Why don't they grow up to be like us?

Did God love Abraham more than he loved Lot? Do Grandparents love one child more than another? Should they?

If you extend the family circle wide enough you will usually find a difficult family member, someone who doesn’t make good choices and can’t develop healthy habbits. Abraham didn’t have to extend his circle very far; he had a nephew, called Lot, who kept on making the wrong choices, and needing help. Did Abram become intolerant of Lot?

In the past strict parents, drove the pregnant unmarried daughter out of the houses, rather than bear the shame, (and the expense?) Today the young pregnant unmarried daughter often runs away from loving parents. Sometimes the parents want to raise their grandchildren themselves, and some daughters run and hide rather than let that happen. Then there are the young sons who drive too fast, don’t pay their tickets, drive without licenses, don’t make car payments and borrow their parents car to drive out of state, after a long time the son returns home but the car never does.

What would God do? I ask the vexed relatives of difficult people,“But I’m not God.” they reply. No, you’re not, I reply, but if you’re looking for an example of good parenting he’s the best model to pattern your actions on.

I’ve known a great many difficult family members; caring for them as a pastor was not hard. Often difficult relatives are charming, interesting and flattering towards everybody but their own family. It was easy for the church to pray for these difficult people, to write to them and want news of them. But usually it was not the church who paid the child support and court costs. Abram was the one who had to pay the costs. He had to bring his domestic army and engage in a dangerous battle on behalf of Lot who would not have been captured if he hadn’t been living in the wrong place to begin with.

Lot wasn't a bad person, we can only guess why he liked living in a place that tormented his righteous soul by lawless conduct. Was he weary of sheep and shepherding? Did he want to be a part of the progress that was happening in those cities? We don't know. What we do know is that he wasn't bad but just made bad choices. Three times the apostle Peter calls him 'righteous Lot' and contrasts him with the people he was living amongst. Jesus talked about the days when Lot was alive and compared them to the last days.

Lot's willingness to appease a crowd of angry men by offering to allow them to have sexual relationship with his two daughters was evil. Even though the code of honor at that time was to protect your guests with your very life. We rise up in angry condemnation, and so we should. We consider ourselves moral but are there evils that we subscribe to because they are accepted and widely practiced?

‘What makes him/her act that way?’ Say puzzled grandparents? They ask, because they believe that if they could only find out what went wrong they could put it right. They so much want the difficult relative to change and become a relative that they can be pleased with.

Lot didn’t change. Consider the chances he had, the experiences which should have turned him around: he was taken captive but his uncle rescued him, the town where he lived was utterly destroyed but angels came and warned him to leave town. Still Lot didn’t change, the angels told him to run to the hills for safety, but Lot said he'd like to live in a town, he chose a little town and something there made him so afraid that he took his two daughters and went to live in a cave. Some times grandparents have to accept that the difficult family members are not going to change a whole lot. Once that fact is accepted it’s easy to love the difficult person just as they are without trying to fix them or force them to change. I used to advise grandparents to just accept that some people can’t please their relatives and to do what God does, love them as much as if they did.

How did God love Lot? Let me tell you about God’s love for Lot. When God was about to destroy the town where Lot lived, God thought about Abram and sent angels to bring Lot out of the town before the destruction began. Lot’s daughters got him drunk, and when he was drunk, they went into his bed and had children by him. This disgusts us so much that our tendency is to think that this is the end! We imagine that from this day forward neither God nor Abram will have anything to do with Lot or his daughters and certainly not with Moab or Ammon, the children born of incest. Yet Moses tells us that when he led the escapees from Egypt towards the land that God had promised to give to them, that God warned him not to trouble the Moabites nor to harrass the Ammonites because the land where these two tribes were living was land that God had given to them, "I have given that land as a possesion to the descendants of Lot" was the message Moses heard from God. Before Israel entered into their land of promise, Lot's descendants were already living in their given land. They had done battle with some tall and strong inhabitants before they took that land.

Seemingly ungrateful, foolish, relatives are loved by God. God gives inheritance to their children as well as to the children of Abram. Because of your love and care and prayers the difficult relatives are remembered in times of danger and his/her children provided for and protected by God.

What remains now is to heal the sadness of grandparents who love the grandchildren and nieces and nephews and cousins and second cousins who didn’t grow up into the kind of adults that they hoped for. To comfort them by reminding them that God remembers and will remember their labor of love. To encourage them to follow God’s example and remind them that God helps those who try to imitate the way he loves

2 Peter 2: 7,8
Hebrews 6:10
Deuteronomy 2:9 & 19
Ephesians 5.1

Priestly Grandparents

Abram returned with the men he had rescued from invading armies and with the property that had been retrieved from the raiders. He came back to the place where the men and materials had been stolen. Rulers and citizens greeted their rescued relatives, and hoped for the return of their property.

