Father's Day | Michael Valliant

Background: I preached last weekend at Christ Church Easton, on Father’s Day Weekend, where the lectionary reading was Matthew 10:24-39. In this reading Jesus tells the disciples that he has come not to bring peace, but a sword, to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother. Possibly an unfortunate reading for Father’s Day. Or maybe not.

“The Spirit of Love”

And then Jesus says, “Happy Father’s Day, everyone!” Amen. The End.

You certainly have to think that the lectionary editors weren’t consulting the secular calendar to put a reading like this on Father’s Day or Mother’s Day. Or maybe they were.

Not all of our earthly parents model God’s love for us. There is a difference between God’s love and priorities and our earthly love and priorities.

I’ve been reading a daybook/devotional every morning by Henri Nouwen titled “Bread for the Journey.” Last week, I came across this entry:

“The Spirit reveals to us not only that God is “Abba, Father” but also that we belong to God as beloved children. The Spirit thus restores in us the relationship from which all other relationships derive their meaning.

“Abba is a very intimate word. The best translation for it is “Daddy.” The word Abba expresses trust, safety, confidence, belonging, and most of all, intimacy. It does not have the connotation of authority, power, and control that the word Father often evokes. On the contrary, Abba implies embracing and nurturing love. This love includes and infinitely transcends all the love that comes to us from our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, spouses, friends, and lovers. It is the gift of the Spirit.”

The love that comes from God, which we have an opportunity to experience, transcends family love, the love of friends, and even love from our spouses. The human love we experience can be complicated, can be lacking, and can even fail us at times. But God’s love doesn’t fail us. It’s an embracing and nurturing love that we can always fall into.

Jesus was and is trying to point us toward and show us God’s love. But he also saw the response he got from those in power, those with status, those who wanted to control or withhold love and use it to their advantage. We all encounter people like that in our lives.

Jesus says, when we encounter those people, we have to make a choice: do we side with them, or do we side with God?

If we are raised in a family that is racist, or homophobic, or with parents that are abusive—siding with our family, continuing those feelings and actions, is being a part of hate, divisiveness, or violence.

When that’s what “peace” looks like, Jesus says:

“I have not come to bring peace, but a sword…
For I have come to set a man against his father,
and a daughter against her mother,”

When what we are handed down, our inheritance, is worldly things that don’t look like love, Jesus says, whoever loves father or mother or son and daughter more than me is not worthy of me.

Imagine being the first person in your family, after generations of racism to say, “No, this is not okay. We are all equal, regardless of skin color or culture. I’m not going to live the way you do.”

How do you think you will be received by your family?

Or to have a conversation that says, “I have this big love of God in my heart, but when it comes to loving someone, I think that love for me looks different than it does for you.”

A number of us were at a program at St. Marks a month or so ago called, “Healing Church Hurts,” and it was absolutely heartbreaking to hear the hate and abuse that people have suffered at the hands of the church, both from clergy and from community, from people who claim to follow Jesus, to love God and their neighbors.

Jesus showed by his life and his example, through the people he spent time with and who he cared for, that love comes first.

As Christians, I think we can all agree that at least part of the reason Jesus became human was because humanity was heading in a bad direction. Jesus showed us a different way to live and different priorities to live by if we want to experience the kingdom of heaven.

Let’s remember that the life Jesus lived, a life of love, a life of caring for the poor, the sick and the marginalized; a life telling the powers-that-be that they were living out of synch with God’s love and that they needed to turn around and get their acts together—this life got Jesus nailed to a cross.

People who are stuck in their ways and invested in their ways of life don’t want to be told they should change. Especially those with power, status, or money on the line.

So Jesus tells his disciples, when you follow me, there is going to be a cost. But when you give up your old life to follow me, you’ll gain a whole new life, one centered in God’s love and priorities.

We have choices to make. Are we willing to make God’s mission of love and justice our top priority, even when it might affect our relationships or our livelihood? Are we willing to use the lens of “What Would Jesus Do?” when we look at our friendships, how we spend our money, and how we treat people we don’t know?

Do our choices reflect our faith? Do our lives proclaim the love of God, both giving and receiving?

Moving in this direction sounds like a huge undertaking. And it is. But in my experience, it doesn’t happen overnight or all at once. It’s a process. It takes time. And we have help.

We have a couple small groups studying J.I. Packer’s book, “Keep in Step with the Spirit.” As Packer introduces what he is up to in the book, he writes that he is particularly interested in:

“The work of the Holy Spirit in the inspiration and interpretation of Scripture, in the regenerating, sanctifying, equipping and empowering of individual Christians, in the gifting and using of God’s people in various forms of service, and in the reviving or renewing of churches and communities.”

That’s the work Jesus was doing.

Sanctification is the process of becoming more Christ-like as we open ourselves to the Holy Spirit’s guidance. Through the Spirit, God meets us in our slow walk and helps transform us. Over the past 10 years, I hope I have been able to live more like Jesus, even though I fail and fall short. I hope I respond differently in situations where I am tempted to lose my temper, lash out in hate, or not treat someone with the dignity that each one of us should receive as children of God.

And if I am being transformed, it’s not through my own efforts—I don’t get a gold star for that—it happens through humility and being open to God’s guidance through the Spirit working in me.

Another way that the Spirit helps us is by giving us people in our lives who encourage and inspire us. Jesus rightly points out the people we need to challenge and not to follow. Thankfully, hopefully, we have family and friends who model the right kind of love for us.

The first of those people, for me, is my father. It’s Father’s Day weekend, so it feels like a good time to share some gratitude.

Henri Nouwen in our opening quote talked about calling God “Abba” as “expressing trust, safety, confidence, belonging, and most of all, intimacy… and implying embracing and nurturing love.”

This week, I remembered an experience I had playing Little League baseball. Our Oxford team was playing against Ruritan in Cordova and I was a runner on third base. The pitcher threw a wild pitch, and I saw my chance, ran for home, and slid safely across home plate.

As I stood up, I saw my coach clapping and I raised my hands to celebrate, only to find my left arm shooting out at an unnatural angle, badly broken. I remember everything going kind of blurry as shock set in.

Oxford Little League team photo. I am third from the left in the back row. Note the fiberglass cast on my left arm. That was after six weeks or so of the plaster cast, which had already come off. This photo was taken well after my season had ended.

One of the things that fathers tend to do these days and those days is to record their kids doing things like playing sports. And my father had researched all the handheld camcorders and had himself a state-of-the-art Betamax video camera.

I have not watched the tape of this happening, but in the live taping of me sliding (safely) into home and standing up with a badly broken arm, as my arm comes up and you hear a collective gasp from the crowd, you can clearly hear my dad say, “Oh…crap!”… though he didn’t say crap, the camera drop, and he rushes to get onto the field to help me, and then to ride in the ambulance with me to the hospital.

This is a pretty good example of my dad as a father figure. Unfortunately for him, I think I could have shown the prodigal son a thing or two. I repeatedly messed up, fell short, and got in trouble. And my dad met me in those situations with love and grace and forgiveness.

Part of the reason that it was easy for me to embrace and understand the idea of God as a loving father is because my dad showed me what that looked like as a loving father. He modeled that for me. And he still does today.

How about one more model. Before I was in elementary school, my father introduced me to a friend of his, Jack Anthony. Jack’s son David was a year older than me, and we spent a good bit of our earliest years together. And the four of us would go to Orioles games. And Jack always seemed like a good guy and loving father, despite wearing a Yankees hat to Orioles games.

Fast forward forty-some years, and I connected again with Jack here at Christ Church, with Jack as one of our Stephen Leaders, helping to lead our Stephen Ministry and giving us all an example of what Christian care-giving looks like. For me, as someone who has not been through Stephen Ministry training, this ministry of friendship, of coming alongside someone who is going through a difficult time, of listening, this ministry is one of the shining stars and models for our community.

Last night, we got to commission Karen Fisher as a new Stephen Minister, and my wife, Holly, who has been a Stephen Minister for a couple years now, as a Stephen Leader. This finishes out the latest class, most of whom were commissioned at the picnic a couple weeks ago, of 10 new Stephen Ministers and two new Stephen Leaders.

I am grateful for these examples of the Holy Spirit “regenerating, sanctifying, equipping and empowering individual Christians, and gifting and using of God’s people in various forms of service, and in the reviving or renewing of churches and communities.”

