Protecting Our Parents

Philippians 4:1,4-6
Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost

This morning’s sermon begins with two disclaimers. The first one is this: I’m not talking about you or anyone you know. If you happen to think that the shoe fits you or fits someone else you know, maybe God is talking to you, because I’m not talking about you or anyone you know. The second disclaimer is this: I don’t deal in guilt. I grew up Lutheran, so I know all about guilt. But because I grew up Lutheran, I also know all about grace. The biblical gospel of Jesus Christ is a message of grace, not guilt. The heart of the gospel is a message of the reclamation and reformation of lives embodied in the God who welcomes prodigals home and in the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. My responsibility as one of the shepherds of this flock is to cultivate behaviors and attitudes and perspectives that shape our lives in the direction of the gospel of Jesus Christ. That’s what I’m talking about, not you or anyone you know, and I don’t deal in guilt. Those are the two disclaimers.

Now to the point. “Protecting our Children” is very important around here. But protecting our parents is important also. As most of us are aware, years ago, First Baptist Greenville put in place a program and a practice that requires anyone who volunteers to work with children or youth to have been a part of our congregation for 6 months, to provide references that we actually do contact, to agree to our running a State Law Enforcement Division check on them, to have a personal interview with a staff member, and to go through a training session on reducing the risk of the sexual abuse of children. Staff and volunteers alike sometimes get frustrated with all the hoops and the paperwork we go through around here; but we are committed to making every reasonable effort to protect our children and youth, and to making First Baptist Greenville a safe, healthy and happy place for them and for their parents.

That’s not everyone’s experience in church. Last week, Associated Baptist Press reported that in the last two years among the more than 900 churches that have purchased a new background-checking service from Lifeway, the publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, more than 600 felony convictions—not misdemeanors and traffic violations, now, 600 felony convictions—were uncovered among church staff and volunteers at those 900 churches.

Last month, Diana Garland, the dean of the Baylor University School of Social Work, revealed the results of a study of clergy sexual misconduct with adults that indicated that “In any given congregation with 400 adult members, seven women on average have been victims of clergy sexual misconduct since they turned 18.” What those number mean is that if this congregation were average, there would be dozens of women in this church who have experienced clergy sexual misconduct as adults. That’s a stunning number, but the issue comes as no surprise to the clergy on our staff.

We have a pastoral staff covenant that was instituted by my predecessor Hardy Clemons more than twenty years ago. In it, our pastoral staff members commit to God and to each other these two things, among other items:
• “We will give special attention to nurturing our marital, family and/or other primary relationships because we recognize the stress and the vulnerabilities our ministries place on us and our relationships,” and
• “We will maintain the highest ethical standards in all relationships. If we feel ourselves becoming vulnerable to sexually inappropriate behavior or if we are approached inappropriately by someone, we will discuss the matter with the senior minister or another one of our colleagues in highest confidentiality.”

Those two items in our pastoral staff covenant indicate that as a pastoral team, we are as committed to protecting our adults as we are to protecting our children. And it’s probably time that our congregation as a whole paid more attention to our shared responsibility to protect our parents as well as our children. If each member here is a minister, as we say, then maybe we all should look at these two elements of our pastoral staff covenant: giving “special attention to nurturing our marital, family, and/or other primary relationships” and seeking out support and accountability if we feel ourselves becoming vulnerable to inappropriate behavior or if we are approached inappropriately by someone.

I know there are folks who would just as soon we not talk about such things in church or anywhere else for that matter, but there is an epidemic in our culture, and individuals and families in our congregation are not immune to it. So on this morning, on the Sunday after we observed “Children’s Sabbath,” I’m raising the issue of protecting our parents as well as our children.

The idea actually came from one of our parents. (O.K., maybe right now I am talking about you or someone you know.) Last month, Bev had a conversation with a parent who spoke positively and gratefully about the Sunday School session our youth ministry sponsored recently on Internet safety. The teacher of that session was a police officer whose undercover beat is the Internet where he poses in various virtual venues as a 13-year-old girl. His job is to lure sexual predators on children away from their computer screens out into the light of day and put them behind bars. But what the mom said to Bev pulled me up short. She said, in effect, I’m glad we’re committed to protecting our children from online predators, but who is watching the people who are preying on our children’s parents?

She said that her husband keeps up with friends and work colleagues on Facebook. She is his “friend,” and that means she can read the online conversations that he has with other “friends.” She told Bev that she was astonished to see how forward, flirty, and inappropriate some women were in their online conversations with her husband. Her husband is mature enough and committed enough to fend off their advances, but not all husbands and wives are that mature and committed. How do we protect our parents from temptation and predation in cyberspace or any other space?

You’ll be relieved to hear, I’m sure, that I have sworn off ten-point sermons after last week’s effort. So, I’m suggesting this morning that protecting our parents begins with three points.

First, paying attention to our marital, family and/or primary relationships. Paying attention is hard work. Admittedly, paying attention is harder for some of us than it is for others, but it’s hard work for all of us. A very wise grandmother I know was talking with her teenaged granddaughter whose parents had divorced. It was an ugly divorce, and things haven’t gotten any prettier since. “I want you to know,” the grandmother said, “that there was a time when your father loved your mother very, very much. He loved her, I want you to know that. A honeymoons is a lot of fun,” the grandmother said, “but marriage is hard work.”

