Repurposed: Fathers

FBCGSO Sermons

Sunday’s sermon continued our summer sermons on Jesus’ parables – “Repurposed” – remembering that in describing the Kingdom of God, Jesus never asked people to leave their world. He imagined it in ordinary and everyday things, repurposed to make known the Kingdom. This week we listened again to the parable of a man with two sons. Read or listen to the sermon below.

https://fbcgso.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/08-14-2016_sermon.mp3

Luke 15:11-32

As most of you know, this is my first sermon since Jenny and I welcomed a new baby. That’s one way to say it. Another way of saying it is, “We just had our fourth baby.” Still another way you might say it is, “We just had our fourth baby in six and a half years!”

Jim Gaffigan is a wildly popular comedian, whom some of us saw just last night right here in Greensboro. He and his wife have five children, and Gaffigan has made his name in part on his fun-loving, self-deprecating, honest look at fatherhood in his standup, his TV series, and in books such as his bestselling “Dad is Fat” – the title coming from the first full sentence Gaffigan’s oldest child ever wrote: “Dad-is-fat.” Before Gaffigan and his wife had their fifth child, he said that people would ask him what it’s like to have four kids. He would say, “Well, just imagine you’re drowning… and someone hands you a baby.”

Jenny and I can relate somewhat, treading water and finding new muscles all along in these recent weeks, and I’ve found myself coming up with some new strategies – rules really – of how to be a parent, and a father in particular, at this time in my life. So let me give you five. Perhaps these will be helpful for some of you, but mainly they’re a way to answer the question, “How’s it going?”

Number 1: Don’t disturb the status quo. Don’t ever do that. If everyone’s happy and no one’s life is in danger, just don’t mess with them, because it’s a thin line between balance and crisis.

Rule number 2: Try to find productive reasons to get out of the house, preferably by yourself for a reason that your spouse or partner can bless. Just invent errands that need to be done. You’ve been meaning to go to Lowe’s or Home Depot to pick up that obscure piece of hardware, or to the auto parts store to change your wiper blades. Get out of the house. So for example, don’t ever order delivery. Always order takeout and then volunteer to go get it, and if it’s not quite ready and you have to sit down at the bar to wait for it, that’s just the price you pay. “Boy were they behind tonight, honey.”

Rule number 3: Along with everything you have to buy for a baby, buy a few extra sleeping bags and maybe even some camping mats, and put one set in every child’s bedroom just to be ready in the likely event that one of them needs you to sleep on the floor. Our baby, Bea, has been great, it’s siblings that have been waking up. Save yourself the extra step of fumbling around in the dark looking for a blanket. You might even want to set the sleeping bag up before you go to sleep, just to make it as smooth as possible at 3am.

With that in mind, rule number 4: Make sure you have some help. Any form of help. For us, this meant finding a trampoline, which is essentially a large, elastic playpen for older kids. Don’t try to have multiple children unless you have some help – a trampoline, or grandparents in town, or at least a couple large dogs that can pitch in with the kids.

On that theme of help is rule number 5: Pick one of your middle children and make sure they’re ready to raise themselves. It doesn’t mean they’re less important to you, but somebody has to pull their weight around the house besides the adults. Thankfully, so far 19-month-old Warner has seemed up to the task.

In all of this, of course, is the overwhelming rule to hold the child as tightly as you can. Don’t miss a moment to let her sleep on your chest and breathe in your ear. Because, as some of you know so well, in a couple weeks she’ll be going to college, or at least picking out new school shoes for kindergarten, and I will be realizing that no matter the rules I try to impose, I can only control so much.

Still, there are rules. Rules for fatherhood, for parenthood, for any relationship. Norms. Conventions. Expectations. They govern our life together. Rules in any relationship in any era, and this morning in the parables we meet a father who breaks every single one.

Return of the Prodigal, Jean Louis Forain

“A certain man had two sons,” Jesus says to all of us listening in. And with that, we basically know the rest of the story. We know how this goes. We can already hear the noise of the welcome home party. We can smell the fatted calf. The wayward boy will make it home from the distant land once again. Some of us have even walked that road ourselves. We know it.

So familiar is the tale, we might mistake it for a reassuring fable rather than a parable filled with the shock and surprise of this Kingdom Jesus is trying to tell us about where heroes appear dressed up like Samaritans, savvy barn-building businessmen turn out to be fools, slackers find the same mercy as hardworking over-achievers, and squanderers find their way home to loving arms. We know the story all too well. I guess it doesn’t surprise us any more.

