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Foundry United Rev. |
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“Dealing with Our
Older Brothers” Sunday, August 9, 2009 |
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I Samuel 17: 20-30
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First, if you are the oldest child in your family
of origin but not an only child, raise your hand, please. Thank you.
One of the things Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen says is
that oldest children in a family tend to be smarter than their siblings. So
if you the oldest child and you are smarter than your siblings, raise your
hand again.
Just about everybody. That seems to be a pretty
objective verification of the theory, don’t you think?
Middle child. If you are a middle child raise your
hand. Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen says middle children are more
mysterious than their siblings because their
identity growing up changed from last-born to middle child. If you are a
middle child and you are more mysterious than your siblings, raise your hand
please.
Not as many hands. Last born children, please raise your hand.
Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen says that last-born children are funnier than their
siblings because they’ll be outrageous or funny as a strategy for getting attention. If you are a last-born
child and you are funnier than your siblings, raise your hand. Again, lots of hands,
objective verification. Any only children here?
If you are an only child, raise your hand. Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen doesn’t say
anything about you. Sorry. Some psychologists say you have to be all of the
above, but on the other hand, there isn’t a lot of competition. I am
actually pretty agnostic about the significance of birth order. It is not
that I think birth order doesn’t matter, I just think it has a relatively
small impact compared to other things. So I am a birth-order agnostic. Birth
order does seem to be a big deal, however, in the Bible. Have you noticed? Older
siblings, especially older brothers, do not seem to do well in the Bible. They
are not usually the heroes of biblical stories. Youngest siblings seem to do
much better. Cain
was the older brother; Abel the younger. Whose sacrifice does God favor in
the Bible? Abel’s. When Cain kills Abel, Adam and Eve have another son to
take Abel’s place and it is the youngest brother Seth who carries on the
family name rather than Cain who lives out his life as a fugitive. Ishmael
is the older brother; Isaac is the younger brother. Who does God seem to
favor in the Bible? Isaac is the hero of the story. Esau is
the older brother. Jacob is the younger brother. Esau is portrayed as slow
and brutish while Jacob is quick and smart. Joseph’s
older brothers sell him into slavery. He ends us as the secretary of state of
Aaron
is the older brother. Moses is the younger brother. Aaron makes an idol for
the Israelites to worship while Moses is off transcribing the Ten Commandments. Absalom
is the older brother. Solomon is the younger brother. Absalom dies while leading
a coup d’état again his father. Solomon ends up as the king of Even in
the New Testament, in one of our favorite stories Jesus tells, there is a
younger brother, a prodigal, who wastes his inheritance on parties and drinking
and women, and he ends up being a hero, and it is his older, much more
responsible, brother who comes out looking bad. How did that happen? This is
so consistent a pattern in the Bible that someone has written a book about
it. Frederick E. Greenspahn wrote a book entitled When Brothers Dwell Together: The Preeminence of Younger Siblings in
the Hebrew Bible. Greenspahn
even identifies several cases in the Bible when younger sisters seem to be
favored over older sisters – Leah and Rachel, for example.[ii] Greenspahn’s
thesis is certainly true in the story of David and Goliath. David’s older
brothers do not come off so well. The
story of David and Goliath is a paradigmatic story. It is the story of what
happens and what needs to happen when one age ends and a new age begins. It
is the story of what happens and needs to happen when you’ve managed to win
your freedom from slavery in Egypt and the Philistines move in next door and
set out to make you slaves again. It is the story of what you need to do when
the Philistines have weapons made of iron and armor made of bronze and you
are trying to fight with sticks and stones, and everybody in their right mind
knows there is no way you can win. In the
story of David and Goliath, what do David’s older brothers do? David’s older brother
tries to keep him in his place. When Goliath and the Philistines are
terrorizing Israel and King Saul and all his soldiers are paralyzed by fear,
and David shows up at the battlefield, David’s oldest brother scolds him for
being there where he doesn’t belong and tells him that his place and his role
is to be tending his scrawny sheep, not to be in the battlefield which is a
place for men, not boys. So in
the paradigmatic story of David and Goliath, older brothers are everybody in your
life and mine who try to tell us our place and who try to keep us in our
place. Let me
say a word about knowing our appropriate place and our appropriate role. It
is not a bad thing to know our appropriate place and role. In most
cases it would be appropriate for me to speak on behalf of In many
cases it would be appropriate for me to ask a Foundry office staff member to
type a letter or do a mailing. It would probably not be a good idea for me to
call your secretary at your workplace and to say that, because you are a
member of Foundry, there is some work I’d like him or her to do for us. I was
thinking this week about a minister of a generation earlier than mine I knew
back in A young
man who grew up in a church Lyle served told me that, when he was a boy, once
or twice a year he would hear a noise at his bedroom window at 6 or 6:30 in
the morning. It would be Lyle throwing gravel up at his window. When he opened
the window, Lyle would say, “Go tell your mother to get up and put coffee on.
