A few weeks ago, while flying out of the city of Chicago, I found myself looking out the window and marveling at the spectacle of miles upon miles of city streets, all lined neatly and orderly by homes, most of them small and packed as tightly as the proverbial sardines in a can, some of them a bit more spacious and spread out, many with those above-ground plastic swimming pools that seem to be all over the middle part of America. Off in the distance I could see the center of the city and the many high-rise apartment buildings where people are tucked together even more efficiently, and as the jet climbed higher, I began to get a sense of the immensity of just this one city, where just a few million of the several billion people in our world live. What hit me was not so much the size of it all, but the realization that, since the beginning of human civilization, we have been organizing ourselves and defining ourselves and separating ourselves off into little groups called families. You can visit ancient Roman homes in Pompeii or ancient Native American homes in Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon and see just how old and how lasting is the human impulse to organize ourselves into families.

In the South, often when you are being introduced to someone for the very first time, one of the first questions asked and answered all around is, “Who are your people?” That means, “From what family do you come?” It is a crucial question because who you are is so much a factor not just of you yourself but of your family. It is the kind of question that has a very long history, actually. When the young David killed the Philistine champion Goliath, Israel’s King Saul asked that question. In the words of I Samuel 17: “When Saul saw David go out against the Philistine, he said to Abner, the commander of the army, ‘Abner, whose son is this young man?’ Abner said, ‘As your soul lives, O king, I do not know.’ The king said, ‘Inquire whose son the stripling is.’ On David’s return from killing the Philistine, Abner took him and brought him before Saul, with the head of the Philistine in his hand. Saul said to him, ‘Whose son are you, young man?’ And David answered, ‘I am the son of your servant Jesse the Bethlehemite.’”

I had another thought, sitting in that airplane flying over Chicago. I was flying off to Florida for my annual sermon-planning retreat during which I agonize for days and days and days over what the Lord would have me preach to you in the coming year. And what the Lord seemed to be saying to me then, and what he continued to confirm, was this. God said, “Jack, preach about real things in real people’s lives. And preach My truth about those real things.” When you set out to write a sermon, most preachers begin with scripture, which is a very good place to start. But sometimes we also start somewhere else, and that is what I am going to do for most of this year. I’m always going to move into scripture, of course, or else none of us will hear anything from God. But I’m going to start the journey from out of the real things in our lives. I’m convinced that God has something to say about the lives you and I lead, that our faith in God is a well-placed faith, that our faith can be powerfully active not just in some remote corner of our being called the “religious” part, but also in every aspect of the real world in which we live. Everything I say this year, I pray, will be driven by the conviction that we have a real faith for the real world, and that is going to take us into some very interesting places indeed.

There are all sorts of places in the real world where you and I can begin this quest. I have chosen that part of the world called our families. Everyone has—for good or ill, living or dead, happy or sad, healthy or sick, large or small, near or far away—a family. Ask what is the most important thing in the world, and most people will say, “My family.” And rightly so. Families are so important that it only takes a millisecond or so for you and me to begin thinking of famous families from our culture and our history. Here are some names from history to get you started: Medici, Hapsburg, Stuart, Rockefeller, Kennedy, Hatfield and McCoy. Or how about some names from pop culture: Ricardo, Cartwright, Bunker, Partridge, Corleone, Flintstone, Jetson, and Simpson?

The American Heritage Dictionary defines “family” in several ways. First on the list, a family is, “a fundamental social group in society typically consisting of one or two parents and their children.” Following that definition, the dictionary gives these: “Two or more people who share goals and values, have long-term commitments to one another, and reside usually in the same dwelling place,” “all the members of a household under one roof,” “a group of persons sharing common ancestry,” “lineage, especially distinguished lineage,” and “a locally independent organized crime unit, as of the Cosa Nostra.” I stopped reading there! Winston Churchill said a family, “starts with a young man falling in love with a girl—no superior alternative has yet been found.” Ogden Nash wrote that a family is “a unit composed not only of children, but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.” The novelist Carson McCullers defined family as, “the we of me.” The most famous family of which I know was the Adams Family, who originated in a town called Eden, but they didn’t live there very long until they found themselves living out in one of the suburbs. No sermon about families would be complete without taking a look at the Adams, the First Family.

A moment ago we read a few excerpts from the history of this family, a family that we all know very well, but perhaps not well enough. Adam and Eve and their two boys, Cain and Abel, are the prototypical human family. And the few things that we really know about them tell us the most important things that we need to know about any family. The first lesson we learn from their story is amazingly simple and amazingly profound: God created the family. Sometimes we forget that and sometimes we might remember but we aren’t happy about it. When you were young and got angry with your folks and so you packed up all your treasures in your backpack and ran away from home (for a few hours!), right then you didn’t care much about your family. Or when you were a bit older and your parents insisted that instead of going out on that hot date you had to go have dinner at a cafeteria with your grandparents, right then you didn’t care much about your family. Or when you were a bit older still and your spouse insisted that the perfect vacation would be going to his or her family reunion, right then you didn’t care much about your family. Aside from Adam and Eve, everyone is born into a family. God made it that way. God must want it that way. God has reasons for doing what he does. When you open your eyes every morning and have to deal with the fact that you have a family, you need to remember that God made you to be part of a family. Families are immeasurably important, of infinite value, sacred, even. And God gave one to each one of us.