But Jesus’ first listeners probably felt they knew the whole story, too. “A certain man had two sons,” and immediately they could think of the conventions and the patterns they knew from their own experience. It’s a story as timeless as Cane and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and his brother Esau. This is a sibling rivalry tale. Two brothers and between them a father’s inheritance. Every culture has these stories. It’s so archetypal it fits neatly into two acts. Act One: the younger son. Act Two: the elder son.

They knew the story. As they knew the conventions. The norms. They knew the rules.

Rule number 1: Fathers don’t divide the inheritance.

The ancient Jewish writing Sirach – a work of ethical teachings from some 200 years before Jesus – is clear enough: don’t give up the inheritance! Don’t do it. “To son or wife, to brother or friend,” Sirach says, “do not give power over yourself, as long as you live; and do not give your property to another…nay only in the hour of your death distribute your inheritance.” (1)

“Give me my share of the inheritance” the younger son says. Just like that. Phrased as an order. And the father actually does it! The younger son is essentially saying to his father, “Dad, you are better off to me dead.” And the father responds in turn, dividing among his sons his bios the text says. “Bios” from which we take “biology.” The son says, “drop dead.” And the father divides his bios – his very life.

An ancient rabbinical saying gives a list of individuals who should expect no sympathy when they cry out in need. Among those listed is “he who divides his property to his children during his lifetime.” (2)

It’s just not what fathers do.

As with Rule number 2: Fathers don’t release their sons to their own devices. A first century father was responsible – accountable – for all the actions of the household and for the entire economy built around it. Fathers couldn’t afford for irresponsible heirs to squander all that had been passed down and all that had been laid out for them.

This is dramatically underscored in this parable when we see the total failure of the son. He wasn’t prepared for such responsibility, wasting his inheritance on anything that caught his eye; he wasn’t prepared to deal with the sudden famine in the land, and when he finally comes to himself he’s wallowing with pigs. He heads home, motivated mostly by the meal ticket he will find there, rehearsing a speech under his breath as he trudges up the road.

The father never should have let him out.

But if you’re going to let him out, Dad, at least remember rule number 3: Life goes on. The child made his choice. He’s no longer under the concern or protection of the household. So move on. There are fields to cultivate, accounting to do, projects to supervise, others who rely on your sound decision-making.

But as the lost son makes his way home, the story is so utterly clear – his father sees him, “while he was still far off.” Bookkeeping, farming, advanced planning… he hasn’t been doing any of it. This father has been watching for his son.

I was about 7 or 8 years old and riding my bike through the neighborhood, and I was enjoying the newfound freedom that comes when training wheels are left in the garage. I was way down the road from my house feeling so independent and rounding the cul de sac when a screen door slammed, and I heard a woman shout “No!” and next thing I knew a playful but huge German Shepherd had bounded out the door, pounced and knocked me down on the sidewalk. It was the scariest moment of my young life, and I closed my eyes, screamed, covered my face… and it seemed like almost instantly I was up in the air; two hands had just yanked me up. My father had been following me. He seemed like a giant to me. He had some not so churchy things to say to that woman down the street, then we left my bike on the sidewalk and he carried me back home.

Some fathers follow you down the road. They walk behind you to catch you or clean up your mess or snatch you from a situation you can’t manage on your own. But this father in the parable waited. He watched. He sees his son. He recognizes what others might not. When the boy is but a silhouette against the sky, the father sees him. He sees his slowed but still familiar gait before he came into full clarity of view; while he was still far off, his father sees.

But for all that is right and respectable, just don’t break rule number 4, that is, fathers don’t go out to their sons. That’s not what fathers do. Sons come to them, and they better have a well-rehearsed apology speech if they do. Yet this father takes off, hiking up his skirts to run down the path as the screen door slams behind him. Then a rapid staccato of action in the text: moved with compassion, he falls on his neck, and kisses him again and again.

No testing of the son. No questions asked. The father cuts him off mid-speech with a robe, a ring, and a homecoming dance. Lost is found. Dead is alive.

