Sermon - 20 June 2026 - Father's Day

I

Talking about God is difficult.

You see, God is not fully disclosed to us. God is not an object in the world, like a tree or a stone or a mountain, something we can point to and say, "There God is." Indeed, scripture itself tells us that no one has seen God.

The German theologian Karl Rahner once observed that every person is a hears the Word of God —that there is within human existence an openness to a mystery that forever exceeds our understanding. We never fully grasp it, yet we are always reaching toward it.

So we begin with things we do know. With ordinary things.  With ordinary modes of living and being. Things like our need to love and belong to others. Our experience of being thrown into the historical world that we did not choose.

A few weeks ago, on Mother's Day, we reflected on mothers. We spoke of how mothers catch us as we fall into existence. How they make room for life, nurture it, sacrifice for it, and sustain it. From that, we moved to what motherhood might reveal about God.

This morning I want to proceed in the same way. Not by beginning with doctrine. But by beginning with fathers. By asking what fatherhood reveals about human life, and by extension, the God whom we worship.

II

Before we talk about fatherhood, we should take a moment to talk about paternity. There is, after all, both overlap and difference between the two, and understanding one requires squaring away the other.

Now then. Paternity is a specific type of relationship between a father and a child. It is commonly described in two contexts: biology, from which paternity emerges, and law, where paternity is enforced. Note that in neither biology nor law is love or care or interest or concern for the child necessary. This is because paternity is, in itself, the hollowest of relations. Indeed, the Irish novelist James Joyce wrote over a hundred years ago that paternity was a fiction. What Joyce recognized was that while a mother's relation to her child is primary and self-evident, paternity is always secondary and contingent.

We know this to be true. Children can exist without fathers. If Dad is absent—at work, or at war, fishing, rambling, or perhaps even dead—his children can survive without him, raised by mothers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and older brothers and sisters.

So what then is fatherhood? Fatherhood is the responsibilities of raising, supporting, guiding, instructing, and caring for a child.

Do you see the difference?   Paternity is a construct.  Fatherhood is a choosing to be there for a child.  Do you remember a moment in the life you shared with your father that exemplifies that? When you knew not just that he was your father, and that you were his child? Think about that. A moment when your father guided you. Provided for you.  When he protected you from danger.

One of earliest memories of my father is him protecting me.  I was probably three or four years old, and we were living in Connecticut,  and just down the hill from our home on Locust Circle was a sidewalk that wandered westward through a small wood to Mary Morrison Elementary school where my sister Karen attended. This was not long after my brother Michael had died, so there was a lot of sadness in the house.  At that time, my Dad was in the Navy, and was teaching at the submarine school there in Groton.  But even then, his great love was the outdoors.  You see Dad was genuine naturalist.  He would have been 37-38 years old at the time, but he already had this fantastic knowledge and fluency with the natural world.  So much so that one Saturday morning he took me and a basset hound and a bucket and set out to gather them. 

Maybe we’d been for fifteen minutes, deep inside this thicket, when the basset hound bellowed out this deep soulful howl, and if you have ever heard a true hound howl out, you know what I mean.  And suddenly, the three of us were engulfed in a swarm of hornets.  And the problem was you couldn’t run.  WE were deep in this thicket, surrounded by vines and thorns and brambles, And hornets.

And what my dad did was remarkable.  He picked me up, brushing these vicious insects from my head and body, and then he turned my face to his chest and he wrapped me in his arms, and then backed out of the thicket, using his back to break through the vines and brambles.  Until he’d gotten me to safety. 

He chose to do this for me.

Now then.  There is a another story where Dad and Mom were walking in the woods, and Mom was holding my younger sister Caroline, who was an infant, and as they went cross a small brook, mother saw a snake and threw my Caroline to my father, who caught her.  

He protected her too.

III

I should stop here and remind you that fathers are not perfect.   I don’t mean to suggest that they are.

My father was very much known for integrity, but never for his diplomacy.  He was not a violent man, but he absolutely had a fierce temper.  I never knew him to tolerate BS.  As a young man, he and I used to fight a lot. This was normal, expected.

