Last Sunday, Roy Hallmark made a passing comment as he passed me on his way to the atrium after the worship service.  It was in reference to my first sermon in this brief series, “Family Factors,” on forgiveness.  I’d first suggested that healthy marriages and families are poor scorekeepers; the better you are scorekeeping, the worse you’ll be at marriage and family relationships.  Following that comment, I remarked that, in general, I’ve found older adults to be more forgiving than some younger people.  In part, I conjectured, that is because they have learned the lessons of being unforgiving too well and those of us who are younger get to benefit from their grace.  Roy’s comment was actually a question.  “You know why we senior adults are more forgiving, don’t you?”  Playing along, I said, “No, why is that?”  Roy said, “Because we can’t remember anything!”

Well, whatever it takes to be a poor scorekeeper, poor memory included, so be it!  By the way, how good are you at keeping score?  How is the marriage or the family experience going these days?

The purpose of this series, again, is not to point out all of the things people tend to do wrong in marriages and family life.  It seems that we spend too much time dwelling on those and many of them are self-evident.  Instead, my purpose is to hopefully help us all identify some very practical things we can do to enrich our marriages and family so that, according to scripture, they will become more Christlike with each passing day.  And, truthfully, there is no one thing that makes any marriage or family experience a perfect one. 

There are scores of issues involved and no one marriage or family is the perfect model for everyone else’s.  As in my marriage, there are some things we do well and some things at which we may struggle for the rest of our lives.  In some ways, Nancy and I are hand-in-glove similar to each other.  In other ways, as Nancy likes to say, we “compliment” each other.  Kind of like the white icing compliments the black cookie in the Oreo.  Yet, there are some key factors that, though they take on many different forms and shapes to fit each family’s personality, are as essential to healthy, loving marriages and families as air is to breathing.  Again, as we discussed last week, one is the forgiveness factor.  Today, we will discuss the factor of friendship.  In healthy marriages, in healthy families, people work at being good friends.  Mates work at relating to each other as dear friends, adult to adult, not parent to child.  Brothers and sisters work at being the best of friends.  And, in their own beautiful way, parents and children work toward deep, abiding friendship as the years pass and everyone grows and matures.  This morning, if you asked me to list the three most important characteristics of a good marriage and a healthy family, if you only allowed a list of three, on that list, without any reservation, would be friendship.

Our model for this series is thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians.  1 Corinthians 13 is like a diamond; it’s multi-dimensional in its meaning and application of love to every area of life.  This week, we turn it to look at the face of friendship.  If you are having trouble with any relationship, with any friendship, especially in your marriage or family, let me suggest that you put your behaviors and attitudes through the filter of 1 Corinthians 13.  When you do, though you may find many other issues, there will be two that you will find essential to a good friendship.  The first of those, yet again, is forgiveness. 

You may have noticed that forgiveness has been the theme of my preaching for the last few Sundays.  Why is that?  Because the central identifying characteristic of the Christian faith is forgiveness.  Looking back on his work among the Corinthian believers, Paul celebrated the forgiving work of God in Christ on the cross as the cornerstone of his ministry.  “I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2, NIV).  The central identifying characteristic of what it means to live as a Christian is forgiveness.  As 1 Corinthians 13:5 says, “love keeps no record of wrongs” (NIV).  It does not say that love keeps a short record of wrongs or an up to date record.  Love keeps no record at all of the offenses against it.  People who are good at loving friendship are not good at evening the score because they aren’t good at keeping score in the first place.

We have inherited a trash can at our house.  At the rate things are going, that is all I will ever inherit!  When we returned from vacation a few years back, someone had thrown this large plastic rollaway trash container into our backyard.  Apparently, the wind had blown it down the alley away from another home and someone must have thought it belonged to us and thought they were doing us a favor.  Except that it wasn’t ours.  The next time the trash collectors were to come by, I put the extra and empty trash can out by the other trash, thinking they would discard it for me.  Except, they didn’t.  They, too, must have thought it was our trash container.  How do you throw away a trash can?

So, we just put it in the garage thinking we’d discard it ourselves the next time we made a weekend excursion to the city dump, which will be never!  Then, the strangest thing happened.  One day we had just a little too much trash for our own rollway plastic trash container so we put the extra, inherited container to work.  And, the next time we needed it again.  And, again.  Before long, we grew to need two trash containers instead of just one.  Now that we have two containers, our capacity for retaining trash has grown to need them both.  I keep wondering what would happen if we could actually get rid of the second container.  Would our capacity for retaining trash week to week go down if we only had one container again? 

Is it true that our ability to forgive is directly related to our capacity to store the memories of past garbage and trash?  If I were to ask you about the alleyways of your heart’s memory lanes, how many trash containers do you have there?  Why don’t you just get rid of the extra, unneeded containers?  You might ask, how do we exactly go about doing that?

