Jesus, John and Aaron

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0:00 The rest of us, we're still talking about these vocations because I have been, since we spent like from October through, I don't know, after Easter, looking at the, going through the whole story of Scripture, I've been thinking about what do we do with that, what should we really like, what are we focused on, what are we, what are we called to be or to do as Christian people in the world. And the church has historically answered that question for us and they've, they've,

0:31 they've used this word called vocation, which sometimes, you know, you might have a vocational training or vocational school or something, that word gets used a couple of places. But for us in the church, the vocation that you might have several vocations, as a matter of fact, you do definitely have several vocations. The places where God has called you in the church over the history has grouped these vocations into what we call three arenas. And so you have the, the arena of family, the arena of church, and what we're calling the

1:03 arena of neighborhood, sometimes it's called civic or social responsibility. But you have these three arenas where you have vocations, callings. The reason I love thinking about my purpose or challenge or work in the world in a vocational way is because it keeps me out of the need of like trying to like discern inside myself what is the one great thing to which I am called. The great value of vocational thinking is realizing God creates you out of his own volition and

1:37 choice, not by accident, but with intent. And then he sets you in the world and it's not your job to determine what shall I do with myself, but he puts you with roles and responsibilities. You have stuff to do. And it's not hard to figure out the stuff you have to do. You are born into roles and responsibilities right in front of you. And the best reason for living up to those roles and responsibilities for taking those opportunities is because the people around you need you to do that.

2:14 Now it just so happens that as you fill out your vocations, you will fall into the most fulfilled life that you can. But that's not the purpose. The purpose is because other people need it. And so the first area where we fall into vocations is family. God puts us into families. That's why I use Psalm 68 as our call to worship because it says that he puts the lonely in families.

2:46 That's the lonely in families. And we've been talking about family last week and this week. And the text that I was thinking of for a family is in John chapter 19. If you would look there with me, John chapter 19. By the time John gets to chapter 19, he's talking about the crucifixion of Jesus.

3:16 And there's a spot here right towards the end. Let's see, John chapter 19, if you start at verse 25, it says, when the soldiers had crucified Jesus. Now remember what's happened at this point. Jesus has been through a meal in the upper room. He's washed to the disciples' feet. He's gone out to the garden of Gethsemane to pray and ask God, the Father, would there be a way besides crucifixion?

3:47 And Judas has betrayed him, brought the Sanhedrin and their soldiers out to the garden of Gethsemane in the evening at night. Betray Jesus with a kiss when he does that. All the disciples flee and leave him. And Jesus is alone without his closest friends in the middle of a false trial. By the time he gets to the cross, you get different stories. It feels like maybe some of the disciples have had the courage to anonymously sneak back and watch this crucifixion happen.

4:19 But when we get in, John's gospel definitely, his mother is there. Now God bless her for having the courage and fortitude to watch this happen. She knows what a crucifixion does. We've talked about this before, but if you lived in a Roman occupied country, you knew what a crucifixion was. You knew how it happened. You knew what it did to people. You knew how what it meant that they were crucified. You couldn't crucify a Roman citizen.

4:50 So she's there. And I was thinking that as she sees this, if you go down, it says, when the soldiers had crucified Jesus, verse 25, they took his garments and divided them into four parts. One part for each soldier also is tunic, but the tunic was seamless woven in one piece from top to bottom. So they said to one another, let us not tear it, but cast lots for it to see whose it shall be. And this was to fulfill the scripture which says, they divided my garments among them for

5:22 my clothing. They cast lots. So the soldiers did these things, but standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother's sister Mary, the wife Clopus and Mary Magdalene. And when Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved, now she's standing there watching it with her friends. And I was thinking while she's standing there watching it, you know, Jesus and Mary have this, I mean, it's a remarkable relationship. Now if we think about the vocation of family, it should stick out first of all that when

5:53 God has accomplished the incarnation, he doesn't do it without people. It accomplishes the incarnation and collaborates with humanity to bring the person of Jesus into the world. So Jesus comes into the world with a mother actually through a mother, right? I mean, that's crazy. And so if we think about your value or worth, the first thing I want you to think about is that when you have these vocational roles and responsibilities, it's not for nothing.

6:25 It's not for nothing. The time I got in the most trouble in high school, I've been thinking about high school some because we have kids in high school. The time I got in trouble, most in trouble in high school is when I thought my English teacher was giving me busy work. You know, work that didn't matter, that she just wanted me to do so that it took up my time. And I remember, I got in the most trouble because I argued with her and said, what's the point

6:58 of this? And she's like, I just think you need it. I said, I don't think I do. And then she said, well, I'm telling you to do it. I said, well, you can give me an F. I'm not doing busy work, you know? God puts you in families but not because he can't think of something else to do. He puts you in families because people need you. You have meaningful work.

