Sermon for June 16, 2013 (Father’s Day)
Pentecost 4
2 Sam 11, 12; Luke 7, 8
PREACHER: Rev. Cordell Strug
When I realized that today
was Father’s Day, I thought: “Well—I’m a father, and a picture is worth a
thousand words, so maybe I could just stand up here and let you admire me for
ten minutes or so.” But since the mother of those children I fathered was going
to be here as well, I thought if I did that, I was unlikely to live to see
another Father’s Day!
But I hoped at least I might
find, in the day’s lessons, a fatherly story—something about Jesus in a bossy
mood, telling the disciples to clean their rooms, get a haircut, or better yet—a
tale of King David or King Solomon, fathers of families, fathers of their
nation. Something noble, patriarchal: I saw in my imagination a tall man,
strong, pure of heart, striding home across his own land, with lavish
provisions in tow, greeted with joy by his dependents who had worked hard all
day for his comfort; he would sit in an easy chair before the fire with his
favorite dog at his side, settle accounts, adjudicate quarrels, and
philosophize on the affairs of the state and the destiny of humankind. I
thought I might find a story like that…
But when I looked up the
lessons, what did I find?
Oh, there’s a story about
King David, small comfort, and he is going to be a father—but he hasn’t exactly
been devoting a lot of thought to children, not to mention nobility, his
favorite dog, or the affairs of the state.
David had been coveting his
neighbor’s wife—and that’s putting it mildly. David was coveting her so badly
that he arranged a fatal accident for her husband and took her. We see him
accused by an upright man, called to account. The story ends with the illness
of their child, who will die—not the first, and not the last child to pay or to
perish for a father’s behavior.
Well, that was sobering!
But who can deny that this is
a word for today? Nathan’s cry “You are the man!” has probably been shouted in
a lot of living rooms and kitchens: and a lot of the ears it’s fallen upon have
been deaf to it.
I was watching a football
game once, and you know how the players on the sidelines always wave at the camera
and say: “Hi, Mom”, and I remembered my mother’s absolute inability to
comprehend football. She’d say “Ooh! They all fell down!” –she couldn’t tell
the difference between a football and a hockey puck, while my father was quite
an athlete. And I thought to myself: “Don’t any of these clowns have fathers?
Wouldn’t old dad like to get a little wave once in a while?” But then I thought,
with a little shame: maybe they don’t. Maybe they don’t have fathers, or at
least fathers that were there—maybe mother had to do it all.
Right now, the number of children
growing up in families headed by single mothers is at an all-time high. And one
of the saddest and bleakest stories of our time must be the story of lost and drifting
boys: men who grow up without responsible men watching over them. They pay for
it, and they’re not the only ones who pay for it.
Really, both mother and
father are as much terms of honor and achievement, of places to be earned, as
they are of biological fact. So we hear people say: “She was my real mother/he
was my real father” – some of them might even get a card today! But we all have
to step up and earn that place. This may be even more true of fathers than
mothers, because of that uncrossable biological barrier. No one talks about
being able to recognize a father’s heartbeat. Fathers either show up for duty
or end of not counting for much.
I remember, when I was
little, being a bit surprised to learn there was a Father’s Day. At least in my
memory, it doesn’t seem to have been nearly as big a deal as Mother’s Day, a
cultural after-thought, a consolation prize for coming in second in the
sentimental sweepstakes. I though Mother’s Day was like the summer solstice:
that it was part of nature and started on the sixth day of creation, while
Father’s Day was a kind of made-up modern observance, like National Poetry Month
of “Save the Whales Sunday”.
Maybe that says something
about the fathers of my youth: as I picture them, they would have held
themselves above such frippery and fuss: I can hear them sounding like Vito Corleone
in “The Godfather” – “women and children can afford to care about such things.
Men? No! Not men!” A lot of them were WWII vets, arms like sewer pipes. They seemed
to think awards were for slackers: it’s the job that’s important, not the
award! What mattered was standing up and getting it done, and not waiting
around for the applause.
They all worked in heavy
industry—steel mills, oil refineries, automobile plants—and, because of that,
they had their own sort of absence. They were providers, of course, in those
days, in that place, and they also provided mothers a kind of nuclear deterrent,
a weapon of last resort: “Wait until your father hears about this!”
It’s been tempting, in our
time, for our cultural complainers, the family values crusaders, to look back
on that time with nostalgia for its male economic dominance, command and power.
But that’s kind of a distorted picture, as nostalgia always is, and there are
some hidden agendas in those yearnings. And it’s awfully hard to make dominance
into a Christian virtue!
I sense in this nostalgia a
resentment of the opportunities gained by women, a resentment I don’t see as
part of the men of that time that I looked up to. There are reasons we got from
here to there, and one of those reasons is that real families embraced opportunities
for both daughters and sons. Real families are richer and more flexible than
the ideologues would have us think.
