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. 

Jesus Scares Me

I recently came across a sermon my father preached when I was two years old. Examining the relationship between parents, children and faith, Dad asked, "Parents, where do you supposed your child first begins to pick up an idea of what God is like? From you, of course. From the way you cuddle and nurse and talk to the child. And as the child grows, his or her concept of God is further colored by contacts with other significant adults. We call God 'father' because we think of God as being like a good father. Children have no other way to visualize God except in terms of adults.

Bill with Phil

The other day, my young son Philip looked at a picture of the bearded Jesus and asked me who it was. I said, 'Jesus.' Philip answered, 'Jesus scares me.' And that set me to thinking about how Philip or any child will come to know God. Not by first seeing pictures or hearing stories, but by experiencing God's love channeled through me."

It turns out that I did come to learn many valuable things about God's nature from the love that was channeled through my father. 

Dad was always concerned for my well-being, was always looking out for me ... and so is God.

Dad was both playful and serious ... and so is God.

Dad was called to serve many others beyond his family. There were the members of his congregations who looked to him for guidance, the grieving who needed comfort, the sick who needed to be visited, the needy who came looking for aid. So it was for Jesus.

And with the many demands that others made on my Dad's time and attention when I was a kid, there was plenty of opportunity for me to be resentful of his ministry ... to wish that he was just my dad and not everyone else's pastor. But I understood -- no doubt because Dad made such a point of it -- that his ministry was our family's ministry. We all were part of it. He wasn't appointed to a church; our whole family was. His work was our work, too. God is like that -- choosing to work with us and through us for the good of others, for the good of all.

Dad ended his sermon by saying, "I thank God, as I look back across my life, for the people who disciplined me, the people who taught me, the people who spoke the words and who gave the gentle shoves that challenged me. I have forgotten the people who didn't care, those who were afraid to advise, the ones who were too busy to teach. I remember only, and I thank God for the men and women who saw to it that I came to love and serve God in Jesus Christ through the church."

Thank you, Dad, for seeing to it that I know and love God. I'm happy to report that Jesus doesn't scare me any more. (Well, at least his beard doesn't.) Happy Father's Day!

From "Lent to the Lord"

Scripture: 1 Samuel 1:19c-28

January 21, 1968

Adams Shore Community Church

Quincy, MA   

A Mother's Nurture

Something felt a little upside-down as we sat around the restaurant table, eating a meal with my mom to celebrate Mother's Day. It was a real treat, I'm sure, for Mom to have all three of her kids there to celebrate with her. After all, my brother, Mark is living in the UK and rarely gets to come state-side. But, as conversation continued, it dawned on me that we were engrossed in discussing everything that was going on with Mom's kids and grand-kids ... not so much about what was going on with Mom. As she so often does, Mom was focused on us, more than on herself. 

Mark, Lisa, Mom (Barb) and Phil

When I think back on my childhood, the word that I would use to describe Mom is "nurturing." In a sermon my dad preached on Mother's Day in 1982, Dad observed that "nurture" comes from the same root as does the word "nourish." That was Mom (and it still is)! You never lack for nourishment at Mom's house!

In that Mother's Day sermon, Dad explained that nurturing "has to do with feeding for growth -- nourishing us physically, spiritually, mentally and emotionally for mature adulthood." Dad went on to say that "[o]ne of our basic modern problems is that no one wants to nurture anymore. Women used to do it, and because it was all we ever let them do, now they are reacting against it and doing it less and less. Men have hardly ever done it, although they are certainly capable of it. Old people want to leave it to the young. The young want to have their freedom and not be tied down. ... With all the emphasis these days on power and self-determination and doing your own thing, we view the role of nurturer as something to do if you can't find anything better. It's as if it were unmanly -- or now unwomanly -- to nurture children or those in our society who are weak or need help.

Where did we ever get the idea that nurture is beneath us -- as women, or as men? Where did we ever get the idea that we are being less than we can be if we feed and comfort and teach and listen and care? Are we not created in the image of God? And are we not supposed to grow in God's likeness? What is God like? ...