And as the story continues in Act 2, he does the same for his elder son – the son filled with anger and self-righteousness and extracting himself from the family out in the field. But the father, again, pursues one of his sons. This is a father that goes out to both of his children, the parable tells us. He pleads with the elder. He even entreats him with a term of such endearment: “my dear child.”

Understand, that in the ancient world of this parable, by many accounts, that’s just not what fathers do. Fathers were detached, authoritative, conscious of hierarchy, and defensive of honor. This father so defies convention that the parables scholar Bernard Brandon Scott has said by first-century standards he might have been more like a mother than a father. (3)

Fathers don’t give away the inheritance, as though they are dead. Fathers don’t wait at the kitchen window for days at a time. Fathers don’t hike up their skirts. Fathers don’t pursue. Fathers don’t fall down in a mess of emotion.

But this father does.

And Jesus is telling us something about a kingdom such as this – the kind of realm he envisions and seeks to bring about where his followers defy convention and limit, where they discard the weights of expectations they’ve carried for years, and lift their noses from the rulebooks they’ve read and rehearsed over and over in favor of a bold new story of unrestricted love, complete with all its compassionate pursuit, and persistent waiting, and extravagant giving.

As a father to my children I may hope nothing more than for my love to stretch beyond limit, beyond conventions and expectation, that I might be for them a gazer, and a giver, and a runner, and a kisser.

But it’s not really a story about fathers and children. Not only that, at least. This is a story, ultimately, of the kind of love that, if we can receive it and understand it, can make us different people and this world a different place.

For we’ve been following our own rules, too. We have rehearsed and performed them. We have lived our lives with the cues of convention and the limits of our inherited knowledge.

We’ve believed the inheritance is limited and finite. We’ve retreated to the fields when we see the abundance of God enjoyed by another we deem less-deserving. We have missed the music and the joy, and we have evaluated our world and our own lives only by the rules of what is just and fair.

So often we’ve forgotten the one who has been watching for us all along – the one who sees us, really sees us as no one else can. The one who according to every rule we know could have said: you’ve earned this broken life, you deserve to be wallowing and limping, these are the wages of what you’ve done, you’ve brought this on yourself.

And yet God in Christ chooses mercy again and again, defies the expectations in favor of a wide, opening embrace, standing at the center of our lives with a message that “Everything I have is yours. All that I am is still for you.”

How will we respond when that kind of love finds us?

I’ve wondered the same about these two sons of the father. How did they respond? What happened? Did the older brother accept the father’s invitation to come in to the party or remain in the fields feeling as though he’s holding up the honor of the family all by himself? Did the younger brother simply enjoy his father’s gifts, or live beneath the weight of shame, or did the place set for him serve as the start of a renewed life and an awareness that he is so much more than his failures?

We don’t know. Jesus leaves an open ending so that we must finish the story for ourselves. Act One: younger son. Act Two: older son. But we can easily imagine a third act.

Jesus’ early listeners probably would have seen it, too – an inevitable conflict on the horizon. For, one day, the father will be gone. And it will just be two brothers – one proven reckless and one fairly sanctimonious – and between them an inheritance is there to be claimed. You can imagine the rest of that story. You’ve heard the tale before. As old as Cane and Abel. And it has its own rules.

Rule number one: Sons can’t be expected to divide equally between them that which the father leaves behind.

Rule number two: Children wouldn’t believe there was enough of their father’s great resources to go around.

Rule number three: There’s only one way to settle this – collision and conflict are inevitable.

Rule number four: The last one standing claims the prize – in the ancient world, one or both of these children would probably end up dead.

Unless, of course, they throw out the rules – which they might just be able to do if they can remember the one who did the same for them. If only at some point they could remember the compassion of their father, how his love defied all the limits they had known, how willing he was to shed the weight of those expectations to demonstrate his affection for them. Maybe they pause in that moment and remember the one that pursued them. The one that did what most fathers don’t do. Maybe they remember his kiss. His gaze. His bare legs and awkward run as he hiked up his skirts and pursued them.

What would happen if they remembered it? What would happen if we remembered it? The watching, the running, the wide embrace, the unrestricted compassion of the one who pursues us still? It might invite us into a new kind of life. It might even help us imagine and embody a kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

See love like that, it changes the rules.

And thanks be to God.

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1. Sirach 33:19-23.

2. Babylonian Talmud, Baba Mezia 75B.

3. Hear Then the Parable, pp. 99-126