to date before we deal with the business of others.  More often than not, what irritates us about others reveals as much about us as it does about them.

I call this the Starbuck’s factor.  You might not think you could learn something about forgiveness at Starbucks, but stay with me.  I used to make fun of people who ordered coffee at Starbucks.  I would order a simple cup of coffee and all the while listen to other people ordering the most obscene sounding coffees in what seemed to me like feigned attempts at sophistication.  Then one day, without realizing it, I had become what I said irritated me most.  Nancy was there when I ordered my grande nonfat white chocolate mocha without whipping cream extra, extra hot.  I felt her eyes drilling into the side of my face as she laughed at me and reminded me that I was now doing the very thing I once made fun of others for doing. 

I was quickly reminded that we ought to pay attention to what irritates us about others because it almost certainly reveals something to us about ourselves.  We ought to pay very careful attention to what we find it hard to forgive in others because, very often, it reveals the very same “unforgivable” thing in us. 

Here is the simple truth, based on what 1 Corinthians teaches.  The better you are scorekeeping, the worse you will be at marriage and family because you will always be more aware of what is wrong in others while you are blind to your own illnesses.  At some point, in a family like that, something will have to give.

Malcom Gladwell, in his best-selling book, The Tipping Point, details the way little things often make the big difference.  In companies or institutions of any kind, people may have been striving for a long time to accomplish something when, finally, one day, they do one seemingly small thing that tips the scales.  It works that way for good and bad.  When family members are good scorekeepers they are often surprised that one tiny, little argument is all it took one day to finally destroy the family for good.  In truth, it wasn’t just that one little argument.  It was simply that one little argument that tipped the already overloaded scales of anger and resentment.  The better you are at scorekeeping, the worse you will be at marriage and family.

Here is a good test for revealing how good you are at keeping score.  Do you ever, in angry response to someone’s failure or offense, say to them, “You always . . .!!”?  Always is a very big word.  And, always only has meaning if someone is referring to a well documented history.  If you have a well documented history to which you are referring this one behavior as one in a long repeated pattern of “always,” then you are better at keeping score than forgiving. 

This is where 1 Corinthians 13 becomes extremely practical as a guide to people who are better at scorekeeping than they are loving.  I have paraphrased the first eight verses of this chapter to read like this. 

If I can translate the language of heaven into every known human language but I still keep a record of every little thing someone does to anger or irritate me, I am not a loving person; my talk doesn’t match my walk.  If I could know the mind of God and decipher all of life’s puzzles and was smart enough to cure cancer and had enough faith in God to relocate Pike’s Peak from Colorado to Wyoming but I am better at remembering than forgiving the failures of others then my love is empty and void.  If I am generous to a fault in giving to people’s material needs and would be willing to give others the shirt off of my back or even be willing to die for my country in battle, but I still remember every little thing someone has ever done to offend me, then all my generosity with others is absolutely meaningless in the eternal scheme of things.  If my love is what I claim it to be, I’ll be patient when others offend me, even kind to them when they are not kind to me.  I will not be jealous of their successes nor will I boast to them when I get ahead and they do not.  I will not respond to their offenses by insisting that the only solution to our dilemma is that things be done my way and I will not, under any circumstances, ever presume that it is my right to be rude to anyone, even those who have been rude to me.  If my love is what I claim it to be, I will not be more aware of what people do that is wrong than I am of what they do that is right.  I will stand by them in their worst moments.  I will never use the betrayal of my trust by others as an excuse to betray my trust in God.  I will never, ever give up hope for anyone and I will go the full distance in loving them, no matter what it costs me.

I would not hold my marriage or family up to anyone as the perfect model.  But, I will tell you of two things I try to do every day to keep from being a scorekeeper.  I tell my wife and my children I love them every single day.  And, I try to find at least one thing they’ve done that is praiseworthy and celebrate it with them.  What I have discovered is that it is virtually impossible to have the energy for both loving and celebrating and keeping score at the same time. 

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13:11, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.”  In other words, when “I became an adult, the more mature I grew to be, the worse I got at keeping score, the better I became at loving.”

This whole thing is about growing up.  About being a Christian.  About marriage.  About family.  About loving and forgiving.  It’s all about growing up in ways we never would grow if we didn’t have to love and forgive up close and personal. 

We have one of those Jack and the beanstalk measuring charts on the back of our kitchen door that goes back some ten years charting the growth of our boys.  One more time before he leaves home I’m determined to make Griffin back up to it again. 

If God had a chart for measuring our spiritual growth, don’t you think that one of the standards for measuring how well we’re stepping into maturity would be how much better we are forgiving this year than we were last year?  So, if God’s standard for measuring our growth and maturity is the forgiveness factor, how is the growing up going for you these days?