National holidays like Father’s
Day are too preachy for this preacher.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s important to
honor parents. Scripture says that honoring parents is the first commandment
that has a promise attached to it—“that it may go well with you and that you
may enjoy long life on the earth."
Honoring parents is not a bad idea for
Mom and Dad’s sake, either.
I usually have to fly to Texas right in
the middle of cherry season, but this year my wife and daughters climbed up on
the ladders and started picking cherries for me. They picked and pitted and bagged and froze
my favorite fruit in order to honor me with cherries on Father’s Day. I was
touched.
But
our national celebrations of parenthood can get on my nerves because in the
pews every Father’s Day sit any number of children who do not know who their
Daddy is. Two pews down sits a man who ran
away from his abusive father, whom he still regards as dangerous. On the other side of the sanctuary sit
children whose hearts ache because their loving Dad has died prematurely. Their wounds are not rawer than the father
who has cried through his prayers every night for a decade wondering where he
went wrong with his kids.
These
people are too bereaved for the sentimentality of Father’s Day.
This article is for them.
God would have them celebrate Advent,
which assures us of the coming future that will heal all wounds. Christmas speaks of a God who has come as an
infant into a world of fatherless infanticide. By Good Friday we learn that there is nothing
he will not bear. By Easter and Pentecost we are declaring with him that death
and failure are undone by the loving power that has come to dwell in our midst.
The church calendar has what Father’s Day
lacks—dignity for the childless--adoption for the orphaned. The secular calendar preaches about being
thankful, but it does not offer a Father to the fatherless nor does it offer eternal
life as the ground for true hope.
Amen
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