Father's Day

History
Apparently, the first Father's Day was held in Spokane, Washington on June 19, 1908.  It was initiated by a man's daughter, Sonora Smart Dodd.  Her mother had died and she had been raised by her loving father.  While listening to a sermon on Mother's Day, she had the idea of honoring her Father who had given so much to her.  The idea spread to Virginia and then Woodrow Wilson declared it a national holiday.  Eventually, Congress got around to legislating it as the 3rd Sunday in June and to date we're stuck with it.

The Sad State of Affairs
Father's Day takes on a near oxymoronic quality in a nation where the abortion debate leaves fathers invisible in every discussion and where one recent national estimate found 30% of fathers owe back child support of an amount averaging $7,705(1). Add to this the vast numbers of people who have lost their fathers to death, had their fathers abandon them or abuse them, the fathers incarcerated, or fathers not even aware of their offspring and it would seem that more fathers are missing than are around to be honored on the day.  I believe every father has done the best they can with the cards they were dealt, and herein I acknowledge that the misfortune of the deal may well have left awful wreckage in the wake, wreckage that often plays forward into the next generation.

A Way Forward
If you are one of the many without a father, what does Father's Day mean?  How does that Father in Heaven theological imagery ring on your soul?  This is a Christian theological blog.  How can/do we respond as the Church on Father's Day knowing full well that a sizable chunk of our congregations have fathers who are missing in one way or another?  Too many churches gloss over the absence or abysmal records and "celebrate" fathers with token gifts as though all dads are "the best.".  It leaves many feeling irritated by the sham on top of the reminders of loneliness, abandonment, and emptiness.

Instead of playing into the social charade, I'd propose the possibility that the substance of healing with our fathers lies in the direction of discovering forgiveness.  I don't mean shallow lip service forgiveness. I mean the much deeper root of forgiveness that is entwined with our spiritual lives where rests a deep understanding about the nature of human brokenness.  To grasp this forgiveness one must go farther back in time than the relatively short span of our own disappointments, hurt, grief, or absence.  It goes back further than the life of our fathers... back to a time when God's love was complete and God's hope for human potential was greater than humanity has proven itself capable of living into. The Biblical witness portrays brokenness entering into the picture and like a long string of dominos tipping into one another, brokenness begat brokenness begat brokenness.  There are only two things that I can imagine breaking the fall of the dominos. One is forgiving the failings of our fathers begotten from the failings of their pasts.  The second is a firm resolve to claim and live out a set of healthy actions.  These include:

• gracing ourselves with prayer,
• taking regular deep soaks in God's Original Blessing & Mystery,
• working to understand our family dynamics and systems and appropriately set safe boundaries while re-interpreting what we may have gotten wrong or misunderstood,
• naming and processing our emotions with others who have understanding ears to hear, and
• focused attention on our spiritual journey to live into the command to love one another while seeking the original hope God instilled into life.

All kinds of events in life can separate us from those we love (or once loved) - illness, death, alcoholism & multiple other addictions, shame, sexual abuse, mental illness...the list defies counting the ways.  But, we live in the faith and knowledge that the love Jesus demonstrated is the best course on which to align our life compass.

For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor heavenly rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. -- Romans 8:38-39

Let's reset our compasses and begin building a future in the New Spirit with an end to family dynamics that hurt and lessen us all. 
   


(1) Citation: Turner, Kimberly J.; Waller, Maureen R. “Indebted Relationships: Child Support Arrears and Nonresident Fathers’ Involvement With Children," Journal of Marriage and Family, February 2017. doi:10.1111/jomf.12361.