Even in an industrial
community like the one I grew up in, with its rigidly separated roles, the good
families were partnerships because they wanted to make a go of it together. We
weren’t that well off, and when my mother got a night job at a bank in downtown
Chicago, life became even more of a partnership. When I was serving as a pastor
in rural Minnesota, which had a completely different work cycle and role
models, I still can’t think of a single farm family that wasn’t also a
partnership.
It’s no accident that the 4th
commandment calls us to honor our father and mother as a pair, that new
creature of one flesh that we proclaim in the marriage service. And when Luther
explains the Lord’s Prayer in the Small Catechism, he says that to pray “Our
Father” (to use, as Jesus did, “Father” as an address to God) is to believe “that
we may approach God boldly and confidently in prayer, even as beloved children
approach their dear father.” In other words, Luther (who drove his own father
crazy, by the way!) sees the title “Father” not in terms of power and rule, let
alone gender superiority, but in terms of loving accessibility. This is the
name that should cast out fear and offer the welcome home.
Now let’s take these thoughts
of fathers, families and values and look at this little episode from the life
of Jesus.
Jesus didn’t have children of
this own, and the only story we have of his growing up is one of him NOT obeying
his parents, but leaving to do what he wanted and teaching in the temple! It
might have been fun to see how Jesus would have reacted to his own son going
missing for a couple of days to study in the temple—or to rebuild an engine in
somebody’s garage. It would have been instructive to see how Jesus handled his
daughter’s first date. But what we learn from him about family life we have to
learn from his life as such.
And, really, it isn’t that
much of a stretch to see this dinner at Simon the Pharisee’s house as a family
scene, in a larger sense of family. It’s about who belongs and who doesn’t, how
we treat on another, and how we go on together.
In fact, it has an eerie echo
of the messy family scene from David’s life. There are two men facing off, one
of whom speaks as a moral guardian, one of whom seems to be compromised,
neglectful and careless of his authority and position. There is a woman
involved, and what’s going on seems to demand the naming of a sin.
Superficially, it we have
learned the lesson of Nathan and David, it might seem that Simon the Pharisee,
the man who names the sinner here, the man with the hard word, is the name with
a true and godly word. I bet if you left out the names and disguised the details
a little, then showed this story to a random group of religion leaders, most of
them would say Simon is the real Christian.
But the hard word of Simon is
not the word of the Gospel, and don’t you ever forget that!
Simon thinks: “If this man were
really a prophet, he’d know who and what this sinful woman is.” And it’s not irrelevant
that Simon adds “This woman who is touching him.” He doesn’t exactly accuse Jesus
of being like David with Bathsheba, but was thinking along that line!
But the point of the story is
this: Jesus does know who and what she is—better than Simon does, and at a
deeper level than Simon does. Jesus never let himself be blinded by his own
goodness. Yes, he knows what she is; he also knows there’ more to her; he can
see her and he knows what she needs. She can come to him without fear and he
welcomes her home. The sin named in this scene is Simon’s sin; his treatment of
Jesus, his scorn of the woman, his distance from which he looks down on them
both. The way that’s shown in the scene is the way of God with the sinner.
We might say David’s story
showed a failure of responsibility; Simon’s story is a failure of forgiveness,
a failure of love. And, provocatively, they’re both blinded: David by lust,
Simon by moral judgment—but neither one can see what he is doing.
It’s to David’s credit that
he can respond “I have sinned against the Lord!” because these failures are
more than personal. They’re failures in what and how God would have us be
together.
Since I was looking at these
scenes through the lens of Father’s Day, I thought there was one more light, or
one more challenge, thrown here on the family.
Children are like guests in
our lives, as Jesus was in Simon’s house: poor Simon probably thought he had a
tidy little domestic arrangement completely under his control (like the Martha Stewart
of the moral world): then all of a sudden this woman is at Jesus’ feet, like a
little too weird-looking date your son or daughter might bring home. It’s a
question children raise in lots of ways, as long as they are with us: “How
flexible can our family be?” Can we see our children for who they are, not for
who we want them to be; how far can the family be open to others and to the
world the kids bring home with them?
So it seems very appropriate
to me that today’s Gospel ends with a picture of Jesus walking around with an
extended family of people who just sort of got attached to him: the 12 picked
up here and there, Mary who had seven demons, the wife of Herod’s steward (How
did SHE get there??)—and I think it’s very deliberately meant to show the rough-edged,
ragged, uncontrollable hodge-podge of everybody, the sloppy bigness of the
family of God, as big as God’s mercy, a mess from the human point of view, but
all wrapped up in the real goodness of God’s kingdom.
Amen.
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