Fourth Sunday after Pentecost | 06/16/2024 | Sermon on Mark 4:26-34 | Paula Murray |

I listened to a television news program as I dressed and prepared to check out of a hotel.  I was attending a continuing education event in Baltimore.  It was a two-and-a-half-day event. Each day had been packed solid with lectures, one after the other, with just a few minutes between each to get a glass of water or touch base with another pastor.  So I was in a hurry, worried that I might miss some part of the last two precious lectures if I got held up as I checked out or if the go to work traffic was bogged down.

It wasn’t the traffic that got bogged down, though, it was me.  As I threw the last few things into my suitcase I found myself suddenly attending to the news report.  The anchor was interviewing a writer whose book on fathering was unexpectedly making waves in the world of books.  The book’s impetuous was the writer’s own father, who had abandoned his wife and son early in the son’s life.  In fact, the son had no memory of actually hearing his father’s voice until the day he found himself in a hospital, at death’s door.  His father called, while the son was in intensive care, waiting to see if he would live or die.  The father called, and the son was so incredibly grateful that his father had actually reached out to talk to him at this dreadful time in his life.  At about the two-minute mark in the conversation, the son heard his father talk to someone else.  When he returned to his son, the son who was perhaps dying, the father said, “Something’s come up.  I’ll call you later.”  And he hung up.

Now there is a rotten father. I drove to the conference in a red rage, and sat seething through the first few minutes of the first lecture of the morning until I calmed down enough to realize that Dr. Murphy was giving the very best presentation of the entire event.  Nor did the neglected son require my wrath.  He had long ago forgiven his miscreant father, who, I might add, never, ever contacted his son again.  Instead of letting rage, grief, and abandonment fuel a lifetime’s worth of misbehavior and misery, he used it to drive himself into becoming the best husband and father he could be.

We do not celebrate fathers much these days, an enormous turnaround from the days when fathers exercised the power of life and death over those who were a part of their households.  It sorrows me to say this, but we lifted up the role of women, including those women who are mothers, at the expense of the very real and personal ministry of men to their families and communities.  It was necessary that, as a people, we recognized the true place of women, but we did not have to do it by making less of men.   There is some sentimentalization of the mother at work here as well.  Victorian sensibilities that imbued mothers with an inward moral superiority did so by diminishing fathers’ role as a moral authority and exaggerating his exercise of power outside of the home.  He became all about the outside world of business and politics. She became the human font of goodness and compassion, localized within the bounds of home and family.

There is this factor too.  The link between mother and child is obvious and undeniable.  That’s the nature of maternity.  The link between father and child is not.  It is not unusual in families for there to be quiet and persistent rumors that a child has been fathered by someone other than the guy whose name is on the birth certificate.  Those rumors, though usually wrong, point to a fact we all know in our hearts as well as our heads.  A man may plant a seed and create a child.  He can, the state notwithstanding, walk away from that child.  He becomes a father when he commits himself to the care of that child, not just at the time of his or her birth, but for the years it takes to rear a child to maturity and even beyond.

This means that a father is, in the way a mother is not, a sign of God’s willingness to restrict his freedom for the well-being of another.  God is free because he is not compelled to add anything to himself or complete himself. He has no need for anything outside of himself for sustenance. The persons of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, relate in a way that is both perfect and complete in their oneness.  Yet God separated the waters, made the lights that regulate night and day, filled the dry land, the waters, and the skies with life, and crowned his effort by the creation of human beings.  Man and women he created them, Genesis tells us. In the image of God he made them.  And God himself looked at all he had done and said, “It is good.”

And that was right, for the thing God did when he created all that exists is share his very own goodness.  He made that goodness manifest, gave it mass and volume, made it move and change with time.  There are those who think God walked away from his creation at this point, leaving it to run on its own, without his aid or intervention.  We call such people deists, because they believe in a deity, a god, but not a god who cares for his own creation.  Such a god would be rather like the father who makes a child but walks away from the care of that child.

But that is not the God we worship.  Christians believe that from creation onwards God has sustained the whole of his creation, giving of his own goodness that we might live and live well.  God chose, freely, to limit his freedom that he might share his goodness with us day after day, year after year, generation after generation.  God’s willing self-giving does not end with providence.  When for reasons of our own self-absorption sin came into the world, he set in motion the means by which he would save us.  There was no need for God to give so totally of himself that Jesus would take on human flesh and die like the mere mortals we are, saving us from sin and death, yet that is what God chose, freely, to do.  He who is immortal chose to assume mortality, and its obvious limitations, to make us immortal and to free us finally and completely from all that limits us.

