The True Father's Day?
Today is another of those cultural holidays that celebrate families and family members. Today is Father's Day. As a proud member of that fraternity of men, I am glad they recognize us as important. Even though we may not get the sentimental attention that Mother's Day gets, it's still fun to get together with my daughter and have a day to celebrate the joys of being "Dad."

But I must admit that when it comes to tagging this day onto the religious calendar, I am ambivalent. In spite of all that we read about "biblical family values," they do not exist, either in the Bible or in our world today- at least not the way we think of them. A quick look through the Bible would give us remarkable examples NOT to follow- or if we did- would get us thrown in jail or mental institutions.

In surfing around about today's Lessons I found this remarkable quote from the Episcopal magazine, The Witness:

This from Genesis is an extraordinary one to read in church on Father's Day 2005. The son of Abraham, the great father of the faith, is cast into the wilderness to die. Hagar, the Egyptian slave woman who is the child's mother, has run out of food and water. She lays the exhausted, parched and famished boy under a bush, and says, to no one, for there is no witness to this act, "Do not let me look on the death of the child." She then cries aloud and weeps.

This could be a scene from contemporary Darfur, or from countless desperate places on our planet today, where mothers and children are abandoned by fathers, by warring governments, by economic forces beyond their control, and sent out to many kinds of wilderness to die.

The day's Gospel lesson is not much better. "I have come to set a man against his father," Jesus declares. "One's foes will be members of one's own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me."
--From The Witness Magazine

Jesus even told us not to call anyone on earth 'Father' for we have only one Father who is in heaven. These are challenging words to our culturally-bound thoughts. We are always in a struggle to discover the heart of the Gospel underneath the cultural trappings we place on them, or even the cultural trappings of the day they were first spoken. In short, for me I ask the question:

What does it mean to "BE" a father in this world?

And I answer it simply:

Look first, last, and always to God and God's example of Fatherhood. Grace, forgiveness no matter what, a willingness to walk with us in all times and places.

The pastor this morning gave a really challenging sermon using the Gospel. It was a reminder that we are always disciples first. It was a hard-hitting challenge to remember The True Father in heaven and His Son, our Lord.

So today let's not lose sight of The Gospel. Let's not lose sight of the fact that God is still God and still our ultimate Father. Let's not lose sight of the hope and love he has handed to us. May we turn in love and hope and walk with Him.

At the end of the article in The Witness is as good a summary as I would want:

Father's Day [can be] a distraction from the Gospel -- unless we go, hand in hand with our fathers, real or spiritual or symbolic or adopted, into the heart of what God is calling us to do.