Readings:
Sermon:
Happy Father’s day! Hello, my name is Roger Latham and I’m the Vicar of Great Malvern Priory. Now, I confess that I tend to be rather cynical about commemorative days: being always suspicious that they are the invention of unscrupulous greetings card manufacturers who want to sell me stuff. So I was surprised and pleased to learn in preparing this podcast that a Sunday commemorating fathers has much deeper roots. Since the middle ages the feast of Joseph, Jesus’ earthly father, was held as a celebration of fathers, and this evolved into the Father’s Day we know today in the early 20th century.
For me this year, Father’s day has a particular poignancy. Last summer I lost my own father after a long journey with dementia. I have spent quite a lot of time over that journey reflecting on who my dad was to me, why he was important, and how he has influenced me in becoming the person I am.
As a child, I don’t think I really knew my dad as a person. He was just ‘dad’, which is to say that I knew him mainly for what he did rather than who he was. Dad looked after me, provided for me, had my back when I needed help, gave me advice which I sometimes listened to, praised me when I was good, told me off when I was bad. In my mind, that was just what he was for. I was, I now realise, very blessed in having a Father who was kind, constant and attentive, and who laid down a foundation of consistency and love which gave me a sense of security that encouraged me to grow, learn and explore the world.
As I grew older, and especially as I began to reach milestones that my dad had himself reached – leaving home, getting married, having children of my own, building a career – I began to understand him more as a personality. I got to know his likes and dislikes, the things he loved and that gave him joy, how he viewed people and how he approached the world. I realised (sometimes with surprise) that I liked my dad very much, and looked forward to spending time with him. He always had something helpful to say about whatever situation I was facing; he never judged but always helped; he looked for the best in people and wanted the best for them. In many ways he became a model for me of what ‘good’ looked like in being a man, a husband, a parent.
This made dad’s journey with dementia very painful, as the person I knew and loved gradually faded away like an old sepia photograph. In time, though, I realised that dad was still present to me, still part of my life, but in a different way. I would find myself using his phrases and characteristic sayings, old family friends would observe how like him I was not only physically but in how I behaved. I realised that dad had become part of me, part of the way I saw the world and myself in it. And so he continues to be. I haven’t lost him, but carry him with me.
Now, not everyone is fortunate enough to have had my experience. Human fathers are, ultimately, human. Some are great, some are bad, some are just people who make mistakes. The word ‘father’ means many different things to different people.
But ‘father’ has a particular resonance to Christians, because it’s how Jesus told us tothink of God. And Fathers in Jesus’ day were just as varied as they are now, so Jesus must have thought there was something particularly important about this idea. As I reflect on my journey with my dad, I realise that the stages of knowing him were less to do with who he was and more to do with my understanding and perception. Dad went from being a role description to being a person in his own right, and then to being a part of my own personality. And so, perhaps, it is with God. In the beginning of faith God as Father is more about what he does for us rather than who he is – a source of blessing, of comfort, of guidance, of security. As we grow in maturity of faith, however, we begin to know God’s character – his compassion, his passion for justice, his loving-kindness, his mercy – gradually we learn to love him less for what he does than for who he is. And, finally, we realise that in getting to know him we have been becoming day by day more like him – we begin to see the world as he does and live in it as he would want, because he is now so much a part of us that this is simply the kind of person we are.
Whatever our own story with our earthly father, God is the model for what good fatherhood looks like, and he is available to all of us, everywhere, all the time. He is the standard for what is good that all fathers are measured against, and a standard that holds before us the kind of people we can become.