Back when I was growing up in Brownfield, we traditionally had at least one if not two “revival meetings” every year in my home church.  Without ever knowing it, the traveling evangelists who came to lead those meetings taught me one of my first memorable lessons in preaching.  If you are going to preach in the same church more than once, you’d better keep record of what you preached the first time.  I don’t remember their names, their faces or even the scriptures they used but I do remember the stories those evangelists told because they used the same stories more than once.

In particular, I remember one story about an old man who owned a gas station atop a hill overlooking a peaceful little community down in the valley below and astride the main road into town.  One day, a new customer stopped for service and struck up a conversation.  He would soon be moving into the community and wanted to know something about it.  “Exactly what kind of town is that down there, anyway?  What are the people like?  Is it a good place to live?”  The old man answered with some questions of his own.  “Tell me about where you’re from.  What were those people like?  Was it a good place to live?”  “Aw,” he said, “frankly, I’m glad to get out of there.  I never have liked that place.  I’ve lived there for years and to this day the people are cold and standoffish, sometimes downright rude.  It was a miserable place to live.”  The old man then said, “Well, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you.  You’re probably going to find this town to be pretty much like the place you came from.  You’ll probably find the people cold and standoffish, downright rude.  It’s can be a pretty miserable place to live.”  The driver groaned and shrugged and went on down the road, looking pretty discouraged.

A few days later the same thing happened again.  Another man stopped for gas and asked the same question.  “What kind of place is that to live?”  The old man again answered with questions of his own.  “Tell me about where you’re from.  What kind of place was it?”  “I can’t tell you how sad I am to be leaving there,” the traveler said.  “The people are the best!  They’re warm and caring.  It’s just a wonderful place to live.”  The old man said, “Well, I’ve got some great news for you.  I think you’ll find this town to be very much the same.  The people are the friendliest, nicest and most caring you’ll ever meet.  It’s a great place to live.”  The traveler thanked him and went on down the road with a smile on his face.

Again, I don’t remember the name of the evangelist who told that story or even the scripture he was illustrating.  But, I’ve never forgotten the moral of the story.  In life, we tend to pretty much find what we’re looking for and we tend to see the world and everyone in it through the eyes of our own hope or misery, whichever the case may be.  The preacher wanted us to see the way we see.  That we tend imagine the world around us in light of the image we have of ourselves, for better or for worse.  So, again, we tend to find in life what we’re looking for and we’re looking for it through the eyes of our own self-image and self-worth, or lack thereof.  Happy people tend to see the world as a happy place to be; miserable people tend to see it as full of misery.  How do you see what you see?

This morning we come to the last of a three sermon marriage and family enrichment series entitled, “Family Factors.”  It is a series intended to help us discover the basic factors that build health and hope in marriages and families.  Whether you are a single or married adult with children in your home or a child in a single or two-parent home, there are some fundamental factors that go into building healthy families.  We’ve been seeking to discuss a short list of those fundamentals with Holy Scripture as our guide.  So far, based on 1 Corinthians 13, we’ve discussed the forgiveness factor and the friendship factor.  This morning, the faith factor. 

What does 1 Corinthians 13 teach us about faith that will help us build healthy, hopeful and loving families?  Among its many lessons on faith, hope and love, 1 Corinthians reinforces the story of the old man who owned the gas station at the top of the hill.  In life, even in our families, in our closest relationships, we tend to find what we are looking for and we are looking through the eyes of our experiences and images of ourselves.  What faith offers is the possibility of seeing the world and all of its people through the eyes of faith, hope and love, indeed, through the eyes of God.

If there was one sermon out of these three that was specifically intended for children, it’s this one.  That’s because children tend to go out into the world finding what their parents taught them to look for.  For the most part, unless something happens to cause them to see differently, they will likely go looking for the same kind of family they came from or trying to recreate the world according to the world of their childhood, even if they would have sworn that, whatever it took, it would have different than the one their parents made. 

I was walking through a department store once and passed by one of those four-sided support columns covered with full-length mirrors on each side.  I was startled when I thought, for just a brief moment, that I saw my father standing there.  I backed up for a second look, wondering what my dad was doing there, three hundred miles from home.  Upon further reflection, I realized that it was me staring back at me, but that what I thought was me was looking more and more like him.  That’s the story of physical genetics.  Here’s the version about spiritual genetics.

Parents, by their example more than anything else, in word and in deed, set the vision of their children.  Proverbs 22:6 promises, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (KJV).  That verse contains both warning and promise.  We are, in fact, training up our children in the way they will most likely tend to go, one from which they will not likely depart.  How’s the training going these days? 

