The Words of the Daugherty Family
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The Words of the Daugherty Family |
Good morning, brothers and sisters. I would like to first give honor to the love of my life, our True Parents that gave me life, gave me a wife, and helped me to raise my family to our True Parents. I'd like to give honor and respect to our continental leader, Rev. Dr. Chang Shik Yang and his family, and all of the national messiahs, continental leaders, and to the regional directors, state leaders.
Brothers and sisters, I'm truly honored and indeed grateful for this precious chance to share with you this morning. I'm indeed excited about the time we're living in, and as our dear brother Phillip spoke this morning about some injustice that was done to us -- can everybody say amen? This is important. Amen. A woman. A family. Give yourself a hand.
1 John 3:13-14 says:
Do not be surprised, my brothers, if the world hates you. We know that we have passed through death to life because we love our brothers.
Do not be surprised if the world hates you. Seems like every time some bad media, or someone says something about us we are surprised. Somehow we think we've made it over, we've assimilated and we're regular like everybody else, and then when this thing comes out we are surprised. John said, "Do not be surprised because the world hates you." You need to understand that, that we are not of the world. We are a different kind of people. We are separated from the world. Our mission is to build a new world. Somebody ought to say amen. [AMEN!]
We're really not concerned about the other world. We're really not even concerned about what they do. What we're concerned about is what we are doing every day of our life to build the new world, and we're not surprised if they say bad things about us because when that world passes away, those things also will do what? Pass away.
I took a little time this morning because I want every stranger in this building, every guest who never experienced a worship service with us to understand our tradition. We're not going to waver or change because we have guests, so I wanted to give a full bow to our True Parents, as though our True Parents were sitting here. Spiritually, they are here. And I hope they're here because if they're not, I'm going to be in trouble. It seems like no matter how much you prepare for a sermon, when you stand up before your audience, you wonder, do you have the right sermon?
So therefore, my topic today is, "How can we settle if we have not yet arrived?" Three basic points I want to talk about. The first one is what is a true settled family? What is a true culture family? Second, how does a family culture affect society? Third, what is the settlement culture?
First of all, in the family a husband and wife through their love and give and take with each other, the husband turns to a father and a wife turns to a mother, bringing children into the world. Thus, that husband and wife become a family with that child. First of all, the father is not a father until the child is born. However, the mother's love is more instant than that. The mother's love is instant as soon as the child is conceived in the mother's womb. The mother begins a love relationship with the child. All of her five senses are being developed except one. The last sense to be developed is the sense of seeing. Once that child is born she sees the child that she has experienced for almost a year. The father, however, does not experience any of these sensations until the child is physically born. Then the child and the father begin to have a give and take and that love begins to grow.
What is the true mission of a family? Think about that. What is my true mission as a father, as a mother? Why am I a mother? Why am I a father? First of all, we have a child, but that doesn't alone make us a mother or father. The true mission of a mother and father, in a nutshell, is to input love to the child. Input love to the child. That comes in various kinds of ways, but if you boil it down to get the essence of what I'm talking about, you understand that your mission is that you have to put in love to that child. The mother begins right away when the child is conceived, putting in that love. And the child receives love until its capacity for receiving love is completely full and then the love begins to spill over.
It may seem that the child is rejecting your love. Have any of you experienced a child rejecting your love? Yes? If you're parents, you've received it, and you felt funny in the process because your love is important because that's what you are. You are a person who is inputting love, and now the child has come to an age that he's stopped receiving your love because that love has reached its capacity, its critical mass, and that child then begins to give love back, and you realize the child has stopped receiving your love because he or she wants to give love back. He wants to do things on his own, wants to do something for the parents now, and now the parents are realizing that this child is not yet ready to do things on his own, so you want to hold onto the reins a little bit and not allow the child to get too free. But the child wants to get loose because he has learned from the parents that he has to do what the parents do. The parents are giving love, so the child wants to give back love.
Then we are developing a culture in this family, so we can say that the family then, its total mission is to be a manufacturer of love. We create these human machines of love. Somebody said a long time ago, "I'm a love machine, baby." In other words, we learn how to give love because that's what we are. We are loving machines. We've got flesh and blood and all these things but really we are loving machines. We're designed to love and to receive love. Anything other than that feels funny or foreign to us.
So this culture has developed through this kind of love. We can accept this love culture because when we don't receive love, we already say, especially in my family, "You don't love me." What do you mean, I don't love you? Of course I love you. I brought you some food and I ironed your shirts. "But I mean real love." Even all the things that you do for an individual, yet you still want something more because love is not just giving something to someone. Love is deeper than that.