Palm Sunday 2019 Sermon

“The Gullible Crowd”                                                                                                 Palm Sunday 2019

Luke 19:28-40                                                                                                          St. Luke’s Episcopal

Palm Sunday... it’s traditionally treated with such jovial triviality. I even had a dear friend refer to it this week as the fun and games before the serious stuff that comes later in the week. But I sincerely believe that Palm Sunday is Jesus’ and the Gospel writer’s last gasp living summary message to us all before the inevitability of coming events in Holy Week swallow us – swallows us in the eventuality of evil despair inherent in all human fear and the human purposeful destruction of God’s will & purpose. The question facing us this Palm Sunday, is the same question that has always faced the church and humanity every Palm Sunday – namely: Do we idly wait for a magnificent do-gooder Monarch to rescue us or do we roll up our sleeves and set about the hard Holy task of building a world of love and healing? That, my friends, is the stark reality Jesus rides into Jerusalem carrying that first Palm Sunday. Sadly, because the maturity that is required to build a world materiality that is rooted in the deepest Jesus spirituality is so beyond the lazy banality of the typical human soul the answer to Jesus’ challenge has gotten consumed in the partying fluff of waving palm branches while secretly and ignorantly advocating: “Crucify Him.”

Perhaps I’m being overly, and I know sacrilegiously, harsh – “Hey Mark, WHERE is your party spirit, yer killing it here.”  But this Palm Sunday I trust I am speaking to serious adults not a bunch drunken freshman at a frat party. Because the stakes are too high, and the suffering too great for any mature adults to be eating, drinking, and making merry right now.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer for my entire adult Christian life has weighed heavily on my spirit. There is nary a month that goes by that in my prayer and meditation I don’t push out against The Veil – you know that veil – the one between this life and the one we only struggle to imagine – push against the veil hoping to touch Bonhoeffer’s shoulder, his arm, his hand trying hard to hear his voice or receive just a look from him.  In his book The Cost of Discipleship, he explicitly lays out the stakes of a Church & people who are bent on living out, what he calls, “cheap grace.” His execution at the concentration camp he spent the last years of his life in was testimony to how the vast number of people still silently let the crucifixion of Love happen while giving lip service to “Hosanna in the Highest.”

Let me lay out the meaning Of the statement Jesus was making on that colt 2000 years ago. Human beings are fundamentally lazy. I know because I frequently fall into it. My immaturity continues to haunt nearly everything I do. I want someone else to do the hard work for me. I look for a Messiah to rescue me. I can’t tell you how often I’ve howled at the full moon for Jesus to come and rapture me into heaven. Who of us can’t identify with “Calgon Take Me Away!”? So, the crowd has been living, LANGUISHING under the sadistic iron fist of Roman rule. The ONLY ones doing well are the toadies of the Roman Emperor - doing the Emperor’s bidding – Pharisees/Saduccees scared to death their own shadows might rock the cushy boat they’ve constructed for themselves. So they strive hard to keep the masses calm, cool and imbibed with hopes of a Messiah who will come and sweep the Romans away with his terrible swift sword. A conquering Messiah of this stature would come to the seat of power riding on a grand huge stallion breathing fire.  It’s true.

Jesus knew the seat of power in Judaism was Jerusalem. He had great faith in the Jewish people, but they were being duped. To affect a change he had to go there. He had become so acclaimed he could go nowhere without a mass of people in tow. He comes to Jerusalem on a colt. A wee donkey by some tellings. All 4 gospel writers are uncharacteristically unified on this point: it WAS a colt. Yet the gullible mob – under the influence of the snitches, the fakers, the fawners after the crumbs of the powerful – are whipped up to frenzy to believe AND WANTED their superhero. To believe this was their guy- the king awaited one, the defender, rescuer, and Savior. The celebration in anticipation was exuberant!  BUT he was on a colt. No sword. No army on chariots & in armor. A cloak and empty hands: proof positive this was no Messiah. And this dangerous public display of obsession with the “King of the Jews” was a public act of sedition against Rome itself. It would bring real horses and real swords falling upon all the wealth & power the Jewish hierarchy had worked so hard to carve out for themselves. This FAKE must die.