Parents don’t create the world their children will live in as much as they create the way their children will see the world they live in.  Let me rush to say that there is plenty of room here for undeserved grief and guilt.  No matter how hard parents try, they do not ultimately control the choices their children make or what their children make of themselves.  Any parent who has finally all but given up on cramming Algebra II down an indifferent teenager’s throat at midnight knows that all too well.  But, no parent worth their weight in salty proverbs will ever allow that to excuse them from accepting the responsibility that comes with the overwhelming power of influence they have over those they usher into this world.  “Train up a child . . ..”  It’s a warning first, a promise second. 

If parents are people of faith, hope and love, if they see the world as a safe, hopeful place and a place in which their responsibility is to care for the needs of others, they will more often than not cast that same vision in their children.  If parents take their children to church but never take the church home with them, if faith is something that is only discussed at church in front of others but they allow sarcasm, cynicism, fear and materialistic self-centeredness to rule the home and, even worse, a standard other than grace by which they measure out their blessing, they will likely send their children out into the world keeping the God of their Sundays separate from the gods of their daily lives and finding the world to be a very frightful place.  A place full of others who are only trying to take advantage of them or as people to be used by them as stepping stones on their way to getting what they want at all costs and, worse, as people who are full of self-loathing, never capable of doing enough, no matter how much they accomplish. 

“For now we see in a mirror, dimly,” Paul has written, “but then we will see face to face.  Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”  What we first see when we are startled by our own reflection in the mirror can be confusing.  What is happening to me?  What about all those promises I made myself, all those secret vows?  Am I doomed to nothing more than live out some kind of genetic code written into my mind and body before I was ever born, only to repeat the habits and steps of generations before me?  Or, is God doing something new in me?  Is there any hope?  What we now “see in a mirror dimly” is the blurred reflection of immaturity.  Yet, even as we’re trying to get a better focus, faith leads us to see ourselves through the eyes of hope and love, like God sees us, to look beyond what we can see with the eyes in our head’s sockets to what we can only see with the eyes of our heart.

Parents who love their children will show them what it means to make God a part of their every moment and thereby give them faith to see beyond what may be happening to them in any given moment to what God alone can make of their lives.  Children who grow into the maturity that only faith, hope and love can nurture learn to see beyond themselves to the world as God would have it, as God will have it.  Some are blessed with parents who give them that faith as children.  Some must grow to maturity by choosing to become their own parent and a faith that their parents didn’t have to give them. 

The Old Testament tells the story of a woman named Naomi who moved with her husband and two sons from Judah to Moab.  Judah was not just their home but also the place of their spiritual heritage.  A famine had struck the land and the only way to avoid starvation was to move across the Sea of Galilee to Moab, a strange and foreign land where people worshipped another god.  While they were there, Naomi’s two sons married Moabite women, Ruth and Orpah.  Some years later, Naomi’s husband and sons had all died, leaving the three women widowed.  Naomi was getting old and had no one to care for her and decided to go back home to Judah but encouraged her daughters-in-law to stay in Moab with their people.  Orpah decided to stay but Ruth could not bear the thought of leaving Naomi and promised to return to Judah with her.  We don’t know the whole story.  But, Naomi’s faith had so influenced Ruth, that when it came time to decide whether she would stay in Moab or return to Judah with Naomi, this is what Ruth told her.  “Where you go I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16).

In many ways, all children are like Ruth was as a daughter-in-law to Naomi.  In countless ways, the faith of parents becomes the faith of their children and children, often without realizing it, make silent vows to their parents to go as they go and worship as they worship.  Sometimes, those are good vows.  Sometimes, those are vows that lead to them to self-destruct on the altar of false gods.

Bill Clinton has risked letting us in on the secret of what may have led to so much of his self-destructive behavior while sitting atop the most powerful position of leadership in all the world.  In his recently published autobiography, My Life, Clinton speaks of learning to live at the feet of a rage-filled alcoholic stepfather.  Vowing to keep the truth about the horror and sadness of his home life from friends and neighbors, he described himself as living “parallel lives,” “outwardly sunny and confident, inwardly pained and insecure.  It was only years later . . . that he realized his stepfather had instilled in him a need for secrets – a need that possibly led to behavior that he would have to keep secret” (“Bill’s Self-Portrait,” Newsweek, June 28, 2004, p. 35).  I’m willing to take him at his word that he is trying to learn what it means to make healthier choices now as an adult instead of living as a helpless child masquerading as an adult.  Can we say the same thing? 

Please hear me carefully right now.  I am not excusing what Bill Clinton did to disgrace the most significant trust the American people can bestow on any one human being.  But, I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt that he is telling the truth now for more than just the $10 million advance he was paid for his memoir.  But, whatever his motives, he has at least been willing to tell the truth about what most of us will never confess to even one other person.  There are some stories I would never tell in public for twice what Clinton was paid.  (He may have sold out cheap!)  The single most powerful dominating force that drives most adults to live parallel lives of public happiness and private shame are the family secrets they were taught to keep from before their memory can recall.  The closer we come to the faith, hope and love of which Paul wrote so eloquently in 1 Corinthians 13, the closer we will come to the wholeness that can only be ours when there is no longer any distance between our public and private selves, no more secrets to hide, no more lies to tell – because we have faith in the love of God to accept us as we are and have extended that same love to ourselves first and then to others as well.

If your parents gave you faith, hope and love, then following Christ as Lord and savior now may be as natural to you as getting up in the morning and going to bed at night.  If your parents did not give you faith, especially if they instead gave you despair, then for you to choose faith now despite what you were given will be a matter of choosing to grow into a maturity that will become yours only if you choose to become your own parent. 

“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.”  When we are children, we uncritically accept what our parents tell and give us.  As we grow into maturity, we learn to sift through what our parents gave us, acknowledge the humanity of it all, embrace what is healthy and hopeful and then graciously discard the rest as we learn to accept responsibility for our own choices about what we will believe and how we will live.  God doesn’t want spiritual robots who only mechanically live out what other generations have passed down to them.  He wants more people like Ruth.  People who weigh the faith of their ancestors over against faith in a living God of hope, accept responsibility for their own faith and make it their own. 

Sure, this was a sermon for children.  But, not for the children still at home.  It has been a message for all of us children.  A message meant to ask us whether or not we are choosing a faith for ourselves that we would recommend to others.  A faith that empowers us to see the world through the eyes of God, full of hope and love. 

Either way – our eyes are either a mirror in which we only see the world reflected according to the image we see staring back at us, the image of our limited selves, or faith is the open window through which we look out onto the vistas of faith, hope and love that God has created for us to explore.  Which might it be for you?

So, even as I have done the past two weeks, I close this message with a paraphrase of a few short verse of 1 Corinthians 13, verses 7-13.  A paraphrase meant to cause to think of faith, hope and love more creatively.  I give you these words as a gift, in the hope and sincere prayer that, if you’ve been living a parallel life of public happiness and private shame, that you may discover the faith, hope and love that God created you to know. 

Trying to describe faith without hope and love or hope without faith and love or love without faith and hope would be like trying to describe the sunrise without light and warmth or the ocean without water and wind.  It cannot be done.  When you love someone, you will have faith in them and hope for them, especially when they cannot believe for themselves and when they have lost all hope.  You will never stop believing and hoping the best for them.  Never.  You will endure their worst as willingly as you enjoy them when they are at their best.  Loving someone will cause you to believe in, to have faith in, more than you can see at the moment in them or for them.  Love expresses itself in a faith in what is eternal, not just temporal.  Love wipes out fear because it chooses to step toward even the most frightening circumstances instead of being cowered by them, to step toward them with faith and hope for yourself and those you love in light of what God is ultimately up to.  Love doesn’t trust just what it can understand or perceive or decipher momentarily but trusts the bigger picture of God’s purposes.  When you love someone, you will love them for what God is making of them not just what they have made of themselves or what others have intended for them.  When it is all said and done, only our relationships with God and each other will transcend time as we know it.  Because only that which we have invested of ourselves in faith, hope and love will make the transition with us from this life to the next.  Someday, in a day and time we cannot know for now, everything that has puzzled us about ourselves and others will finally be made clear in the light of God’s eternal love.  Everything else, everything, will pass away and become the dust of time’s decaying memory.  Only faith, hope and love will remain to share eternity with us.  When time is no more, we will finally know, once and for all and forever and ever, that all along we were loved beyond all human comprehension, even beyond our capacity to dream or imagine.  No more secrets, no more fears.  No more doubts.  Faith and hope are the assurances for now that, when time is no more, we will be swallowed up in the vast, timeless ocean of God’s forever love. 

No matter what got you here to this very moment in this very place, the choice is yours.  Will you choose faith?  Will you choose hope?  Will you choose faith?  Will you choose it for yourself?  For those you love?

Will you?