This sermon was inspired by Rev. Lee and Hyun Jin Nim. Father's son called a meeting last week, and Dr. Hendricks was the master of ceremonies there. Basically what I received out of that talk, he said, we have got to learn Korean. Of course, we thought, yeah, I'll get to it someday. I'll learn it someday when I retire and I have plenty of time on my hands. But then it was brought up in that conference that if you really want to know who God is from our religious perspective, you've got to learn Korean. In the Muslim faith, Muslims can't understand God unless they learn Arabic. They've got to speak and read and pray Arabic and also be united with that religion. How about the Jewish faith? If you don't learn Hebrew and you stand before the Wailing Wall and pray in some other language, everybody looks at you strange. You've got to be speaking Hebrew because only the Hebrew language gets to the heart of God according to that religion.
Why did God choose Korea? Because Koreans are handsome or great or they like kimchee? No. God chose Korea because of the language. That language can reach the heart of God better than any other language. Some things just cannot be translated, and you can only understand Korean culture if you know the language that can express God's heart. This is a true statement. If that's the language of the heart of God, when we die and leave this world and enter the spiritual world, we want to communicate with the God that we've been serving all of our life, and how do we get there if we can't communicate?
I heard the other day that people do talk in the spirit world, and when they talk, the closer you get to God's heart, you have to learn Korean. That's an extra burden on us. It happens to be a part of the heavenly culture. We're talking about a culture here, a way of life here. One of our problems in the Unification movement, we expect everybody to understand everything immediately, correctly, and do it according to what has just been said. No other church believes that. No other church expects that. But we do. Why? Because we have a high standard of what we think is right, and we expect everybody to go forth and do exactly the same thing. Some of us just cannot.
In this culture we need to understand how do we develop this culture? If it goes to the family, then what is the purpose of the family? Even psychologists and sociologists today are saying the problems of society are linked to the family, that the broken family is the cause of these five major risk behaviors -- alcohol, drugs, tobacco, sexual abuse and violence. All of these are behaviors begin in a broken family. Eighty percent of the people in our judicial system and penal system are from broken families. Even the president of the United States, Bill Clinton, attributed his problems to his family situation. His wife backed him up on that.
If that's the case then it's crystal clear that before we fix the automobiles and the Internet, we need to fix the family. If the head man, the top guy in charge of everybody's life has a problem in the family, and then we're going to ignore that situation? How can we ignore that? It is because of broken families.
You may say, well, Rev. Daugherty, I don't have that problem. I had a two-parent family. I'm all right, I went to college, I'm doing all right for my family, I've got a nice home, got my children in nice schools and I'm doing fine, so your sermon does not apply to me. I say if you look into your ancestry, somewhere down the line you'll find you have some problems. If you look far enough, way back far enough, you'll find back in the beginning there were some problems, in Adam and Eve's family there were some problems. Because their mission was to receive love. Eve was to receive love from Adam. Adam was to receive love from who? I want to see how well you know the Principle. From who? Through who? Lucifer. Adam was to receive love through Lucifer from God. And instead, Lucifer went to Eve and took love from Eve, and Eve went to Adam and took love from Adam, and both Adam and Eve took love from their children, and thus Cain killed Abel.
In our lives, our families are already broken, I don't care what kind of family you came from. They are dysfunctional, so therefore we are the beginning of a new family. That's why we call True Parents our True Parents. The True Parents are the only parents that have somehow figured out how to overcome the problems of a broken family. So then we receive persecution through this path. We ask ourselves, if we are to establish this family, why do we need this church anyway? What is the value of the church, the purpose of the church? Well, the church is the inside culture, the logos of the culture that we want to develop outside.
If we can't love each other in here, how can we love people on the outside? If we can't love our neighbors in here -- have you ever experienced some of you who came kind of late and want to find a seat, and somebody is sitting on the edge and just won't move over for you? Just makes you stumble and climb over people to the middle? All they had to do was slide over and let the person sit down, and say, "I'm so glad to see you this morning. I know you're late but you made it."
Our culture has to be the culture inside of our hearts, and it comes out of our hearts to the person next to us. That person showing up on Sunday helps you solidify that what you are doing is all right. If you're the only one who came, after a while you'd be here by yourself. But when everybody comes, it lets you know that what you're doing is right. It's affirming your faith. It's making those of us who are a little bit rocky and not so solid and our feet are not on solid ground, that when we receive that neighbor, that person sitting beside us, and they say, I'm so glad you're here -- soon I'm going to get it. I know if I keep coming, I'll get it.