7:28 It's so meaningful that even the Savior of the world comes into a family. And you think about Mary when she's the mother, if she's standing there watching her son be crucified and the moments that she pondered in her heart from the story of his birth kind of flash through her mind. Maybe when she came to find him in the temple and he had been lost and he says, didn't you know that I had to be about my father's business? Or even maybe at the wedding, remember when he's at the wedding with his buds and he's

8:01 just got together his disciples and it's kind of crazy because he didn't have a rabbi but he's going to be a rabbi. And they're just like building his reputation and they're at the wedding and they ran out of wine. And so, no, Sam, and doesn't know what he'll do but knows he'll figure it out if he just decides to do it so she tells him solve the problem. And so, Jesus moves up his miracle. He said it wasn't his time but Mary asked him to do it. I'm just saying, they had an interesting dynamic, a meaningful one. And so, as Jesus is hanging there on the cross dying, carrying the weight of the sins of

8:36 the world, he also carries concern, love, care for his mother, which is like, I mean, he's got other things on his mind. One of the things we say about Jesus as the incarnated Son of God is that he lived as a person fully submitted to the Spirit. So, when we look at Jesus, we can see the model of who we might be in the world.

9:09 We don't get the excuse that he was able to do that because he's divine and there's no way that I could. He models for us what it looks like to be fully submitted to the Spirit. So, as he hangs there on the cross, he also carries concern for his mother and look at how he handles it. So, the soldiers did these things, but standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother's sisters, Mary the wife of Clopus and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved, standing nearby, he said to

9:43 his mother, woman, behold your son. Then he said to the disciple, behold your mother. And from that hour, the disciple took her to his own home. Wow, he thought about his mother and didn't want her to be left without a son. And so, even though he's accomplishing the turning point of humanity, he also thinks individually about his role and responsibility as the son to this woman and making sure that she's cared for.

10:14 Here's the kicker that doesn't always occur to us. He hasn't said other brothers who were alive, you know? So he's hanging there on the cross and he's looking at his mother, Mary, and he's, she's not left without sons. And if we were to go back to John chapter 7, you would see Jesus at one of the feastimes,

10:45 his brothers are kind of teasing him because there's a feast time in Jerusalem and they're like, you should go back to Jerusalem, but they know everybody in Jerusalem wants to kill him and they think he's crazy. There's a couple of points in the story of Jesus' life where you realize his family doesn't get it. Even his mother at one point doesn't get it. And so you get the feeling that Jesus on the cross is affirming familial relationship, but also it's human limitations and frailty.

11:17 And so he's like, those dudes aren't going to do it. John, who's here, he'll do it. And so he doesn't, this is the crazy thing to me. He affirms familial relationship. He asks John to assume the role of son. He doesn't just say, hey, John, take care of Mary, would you? Mary, let John take care of you. He could have done that, but there's a shorthand for it with all the attendant responsibilities,

11:48 love, care, obligation, and difficulty. Hey, John, take her as your mother. So I'm saying that he affirms the roles, responsibilities, and dynamics of family even above the family you're born into. He's like, if your family isn't working, don't use it as an excuse. Get into familial relationships because people need you.

12:21 They need your love. They need your care. They need your obligation. And what we find is we need to be obligated. We need someone on whom we can put love, on whom we need to think about. Even when the weight of the world is on our shoulders, yet do we need individual people to care for as modeled by Jesus. So what I wanted to just, and this is our last week talking about family, is to remind

12:52 you that you were born into a family not for nothing, but because the family needs you. But they don't always work. Don't let that be an excuse. Find the family to whom you are obligated and fulfill the role, son, daughter, brother, sister, mother, father, whatever the roles are. Take them seriously because in them we find is this obligation to model divine love, to

13:26 glimpse it in little pieces. And what we find is that family endures forever. We'll see in the next couple of weeks it becomes the model for church, for Israel in the world. Significant and important. Let me pray that we could do it and then invite Aaron, you want to come up. Hey Lord, thank you for putting us in families. Teach us what it means to be in family with one another and bless our conversation now about family. In Jesus' name we pray.

13:58 Amen. I asked Aaron to come and share some ideas on family. You can take this mic here actually. That way people can hear you. Oh, was that? I think it was. Sorry about that guys. So I was saying last week that it's not the first time I've said it won't be the last. This congregation is densely populated with cool people.

14:32 And so trying to get a chance for you all to hear stories of some of the folk and ask Aaron to share some of his experience in family. Do you want to say a little bit about the families that you're in? Sure. Okay, good. I'm Aaron. I'm married to Michelle. She's back there in the kids' room right now. I was thinking about this last night because I listened to Amy from last week because we were out of town. And we've married 24 and a half years.