I’m here for a pastoral visit.” A
friend of mine was once an associate pastor at a church Lyle served. Lyle
told him to accompany him on a pastoral visit once. It was to a family where
the wife attended church and the husband did not. At the end of the visit
Lyle put out his hand to shake the husband’s hand. When the husband held out
his hand Lyle grabbed it and said he would not let go until he promised to
attend church with his wife. The husband was evasive. It took more than five
minutes until he agreed to attend church. When they were leaving the house,
Lyle said to my friend, the associate, “Young man, now that is the way to do
evangelism.” Knowing
our appropriate place and role is not a bad thing. I
worked with a church once where the church secretary spent her week having
long phone conversations with church members and the custodian spent much of
his day praying with people who stopped by the church’s chapel during the
week. The pastor spent his Saturdays typing and running off the bulletin and
he came in on his days off to strip and wax the church floors. Before our
staff begins to applaud, let me quickly say that this church was a confused
and sorry place. When someone needed help making a decision they didn’t know
whether to go to the church secretary who was their friend, the custodian who
prayed, or the guy who ran the copier and waxed the floors. I have
on my desk a copy of the policy manual of one of the most successful and
effective nonprofits in our city. I think the organization’s success is
largely due to just 15 pages in that manual. The pages say what it is
appropriate for the executive director and staff to do and what it is
appropriate for board members and board committees to do. The
manual makes it clear that the board sets the organization’s policies and
goals. The staff manages day-to-day operations There
is a list of the ways the executive director is expected to treat staff.
There is also a clear statement that board members do not get involved in
individual personnel decisions or issues. If you’ve ever been part of an
organization where that happens you know how harmful it can be. I think
this kind of role clarity is essential for an organization’s success. It is
good to know our appropriate role and place. It is
also true that no significant change happens in our world unless there are
persons who are willing to refuse to stay in the place their older brothers
have assigned to them. Just
the fact of young David’s presence on the battlefield made a difference. Just
being in the room can make a difference. During
the debate about Justice Sotomayor’s nomination last May, Adam Liptak wrote
an essay in the New York Times
entitled “The Waves Minority Judges Always Make.” In the essay he repeated
something Justice Scalia said about Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first
black Supreme Court justice. Justice Scalia said: “ No
significant change has happened in human history without persons being
willing to take the risk of being in rooms where older brothers have said
they did not belong. If you
are a woman, a person of color, openly gay, or differently abled, there are
rooms where some people will say you do not belong and you just being there
will make all the difference. If you
are openly a member of a reconciling congregation, there are rooms where your
presence will make all the difference. Before
I became Foundry’s pastor, I would sometimes be in conference meetings and we
would go around the room and everybody said their name and home church. When
someone would announce that their home church was Foundry, it would change
the conversation in the room. When I was asked to think about becoming
Foundry’s pastor, there were those who thought it would not be a good thing
for my ministerial career for me to come here. Part of the reason I made the
decision I made was that I wanted to be the pastor of a church where somebody
from that church just being in the room made a difference. Ronald
Heifetz says there being two kinds of change.[iv]
One kind of change is technical change. Technical change is when you apply
the knowledge you already have to fix a problem and find a solution. You make
an adjustment, you do more of something and less of something else. The
other kind of change Heifetz calls adaptive change. Adaptive change is a
change that requires rethinking everything you know and being willing to
reinvent yourself in order to respond to a new reality. If your
car has lots of scratches and scraps and you figure out that it is because
the car is out of alignment, you can take it to the dealer and get it
realigned. This is a technical change. If your
car has lots of scratches and scraps and you figure out it is because you are
driving the car under the influence of alcohol, this will probably require an
