P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

WHITE HOUSE BRATS

It’s tough going out on a date when your dad is the President of the United States and four Secret Service men tag along. When Susan Ford, former First Daughter, finally snagged a husband, comedian Bob Hope joked that the wedding march should be replaced by “Me and My Shadow.”

According to Dad, Franklin had six problems: drinking, drugs, smoking, girls, fast driving, and long hair. Mom was more descriptive in describing her boy’s many sins; by her account, he began sucking on cigarettes at the age of three. When he turned 17, it was the hot rock-and-roll summer of 1969, and Frank rattled the windows of the family house with the acid-drenched music of Janis Joplin. He got into fights at school. He once fired a shotgun out his bedroom window, and began coming home at two in the morning. Once, completely fed up with this reprobate kid, Mom actually climbed out onto the roof of the house, snuck over to his window, and was planning to give him a face full of cold water. He heard her coming, though, pretended to be asleep, and then plopped the window closed just as she came into view. Then young Franklin Graham, firstborn son of Ruth and Billy Graham, the world’s most well-known Christian evangelist, impudently grinned at his exasperated mother with her housecoat and glass of ice water.

A news commentator recently observed that “something as mundane as trying to buy beer with a borrowed ID [is] something that happens 10,000 times a day in every college town in America.” True, but when it happens twice in two months to a young 19-year-old lady whose father is the President of the United States, people notice. Late-night comics began referring to her as Jenna “Anheuser” Bush. Reports began to swirl around about the First Twins’ hot night life in L.A., going to strip clubs, smoking, partying. Barbara Bush — the daughter, not the grandma — left her Secret Service detail behind at a tollbooth while speeding with friends to a spiritually uplifting night at a World Wrestling Federation match in New York. That news commentator, by the way, was Ron Reagan, Jr., who knows a thing or two about embarrassing presidential parents.

You know, it’s tough when you have a famous father. I suppose William Franklin Graham III has to be perhaps the ultimate PK — preacher’s kid. Tourists used to stop by the family house there in Montreat, North Carolina, to gawk and snap souvenir pictures. And young Franklin got weary of being his father’s boy, of living up to the high standards of the BGEA, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Today he’s a repentant born-again Christian, director of a worldwide charity group known as Samaritan’s Purse, and heir to the Graham mantle, but for a long time he found it impossible to live up to what the Bible, in Matthew 5:16, teaches all of us to do about our famous Dad who rules from the throne above:

“Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify YOUR FATHER which is in heaven.”

It’s interesting that this passage falls right in the very center of Matthew 5, which contains both the Beatitudes and also Jesus’ well-known Sermon on the Mount. We’ve been going page by page through a wonderful book chapter entitled “Sons of God,” where Dr. J. I. Packer, in his bestseller, Knowing God, describes the great privilege every Christian has of being adopted by God. We are actually His children, he writes, and he suggests that we cannot begin to understand the Christian faith unless we understand and live by this idea of adoption. Adoption is the highest ideal of Christianity; it’s the fundamental reality of every follower of Christ. God is our Father; we are His children.

But then he goes on to say this, and you talk about rubber meeting the road. It happens right here:

“[Jesus’] Sermon on the Mount,” he writes, “could be described as the royal family code.” Then he adds: “Adoption appears in the Sermon as the basis of Christian conduct.”

What does that mean? It means — Franklin Graham, and Jenna Bush, and Lonnie Melashenko — that people in royal families, whether by birth or adoption, need to live a certain way. Matthew five and six and seven are packed — 107 verses’ worth — with do’s and don’t’s and idealistic challenges for daily living. “You are the salt of the earth.” “Blessed are the peacemakers.” “Turn the other cheek.” “Reconcile with your enemy.” “Hatred is as bad as murder.” “Lust is as bad as adultery.” “Pray the Lord’s Prayer.” “Lay up treasure in heaven.” “Judge not that ye be not judged.” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Listen, this goes on, like I just said, for 107 verses. A blueprint for princes and princesses. And any man, any woman, any teenager, any child who agrees to be adopted by this wonderful Father also agrees to live by this code. Why? Essentially because we have a famous Father.