Even as God gives freely to us, so a father gives himself freely to his children.  He sets limits on his freedom, so he can set the needs of his family over and above his own.   Now I speak to the gifts of the godly father as a wife and mother.  I clearly cannot speak firsthand to what a father wants for his children as I could speak firsthand about what a mother wants for those same children.  So the remainder of this morning’s sermon is a mother’s perspective, and a pastor’s, on what godly fathers do for their offspring, and by extension what they hope for them.

A father is usually bigger than mom, and stronger.  To a child, the male parent will be a witness to strength as well as freedom yoked for the well-being of the child.  In other words, dad, and mom also, are like God to a small child, in fact, they are God to that small child.  It is a parent who stills the raging storm in an infant’s stomach when he is hungry.  It is a parent who makes pain and discomfort go away.  It is a parent who soothes terrified babies when the thunderstorm goes overhead or the lights go out.

Dads, in the toddler period of a child’s life, when he or she thinks “god,” the image he or she likely thinks of is yours.  You are the one who can open stubborn spaghetti sauce jars with a single twist, and lift one end of the couch to retrieve the lost binkie from underneath it.  As a father you will teach your sons to use their strength and freedom to benefit the weak, the poor, and the helpless.  As a father you will teach your daughters to reach for strength and freedom even as generations’ old habits seek to make her dependent and weak.  In other words, for the son you will set boundaries, but you will blow the boundaries polite society seeks to establish around your daughters away.  But the other thing you will do is point to the One who is truly the source and the seed of life and growth, Jesus Christ our Lord, God’s own Son, through whom we are saved.

It’s a bit of a paradox Dad, but you bring a child to understand God’s providence, his ongoing goodness and care for those who are his own.  You do that by caring for him or her, limiting your freedom, using your strength, to provision a home.  And then what you must do is point beyond yourself to Jesus Christ himself, so your children understand that it is God who provides for you so you may provide for them, that it is God’s strength you rely on when strength is necessary, and that the very essence of the well-lived life has to do much more with trusting God to love and care for us than it has to do putting away money or plinking the perfect 8 point buck.  Not that that isn’t important, or anything.

Here’s something else you do, Dad, that is related to that last point.  We’ve quoted Proverbs often enough that everyone who was here during the early stages of the building program ought to remember it.  The people perish when there is no vision.  A dad casts a vision for a child’s future.  A child cannot do this for himself or herself at all in the early days, and when a child begins to imagine or dream the future those dreams are often illusory and unrealistic.  It is part of a dad’s role in his children’s life to imagine a world they cannot imagine and to make them a part of that world.  Now, the danger here is that often we are not pleased as parents with the world as we see it now.  We see dangers and difficulties everywhere, as once we didn’t.  Our children don’t see those social snares or obstacles.  It is possible to drown in fear for the future, and to infect our children with that same fear.  It is your role father, to cast a vision for the future for your children that prepares them for what might come their way in a time when you are no longer present, and yet gives them the freedom to develop those gifts God has given them.  And you get to do this really rather terrifically difficult thing in the midst of the day-to-day madness of life and work.

But have no fear papa.  For while you daily labor to provide and to love your children, and their mother, encourage them, uplift them, guide them, discipline them when they sin, forgive them, teach them to forgive, and most of all, introduce them to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, God is in the trenches with you.  The sprig that grows into a mighty cedar, up to 180 feet in height in some species, the tiny mustard seed that grows into a large bush, the lesson from Ezekiel and the parables from the fourth chapter of Mark all show us that however we labor in God’s vineyards we don’t labor alone.  And that is most especially true for the parent who, in obedience to the command to be fruitful and multiply, panics at the very thought of raising the newborn in his arms to competent and loving adulthood.  You are not in it alone.  It is God who gives life and who raises it up, and you may rest assured, though you cannot always see or sense his loving, strengthening presence, that he will see this little project through with you.  Have hope, Dad, for what you do with God’s help will bear good fruit and bear it abundantly, and that includes the children given over to your stewardship that God might share his goodness with you and the world.