adaptive change. You may need to rethink everything. Heifetz
says technical change can be managed by the people in the places of authority
and position doing what it is their job to do. He says adaptive change can
happen only as a result of someone being willing to take the risk of
exceeding their authority. When
the Bronze Age has ended and the Iron Age has begun, and the Philistines are
your new neighbors, and you have weapons made of wood and they have weapons
made of iron, technical solutions will not be enough. This is a time for
adaptive change, and there will be no adaptive change unless somebody is
willing to do what needs to be done, even if it means exceeding their
authority, which it always does. Somebody has to be willing to do what their
older brothers say it is not appropriate for them to do. There were
people in Rosa
Parks knew all about this effort being done in the appropriate way by the
appropriate people. When she refused to surrender her seat to a white man on
Dec. 1, 1955, no one had given her the authority to do it. She exceeded her
authority…and she set off a movement that led to profoundly adaptive change
in This is
a very, very small thing, I know, but it is one of the things I am somehow proudest
of in all my years of ministry. It was an experience that gave me a
confidence in ministry I very much needed at the time. It happened while I
was a seminary student doing an internship in the United Parish of Lunenburg,
We had
a member of the church named Walt who had multiple sclerosis, MS, and his
symptoms were worsening. He walked with the kind of crutches that wrap around
your arms. I loved Walt. He liked to discuss theology with those of us who
interned there. (I hope some of you are discussing theology with our seminary
students and fellows and US2s.) One of
the first things I was told when I got to Lunenburg was never to help Walt. Never!
He hated to be helped. He would snap at you and scold you in no uncertain
terms if you tried. I saw him do it again and again. He so valued his
independence that he made it clear he was to receive no extra help. Everybody
in the church was well trained. One Sunday
a group of us were walking toward the church and Walt slipped and fell flat
on his back. All of us froze. It was clear to all of us that we had no
authority to help Walt. It was clear to me that there was no way Walt was
going to get up without help. So I walked over to Walt, made sure he was
okay, and then wrapped my arms around him and lifted him to his feet. Everyone
stood in shock waiting to see what Walt would do. He quietly thanked me and
made his way into the church. Everybody let their breath out. After
church, Walt thanked me for not making him ask for help. “I needed help,” he
said, “but it would have killed me to ask.” When my
internship ended, at the party the church threw, Walt made a toast for the
intern who had lifted him high when he was down low…literally. Such a small
thing, I know, but it somehow confirmed that I could do this work…that I knew
when to exceed my authority. I don’t
have much use for defiance for its own sake…being defiant just to be defiant.
I know too many people who have failed to fulfill their potential because
they could not be part of a team. They always had to do things their own way.
They always had to prove their independence. They always had to undermine. I
don’t have much use for defiance for defiance’s sake. But
when we can’t win, and no one else is doing it, there is no hope unless you
or I are willing to not listen to our older brothers and are willing to take
the risk of exceeding our authority to do what needs to be done. If it
hasn’t happened yet, every one of us will face a Goliath in our life. I
promise. Every one of us will face a situation when we will not be able to
win doing things the way we know how to do them now. The
pink slip in our mailbox. The life savings almost depleted. The house upside
down. The work we used to love, we now dread showing up for. The doctor’s
call. The news that we will never be able to be biological parents. The dreams we’ve had for our child or a
nephew or niece dashed by an addiction. Our partner’s affair. The lost
election. The getting caught. The scandal. The addiction we used to control
that now controls us. Our parent’s homophobic comments whenever we visit
home. Doing
more of the same will not work. Our
older brothers, including the older brothers inside us, especially the older
brothers inside us, will try to keep us in our place, but our only hope then
will be to claim an authority we don’t have and do what needs to be done with
nobody’s permission at all, except the permission of the God who made
us. www.foundryumc.org |
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