Fathering Well

A Sermon Preached on Fathers' Day

June 18, 2006

At Hanover Street Presbyterian Church

By Pastor Thomas C. Davis

Texts:

1 Corinthians 4: 14-21

I am not writing this to make you ashamed, but to admonish you as my beloved children.  For though you might have ten thousand guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers.  Indeed, in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel.  I appeal to you, then, be imitators of me.  For this reason I sent you Timothy, who is my beloved and faithful child in the Lord, to remind you of my ways in Christ Jesus, as I teach them everywhere in every church.  But some of you, thinking that I am not coming to you, have become arrogant.  But I will come to you soon, if the Lord wills, and I will find out not the talk of these arrogant people but their power.  For the kingdom of God depends not on talk but on power.  What would you prefer?  Am I to come to you with a stick, or with love in a spirit of gentleness?

Ephesians 6: 1-4

Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.

"Honor your father and mother"?this is the first commandment with a promise: "so that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth."  And, fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

Sermon Text

Two passages seemed appropriate for this Fathers' Day sermon.  The first is the oft-quoted one from Ephesians:  "Honor your father and your mother, " which is one of the Hebrews' ten commandments.  Father and mother refer here to your birth parents.  In the passage from the letter to the Corinthians, Paul uses "father" in a broader way.  He says that he became to them a "father in the gospel."  He was clearly speaking metaphorically.  He was not talking about fathering as begetting, but rather, fathering as guiding.  It's also clear that Paul believed he was a good father in that metaphorical sense.  He believed he had a God-given power to guide others.  He wasn't at all shy about offering himself as a moral and spiritual example to the churches he founded.  Often in his letters he wrote:  Do as I do.  Follow my example.  He did not lead this way to inflate his own power, but rather, to make the way of Jesus more readily accessible. 

You see, as we grow up, we learn to do right by following the example of a moral guide, not by doing complicated moral reasoning.  We become moral by following a person.  Paul knew that.  He was a practical leader.  So, he wrote to his "children," that is, the members of the churches he had established:  Look to me, people.  I am doing my best to follow Jesus.  I promise to do my best to reflect for you what it means to live in his spirit.  Therefore, do as I do.  Follow me.

Now, Paul may seem brash to you.  You may think:  How dare he lift himself up as a reflection of Jesus?  Who does he think he is, a second incarnation?  I have had such thoughts myself.  Sometimes Paul does sound cocky to me.  But, I also realize that leaders may err in the opposite direction, by failing to own the moral authority they could and should be exercising for the sake of their communities.  There is such a thing as false humility, and falseness doesn't do anybody any good.

All of us are fallible.  We don't always set a good example for others.  Paul was no different.  But although he made some mistakes, this did not dissuade him from exercising moral authority, which is a necessary part of fathering well.  His children, that is, the members of the churches he started, undoubtedly benefited from Paul's confident, and strong leadership.

Now, let's look a bit closer at Paul's remarks about fathering.  What is involved in fathering well?  Paul had a lot to do, keeping the churches he had planted on an even keel.  There was bickering, infighting, and sometimes Paul himself was attacked.  The church in Corinth especially gave him headaches.  This morning's excerpt from his letter to that church reveals that some people there were angry at him because he hadn't visited them for a long while.  So, Paul dispatched his young protégé, Timothy, in order to give them an example to follow.  But Timothy didn't carry the same gravitas as Paul.  So, Paul writes that he hopes to visit them soon, and warns that he will not be fooled by mere talk when he gets there.  He will find out what kind of power the complainers are using, he says. 

The last thing he writes about in this passage is a "spirit of gentleness."  He suggests that the complainers are the kind of people who expect a community's squabbles to be settled by force.  But Paul doesn't want to settle the problems at Corinth that way, because that wouldn't be in accord with the spirit of Jesus.  The spirit of Jesus was a gentle spirit, not a coercive one.  Paul skillfully urges the troublemakers to understand that.  He gives them the benefit of the doubt and assumes that they will understand it.  "Would you have me come to you with a stick," he asks, or "with a spirit of gentleness?"  The answer should be obvious to anyone who is living in the spirit of Jesus.  Rather than scold the troublemakers, Paul appeals to their "better angels," as Abraham Lincoln once put it.  This is the gentle way to lead:  appealing to the best in people. 

Appealing to the best in people, and exercising gentle persuasion-- that is a major piece of fathering well.  Would that more fathers understood that.  Would that mine had, earlier than he did.  My father was not fathered well you see, and so, he had a hard time learning not to carry a big stick.  Remember, I mentioned earlier that the way children learn how to do right is by following a personal example.  Well, his father wasn't much of an example, so my father had to figure out on his own how to be a good father, and that took him a while.  He had some good instincts, but nevertheless, it took him a while.

 My father taught me to sail when I was thirteen.  I spent more time with him then than any other time in my life, and they were very good years.  When we were out on the Delaware River, he would sternly admonish me that a captain must be obeyed.  His every command must be obeyed without question, and promptly; otherwise the safety of the ship may be in jeopardy.  Subliminally I was working out that this was my father's philosophy about fathering.  Fathers should be obeyed, like captains.  That was better for the whole crew, that is, the family.  Fathers' wills should not be questioned.  This was the subtext of my dad's maritime discipline. 

Lots of patriarchal societies still work that way.  And several worldwide religions still support that kind of fathering.  But, as I went to Sunday school and learned about Jesus, I was also subliminally working out that this was not the way Jesus led people; no, not at all!  Jesus didn't coerce.  Jesus dealt with people in a gentle way, appealing to the best in them, and challenging them to treat others likewise; in other words, teaching them by example not to force their authority upon others, but rather, persuading others through kindness and gentleness. 

For the longest time I didn't know enough about my own needs to realize that I wanted a father like that.  I just figured that the kind of fathering my dad was giving me was standard.  In the meantime, that is, until he finally got the knack of it, I was just grateful to have a father.  That in itself is something very precious, even if your dad still has a lot to learn.

The way I was fathered affected the way I have fathered, no doubt.  My sons have suffered from that, and for that, I'm sorry.  Just as I have come to understand my father's difficulty in fathering well, so I hope that they have already understood and forgiven my shortcomings of the same variety.  Healing happens in a family when kin cut each other some slack, as they come to realize that people don't generally behave maliciously, but carry on pretty much as best they know how.

This has not been an easy subject for me to preach about.  And I realize that although I have tried to be gentle, I may have touched a raw place in you.  I haven't meant to wound, but as usual, have tried to tell the truth in love.  I know that some of you haven't had a father in your life.  That's a sadness.  There are many sadnesses and shortcomings around the subject of fathering in our society.  You see, things still run pretty much according to the macho myth that might makes right, and that coercion pays dividends, and that fathers ought to rule with a stern, impassive hand to prepare their children for survival in a world like that.  Many families run that way, and our nation certainly does.  But I am hopeful that if we keep the example of Jesus ever before us, we may yet get the knack of fathering (and mothering) well.  We will honor all fathers and their children this day by inclining our souls in that direction.  May the holy spirit of Jesus keep us headed that way.  Amen!