Thanks for asking, Paul might say.  And, his response might well be these words from 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.”  The choice to be more loving, to be more forgiving in our journey toward deeper friendships, involves the choice to grow up, to move from childhood to adulthood in the ways we relate to each other.  Let me rush to say that this verse of scripture in no way implies that children are unforgiving by nature.  In fact, in many ways, the child in all of us can sometimes be the most forgiving part of our nature. 

A while back I was visiting in the home of one of our families when there had been a death.  As we were talking, a picture on one of the shelves in the family room caught my eye.  As I got ready to leave, I went over, took a closer look and asked about the story behind it.  It was one of those 1920’s era family portraits.  In the bottom left corner, someone had put another picture, one like a child would have made at school, of a little freckled boy in overalls from the same era.

It turns out that this family’s father was an alcoholic who had abandoned his family when the little boy whose picture was in the corner was very young.  No one had ever heard from or seen him again.  This was the only family photograph with the father in existence.  His abandonment had so embittered the family that all the children had taken their copy of the picture and torn the father’s face from it.  With one exception.  One child didn’t tear their dad out of the family picture and had instead added his own childhood picture to it in the bottom corner, as though keeping the family together after all.  No matter how badly his father had behaved, even despite his abandonment, this child still wanted to keep his father in the family picture.  That is the way children tend to be.  No matter what, they are always looking around and over and through the most awful things for a way to keep everyone in the picture.  Children can be very forgiving, even to their own detriment.

What this verse does say, in context, is that love is a choice to grow up.  Love is a choice to move toward maturity in our relationships with our family, with anyone with whom we choose to be friends.  It can be a difficult, painful choice.  As Scott Peck has written, “Of the thousands, maybe even millions, of risks we can take in a lifetime the greatest risk is the risk of growing up.  Growing up is the act of stepping from childhood into adulthood.  Actually, it is more a fearful leap than a step, and it is a leap that many people never take in their lifetimes.  Though they may outwardly appear to be adults, even successful adults, perhaps the majority of ‘grown-ups’ remain until their deaths psychological children who have never truly separated themselves from their parents and the power that their parents have over them” (M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled, Simon and Schuster, 1978).

Love is a choice to grow up by choosing not to measure the meaning of life only in terms of how things affect us.  That’s one way we start the process of getting rid of the unnecessary receptacles in which we store yesterday’s unforgiven trash.  We choose to grow up.  “When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.”  Becoming a friend who forgives begins with the choice to be forgiving.  For some, that is a bigger job than it is for others.

Pat Conroy has written eloquently of his very painful journey through childhood under the tutelage of a very abusive father.  Looking back from the vantage point of an adulthood he had chosen, he remembered that “There was nothing my father could not teach me about the architecture of despair.  I knew all its shapes and blueprints, the shadows of all its columns and archways.  My father could send me reeling down its hallways and screaming into its bat-spliced attics with a curl of his thin-lipped mouth.  He brought madness home every time he entered the many houses of my overlong childhood.  His cruelty baffled me, shamed me, and I promised myself I would never be anything like him” (Pat Conroy, My Losing Season, Doubleday, 2002, p. 81).

For many, Father’s Day means honoring a very loving father or celebrating the memory of a very loving father.  For many others, Father’s Day can mean reliving very painful memories.  Perhaps, for some, this Father’s Day might be a day to draw a line in the sand, a marker, the point at which you chose to forgive, to no longer hold your father accountable. 

Loving friendship demands the holy work of forgiveness.  It also demands Christlike devotion.  Devotion to someone other than self. 

I can only speak for myself.  But, I do not like one-way relationships.  It is very difficult for me to maintain relationships in which there is not some level of reciprocation.  People who don’t respond, who don’t return phone calls or the most simple overtures at staying connected, make it difficult for me to stay involved in friendship.  Yet, taking ongoing steps toward adulthood in my relationships has proven over and over again that loving some people means maintaining one-way relationships.  Sometimes, love is a one way street.  Just ask Jesus.  Isn’t it a good thing that he didn’t demand immediate reciprocation in order to stay committed to us?  That, “while we were yet sinners” (Romans 5:8, KJV), while we were still walking away from him, Christ kept walking toward us.   

The gospel even teaches us that Jesus is “a friend of sinners” (Matthew 11:19), of those who have no interest in walking toward him.  Which means that, no matter what, I’ll always have at least one friend I can count on!  How about you?  Indeed, Jesus is a model of devotion.  The perfect model of these very words, “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.  It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.  It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Love never ends.”  It is those very words that makes me ask if I model that kind of devotion in my friendships? 

I know what it is to love my wife and sons.  I’d die for them.  I don’t know a husband or father wouldn’t.  I know that there are fathers out there who have drawn boundaries on their love that exclude their wives or children but I’ve never met them.  I’ve heard about them.  I have met fathers who would say they love their children but have never equated that with actually telling their children they love them.  I’ve known more than one person who has no memory of ever hearing their father say to them, “I love you.”  And, I’ve known more fathers than I care to count who said they loved their children but devoted more time to work or hobbies than they did to raising their children.  But, I’ve never met a father who wouldn’t at least say he’d die for his children if that is what loving them required.

Most fathers, I believe, are like the father who followed his own two children into the water and drowned trying to save them at the Water Gardens in Ft. Worth this past week.  It’s just that it is easier to believe we love someone because we believe we’d die for them than it is to work our way back from dying for them in one heroic leap to what it means to love them by living for them in little, often unnoticed and unrewarded actions day by day.

Could I pray this prayer?  “Dear Jesus, I love you so much that I would die for you.  I love you so much too that I will place no restriction or boundary on what it means to live for you.  I will go wherever you want me to go, do whatever you want me to do and, until the day I can see your face, I will love those whose faces you’ve given me to see now, my neighbors and friends and family, and even my enemies?”  Could we pray that prayer?  Jesus is our friend.  Are we his? 

Could we also extend that kind of love to all those whom we call our friends, especially those within the boundary lines of family?  Loving God and loving those he’s given us to love as friends means letting him set the boundaries on what that love looks like, how it behaves, what it does.  God makes the rules.  When we presume to make the rules, things are radically and woefully short of true love, aren’t they?

One of our senior adult ladies sent me a list of rules that she had heard some men have supposedly made in their marriages.  I’ve decided to share some of them with you, at least the ones I can read from the pulpit.  Again, this is what happens when men make the rules on what it means to love their wives.  Those rules sound something like this.  “If possible, say whatever you must during the commercials.”  “Christopher Columbus didn’t need directions and neither do we.”  “Crying is blackmail.”  “Come to us with a problem only if you want help solving it.  Sympathy is what girlfriends are for.”  And, last but certainly not least, “A headache that lasts for 17 months is a problem!  See a doctor!” 

Who makes the rules of love and friendship in your family?  Do those rules sound anything like 1 Corinthians 13?  We don’t have to abide by them.  What price do we pay if we chose not to?

Last Sunday, when we turned the beautiful diamond of 1 Corinthians 13 toward the face of forgiveness, I paraphrased the first eight verses of that chapter to help us see what forgiveness looks like in a yet another way.  Today, I will do the same.  Turning 1 Corinthians 13 toward the face of loving friendship, this is how I would paraphrase the first eight verses. 

As important as saying that I you love you may be in many different ways on different occasions, if I am your friend, I will always remember that love is more than just what I say, love is what I do, or not.  That Forest Gump-like, love is as love does.  If I am truly your friend, I’ll know that, when you have a question, you need more than just an answer.  That most of the time you don’t need me to solve life’s unsolvable mysteries as much as you need me to walk with you through them or at least listen compassionately while you’re confused.  If I say that I am your friend, especially if you are family, I will be there for you when you need me.  I will be physically, emotionally and spiritually available, even vulnerable.  I will be more than a workaholic who tries to prove his love by working so hard to provide things that I never have time just for you, to listen, to hug, to laugh, to share the little details of every day life or a cup of coffee in the morning and a prayer at bedtime.  I’ll remember the inestimable value of hellos and goodbyes, try to be at your games and recitals, to help with your homework or housework, and even, now and then, to cry with you.  If I am your friend, when you make me mad, I’ll count to ten, then to eleven, then to twelve . . . because I will try to remember, even when I am angriest, that love makes you count further than you ever thought you could instead of just looking for the easiest way out when things get tough.  And, as for counting, I will never stop counting on finding a way to love you even if I come to discover the most unlovable things about you.  I will practice kindness that is more than just flowers after a fight by looking for every day ways to help ease the burden that life can become any moment of any day.  Because I am your friend, I will tell you the truth but I will measure the weight of my truthful words and the way I deliver them by the impact they will have when they find their way to your heart.  I will never be mean to you.  I will never, ever walk all over you on the way to getting my way.  No matter how passionately I believe in something, I’ll stop long enough to measure the value of the gift of your perspective.  I will never be a bull in the china shop of your dreams, feelings and ideas.  I will not ever get into competition with you for the affection or recognition of others because I will never let our friendship become a contest in the battle for discovering self worth.  When everyone else walks out, I’ll be the one who stays to throw a party the next time you win.  If I am your friend, I’ll trust you until you give me an unqualified reason not to.  I’ll never give up hope for what you can become and even for what you I together can become.  I’ll put up with you on your worst days because I believe your best days are still ahead; I won’t use your most unlovable traits as an a reason to excuse myself from my promise to love you, no matter how hard it gets, no matter what . . . no matter what.  If I am your friend, I’ll never stop looking for one more way to say and show you how much I love you.

Are you that kind of friend?  Wouldn’t this day, this special day, be a very good day to take a step in that direction?