But when we don't have that kind of love, where we can appreciate the suffering and sacrifice that our next-door neighbor has gone through, that we keep thinking about ourselves, that we cannot give love out. When a parent is suffering inside and feeling down, feeling not worth much -- can they give love to the child? They cannot. In that house there is disarray. Dishes haven't been washed, clothes not cleaned, the bathroom is dirty and the parent is laying in bed while the children are running around uncared for because the mother herself is not qualified or able to give love to the children. Once you give love then everything becomes right and you have the energy to do something else. But as long as you keep it inside, you just get more and more inside. The next thing you know, you just want to die. You don't care about anything. Because we are love machines. We are designed to give love and designed to receive love. When we don't get it, we get depressed.
Our family in this new culture of the settlement, how can we settle if we have not arrived? Then why are we satisfied with our new car? How can we be satisfied when we finally move into the neighborhood we've been trying to get into? When we've settled down we think, I'm all right now. Then we see a negative story on TV and say, "What, they haven't loved us yet? Look at me, I've got a nice house. What if my neighbors see this program? What am I going to do?" Because we settled before we arrived.
What happened to the fervor we had? This movement reminds me of what happened to the black ministers, when we fought so hard to get civil rights and justice done for our lives. We were looking for a better answer, a better world, and Martin Luther King stood up and said, "I have a dream. I've already been to the mountaintop and I've looked over and I've seen the Promised Land." When he said that, the crowd burst into cheers and applause because he reaffirmed the dream of what we were living for, fighting for.
But then along came affirmative action and we settled down. We got satisfied. We moved into the white neighborhoods, we put our children into white schools where the teachers at that time hated and despised us and the children, and it was that kind of attitude they began to teach the children. And what we have 25 years later is a culture of kids who just don't give a damn. And parents who should be able to give out the tradition of how hard they've worked and how hard they've sacrificed, but they can't say a word because they got it free. By chance, by lottery.
They've got a good job and so now they've got a Mercedes and everything is fine, but they can't give anything to the grandchildren because they can't say, son, I worked three jobs. I worked two jobs in the daytime, morning job and a nighttime job, and on the weekends I worked. I cut grass for the neighbors, I painted buildings, I did hard work so I could put you into school. And if you look for somebody to give you something, you're not going to get anything. Now they say, they're supposed to give it to you. You'd better tell them that you're black so they can give you good grades. What's wrong with them folks? You've got to let them know you're not Hispanic; you're just light-skinned. You're black. So you can get a good position.
Sometimes our movement reminds me of that. There's an old song the slaves used to sing that was rekindled back in the 60s. That song was, "Keep your eyes on the prize and hold on; hold on, hold on; keep your eyes on the prize and hold on." You see the depths of that song? "Talk about me as much as you please; the more you talk, I'm going to bend my knees; keep your eyes on the prize and hold on." That's the kind of song that keeps you focused. But if you're satisfied you've got it all made, then no need to worry about tomorrow because I've got a bank account that's already set. MFT? Not me -- I paid my dues.
But I tell you, what if it's all taken away tomorrow? What if it's all gone when you wake up in the morning and you have nothing. No job, no house. If we give our children to the enemy and say, you raise my child, you put him in that school and you say your values are important, but we don't get up in the morning and read Hoon Dok Hae, or do pledge, and we just leave all of that to the world to teach our child? And then we wonder why they don't want to get blessed? We wonder why they want to leave home at age 16 and start their own life?
What happened to the dream we saw years ago, when we saw a blessed couple walk in with a ring and we almost bowed down and kissed the ring. I remember back in '75 when there were few blessed couples, and we thought, if I ever can get blessed. But some of us got blessed and we thought that was it.
I went through this crisis. My daughter said, "Daddy, every blessed child doesn't know who they are. They have to go through the same crisis. You can't teach me to love God. You can only teach me about God. I have to love God on my own." She said, "When I'm ready, then I'm ready." But my responsibility is to teach the child about God, and how much I love God, and try to instill that kind of tradition in that child. Why? So that child can take responsibility for their own life and begin to live later on.
Hyun Jin Nim asked the question. He said, I need one blessed child to stand with me who is ready to give their life. He looked at one second generation son who was there and said, "How about you? Can you stand with me?" And he answered, "No." Hyun Jin Nim said, "So there you have it."