We call the God we worship 'Father,' and we picture a creator and judge, but that is not the full Biblical revelation of God's nature. Think of the Lord as gentle shepherd, the one who nourishes and cares. God is the one who provides manna in the wilderness for God's hungry people.

I always have found it interesting that one of our most precious Christian doctrines -- the doctrine of new birth -- sheds a light on the nature of God that is not traditionally masculine at all. We can be 'born of God,' we can be 'born of the Spirit.' Do you know what that means? God is our spiritual mother as well as our spiritual father. What I mean by that is: As one person, God does for each of us everything that we traditionally have divided up between male and female roles. God combines within God's self the creating function as well as the sustaining function, strength as well as tenderness, self-control as well as the free flow of emotions. God is the perfect person, and by God's grace we strive for that wholeness. 

Strength and tenderness ... Yes, in spite of what we may think the two can combine. And they can combine in each one of us, regardless of our sex, because they are combined perfectly in the God in whose image we all have been made."

Thank you, Mom, for the life-giving nurture that you provided (and still provide) for your children and grandchildren. And thank you to my wife, Dorry, who is an amazing nurturing presence in the lives of our kids. May we all learn from the nurturing example of our mothers ... and of our God ... so that we can mature into whole and healthy people.  Happy Mother's Day!

From: "Nurturing for Maturity"

Scripture: John  19:23-30

Preached: Mother's Day 1982

Calvary United Methodist Church, Easton, PA

The Cost of Discipleship

On this date in 1945, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazi regime for playing a role in a movement that resisted Hitler, even to the point of attempting assassination. Bonhoeffer was my father's favorite theologian, not only because of what he wrote, but also because of how he lived and died.

A couple of Bonhoeffer's works from Bill's library:
The Cost of Discipleship & Letters and Papers from Prison

My father's sermons include many references to Bonhoeffer's life and writings. In one of those sermons, Dad described the fateful choice Bonhoeffer made which set him on a path toward his death:

"Bonhoeffer, who along with other Germans fled Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, came to America seeking refuge and peace. And yet there was no peace for him. In the steamy heat of a Summer night in 1939, Dietrich walked up and down Times Square in New York, agonizing over the news from Europe. Alone, he tried, as Christ did so many years before, to reject the cup of suffering he knew would be his. The next day, he wrote to Reinhold Niebuhr: 'I have come to the conclusion that I have made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this same time with my people.' And so he returned to Germany; he led the underground Confessing Church; he plotted against Hitler; he was arrested, imprisoned and finally hanged. Neither Bonhoeffer nor Jesus were stupid or foolhardy. They recognized the dangers and the cost involved. But they also recognized that they would be less than they were meant to be, if they stayed in America, or in Galilee."

My father never expected that every Christian would be called upon to make the same sacrifice as a Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but he did believe that all Christians are called to the single-minded devotion to Christ that landed Bonhoeffer in Tegel Prison:

"What is involved in following Jesus? We must put Him and His Kingdom of love and justice and righteousness first in our lives. Don't let anyone kid you. This is difficult, and if you do it seriously it will get you into as much trouble as missing your father's funeral. We are called to be totally committed to Christ in the midst of, within, all our daily routines and responsibilities ... to follow Him in our work, our home, our marriage, our leisure, our civic responsibilities.

This will mean raising your children in a distinctly different way from many of your neighbors. It may mean conducting your work or business life according to principles that cause you to make less money or to get passed over for a promotion. It will affect what you eat, drink, wear, ride in or live in. It will mean that you will not automatically go along with the crowd in your opinions about social, political or economic issues. And you know those bull sessions with the boys or the girls? You may not be able to roar with laughter at all the jokes, or agree with prejudices that are expressed there. It will mean taking unpopular stands and getting used to feeling out of place around some of your neighbors and friends and relatives. 

Total commitment is the Lord's expectation of every Christian. Our duty is to single-mindedly translate Christ-likeness into every area where we play out our lives, regardless of the cost." If we do anything less, won't we be less than God meant us to be?