“It is a fine thing,” Packer writes, “for children to be proud of their father, and to want others too to see how wonderful he is, and to take care that they behave in public in a way that is a credit to him; and similarly, says Jesus, Christians must seek to behave in public in a way that brings praise to their Father in heaven. Their constant concern must be that which they are taught to voice at the outset of all their prayers” — this is right here in Matthew 6 too — “‘Our Father . . . hallowed be Your name.’”

I suppose it is natural that a regular kid wouldn’t be that inspired by the high ideals of Dad’s kingdom. Peace and security? A balanced budget? Welfare reform? “We don’t care about that,” the would-be First Son or First Daughter says. “I just want to hang out with my friends and get my navel pierced.” When Texas Governor George W. Bush first considered running for President, his 16-year-old twin daughters begged him not to. They were afraid, Newsweek reports, that it would put a damper on their college experience. And sure enough. But are these two young ladies now able to see the larger picture, to understand that their father trying to hold together a world coalition against terrorism is more important than going out for a margarita at Chuy’s Restaurant and binge-drinking every weekend? And can we as Christians get to the point where we are so thankful we have been adopted, and so in awe of the vital grandeur of our heavenly Father’s kingdom, that we are willing to live by the Magna Carta of this Sermon on the Mount, even when it may conflict with our fallen frat-house inclinations?

It was interesting to read in an Internet edition of Talk magazine about another First Daughter, this one named Chelsea. Even the most diehard Clinton-haters have generally conceded that this is a remarkable young lady, a good role model, and that most of the scandalous headlines in recent years came from the Lincoln Bedroom and the Oval Office, not from her room. Ms. Clinton, now that Mom and Dad had left the White House, was a grad student at Oxford University in England, but happened to be in New York City on September 11, 2001. And faithful Democrat that she is, she and best friend Nicole Davison were grousing about things like the Bush tax cut. All at once, as the two girls approached Grand Central Station, “hordes of people came running out of the station.” People were crying and screaming: “Fire!” “Bomb!” The World Trade Center towers had been attacked; the Pentagon was under siege, and young Chelsea honestly thought she was going to die. She and Nicole began running. And, speaking of suddenly seeing the larger picture, here’s what she writes:

“Once we stopped running, I started praying. I prayed for my country and my city. I stopped berating the tax cut and started praying that the president would rise to lead us. And I thanked God my mom was a senator representing New York and that Rudy Giuliani was our mayor. I have never reacted more viscerally to a leader, particularly not to one I had been criticizing just the day before for some insensitivity or other. I realized that I had become a New Yorker. I expect now that I’ll always be one.”

Isn’t that a great observation? And friend, this is exactly where we need to get to as Christians. No, we’re not all New Yorkers but we all have spiritual drivers licenses that have HEAVEN embossed on them. Expiration date? Never. Corrective lenses needed? Not anymore. Permanent address? “City of God.” Aren’t we thankful that the mayor of the New Jerusalem is named Jesus Christ? Don’t we want to pray for the survival of that City, for the advancement of its interests? And when we’re tempted to “go out drinking on a Saturday night,” so to speak, are we willing to see the larger view instead, to live as adopted sons and daughters of the King

And sometimes it is frankly hard to be a First Son or a First Daughter. Your friends order beers, and there you sit. Everyone in the office where you work gossips and backstabs the people they despise . . . and what are you to do? Your White House manual reads as follows:

“I tell you: Love your enemies . . . that you may be sons of your Father in heaven . . . Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” And Packer adds: “The children must show the family likeness in their conduct.”

So take heart, Jenna Bush. And all the rest of you sons and daughters of the living God. It’s a wonderful kingdom we’re called to dwell in . . . and represent. Maybe it’s no accident that royalty rhymes with loyalty.