15:02 And if you didn't know this, Ben and Megan were there at our wedding, taking part in our wedding. We've been friends since we were 19. And we got married and married. And you're partially responsible. You did not object. But we've been with each other for a long time. So when we think family, it was funny thinking about this because you've seen like, you knew me as a kid. Yes. So you've seen kind of us grow up and Michelle and I kind of grow up. And so Charlotte and Dylan are our kids.

15:34 They are 14. They're about to be freshmen in high school. And many of you all have walked with us since they've been born and watched them grow up. So I thought we were going to talk about family and talk about parents. I have two older sisters, one's four years older, one's eight years older. And both my parents and both Michelle's parents are still alive, still around. But we're also in the middle of kind of walking through what it means to kind of have to begin to parent your parents. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I was thinking about. Like I remember meeting your parents in college and like your dad and your mom in their

16:09 little house in Bradenton and like the way you're the youngest and the only boy. Talk about your relationship with your parents a little bit. Okay. Yeah. So man, I mean for those of you all that don't know, Michelle and I are both therapists. I don't know how to talk about stuff about it because it kind of sounds weird like that sometimes because we've spent like decades thinking about like, sounds so clichey when you think about like your relationship in your family. And I've spent a lot of time talking not just with my wife, but with my sisters about

16:43 what it was like in our relationship with our family. And I've been really fortunate to have especially walking through that with them. A lot of lenses through being able to look at what it was like being like the youngest and the only boy. Yeah. And kind of like the good and the bad of that. Yeah. Like where that probably, you know, spawned a lot of really, really wonderful things of me being really cared for by my sisters and my parents. And also a lot of like selfishness and a lot of self centeredness of being the youngest

17:15 and the only boy growing up doing where the heck I wanted. And so that balance of like it was, you know, God brought a lot of really good things out of it. And then there was a lot of, you know, kind of drawback, but, but my parent, my, I've been fortunate to be able to think through a lot of my relationship with my folks and process it with them. They have been, they have been pretty game over the years to process like our relationship and what it was like. And some of that's gone well. Some of that's been a little harder when we were, when we were in grad school, like,

17:49 when you're in grad school as a counselor, I had a buddy he described. He's like, man, it was like being a toddler with a chainsaw. Because it was like, man, like you're like being asked all these things and processing all these things and like your life and your family relationships. And it's like super dysfunctional and you're like super dangerous. And so I remember going to my parents and being like, but we need to do this. And why are we talking about this? And we never talked about this hard thing. And they were very, very gracious. Oh, cool. With me. As much as I felt like they had the capacity to be. Yeah, that's awesome.

18:19 You know, so, yeah. Yeah. I think it's like, it's funny when you think about, it's like he mentions the counselor stuff and how much we examine our relationship to our parents. But when you consider how formative and important the vocation of family is, it makes sense that we would, we learn about God, we learn about love from the, can you talk a little bit about how faith has interacted with the way that you think about family? Yeah. Okay. So like you mentioned, like that's what we learn about God. The way that I see it.

18:50 I mean, this has probably been pretty deeply formative, I think, in me. It is because I do look at like our relationships are the place where we learn, like, you know, some people say it's where we learn how to be human. But to me, it's like where we learn how to be human, but it's where we learn what it is to be human and what a human actually is. And because of that, it's also the place where we learn who God is. You know, and I mean, you hear the phrase like, you know, God, I mean, obviously, scripture tells God created man in his image, but then there's a popular phrase that says, you know,

19:20 kind of the man returned the favor. And I think like, fortunately and unfortunately, like our relationships and specifically in family and to me, it's like Deuteronomy six type stuff, but at a deep, deep, deep core, where we learn how to relate to God. Like I learned my internal like image of God through like core family relationships. Like the look on God's face for us often has something to do with how we've experienced core family relationships.

19:51 And so and through that, that becomes also like where I how understand what it means to be a human myself and interact in that. Yeah. Yeah, for good. And so you have to uncover that a little bit to figure out, am I shaping God in the image of my parents or is my parents being shaped by my image of God? And there's like a relationship there, right? Yeah. I mean, and that's a, yeah, I mean, that's such a that's such a mix, man. It's such a mix for me.

20:21 But that's like, I really do believe like that. That's like the role that faith plays in it is because it's like, man, this, this is the place that is like you talk about roles and responsibilities. And I think, man, these are responsibilities that are handed to us and all of our best responsibilities, especially like family, if anybody, if any of us really knew what they were going to entail, we would have been scared to death and probably not done it. But you get handed these responsibilities and that becomes the place where we get to work out. And man, this is, this is who God is and this is the role that I get to play.

