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04.26.09

3rd Sunday of Easter

THE FAMILY TREE

GENESIS 11:10-32; 1 John 3:1-10

• Connecting With Our Roots
• How Big Is The Family Tree?
• In 1620, the Pilgrims came to what is now the United States aboard a small cargo ship called the Mayflower
• There were 102 passengers aboard that ship, and today there are more than 35 million Americans who are direct descendants of those first Mayflower Pilgrims—that’s about 12 percent of our population
• An important part of our history here at Cold Spring Presbyterian Church is our tie to the Mayflower descendants who migrated into this area, and there are more Mayflower descendants buried in our cemetery than anywhere else in the nation, outside of Massachusetts
• Many of you are part of that 12 percent of our population who are direct descendants of those Mayflower Pilgrims
• In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in tracing one’s family tree
• The internet has helped to spark that interest and has made the task of tracking down one’s roots a whole lot easier
• One of the most popular family research search engines is Ancestry.com
• Contained on that site are census records, immigration records, military records, and just about anything else you would need to research and discover all of the various branches that are part of your family tree
• My son has been working to trace our family tree using Ancestry.com
• He has a lot more work to do, but he has uncovered our family’s Scottish roots
• It was my great-great-grandparents who emigrated from Scotland and established our family here in America
• To show you how popular Ancestry.com has become, their website’s homepage reports that during this past week alone, over 13 million people have added to their family trees, nearly 29,000 family stories were submitted, and over 261,000 photos were uploaded
• Think for a minute about how many ancestors you have
• You know that you have two parents and four grandparents, but as you go back in time the numbers grow quickly: eight great grandparents, 16 great-great grandparents, 32 great-great-great grandparents
• If you go back forty generations—about a thousand years—each of us, theoretically, has more than a trillion direct ancestors
• And our family trees are not independent—they’re going to overlap and intersect with other family trees within that period of time
• The point is, we are all swimming in the same genetic pool
• At some point, we’re all family sharing the same genetic material
• The Importance of Ancestry
• It’s important to know who we are and where we come from, perhaps more so now than it has ever been in earlier periods of history
• Since scientists have been able to map the human genome and crack the genetic code, knowing our family history has become extremely important in the treatment and prevention of disease
• As a result, adopted children are no longer discouraged from searching out their family of origin because knowing their family history might provide important medical information later in life
• In ancient cultures, family history has always been important
• It was the means by which a person determined his/her place in the community
• Land and possessions typically passed through family lines as did occupations
• Last names such as Carpenter, Smith, Miller, and Tanner are all associated with their respective trades
• Throughout the pages of the Bible, there are numerous recounting of genealogies, such as the one we read today from Genesis
• While most of us skip over those portions of Scripture because the names are so strange and difficult to pronounce, and consider them irrelevant for us today, they are still a very important part of our family history
• In our Genesis text, the writer provides an important link between Noah and Abraham as the world was repopulated after the Great Flood
• In the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, these Gospel writers record Jesus’ lineage because it was important to establish Jesus as a descendant of king David
• But these genealogies of Jesus do more than that
• Matthew takes great pains to establish Jesus as a descendant of Abraham because it was important to connect him with the very beginning of the Hebrew people
• Luke takes Jesus’ heritage even further by tracing his family line all the way back to Adam to establish the fact that Jesus was the Son of God
• If it were possible to trace our roots back far enough, we would all discover the same truth: we are all descendants of Adam and Eve, the parents of the human race
• Therefore, we are all related—we are all one family
• It makes no difference what color our skin is or what language we speak
• It makes no difference if we are Jews or Christians or Muslims or atheists
• We are all descendants of Adam—we are all swimming in the same gene pool
• And since we are all descendants of Adam, we are all children of God since God is the Creator of all things and the giver of life
• Being Born into God’s Family
• Paternity vs. Fatherhood
• While we recognize that, in one sense, all people are children of God since God is the creator of all things and the giver of life, as Christians we understand our relationship with God is different from the relationship that others who are not Christian have with God
• That difference is set out in the distinction between paternity and fatherhood
• Paternity describes a relationship in which a man is responsible for the physical existence of a child; fatherhood describes an intimate, loving relationship