Even though God created families, we do have to admit that from the very beginning, there were problems. Adam and Eve had their little conflict with God over the business of eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which got them kicked out of the homeowners association, and then much worse happened with their precious sons. Sibling rivalry got off to a roaring start when God approved of Abel’s offering but didn’t think so much of Cain’s, and it escalated rapidly to its logical end: murder. No matter how dysfunctional your own family might happen to be, I suppose it is some small comfort to know that even the first family God made had its problems. But there are very deep lessons to learn here. The biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann teaches that the story of Cain and Abel leads us to, “discover that life with the brother is not lived in a void but in relation to God. Whoever violates the brother must face the riddle of God.” The second lesson we learn from the First Family in Genesis is that the family is the primary place within which we meet not only each other, but also God. Another way to say that is our families are fundamental locations within which God is at work.

I know that when you sit back and look hard at your own family, it may not seem like God is anywhere to be found. You may feel like the person who wrote this about family life: “If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it will always be yours. If it doesn’t come back, it was never yours to begin with. But, if it just sits in your living room, messes up your stuff, eats your food, uses your telephone, takes your money and doesn’t appear to realize that you had set it free…you either married it or gave birth to it.” Cain blew it as far as his relationship with his brother Abel was concerned. And God knew it. God always knows it. Immediately after Cain kills Abel, God asks Cain, “Where is your brother?” And Cain comes back with that famously evasive question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Scripture doesn’t record it this way, but if I were to write a paraphrase, I’d write it this way: “Thus saith the Lord, y’er darn tootin’ you are!” A recent cover article in Time magazine highlighted the fundamental importance of sibling relationships in forming our essential identity and psychological health. The family is the first place, the most influential place, and the most promising place, within which you and I live out our lives in relation to God and within which God does his work of redeeming us. As we learn to live with each other we learn to live with God.

Thank God the story of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel is only the beginning of the story of human families. The rest of the story plays itself out in the history of Israel and of the church, and still is playing itself out in your history and mine. Genesis tells us that God exercised both justice and mercy when he dealt with Cain. He sent him away from his family, to the land of Nod, east of Eden, but there Cain started his own family, protected by a mark from God, so that he would not be killed. The family that Adam and Eve started grew and matured in its knowledge of God, and as it did so, it began to learn the value of the family. People learned how difficult it is for families to get along with themselves. And they learned that the problems of the First Family were the problems of all humanity. Untold centuries after the time of Adam and Eve, King David, (who himself had family problems!), wrote this simple little song, “How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity! It is like the precious oil on the head, running down upon the beard, on the beard of Aaron, running down over the collar of his robes. It is like the dew of Hermon, which falls on the mountains of Zion. For there the Lord ordained his blessing, life forevermore” (Psalm 133). Jesus and the first Christians picked up on that theme. Everything Jesus taught, in his parables and proverbs and miracles, had to do with our getting along with each other and our getting along with God. John, in his three little letters to the early church, couldn’t stop repeating himself, that if we say we love God then we must also love each other, and if we don’t love each other, then we don’t truly love God, either. God did not give up on Cain or on the rest of the family either. And so, the third lesson we learn from the First Family is that God wants to redeem and transform our families in order to make them the blessing he intended them to be.

A couple of years ago I was thrilled to see, on the cover (and in several pages inside) of a clothing catalog from a prominent national chain, a picture of a large, extended family. Their faces were glowing, and you couldn’t help but think, “Here’s the perfect family.” I almost thought that, but the family in the picture was a family from this church. I know this family. And they are almost perfect! Of course, no family is perfect because families are made up of people. Even the best families need some work. A large part of the life of this church is aimed at helping our families grow into Christlikeness. Thousands of books have been written about what makes for healthy families. Tim Stafford says that Christian families should teach these things: that God always comes first, concern for others, hard work, truthfulness, unity and love, sexual fidelity, generosity, submission, boundaries, joy and thanksgiving, rest, care for creation, contentment, and grace. Robert Wolgemuth says that the Christian family should be a place where it is obvious that God lives in your home, a place where every person is honored, a place of grace, a place where words are used to encourage and build up, a place of laughter and humor, a place of discipline, a place of safety and refuge, and a place where parents seriously take their role as the primary teachers of the faith to their children. John Trent and Gary Smalley remind us that the family is a place where children should receive the gift of blessing, which they define as unconditional love and acceptance.

I want to show you two of my most valued possessions. When I was in seminary, I once gave a children’s story about old books, and the very next Sunday, two elderly couples from that church brought me their family Bibles. They both told the sad story that none of their children were interested in the Bibles, and so they had cut out the pages that listed the generations of the family, and they were giving me the Bibles. I brought only one to show you, as the other is in pretty bad shape now. This one is inscribed on the cover with the names “Henry and Dorothea Winkel,” This particular Bible was published in 1843 and was given to them when they were married, in 1858. This other, much smaller, Bible is more precious. My Grandmother Baca bought it from a door-to-door peddler on January 14, 1917, who then gave it to my Aunt Evangeline on June 10, 1952, who in turn gave it to me on the date of my ordination to ministry, June 13, 1982. This Bible is called “La Santa Biblia,” and is, of course, in Spanish. What makes it even more precious is the fact that my grandmother, when each of her ten children were born, carefully wrote their names, the date, and even the time and the day, of their birth, beginning with my Uncle Eduardo, born at 10:00 o’clock at night on a Sunday in December in 1912.

These family Bibles remind me that God made families. They remind me that in our families we meet not only each other, but also God. They remind me that God wants to restore and renew our families so that they can be a blessing to us. The God of whom these Bibles speak challenges you and me never to forget that our families are sacred. This God challenges you and me to treat each other with sacred love because we are indeed, our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper. This God challenges you and me to work hard at making our families a blessing to all who are part of them. An old Irish proverb goes, “It’s in the shelter of each other that people live.” The family is your first and best shelter. Your family is “your people.”

Amen.