Sermons from the Pulpit

Preached to Exeter Congregational United Church of Christ on the fourth Sunday after Pentecost, June 20, 1999, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.

Genesis 21:8-21; Romans 6:3-4,9-11; Matthew 10:34-39

Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
-Matthew 10:37

     Hard words, and even harder when read by a daughter on Father’s Day.

     Our family doesn’t really celebrate the Hallmark Holidays, so it was a surprise when one of my three daughters gave me a Father’s Day present this year. It’s a short story entitled "A Father’s Story" by André Dubus, who died recently. She handed it to me about a month ago and told me it would be my sermon topic today. So I’m just obeying orders here, being a good father.

     The thing is, I haven’t been such a great father. I messed it up at any number of points. I won’t bother you with the details, but any of my kids could readily supply a long list of them. And that’s precisely why this short story really grabbed me. I wish I had time to read the whole thing now. You might want to read it yourself.

     The voice telling the story is a man named Luke who owns and operates a riding stable near here. His wife left him years ago and took the kids with her. He is a good Catholic and goes to early Mass every day. His best friend is his priest, Father Paul. His four sons are all grown up and married now, and his one daughter, Jennifer, is practically grown up but still comes to stay with him sometimes. His life has a lot of sadness in it, and loneliness, but he has adjusted fairly well.

     One summer night, when Jennifer is staying with him, she goes out to a movie with a couple of old schoolmates. Afterwards they buy a couple of six-packs and drive to the beach and watch the waves roll in while they drink them. So they’ve all had four beers apiece and the empties are clinking around on the floor of the passenger side when Jennifer drives the others home, then starts home herself on a winding country road in the middle of the night, listening to a cassette on the tape deck, singing along with it, patting the beat on the steering wheel.

     She crests a hill and there’s someone walking in the road. She swerves and goes for the brake but hits him before her foot reaches it. She sees him in the air, arms and legs flying out of her headlights into the dark. She puts her foot back on the accelerator and races home and wakes her father and tells him.

     Luke gets up and holds her and sits with her while she cries, then he gets in his pickup and drives to where it happened. He searches in the brush on both sides of the road until he finds a young man. He feels his wrist and his neck, thinks for a moment there may be a faint pulse but then there isn’t. He kneels and prays for the peace of the man’s soul, then goes home and tells Jennifer he’s dead.

     He goes out to the garage and looks at the damage to the front end of her car, the headlight and the fender, and he takes all the beer bottles and throws them away. She looks him full in the face and says to him, "I thought you’d call the police," and she holds on to him so tight it pulls him off balance.

     He tells her to go to bed, and he sits up the rest of the night listening to opera until the dawn comes with rain. Then he takes the keys from her purse and gets in her car and drives to town in time for early Mass, and aims the damaged headlight at a tall pine tree next to the church and shifts into third and puts his foot on the gas and crashes. He turns off the ignition and sits in the car until Father Paul opens the door. He tells him he fainted at the wheel, but he doesn’t want to lie down or see a doctor, he wants Communion.

     And he never confesses to anyone but God, but he has frequent conversations with God, and the story ends with this one. He says to God, "I would do it again. For when she knocked on my door, then called me, she woke what had flowed dormant in my blood since her birth, so that what rose from the bed was not a stable owner or a Catholic or any other Luke I had lived with for a long time, but the father of a girl."

     And God says, "I’m a Father too." And Luke answers, "Yes, but You are the Father of a Son, and your Son pleaded for you to remove the cup of his suffering, and you wouldn’t. And if one of my sons had come to me that night, I would have phoned the police and told them to meet us with an ambulance at the top of the hill."

     And God says, "Why? Do you love them less?" And Luke tells God, "No, it’s not that I love them less, but that I could bear the pain of watching and knowing my sons’ pain; could bear it with pride as they took the whip and the nails. But You, God, never had a daughter, and, if You had, You could not have borne her passion."

     "So," God says, "you love her more than you love Me." And Luke only says, "I love her more than I love truth." To which God answers, "Then you love in weakness." And Luke says, "Just as You love me." And he gets the last word.

     In this story from Genesis that makes us think of all the refugees in our world right now, Hagar says, "Do not let me look upon the death of the child." She doesn’t know God is with Ishmael and has no intention of letting him die. Sarah has no feeling for the boy at all, except jealousy, and Abraham, while grieved, is willing to abandon him if God says it’s OK. Abraham puts God ahead of his own fatherly feelings and responsibilities, and we are not at all sure we like this about Abraham. He once did the same thing with his son by Sarah, Isaac, remember? He was all ready to make a burnt offering of the boy if God wanted him to, and God almost let him do it. We didn’t like him for that either.

     And we don’t much like God, or Jesus, for putting any father or mother, son or daughter to such a choice, either. Today we baptize two daughters into Christ’s church, and pray that neither they nor their parents will ever, ever face such a choice, knowing that if they must, we will be rooting for them to put flesh and blood first and God second.

     Yet we claim that in the water of baptism we and our children die to sin and rise in newness of life to God! What a terrifying thing it is to put one’s life in God’s hands. We do not and cannot know what God may require of us down the road. God is the author of all these covenants of kinship that so delight and bedevil us, and God can require us to subordinate them to some other value which we may not even see. Then righteousness becomes cruelty, sin becomes kindness, and faith becomes a lifelong conversation and communion full of puzzlement and probing and irony, a loving standoff between the Creator and us creatures who will never quite understand or believe that sometimes love can be an even greater evil than indifference.

     What would it take for us to feel as safe in God’s hands as God says we are?

Amen