Into this scene comes a priest, a priest bringing bread and wine.

In the 12 months I spent being a chaplain in Methodist Medical Center St. Joseph. I was always a priest coming into the scene. There were many scenes, once in a moment of shock a mother let her baby slide out of her arms I was there to pick up the baby, (she wasn’t hurt) and hold it . I was there to stand beside that mother while she heard the news that one of her children was terribly injured. I stayed there, doing nothing, except holding the baby and being there. A year after, I met that mother and she told me that it had been truly helpful to have a person who was obviously a friend materialize at that time.

I was a priest who came into the hospital room when the lights were still on at 2 a.m. who listened to fears without saying that they were groundless. I was a priest when an angry visitor attacked the security guard and the guard sent for a Chaplain because he was too sorry for the distraught visitor to escort him out of the building. I was a priest who came out of the corridor into the room where a mother held her new-born baby for the only two hours it lived.,

I was a priest not only because the New Testament says we are all priests but because the Church had piloted the Chaplaincy program and because that hospital authorized me to represent the Church Catholic to everyone in the building.

As a pastor people came to me; as a chaplain I went to them. And the coming into their presence was, to me, always a sacred re-enactment of the Son of God coming into the world to seek and to save.

A priest doesn’t just come personally into a scene; a priest is a representative of the Most High God, and of the Church. When the priest comes in so does the power of the Church that trained and approved and authorized that action. Within that authority are contained the prayers of the church that authorised the mission. When a priest is present both the power of Christ and of His Church is present with his representative.

At Abram’s hour of triumph a priest was present. Unlike my hospital patients and staff, Abram was not in need of comfort and friendship. He was a winner returning in victory, he was neither sad nor suffering. (Unless you can call having a nephew who didn’t know how to choose the right place to live, suffering) But it was appropriate that the priest should appear at Abram’s time of triumph because he was there to mediate God’s blessing to Abram and Abram’s praise to God. Abram was already blessed and had the promise that he would be even more blessed, yet he accepts the priest’s blessing. He recognized that to be involved with this representative of God was to be blessed. It's still the same; you can refuse the blessing, but you can’t avoid it, it comes with the priest.

And whose priest is he? This land was already filling up with immigrant tribes, each praying to their own tribal god; is he a priest of the sun, or the moon, or the stars? No he is the priest of the God who possesses Heaven and Earth. Interestingly enough the people with many gods knew the priest Melchizedek’s God as ‘The Most High God’

So Abram wasn’t alone in his worship of the One God. There were others. The self-revelation of God had only just begun, they knew so little, but they knew that the One God was the great God. How did they learn it? By the telling of stories, the stories Seth told to Enos, and Enos told to Cainan, and Cainan told to Mahalalele, and Mahalaleel told to Jared, and Jarad told to Enoch, and Enoch told to Methuselah, and Methuselah told to Lamech, and Lamech told to Noah. And then the process began all over again because Noah told Shem, Ham, and Japheth. May I ask who you are telling the story to? It seems a priestly task for grandparents, especially because grandparents can add their own part of the sacred story to the great story.

The priest has 3 major tasks: to offer the sacrifice, to be a mediator who introduces God, to man and man to God, and to keep the records of the sacred story. God has made those who trust him into a nation of priests, and everyone who trusts Jesus has the privilege of carrying out those same priestly duties.

In the days when the Church called everyone a priest according to the New Testament but did not help women to carry out all of the priestly tasks, I understood that I had inherited the New Testament priesthood of all believers; but I was compelled to recognize that no one was very interested in helping me immerse my life in that calling. So I initiated an agreement with God, that I would be his minister and the world would be my parish. It sounds spiritual and enlightened, but it was lonely and I lacked sufficient training, not that I let that stop me, I lacked the support of other ministers. There was a lot of evidence that God accepted my ministry, but if the Church had authorized it sooner it would have been a much stronger ministry.

Recently, desperate about the duties we are not emphasizing in the church, I have had to begin another lonely crusade. Whenever I meet someone who appears by dress or speech to be a Muslim, I feel compelled by my understanding of the New Testament to tell that person that I am a Christian and I love Muslims. Again, because I am alone in this aspect of the priesthood it feels clumsy, lacks support and would be so much more effective if the Church had authorized me to say it.

I still visualize that scene: the noisy crowd, weeping their thanks and shouting their joy at seeing their sons and brothers return home, the rulers meeting Abram, and into it all walking the priest of the Most High God. Abram receiving the bread and wine and then Abram, the members of his army, the priest, and perhaps a few others, praising God for the victory he had granted. I would like to be an authorized priest again