• In the sense of paternity, we are all children of God since God is responsible for our existence, but we only become children of God in the sense of fatherhood when God approaches us and offers us grace and we respond by accepting it
• As Christians, we have that special relationship with God as “Our Father” because through Jesus Christ God has offered us his grace and we have accepted that grace through faith in Jesus
• Over the years, I have grown into the likeness of my dad
• I look like him, in many ways I act like him, and I have his sense of humor
• Just as I have grown up to be like my dad, so each of us, once we become children of God through faith, must grow up spiritually so that our lives might take on the image of God
• Jesus Christ is the fullest representation of God we have, so our goal as Christians is to become like Jesus as much as possible
• And since we don’t know what Jesus looked like physically—and we won’t know until we see him face-to-face—the only way others will know that we are children of God is through the way we act
• Only through our actions will others see Jesus living in us
• A Life Free From Sin
• John’s words in the remainder of this passage are somewhat complicated, but his basic point is that we are identified as children of God by the way we put our Christian faith into practice
• While it sounds as if John is saying that faith in Jesus makes us perfect and free from sin, John recognizes that that isn’t the case
• He states the fact that “everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact sin is lawlessness.”
• He also states the fact that “He [Jesus] appeared so that he might take away our sins.”
• After he states these facts, John calls us to faithful living by saying, “No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him.”
• What John is doing here is calling us away from deliberate acts of sinfulness
• He’s calling us to weigh the consequences of our actions before we take the action and to consciously choose to do what is right and avoid dong what is wrong
• John knows that we can never completely avoid sin since sin is part of our nature as human beings, but we must never deliberately choose to sin because we are children of God who are striving to reflect the image of Jesus Christ in the world
• What a difference that kind of conscious choice will make in the way we relate to each other and to the world
• If we continue to deliberately choose to sin, we are not God’s child, we are the child of the devil
• The devil has been sinning since the beginning of time
• Jesus came to destroy the work of the devil, and the work of the devil is seen in deliberate, willful acts of sin
• So if we are truly children of God, if God’s seed abides in us, if we have been born of God, we will choose to act in ways that please God and reflect the image of Jesus Christ to others
• To have God’s seed in us means that we have been born into the family of God through the work of the Holy Spirit upon our lives
• It means that we live so close to God that we start taking on God’s attributes
• And because we have been born of the Holy Spirit and live so close to God, we have the strength and guidance of the Word of God within us to avoid the temptation to sin
• Reflecting God’s Image
• The place in our life where this ought to be most evident is in our relationships with others
• The key distinction between children of God and children of the devil is the quality of our love
• John says, “Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God; nor is anyone who does not love his brother.”
• Once again, we have a family connection
• Brother here doesn’t simply mean “a child of the same parents”
• Remember, we’re all swimming in the same gene pool and our family trees are intricately interconnected
• So if there is one other person in the world that we can’t find it in our heart to love, then we are not the child of God we think we are
• To love our brother is not to think we are better than them
• It is not to say an unkind word to them or about them; it is not to belittle them or demean them
• It is not to allow them to suffer for want of food, or clothing, or shelter
• It is to treat them with kindness and respect, to minister generously to their needs, to work for justice on their behalf, and to do all in our power to help them experience the love and grace of God present and active in the world through the presence and power of Jesus Christ
• Granted, there is not one of us who is living up to our fullest potential as a child of God
• We will never become fully like Christ until he returns
• In the meantime, we must continue to seek to grow in our relationship with God so that we can continue to become more like Christ
• We must continue to strive for maturity in our faith so that we might better understand and do God’s will
• We must continue on the path that leads to purity so that we can let go of our deliberate acts of sin, and we must continue to pursue righteousness so that our lives might become more conformed to the example of Jesus
• We will continue to fail because we can’t attain perfection on our own, but God will continue to love us and forgive us
• Once we become a child of God, our place in the family is secure
• It is scientifically impossible to remove the DNA connection we have with our earthly parents, and it is spiritually impossible to remove God’s DNA from our soul once we have been born again
• God will never break his relationship with us even though we may break our relationship with him
• When we sin –and we will—we have Jesus as our advocate
• When we return, God will always welcome us home
• May we be as loving and compassionate toward others in this human family as God is with us