But I have heard stories about him, 60 years after it happened, that reminded me that he was not perfect. My older sister Karen told me.  You see, my brother Michael had died, of leukemia, and there was this house, there on Locust Circle, where there was no hope, where God’s grace did not shine.  My dad’s sister, my aunt J, came up from Hattiesburg, and stayed on and off and on for the better part of a year.  I was born in this time, even as I am not sure that at that moment I was wanted. 

But here is the real sadness.  No one told my sister K.  She would have been 4 and 5 at the time.  So there is this great sadness around the house, and no one told my sister why.  My father failed us, his living children, in this moment.  Actually, my father and mother both.

In his later years, my father developed a capacity to talk about Michael’s death.  He was never extravagant in things he said on the issue.  I guess more was less.  And none of this is to say that it was my father’s fault.  Perhaps this too was normal, expected.

IV

So fathers are imperfect. They inevitably fail.  But we should return to that moment of stepping forward.  It is auspicious.  Because what the father chooses to remain for is largely unknown to him.  When my daughter Kate was born, on November 18, 1996, I remember how strange it all seemed. Kate's mother knew her, after all. She had carried her for the nine months of her pregnancy. But me? They put this baby in my arms, and she was a stranger.

Spoiler: we have a strong and loving relationship now.  But then? She was a stranger to me.  I had no idea of what was to come.

Which is remarkable, because fatherhood does not necessarily begin with affection.  or certainty.  Or even competence.  No, fatherhood begins a blank slate.   How does brand new father feel?

I was nervous and apprehensive. You seem, when Kate was born, I was living in Belgium, unemployed, unsure how I would support my wife and child.  I have heard other fathers who felt left out.  After all, the rhythm of a home with only a husband and wife changes significantly when the wife becomes a mother.  Her children must be comforted, fed, washed, clothed, rocked to sleep.  Husband becomes secondary, contingent.  I know other fathers who were confident, ready to get up at all hours of the night. 

But whatever it is that this brand new father is feeling, notice the subtle way that his life is expanded.  Gotten larger.  For fatherhood might have started as choosing to care for a child, but it became commitment to a family. 

The Kentucky writer Wendell Berry wrote of this expanding in his poem The Country of Marriage:

Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange of my love and work for yours, so much for so much of an expendable fund. We don't know what its limits are--that puts us in the dark. We are more together than we know, how else could we keep on discovering we are more together than we thought? You are the known way leading always to the unknown, and you are the known place to which the unknown is always leading me back.

V

And yet fatherhood contains a strange tension. While fatherhood implies a vocation to remain, and a tendency to expand, there remains an instinct, of men, at least some men, to wander.  To be restless. To have a part of their lives that is apart from the family. 

How to describe this?  I think of my parents.  As ambitious as my mother was for our family, my father would not be managed.  He deeply loved her, and cared for and protected us.  But he was his own man.  They were married 62 years.  But rarely did she manage him. 

You see, he needed things apart from her, outside of our family.  I’m not talking affairs, or other woman.  or even abandonment.  No, I mean apart from my mother, my father was a accomplished naturalist, who knew the flora and fauna of the entirety of eastern North America.  And he was an extraordinary gardener, and a birdwatcher with over 700 species on his life list, and for a while, he kept more bees than anyone else in Jackson County Mississippi.  And while we would have been welcome to join him in any of these adventures, if we chose to stay home, well he was content with that as well. 

There was something in man that reaches outward — toward the distant, the unknown, the undiscovered, the adventure, the idea. 

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke said it very well:

sometimes a man stands up during supper

and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,

because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

And another man,

who remains inside his own house,

stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,

so that his children have to go far out into the world

toward that same church, which he forgot

In its healthy form, this too is part of fatherhood.  Because fathers do not protect just children from the world; they actually prepare children to enter the world.

VI

A child may ask:

Where is Dad? And the answer is often: He's at work. He's fixing the roof. He's out in the field. He's deployed.He's helping someone. He's providing for us.  In other words, the father is absent from immediate experience, yet present through the world he is helping sustain.