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Awkward Family Gatherings

Truth in Love 77

How can Christians love awkward and difficult family members?

Apr 5, 2017

Heath Lambert: It is that time of year again. Christmas trees are going up in the stores, people are headed to attics all over the world to pull out boxes of decorations that they haven’t seen in the last 11 months, people are pulling out recipes for stuffing, and the smell of turkey is permeating the air. It’s the holiday season, of course, it’s that famous time of year that’s marked off by the celebration of Thanksgiving and Christmas. And that means one very important thing, and that is that we are all about to go to some very awkward family gatherings. You know what I’m talking about. If you’re honest at least once a year we all have to get dressed up, plaster a smile on our face; and consume vats of cranberry salad with people that we spend one meal a year with, because of a faint connection and our genetic code. We’re going to listen to great aunts describe their medical trouble to mothers, and long complain that the yeast rolls we’ve served aren’t as good as theirs. We’ll have to nod with pretend interest as are second cousins twice removed describe in painstaking detail the frustrations they experience from co-workers in the next cubicle. And these are the easy interactions. We haven’t gotten to the really serious and often truly painful engagements with estranged siblings, estranged parents, and former spouses, that some of us will engage in after experiencing years of painful conflict. We all have to spend time in these awkward gatherings and what I want to do on the podcast this week is explain three biblical instructions, and three biblical texts that help us know how to navigate the awkwardness of these meetings. 

The first text I want to pay attention to is 1 Peter 4:9; that short verse says, “to show hospitality to one another without grumbling.” It’s a text that tells us to go happily to that Christmas party that we dread. Peter here is encouraging us to open our home, to the in-laws who grumble, without grumbling in return. He is encouraging us to invite our socially awkward neighbor to our open house and to do it with a happy heart. It is the Christmas season after all. We are right now at this time of year celebrating that time in human history when God sent His Son as a servant, to be a ransom for sin. That means this is a great time to display that same spirit of selflessness in our own lives, and with our own loved ones. You don’t know that your invitation to Thanksgiving dinner might be the only one that you’re immodest niece would receive. You might be the only person this year to listen to your late grandfather’s third wife complain about the pain in her hip, and nobody’s listened to her yet. This Christmas could be the time that you finally lead your sister-in-law to Christ. So, open up your home, show up at someone else’s, and demonstrate the love of Christ whose birth we are celebrating right now. 

A second passage that informs this issue is another text from 1 Peter. In fact, it’s the verse right above the one I just read. It’s 1 Peter 4:8, Peter there says, “keep loving one another earnestly since love covers a multitude of sins.” Sometimes our family gatherings are painfully awkward because of sinful relationships. And Peter here is giving us a very specific way to love others in such a situation by covering sin with love. In the Kingdom of Jesus, there’s no sin that love cannot cover. And the way love covers those sins is through the confession and forgiveness of sins. A lot of times people will talk about this issue of love covering sins, and they think that means to ignore the sins. But the reality is the Bible is so clear in its teaching on how to deal with sin, that if our brother, for example, is caught in a transgression, we who are spiritual should restore him. If your brother sins, go and show him his fault. This is the instruction we receive in the Bible again, and again, and again. And so, the Bible doesn’t emphasize to us that we are to ignore sin. The Bible emphasizes to us though, that when we engage in sin love covers it. And love covers sin through an honest confession of sin and a sincere granting of forgiveness of sin. And so, if you have been unloving to a friend or a family member through sin that you’ve committed in the past, then this is the year to cover that sin with love and confess it. If you have been unloving to a friend or family member by refusing to forgive a sin they’ve confessed, then this is the year to cover that sin with love and forgive it. I want to encourage you that if that has gone on in your past relationships, if one of the reasons for the awkward family gatherings at Christmas and Thanksgiving is because of unconfessed and unforgiven sin, then this is the year for you right now to pick up the phone and demonstrate love by saying, “hey, I need to confess a sin against you. I’m so sorry for what I did. Would you please forgive me?” Or to say, “Hey, you know, you ask me for forgiveness, and I never gave that, and I just want you to know that because Jesus forgives me, I can forgive you, and I do forgive you. And I can’t wait to spend Christmas with you this year.” I promise if you do that, it’ll be a hard phone call, but it will be a loving one. And you’re gathering at Christmas and Thanksgiving this year will be much, much less awkward. 

A third text is Proverbs 19:11, it says, “good sense makes one slow to anger and it is his glory to overlook an offense.” It’s your glory to overlook an offense. Not every slight is a sin. Often the best response to an affront is simply to look the other way and to forget about it. So if your mother-in-law puts extra mayonnaise in the Waldorf salad and you’ve told her a hundred times that you don’t like extra mayonnaise in the Waldorf salad, then you don’t have to take offense at that. You can overlook it, and you can pass it in the buffet, or you can put something else on your plate. You can just forget it. If your Aunt Hilda takes the last piece of pumpkin pie that you were going for, you don’t have to take offense, you can get some rice pudding instead. And if you get stuck hosting the family gathering this year when it wasn’t your turn, then you can go back, and you can read 1 Peter 4:9, where we are to be hospitable without complaint. So we don’t have to be offended at everything that comes our way that happens to be a slight. We can look the other way, we can look the other way in love, and we can decide not to make a big deal out of it, and Jesus will help us to do that. This really is a glorious time of the year. It can also, when you put sinful people together, be a bit of an awkward time, but in the kindness of God and by the truth of his word, perhaps we can all have a Christmas that’s a little merrier and a little less awkward.