From: "A Trip to Jerusalem" & "Total Commitment"

Scripture: Luke 9:51-62

My Candidate Quandary

On Monday, the Iowa caucuses will be held, kicking off voting in the 2016 race for U.S. President. I am fascinated by presidential history; yet, this presidential election has me feeling something between annoyance and depression. When I look across the assembled field of candidates, I find impossible to imagine any of them as the next Teddy Roosevelt or JFK. Heck, I'm not trying to find Abraham Lincoln in this crowd. I'd settle for a James Garfield. Is this the best we can do? 

A friend of mine named Dave had an interesting take on this situation. He recently wrote: "Some say we lack great leaders and they may be right. But I am more saddened by what a small minded and hard-hearted people we have become. It may be that we no longer produce good leaders because we fail to be a good people." Dave's words on Facebook caused me to dig into Bill's Barrel to see if any of my dad's old sermons spoke to this leadership void and its possible causes. There I found a sermon called "On Being a Christian in the Voting Booth," in which my father suggests, as Dave suspected, that our leadership problem begins with us:

"Isn't the voting booth one of those places where we customarily leave Jesus outside while we go in with other things on our minds? Somehow, when the curtain closes behind us in that booth, the fact that we are Christians seems secondary to the fact that we are Republicans or Democrats, or veterans, or taxpayers, or hot on one particular issue that affects our self-interest. The way political campaigns are conducted, and the way past elections have gone, this selfish attitude toward the vote is quite clear. The voting booth is one place where the person is actually encouraged to let his prejudices and his selfish interests take over and be expressed in his vote.

As Christians, we cannot accept this. We are called to love and sacrifice for our neighbor, as much in the voting booth as outside it. How can we talk about 'going the second mile,' 'turning the other cheek,' 'feeding the hungry,' or 'proclaiming release to the captives' if we are not willing to vote for candidates whose policies are most in keeping with our Christian ideals? To be a Christian in the voting booth means to lay aside self-interest, prejudices and party labels. It could mean voting for a Democrat if you're a Republican, or for a Republican if you're a Democrat. It could mean voting to raise your own taxes if that revenue is needed to improve society. It might mean voting for someone whose policies could negatively affect your job, if  those policies are good for the nation's people. There is no end to the 'strange votes' you may have to cast if you take Christ with you into the voting booth, if you dare to say to Him in there behind the curtain, 'Thy will, not mine be done.'

We can be as selfish with our vote as we can be with our money, our time, or our abilities. It is this selfish voting that has gotten our country into the trouble that it's in today. We are polarized into so many opposing groups, each jealously guarding and looking out for its own interests, each voting accordingly, and not giving a care about other people and their needs and feelings. It is time that Christians make a loud, clear witness with their vote. We care about what happens to all people -- black and white, rich and poor, rural and urban. We will vote to care even if it causes us to sacrifice. After all, sacrifice should be nothing new or unusual to us as Christians; it should be our way of life.

And so being a Christian in the voting booth means judging each candidate on his [or her] merits by our Christian standards. These are questions we must ask ourselves if our vote is to become an act of Christian witness:

• Even though the candidate may not be a professing Christian, how closely is that candidate allied with our Christian principles? 
• How does a candidate fare when measured by the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control? 
• Does the candidate not only have the qualities of great leadership, but will he [or she] lead us in a way that is consistent with the coming Kingdom of  our Lord? 
• Do the candidate's policies promote the God-given dignity and equality of all, or does the candidate favor certain interest groups  and thus tend to divide people from each other rather than draw them together?
• Does the candidate recognize that 'law and order' and 'justice' are equally important?
• Does the candidate believe that we should be a real neighbor to the world's people -- not the sort of neighbor who goes in and takes over, imposing his own will and inviting hostility and resentment?

These kinds of questions are not easy to answer. It is not very easy to judge the real person who stands before us as a candidate, what with all the image-building and news managing that goes on. Educated guesses are needed in making the final choice, and sometimes neither candidate measures up very well to Christian standards. Even then, there is a responsibility to choose between the lesser of two evils. This too is the form Christian witness may take in the real world. 