I was reminded of that the other week at Wednesday-night supper in the Fellowship Hall when the conversation turned to what it’s like to try to sustain a relationship for decades. Bev said of a friend of ours, “She’s been married as long as I have. After 33 years of marriage, you understand it isn’t always pretty. It’s not a feeling you have; it’s a commitment you make.” Commitment carries you where on any given day feelings can’t take you, and commitment requires paying attention to the marital and family and/or primary relationships you have instead of dallying in relationships outside of them.

A honeymoon is fun, but a marriage is hard work. Having a baby is exciting, but rearing and nurturing children to adulthood—and sometimes beyond—is hard work. In the course of the hard work that relationships are, all of us experience stress and vulnerabilities that can leave us susceptible to inattention or to attention to the wrong people. Pay attention to the right people, not the wrong ones. Pay attention.

After attention comes accountability. Our pastoral staff covenant expresses it this way: if we feel ourselves becoming vulnerable to inappropriate behavior or are approached inappropriately by someone, we will make ourselves accountable in highest confidence to one of our colleagues. I’ve told this embarrassing story before, but it’s a story of accountability, so I’m going to tell it again.

Many years ago, in my former life in the university, after the word broke that yet another tall- steeple Baptist preacher had blown himself out of the pulpit by his sexual misconduct, a friend of mine came in my office and asked, “What is wrong with these guys? I’ve met a lot of attractive women in my life,” he said, “but I’ve never met one I thought was worth throwing it all away for.” I’m a little embarrassed to tell you that we went from that comment to making a list of what it would take in a woman for us to throw it all away for her. Attractive, smart, funny, rich. As the list grew, it should have become clear to us that if any woman had all of them, she sure wouldn’t be interested in either one of us. But then we did something that neither one of us expected. We both agreed that if either one of us ever thought we had found the woman worth throwing it all away for, before we acted on that thought, we would call the other one in for a consultation. And we agreed that throwing it all away would require a unanimous vote of the two of us. Embarrassing that we would think like that, huh?

A couple years later I confessed that story as sin to one of my best professional friends who has spent decades working with clergy who have thrown it all away. When I told him I was embarrassed by that little episode, he said, “Don’t be. What the two of you did is to make yourselves accountable to each other. That’s the mistake everybody who goes over the waterfall makes. They come to believe they are accountable to no one, and that’s when they mess up.”

In a community of believers, each member a minister, we are accountable to God and to one another. If you feel yourself becoming vulnerable or being approached inappropriately, seek out someone you can trust in highest confidence to whom you make yourself accountable.

Attention, accountability, and now direction. It’s the direction of our energy and our attention. In a wonderful benediction to the people of God in Philippi, the apostle Paul points us in the direction of “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

The misdirection of our energy and our attention is one of our greatest human failings. Except in the rarest cases, in our relationships we know what is right, what is honorable, what is just, what is pure, what is pleasing, what is commendable, excellent and worthy of praise. Our most frequent problem is not that we do not know but that we do not direct our energy and our attention to those things. Think about these things, Paul says, and you will discover the presence of the God of peace in your relationships.

Fred Craddock tells a story about riding to a denominational meeting with a leader in the congregation he was pastoring, a successful and well respected businessman in the community. The man’s wife and teenage daughter were riding along because they were going to shop in the city while the two men attended the conference. Craddock says that he was astonished at what he heard as they rode. The husband and father was assaulted with a constant barrage of criticism and ridicule. He was a human punching bag for barbs and slings and arrows from his wife and his daughter. At the beginning, Craddock said, he was in shock. And then he became embarrassed first for the man, and then for his wife and his daughter, and then for himself even. And then, as the barrage continued, he became angry. And then he was just sad to see what kind of family life this successful and respected man had, successful and respected everywhere else except in his own family.

They arrived for the conference early, so when the women headed off to shop the men went to a nearby café for a cup of coffee. They sat in silence for a while, and then the husband and father spoke. “I’m sorry you had to hear that,” he said to Craddock. And then he asked, “What do you say to a man who has everything he wants in the world except the thing he wants the most?” What do you say to a woman who has everything in the world she wants except the thing she wants the most? What do you say?

I’m going to offer two responses under the heading of "direction." First, I would say, Get your entire family into counseling with an expert family therapist. You guys need professional help. And if they won’t go with you, then you go alone. Don’t try to do this on your own. You need a family therapist.

Second, I would say, I grieve for you. It shouldn’t be that way. But don’t make the mistake of obsessing over the one thing you want most that you don’t have. Happiness is to be found not in having the one thing you want most but in wanting what you do have. Direct your energy and your attention to what is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, excellent and worthy of praise in your life. “Think about these things,” the apostle Paul says. So often, we make ourselves miserable in our obsession over what we don’t instead of appreciating and enjoying and being grateful for what we do have.

In whatever condition or state we find our lives or our relationships, it is a spiritual discipline of the highest order to direct our energy and attention to what is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, excellent and worthy for praise. And when we exercise that spiritual discipline, we discover just as Paul tells us that the God of peace is with us after all, that the peace of God which passes all understanding keeps our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

A starting place in protecting our parents is that we all covenant together that whatever the condition of our lives and our relationships may be, we will engage in attention, accountability, and direction. May it be so. Amen.


Photo by Dustin Diaz under license of Creative Commons.

This material is Copyrighted © 2010 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.