Whose fault is that? Is that his fault? No. And the mother of this son was sitting right there. He said, "It's the parents' fault." But it is his responsibility, even though it is their fault.
Some of us have already settled and say, "Well, the kingdom is not coming in my lifetime. It ain't coming. Sorry, I had a false image, a false dream, so I'm just going to do my thing." My wife went back to school, finally got her degree. Lots of people are getting their degrees, settling in. I don't care what we think. This church is like the Ark of the Covenant. That's all it is. It is not a place to settle. Don't worry about where it is. Don't worry if it's in the middle of the ghetto. This ghetto is a symbolic representation of the wilderness. We're just passing through.
When we get on the other side, we're learning now a culture, developing a way of life so that when we get to the other side, where the second generation is supposed to do the building of the kingdom, not us. But we haven't laid the foundation. We haven't settled in their hearts and minds. When we get old and gray and decrepit and can't move and are ready to die, and our children look at us and are doing something contrary to what we fought and lived for, we will not be happy with that. Our children then will say, you didn't tell me, you didn't teach me, you didn't help me to understand it. I don't know anything about it. They will have resentment that they are working so hard and you are doing nothing.
So I say, let us rekindle the dream, re-focus our hearts and minds on what we started out with. I'm now 53 years old, but I'm truly inspired by this young lady here who's 84 years old, who's still got the fire burning inside, begging to get out on the battlefield, saying, "I want to go where the fight is going on. I want to go over yonder, across the water, over there in a place called the United States of America, with the Statue of Liberty, with the Jefferson Memorial, where King stood and said, 'I have a dream.' I want to go there. I want to fight the battle. Yes, I'm 84 but I ain't dead." She's already committed that if she dies, she wants to die on the battlefield, not home in the easy chair looking at Saturday night sumo wrestling.
Fighting on the battlefield, talking to somebody -- got to get this person to the kingdom. That's where we've got to go because we don't have a whole lot of time here. People are already dictating some great millennium problem. I can't predict that, but I do know this. At night when we go to our children's bedrooms, so beautiful in their sleep, we pull up the cover and tuck them in, can we stand there and say to these children, I've done my best? If you wake up in the morning and I'm not around, I give it all to you. I bequeath everything to you, my son, my daughter. My fight is just about ended and I'm turning it over to you, and you're the one that's going to build the kingdom. I've done all I can do now. I'm handing it over to you.
Can we look at our children and feel we have no kind of obligation in that way? This is what allows me to speak now this morning. Because I went to their bedroom and they were laying there, all wrapped up with each other. I began to straighten them out so they could lay correctly, and in that moment I said -- this may be the last time I see you guys. I'm doing my best. Do you have enough from me to go on? Did I leave behind enough tradition for you to understand who True Parents are, to get up in the morning on your own, to go to work and to be a part of the kingdom? Or did I fail?
I went back and told my wife, something is not right. I don't feel I've done it right. We've got to get it right. We've got to get our minds and our connection together. We're partners in this thing. I feel like our children are waiting for settlement time. Brothers and sisters, did we settle, and our children then wake up? One day True Father will die. One day we will die, one by one. We will all die. Everybody in this room. Our investment of our love is to the children that will live again, and our dream will live in those children, our hopes, our desires, our passions, our sermons, our lectures, our dream will come alive in the new generation.
Jesus on the way to the cross said to the women who were crying for him, "Don't weep for me. Weep for your children and your children's children for it is on their heads your sins will be laid." We have to say that we will not weep, that we have done the best we can. We have lived a life. We have now reached the apex of our hearts. We have learned not just to love our children and our neighbors, but we've also learned to love our enemies by praying for those who hate you.
I'll close with this. In Matthew Jesus said in one of his first sermons, the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 5:10, "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven." Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness. Heaven will not come. We have to build it, brick by brick, every day of our lives.
Reach over and touch your neighbor's hand and sing with me,
I'll never leave you any more,
For
I have found in your bright eyes
A river of love, a heart of
gold,
A peaceful mind, a hand to hold.
And what will I do with this precious
gift?
Shall I embrace it to myself?
Oh, no, I can't; I would
lose it sure.
It must be given if it's to endure.
And together we'll build a world
that's new,
That's fit for kings and fit for queens.
We'll
raise them up to rule the land,
And place dominion in their hands.
We'll never leave you any more,
For
we have found in your bright eyes
A river of love, a heart of
gold,
A peaceful mind, a hand to hold.
(Closing prayer)