20:51 And I like the lot of what Amy said last week where family becomes this like imperfect place where hopefully our kids get to learn what it's like to struggle well, where, you know, we learn what it's like to like, like, like, if you, I mean, in all honesty, I can't see great far away. So it's probably that I can't see my kids' expressions right now very well. But they, more than anybody else in this room, understand like how big I can kind of screw up. And so in that, hopefully, hopefully we get to relate in a way that they gain an accurate

21:27 view of what it looks like to be like a son and a daughter of God and a healthy view of God. And that kind of becomes the way that we get to play that out. No, that's good. And an ability to mess up and the space to mess up. I guess to kind of my last question is like, what are you thinking in terms of your different roles? So your brother, your son, your husband, your father, what are you thinking those different roles about what you owe people in your family in light of your faith in this vocational college? What do you feel like your family's owe one another?

22:02 You sent me that question. That was the hardest one. I did give it to him ahead of time. You gave me that one. Yeah. So I'm going to say just briefly, one of the things that's coming alive for me lately is what it means to be a sibling as an adult and what it means to be an adult son of parents. I feel like that's evolving for me in my 40s right now in a way where I'm realizing the blessing in those two things that are different from when I was a kid. And if I don't allow that to evolve, I miss out on the gift of that.

22:34 And so I feel like I continue to owe adventure, acceptance, understanding to my siblings, love, and like not obedience, but like acquiescence almost to my parents in a way that allows me to continue to still be a kid and continue to receive that blessing and then the sibling thing, the adventure and the love and the safety, the encouragement of siblings as an adult. Yeah. Which I think like the adventure stuff and so much of that like flows out of what how hopefully happens, you know, like when we show up.

23:08 Like I mean, I do feel like I struggle with kind of thinking that as obligation and more like these are responsibilities that God's placed in front of us and I can choose to take it up and I can choose not to, you know. But so, but I can choose to respond to that invitation and go, okay, what does it look like for me to show up in this difficult space and be present, you know, my mom's in the hospital. And I wanted, ghosted in on I for hours to get there, but what does it look like for me to step into that?

23:38 What does it look like for me to step in? And it's easy. What does it look like for me to step in? It's hard. Kind of like Amy said, like what does it look like to engage and be willing to be present like in really vulnerable spaces in whatever capacity kind of comes. And I thought about our conversation yesterday. I can get what you said, maybe think of it again. Can I talk about like your trip to. Yeah. Yeah. So, bonus telling me yesterday we were hanging out about hiking with Wes. Yeah. And hiking up all day and you had a plan to sleep, you know, on a certain platform and

24:12 you get there like seven hours up the mountain and it's covered in four feet of snow. Yeah. It was frustrating. Yeah. You talk more about it later. Yeah. But so they end up hiking back down. But what you said was so cool because you're like, yeah, I didn't have a plan for it. And Wes and I just sat there and kind of talked it through and figured it out together. Yeah. And made a decision together. And I was like, oh man, okay, like that, like that sucked in the eye. I was thinking about it last night.

24:42 Because I'm like, man, in that like willingness to kind of sit in a space where we don't like know what to do in that kind of showing up because it can a family, you have that opportunity multiple times a day every single day to kind of sit in these weirdly like vulnerable spaces. Some feel big, some feel small. But if we can do that, then like you get to go, okay, well, what does it look like for us to move forward in this? What does it look like for me to pick up my sister's phone call and let her talk? You know, what does it look like for me to call her and share where I'm at with it?

25:15 Was it look like to let my mom talk for 20 minutes about the bathroom we met and we'll roll with it? You know? And then like, you know, what is like all of that kind of spaces that if we're willing to enter in, some are big, some are small, we get kind of an invitation to see what it comes with it. That's awesome. So it's worth kind of sitting on just for a little bit this moment that what if you think about what do Christians do in the world? The first thing is we lean into this vocation of family.

25:50 We're good sisters. We check in as brothers. We take the role of children and parents seriously. We cultivate families. Going back to the Babylonian exile all the way back to the garden. We cultivate families. It's what we do. Even more than we read whatever the cultural answer would be to what does Christians do in the world or in America today, right? We take our family obligations. It's an opportunity to bless like you're saying.

26:22 So let's pray. Lord, thank you for the chance to be in families. Thank you for the Moors, for Aaron and their family. Thank you for all the families you put us in. The ones we've chosen, like Jesus on the cross, chooses John as a brother. Teach us what it means to have chosen family and teach us proper opportunity and obligation in the families that you have chosen for us. Be with us now as we worship in Jesus. And we pray. Amen.