We cannot expect that after due prayer and study all professing Christians will vote for the same candidates. But each Sunday we all pray, 'Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done.' So it is up to you to decide who best expresses, not your own selfish will, but the will of your Lord Jesus Christ." 

From "On Being a Christian in the Voting Booth" 

Scripture: Romans 13:1-7; Acts 5:27-42

Preached at Grace United Methodist Church

Millersville, Pennsylvania

November 5, 1972  

Advent in a Prison Cell

I spent some time in prison earlier this week -- not as an inmate, but as a visitor. I traveled to Graterford State Prison -- the closest state prison to Philadelphia -- to take an inmate's deposition testimony in a lawsuit he filed against three correctional officers. This is something I do with some frequency. At any given time, at least a third of the cases I am defending are ones brought by inmates who claim that their rights have been violated in prison.

The State Correctional Institution at Graterford

Graterford is Pennsylvania's largest maximum security prison, housing over 3,000 inmates. Built in 1929, it's mind-boggling to imagine the number of people who have passed through this prison during its lengthy history. It's an understatement to say that the facility is run-down. The place is worn, dimly lit, grungy, bleak. And there's something else the place is: incredibly secure. 

To get from the visitor's lobby to the room where I would question this inmate under oath, I had to sign in, have my identification checked, have my hand stamped, pass through a metal detector and have my belongings searched. Then, I had to pass through a "sally-port" -- a short hallway with two sliding security doors at either end controlled by a guard who sat in an adjacent, locked booth.  The two doors are never opened at the same time. The first door slides open, you enter the sally-port, then the door slides shut behind you, making a loud thud as the door's lock engages. After a few moments pass and the officer in the control booth has accounted for the persons standing before him in the sally-port, the second door slides open, and you can walk into the main corridor of the jail. The second door closes behind you with the same unmistakable thud, and you realize that there is no getting out of this place unless or until the staff sees fit to open the doors for you.

In a sermon entitled "A Possibility for Change," my father recalled why his favorite theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer "reported that while in prison he came to a fresh new understanding of what Advent is all about. For in prison, one can only wait, locked up in his cell. The prisoner is totally bound and helpless in his imprisoned condition. He cannot free himself. All he can do is sit and wait for someone on the outside to come and open his door and offer him his freedom. For the prisoner, the good news of redemption can only come from outside himself, from the other side of the cell door."

"So it is with Advent," my dad wrote. "We can do nothing during this period but quietly prepare and wait until the 'Dayspring from on High' chooses to come and visit us. ... We must see ourselves for what we are -- prisoners of our self-centeredness -- hopeless and helpless in and of ourselves, until the appearance of the salvation that God has prepared for us in Christ. The meaning of my personal Advent is that Christ comes and opens my prison door and bids me to step out into His Light. The stepping through that door is the stepping from Advent to Christmas, from prison to freedom, from my sin to God's salvation. There can be no real experience of Christmas without a prior experience of Advent. There can be no real sense of freedom unless one knows the meaning of bondage. There can be no salvation until we realize how lost we are in our sin."

I sat across a shaky, old table from the inmate I was questioning. A court reporter sat at the end of the table, dutifully recording our dialogue. Usually, inmates I encounter are angry and bitter. This one, though, seemed different. As I questioned him, I sensed a lightness about him. He seemed strangely ... hopeful. Then came this exchange: 

Q.  You allege that you injured your back in the altercation that brings us here for your deposition, correct?

A..  That's right. Those guards hurt my lower back.

Q.  That was two years ago, right? Has the injury healed?

Flashing a wide grin, the inmate responded ...

A.  I'll let you know for sure in two weeks.

Q.  Why do you say that?

A.  In two weeks, I'm getting paroled.

... Just in time for Christmas, I thought to myself.

From: "A Possibility for Change"

Scripture: Jeremiah 13:20-27; Romans 7:13-25

P.S.: For more on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Advent in prison, click here.