The message Jesus was sending that day was his last public statement: “This is NOT about me and what I can do. I’m not your Savior. I’m not going to do the growing up work that you all need to be doing for yourselves. I’ve been modeling and showing you the way. The way to salvation is through your love of God and of your love of neighbor. You must be thinking all the time of the other- healing, sheltering, clothing, feeding. Basic needs, basic thoughtfulness, basic caring for everyone around you.  Therein, IS YOUR SALVATION.

Power and wealth are frightened to death by one force - the rising of a mass action of compassion, hope, and mass sharing and defense of all - and by all I mean all- not just human mind you (though we aren’t even doing a good job with just humans), but I mean defense of all creation that gives and sustains life for the entire planet; that gives us the very air we breathe and water we drink. Those are fundamental to all life on this planet and they cannot and should not be for sale by the ones who have wealth or power! Any more than they should control who we love or who we feed or who we clothe.

 
Do you see? Do you hear? Do you feel? A humble man on a burro rides into a seat of power with open hands offering love as the example for all of us to do the same. And the forces of greed, violence, and graft - like they have historically done every damned time throughout the ages inside the Church and outside have done the same damned thing- they’ve done their best to crucify Love.

Palm Sunday is not a party or a celebration. It is a call to roll up your sleeves and take Love to the masses. It is the call to pry open tight little fists grasping to collect more & more for me and mine and open them up and share it with the whole world- to give our all and trust in a God capable of spinning out galaxies, that we’ll (TOGETHER) have enough for everyone. That is called faith. That is what forces of evil call “socialism.” That is what Jesus called Love.

Love, our love broken and poured out is what saves us. Fight the internal lazy immature temptation to hole up dig in and hope for a rescuer to come on mighty steed to save you. Look. Listen, Feel the power of Christian faith and community in action. Trust in it!  Then, pour your heart and mind and hands into the task of facing down the rich & powerful with your own style of little colt and open hands.

Monday the First Week of Lent

Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.  -- Matthew 25:46

This is verse is part of the larger passage (Matt. 25: 31-46) of separating sheep from goats and emphasizing that the way we treat the less fortunate is the way we treat Jesus.  It has frequently shown up in various ways on social media as a not-so-subtle message that U.S. border policies are not measuring up to the standard. While that is sure to set up a debate steeped in political wrangling, there are a couple of points that should be considered.  

First, in Jesus day the weight of caring for the hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick, or in prison was not a task the government(s) felt any compunction to handle.  So, the government's approach should come as no surprise.  The Realm of God doesn't depend on government spending or taxation to bring it about.  Perhaps some of the insensitivity and even hostility directed at the less fortunate is a direct result of the Church's surrender of it's compassionate servant power to secular governmental welfare? 

Second, as the environment continues its downward spiral through lack of international cooperation the world will know millions more in all of the less fortunate categories.  Homes are already being lost to wildfires, hurricanes, rising seas. As this is being written, it's not lost on me how the anxiety level rises just mentioning it all.

What can we do?  This most important principle to hang onto as spiritual sojourners is just do your best. God knows our puniness and does not expect us to be Saviors or even be successful.  Just do your best.  Sweep your own porch - offer care where you can in whatever way(s) you feel drawn and called to plug into the great project of "Making A Difference."  There are tens of thousands of ways that we each can bring an uplifting, kinder, gentler presence to the throngs around us.  Nearly everyone has been, is, or will be in need of such a presence. Offering it, in the best way you can, is the essence of community.  It will be the world-wide community that stands in the way of Jesus and brings hope to all.

Questions for journaling or discussion:

1. When did you feel in a "less fortunate" space?  Did a community of people surround you, or did you pull yourself out of it?
2. What situation or who were you a friend to this week?
3. An early possible beginning point is always praying.  Who might you invite to pray with you to hear the call in addressing any needs you know about?

Prayer:
Great Spirit of grace and influence, instill within us the heart for those less fortunate, and if we are the ones in need shower us with abounding love from others.  Amen.