Sermon

INTRODUCTION: The history of “Fathers’ Day” is simple. It goes like this: In 1909, a woman was listening to a Mothers’ Day sermon. It inspired her to want to have a special day dedicated to her widowed father. So in tandem with her five sisters and brothers, she held the first Fathers’ Day celebration, June 19, 1910, the birthday of her father.

The idea caught on and in 1924, President Calvin Coolidge joined in support of the idea. Two years later, a National Fathers’ Day Committee was formed in New York City. Thirty years later, a Joint Resolution of Congress gave recognition to Fathers’ Day. Sixteen years after that, in 1972, President Richard Nixon established the third Sunday of June as a permanent national observance day of Fathers’ Day. So if it will make you feel any better, June 17^th, the third Sunday of June 2007, is a gift from the late President Richard Nixon.

Here’s even more uplifting information for fathers: Recently, SharedBook, which is a company that turns digital pictures into book form, conducted a survey of the picture-taking habits of American families. Guess who was in more family pictures than any other: Even though it’s Father’s Day, I have to tell you the truth – mothers appear more frequently in family shots than any other. So who’s next? The daughter! Okay. Who was next? The son. So next will be the father, right? Nope! The family dog showed up more than the father.

One answer to why the father might be the one absent the most from the pictures is that he’s the one taking the pictures. But Clyde Haberman, a writer for the New York Times, theorized that there’s more to it than that. He believes that one reason fathers are significantly absent from photos is because the father is often absent, period. And while traditional roles may be bending somewhat, and fathers may be sharing more household responsibilities, Mom is still the mom…the nurturer. That role has not disappeared. And too many times, fathers are still absent.

As I reflected on these data, I thought about my own time as a young father, and how for many years I was absent. There was a time when I traveled every month to London. I spent more than six weeks in Africa and the Middle East while my wife was pregnant. For six months I traveled every Tuesday through Thursday to Denver. And for a year and a half, I was in Los Angeles, Monday through Thursday. Once a month in Atlanta for two years.

At the time, I explained to myself that it was my job, consulting and working with nonprofit organizations and the General Boards of the United Methodist Church. And it was. But as I reflect back on it, it’s not necessarily the absences that hit me as much as wondering how present I was when I was home.

My daughter, Laura, sent me a quote recently that I found hauntingly striking. It states: "It's okay to be gone from home…but when we're home, we can't be gone." That’s really a matter of being fully present, or as Thich Nhat Hahn reminded us last week, to be mindful – mindful of the gift of life we’ve been given…mindful of the gift of life that others represent.

I know many of us have felt deeply for Lorrie Vezineau, whose 22-year-old granddaughter Helen has been told that additional transplants are not a recourse. A courageous physical path that started at age two has now become an extended waiting period, with Hospice providing palliative care. I think we would all say that no one should be facing such situations at 22. But neither at 32, or 42. And when it’s you or I, neither is 52, 62, 72, 82, or 92.

But we don’t make the decisions about when life begins, nor do we make the decisions about when it ends. But we do have a lot to say about how it’s lived in between. About the moments that life presents…how we will be present for each one. "It's okay to be gone from home…but when we're home, we can't be gone."

So this Sunday says to all fathers and daughters and sons of fathers – grandfathers, and great-grandfathers – be present in the moment, not tomorrow nor the past, but the now.

But since this is not a forum for fathers, but a congregation of faith, which is filled with both mothers and fathers, and daughters and sons of fathers, here’s an interesting question: If moms are the glue that hold most families together, and fathers have a reputation of being excessively absent, then why is it that the majority of people still think of God as “Father” instead of as “Mother?” Though there has been a significant effort to correct the tendency always to think of God in masculine terms, the truth is that old habits die hard. So is God an absentee father? How should we think of God?

The late Dr. John MacQuarrie, a distinguished professor who taught both here at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and at Oxford University in England, had this to say about the divine equation:

First, the God in which he believed was not a feminine or masculine being; rather, God was “being itself.” This is a concept that the German philosopher Martin Heidegger developed in the first half of the 20^th century. God is not one being alongside other beings. God is not a super being compared to other un-super beings. No, God is the very essence of being itself. To be is to be part of being. We are all part of the divine.

Second, all language about God is symbolic, and therefore, not to be taken literally. Just to be sure we’re all on the same page, let’s discuss “symbolic” for a moment. When I say the word, “lectern,” the sound “lectern” is a symbol for this lectern, and if I write the letters “l-e-c-t-e-r-n,” they too are symbols that we have agreed among us will “stand for” or “represent” what we mean by this wooden structure here, which I’m using to put my sermon typescript on – a lectern. We’re engaging in “symbolic communication.”

Thirdly – and this is an important nuance – Dr. MacQuarrie insists that although religious language, or language about God, is symbolic, that does not mean it should not be taken seriously. Why? Because what separates believers from nonbelievers is the difference we have in our attitudes towards the creation and existence. “Faith’s name for reality,” he says, “is God.” And as persons of faith, we believe that reality is good and existence is good.

That means then that God is not father or mother, not an “it,” nor a thing. Rather, the encompassing mystery of our existence which extends above us and below us, surrounds and envelops us all the live long day of our lives is the reality before which we all stand. And what do we call that reality? That’s up to us, but many persons of faith use the symbol “God.”