Every day we have choices to make. Let us choose to follow Jesus, to learn from the examples and encouragement of those living into God’s love and priorities and allow the Spirit to work through each of us.

Being a father and a son, gratitude and all the feels well up on Father’s Day. About four and a half years ago, my father turned 70. We had a surprise shindig for him at the Oxford Community Center, which was the Oxford school where he went for kindergarten through 8th grade. He got roasted by a number of folks, and I spruced up my remarks and published them on Eastern Shore Savvy, a cool online magazine that has since gone away. And along with it, all the articles that were once online.

I missed having that article around in particular, so I found my draft of it, and bring it back here, for Father’s Day, four years later.

I’ll Never Be on Oprah
From Eastern Shore Savvy, January 2014

My father just turned 70 and I think I can beat him in a foot race. We used to race in front of our house in Oxford, maybe 50 yards to the end of the street. I was in high school the first time I managed to beat him.

My father grew up in Oxford when you could have horses and chickens there. He shares his name, Robert, with his father. He went to school in the building that now houses the Oxford Community Center. He met my mom, who is from Towson, Md., through a mutual friend in Ocean City when they were teenagers. He graduated from the University of Virginia in 1966, the first in his family to do so. The Vietnam War was in full swing and the draft was happening. So he enlisted in the Army. The classes that completed basic training before and after him went to Vietnam. My dad was sent to Germany.

After the Army, my father returned to the Eastern Shore. A friend convinced him to think about public accounting as a career. In 1974, when I was two, he joined Beatty, Satchell and Company, a CPA firm, became a partner and has worked there ever since.

I have a lot of classic memories of growing up, father and son stuff. We’ve always had baseball—from learning to play catch in the back yard, to going to Orioles games at Memorial Stadium. To this day I’ve seen more professional sporting events at Baltimore’s now leveled ball park than anywhere else. I remember Dad playing first base on his office softball team, and when I got old enough, and good enough in little league, that’s the position I wanted to play.

During my last year of little league, my dad had taken to filming our games on his Betamax camcorder—he was convinced that Beta would surely outlast VHS—he created priceless audio while filming the last play of my season. Playing in Cordova, I slid safely into home plate on a wild pitch, stood up and raised a badly broken wrist up in the air. You hear a few gasps in the bleachers and then dad saying, “Oh sh**!” right before the tape cuts off. I haven’t watched that tape very often.

As an accountant, my father planned our family trips around CPA conventions—to Disney World, the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tenn., and to Boston. We drove like the Griswolds in the movie “Vacation,” as I wasn’t big on flying, and we stopped to in Charlottesville, Va., to dad’s alma mater, the Natural Bridge and the American icon, South of the Border, where Pedro straddles the line between the Carolinas.

Growing up in our house, Halloween quickly became our favorite holiday, because it meant helping build and being behind the scenes of the Kiwanis Club haunted houses, which were well known and epic to almost anyone that lived in Talbot County between the late 1970s to mid 1980s. I’ve seen my dad as Frankenstein, as a mad scientist, and a swamp creature, among other things.

There are some things a son picks up from his father. When I started drinking beer, I always went for Miller Lite. When watching the Baltimore Ravens, we yell the same words (in the same pitch) at the television when they throw an interception. I learned that real Christmas shopping is done on Christmas Eve, and not a day before.

There are some traits or inclinations that aren’t necessarily passed down. I’ve got more hair than my father does. I don’t eat as many Snyder’s Pretzels. And numbers don’t speak to me the way they do to him. With any father and son I guess there are going to be striking similarities and head-scratching differences and I think as I’ve gotten older I have learned to marvel at both.

A lot of writers get noticed for having troubled upbringings or non-existent parents, and they have become great despite what they’ve had to overcome. Dad has given me the creative disadvantage of raising my sister and me well. He taught us, by the way he lives, the difference between right and wrong. He’s been the consummate provider, working so that my mother didn’t have to, and making sure we could go to college. He has provided the example for me, of how to be a father, and set the bar immeasurably high. I’ll never be on Oprah.

When we get together for holidays or family dinners or kids’ sports games, my father has accepted the mantel of “Granddaddy,” which is what my sister and I called his father. As a father now, I think I feel maybe what he must have felt then, surrounded by your parents and your children. I’m not sure it gets any better than that.