Family: It's A Given

Cousin Jeanie, who had organized our family reunion, stood at the front of the picnic pavilion and exclaimed to the assembled Newcomers,"This all began with four knucklehead brothers: Bill, Ray, Bob and Charlie Newcomer." Those four men -- my grandfather and his three younger brothers -- are no longer with us. But all of their living children, plus my mother who represented my dad, came forward to stand on the stage. Soon spouses joined them, then their children, then the spouses of their children, then their grandchildren, until all the Newcomers were standing to form a living family tree. It was quite a sight: the most Newcomers I've ever seen in one place. Some I've known all my life, others I've only seen sporadically, and a few I was meeting for the first time. Yet, we were all family. 

  

My Mom (far left) with the Children of Bill, Ray, Bob & Charlie Newcomer

My father once wrote that being with family gives you "an appreciation for what it means to learn to live with people who are given to you, not people you choose to live with, but people who are given. Certainly the particular children we have are given to us; we did not choose them from a large selection. Sometimes this is true of someone else you might live with -- an uncle or a grandparent. One time a number of years ago, two college girls in tears knocked frantically on our door. They had been put out of their rooming house across the street by a local density ordinance. They had no place to go. We took them in and they became a part of our family for a year, and a real blessing, too! What else could we do? They were given to us. I've always felt it important to accept those who are given to me."

"You say, 'Yes, but there's one person in my family whom I choose -- my wife or my husband.' That's true, and there's a real sense of free choice in the first months or even years of marriage, but it's not too long until that wears off and our marriage partner has a certain 'given-ness' about him or her in our eyes. You know what they say: 'You can choose your friends but you can't choose your family.'"

"Jesus ... [uses] the family to teach us how to love and appreciate and care for those who are given to us. It is easy to love and appreciate and care for the people you choose. But the family is where we first learn to deal with people who are given. And the main blessing that Jesus provides for us in this respect is to teach us that love is a matter of the will, even more than a matter of our feelings. Chosen people are easily loved because we feel like loving them. Given people are not as easily loved, and so we must will to love them. The will to love is largely unknown in the secular world. It comes from Jesus Christ when we want it and ask him for it. It transforms the family into a group of people who, though they did not choose each other, have a strong mutual love that sets them apart from so many other families where there is mutual distrust and dislike and bare toleration of each other."

"This love for those who are given is such an important thing to learn in the family because it is a valuable asset to have in so many other areas of life where people are also given to us. A choir and its director are given to each other; a United Methodist Church and its pastor are given to each other; a teacher and a class are given to each other; an employee and a boss are often given to one another; neighbors are given to each other. Every day we can, by God's grace, will to love those who are given to us. And we can first learn how to do this in the Christian family." 

From: "The Family: Conformed or Transformed?"

Scripture: Romans 12:1-2

Preached at Paoli U.M. Church

May 8, 1988 

No Forgiveness, No Peace

The news this past week has been horrible. One morning, I picked up the newspaper and read a headline saying, "Traffic-Stop Sheer Horror."  A black man from Minnesota had been shot and killed by a police officer in a mere traffic stop for a broken tail light. It was the second fatal police shooting of a black man in as many days, the other occurring in Louisiana. Then, when I picked up the newspaper the next morning, the banner headline read, "Dallas in Shock." A man with a rifle, looking to avenge the week's earlier deaths, turned a peaceful protest into a blood-bath -- shooting twelve police officers, killing five of them. How do we effectively address such violence, such anger, such injustice? Where does it end? 

My father's ministry began in the Boston area during the racially turbulent 1960s. On the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., my father preached a sermon he simply titled, "Reconciliation." There, Dad said that racial reconciliation has two key ingredients. The first is justice: "Justice is making up for past wrongs. It is everyone getting what is deserved and enjoying equal rights and equal opportunities."  My father said that "[e]very muscle of our bodies and every cell of our brains and every dollar in our pockets must be strained to the limit to achieve justice in our society." 

As vitally important as he believed justice to be, my father saw that justice alone is insufficient to bring about true reconciliation: "So many leaders will tell us falsely that 'justice' is the be-all and end-all of reconciliation between the races, or any other at-odds groups, of which there are so many. They are wrong! Justice alone will never bring reconciliation because, strictly speaking, as long as men are men and sinners, there will never be total justice. ...

"You know, there are some debts we owe to other men that we just cannot pay. There are other debts that we can only begin to pay. At the point where my ability to pay my debt to you falls short, that is where you must begin to forgive. And only because you forgive can we be reconciled. Forgiveness is the meat of reconciliation, its main ingredient. Dr. King realized that the meat of reconciliation is forgiveness -- thus his philosophy of non-violence. ...

"Men are human; they sin against each other. Even in a perfectly ordered society, they hurt each other. And so if there is to be peace, there must be a constant flow of forgiveness. The history of the church -- from the day Stephen was stoned to the day Martin Luther King was shot -- shows us that sometimes no reparation is possible and forgiveness is the only practical action which can be prescribed. We must recognize that we are indebted to each other. If we want to live together and work together, we must learn to forgive."

So where do we go from here? From the evil, loss and division we witnessed last week? My father believed that, "as Christians on this day, we have the audacious right to proclaim that unless the  divided world recognizes and understands the word of reconciliation spoken by God at the cross, it is without hope of survival in any sense."

"What does God do at the cross that reconciles us to him? He forgives. He forgives. In Christ, God bears our sin and suffers. Loving us with unfathomable love, he forgives us the thousands of misguided ways we have attempted to be masters of our own fate. He forgives. By the cross, God shows us that he forgives the great corporate and social evils that we have helped set in motion, but over which we no longer have control. He forgives. ... There is nothing I can do to pay the debt I owe God for what I have done to my neighbor and therefore to God himself. But God loves me, and so he forgives. ...

"Who would think that the cross would give us the pattern and the source for ordering our social relations? But I submit to you that if it did not, what would it be worth?

From "Reconciliation"
Scripture: 2 Corinthians 5:16-21
Preached Good Friday, 1969
Adams Shore Community Church, Quincy, MA  

P.S. - For more from Bill on Christian faith and racial reconciliation, I urge you to read the post: Bill on Martin: A Call to Action.