It’s important to note this distinction. When I say the symbol “lectern,” we all agree there is this for-real lectern positioned here in plain view. But if I were to say “jobberwocks are inflabulated,” even though I would be using the sounds of symbolic communication, I would not be in fact communicating symbolically because “jobberwocks” is a made up sound and so is “inflabulated.” For “jobberwock” to be part of communicating effectively requires that we all agree that “jobberwock” refers to something specifically understood and agreed upon by each of us – we know what it symbolizes and refers to.

The same is true when we use the word, “god.” That’s why at All Faiths, we don’t say that all language about God is symbolic – because we don’t agree on what the word “god” refers to or stands for. Rather, we say all language about God is poetic…it poetically and like an artist attempts to describe the Mystery of the reality before which we stand and that can never be described. That’s why I’m so drawn to modern art. It paints that which eyes do not see, nor ears hear, no lips describe.

The same in theology: That doesn’t mean religious language should not be taken seriously, rather, it is the language of affirmation rather than description. In the same way that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so religious language about reality is a personal statement about how we perceive our place as a part of the Whole – not descriptive of the Whole itself.

Now if you noted the initial title for today’s sermon as it appears in the order of service, it was to focus on Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross. You, like Sarah, our Office Manager, might be wondering how do Clara Barton and the American Red Cross relate in any way to Father’s Day? At least, I think that was the gist of her call, when she was preparing the Saturday Worship Page ad for the News-Press.

So over the phone, we changed the title of the sermon going in the paper and put in something about Father’s Day. Which meant when I sat down to write this sermon yesterday, all my planning and reading regarding Clara Barton seemed lost.

Until I realized – and this is monumental – Clara Barton had a father! And guess what? He and his wife helped to found the First Universalist Church of Oxford, Massachusetts. Clara Barton was raised in that church, and still late in life, she continued confessing that she was a Universalist. She remembered the church as austere, with tall box pews and high narrow seats, where the faith was "hammered out" in "an incongruous winter atmosphere." I’m not sure what that meant, but it was intriguing.

Barton's father and mother were abolitionists – that meant they were in favor of abolishing slavery. Clara's father, Stephen Barton, was a farmer and horse breeder, a captain in the Revolutionary Army, and a state legislator.

When Clara's father was dying, he gave her advice that she would later recall in this way:

"As a patriot, he had me serve my country with all I had, even with my life if need be; as the daughter of an accepted Mason, he had me seek and comfort the afflicted everywhere; and as a Christian he charged me to honor God and love humankind."

Clara Barton did that throughout her long life. She was born in 1821 and died in 1912 at the age of 91. In her long and productive life, she taught school for 15 years, and clerked in the U.S. Patent Office before the outbreak of the Civil War. She then became a part of the United States Sanitary Commission, which attempted to bring some basic sanitation to battlefield hospitals. She established a service of supplies for soldiers, nursed in army camps and during battles, and because of her heroics was called the “Angel of the Battlefield.”

Near the Civil War’s end, in 1865, President Abraham Lincoln appointed her to search for missing prisoners. The records she compiled also served to identify thousands of the Union soldiers held by the Confederacy, who died at Andersonville Prison near Americus, Georgia.

In 1870, she was in Europe attending a conference at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. She immediately went to work behind the German lines for the International Red Cross.

She then returned to the United States in 1873 and in 1881 organized the American National Red Cross, which she led until 1904. She also labored successfully to obtain the President’s signature to the Geneva Treaty outlining the care of prisoners of war. (Can you imagine her response to this administration’s treatment of its prisoners, or to our Attorney General, who called its provisions, “quaint”?)

So what lesson can we learn from the life of Clara Barton, or for that matter, her father? It’s this:

No matter what our occupation is – teacher, waitstaff, physician, politician – the point of being human is to care for other persons. We care in many different ways, but we do not have the option of not caring. As people of faith, we know that and say that. We are born with that responsibility to care for others.

One of my tasks as minister is to hold that responsibility up for us, to inspire us to do more, to find ways to be creative about it. I’ve taken upon myself week after next, to attend a summer institute in Jackson, Mississippi, sponsored by Tougaloo College, a historically Black college founded in 1859 by New York Quakers. The theme is community participation…how we can join together in doing good one for the other, in our community, and world.

Here at All Faiths in our brief six years, we’ve helped the poor, clothed the abused, supported equality for persons of same-sex orientation, fought for the rights of agricultural workers, supported Ruth Cooper/Lee Mental Health, stood by victims of AIDS, rallied for peace, worked to diminish racism, pushed caring for our environment, paraded for abortion rights, and all the while continued building a community of caring and supportive persons of all flavors and brands of religion. Maybe our cause is all kinds of causes. Or maybe there’s another way to focus who we are and how we express that through our multiple causes.

I’m intrigued by all the possibilities. For certain, all of us – fathers, daughters, and sons of fathers – Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross is an example for each of us.

Gary Chapman’s written several books about the five languages of love. In brief, he says every person has one or two of those five languages, which are natural to who they are. Some times we give and receive love in the same ways. Sometimes the person to whom we give love does not always have the same love language as we. Which means we have to work at relationships, work at the different ways of expressing our love one for the other. So try evaluating how you like to give and receive love…your love language. Which of the five is more you? Chapman says:

Those are the five “languages of love.” And just like the languages we speak, we have to commit to being students of our spouse, our partner, the love of our life, and how to love them in that language. That’s especially so for fathers. Happy Father's Day.

[1] Given June 17, 2007, “Father’s Day,” as the third Sunday of Unitarian Summer 2007, at All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, Ft. Myers, Florida, meeting at the Crestwell School, 1901 Park Meadows, Ft. Myers, FL, by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister.