June 20, 1999 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

A Father’s Needs and a Father’s Wants

William A. C. Golderer
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Luke 15:11–32
Philemon 1:8–13, 17

“I am appealing to you for my son Onesimus, who became my son while I was in chains. (He) is my own heart.”

Philemon 1:10, 12

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Robert is 11. He comes to Junior High Group here at Fourth Church nearly every week. He comes because he wants to—no pressure from his parents. He says he likes it here, and I like Robert a lot. Thinking he might have some insight to share about Father’s Day, I told him that my dad was coming to town and I was struggling with what to do for him. He looked puzzled by the question—“Get him something he needs—that’s what I’m doing.”

Robert continued, “I got my dad a great big card and I put one of my favorite paintings in there.” Knowing that Robert’s dad did need the card and the painting at some level, I told Robert how great a gift I thought it was, and Robert cut me off by saying “that’s not all I got him. I also bought him an oil filter.”

A pragmatic love if I ever encountered one. Robert, at age 11, has dominion over the dilemma faced by every daughter and son who struggles to honor the occasion of Father’s Day. Ever since Lyndon Johnson officially declared the 3rd Sunday in June as Father’s Day in 1966, young people have racked their brains coming up with ideas for Father’s Day.

In our home, anxiety about Father’s Day celebrations climaxed after school on the Friday preceding. My Dad acted blasé about it, but we knew he liked the fuss.

I remember attacking the question of what to do for Father’s Day in this way—I would start with a sheet of paper, draw a line down the center, and write two questions at the top of the page: “What does Dad need? And “What does Dad want?” The “wants” filled up quickly—a cleaner bathroom, less back-talking, more lawn cutting, and so on. The “needs” column, however, was pretty sparse—he already had more golf shirts than work shirts. And if indeed he was ever in need of an oil filter he never let on to me.

This annual ritual resulted in a Father’s Day axiom in our house; What does Dad need? Nothing. What does Dad want? Everything.

The question about a father’s wants and needs echoes a question faced by every Christian at one time or another. What does God want from me? And, what does God expect from this church?

“The community of faith gathered is to discern together the will of God,” is one of the lines from our Presbyterian Book of Confessions.

Claiming to know the mind of God is not a concept most Christians with humility are comfortable with. But we do address this question about God’s expectations and wishes with the course on which we take our lives and the direction we take the church.

And so we are faced always with the challenge to learn more about God’s wants and needs, as daunting as that idea is.

One lesson history teaches is that the process of discovery is doomed when we skip over the part of trying to know as much as possible about the God we seek to serve. There is heavy lifting involved with this task, but it often prevents making God in our own image rather than the other way around.

William Safire’s collection of some of the finest speeches delivered in history, called Lend Me Your Ears underscores the importance of this concept when he talks about the anatomy of a great speech. He says that great speeches always begin with an attempt to “shake hands with the audience.” Effective speeches, in his opinion, must first convey at least some understanding of the audience’s wants, fears and hopes that they carry with them.

If you are unsure who God is, God becomes harder to serve. Before making bold proclamations about what God wants and needs from each one of us, it makes sense to try to clarify our picture of God and spend time looking at what our experience together with the witness of Scripture tells us about what God is like.

Almost from page one of the Old Testament, we encounter an image of God as God the Father. This image is not confined to the dog-eared pages of family Bibles, but has been blasted into the granite of our collective Christian memory for thousands of years. The image of God the Father is in our hymns, our confessions, our poetry and popular culture. One of my earliest images of God from childhood was from the 1970s film starring George Burns as a kindly, older God.

This image is not without its problems. Women have suffered greatly from wrongheaded interpretations about what it means for the church to serve God, the Father. Sadly, examples abound. One of the less enlightened theological conclusions of St. Augustine was that if God was, in fact like a father, it stood to reason then that “women were not made in the image of God.”

Fast-forwarding to recent history, opponents of women’s ordination to the ministry conclude that what is important about the image of God the Father is male-ness. These opponents then made the dubious jump to conclude that females were then unfit for ordained ministry. The cost of misinterpreting “Father imagery” has been high.

But if you asked me, the highest price is paid by the church when it mishandles this imagery of God the Father. If you love the church as I do, it is so painful to hear people who feel excluded by references to God as a father. I shudder to think how many people are like the character of Celie in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, who declared that “When she found out she thought God was white and a man, she lost interest.” Some do more than lose interest. Many are wounded by the analogy of God as Father because of troubled relationships with their earthly fathers, relationships marred by guilt, by neglect, and by abuse. God as a father-figure becomes a nearly impossible image to find helpful.

And yet, I maintain that the church has not “outgrown” referring to God as Father as some have suggested. We are not too sophisticated for it. In fact, I think we need it more than ever—not just for tradition’s sake, but because there are things about this relationship, flawed as it often is, which reflect God’s essence.

The two passages we heard this morning have been a huge help to me in locating what is blessed about this imagery. The first is from the book of Philemon. It is a letter from Paul to Philemon who owns a slave named Onesimus. At the top of the section on the page where the story appears is a typed heading which reads, “intercession for Onesimus.” Paul, who is in prison, tells us that while he was in prison Onesimus the slave became his son. He does not say that Onesimus is like a son to me now, but in prison he became Paul’s son. And Paul does for Onesimus what the best fathers have done for their children for centuries. He tries to get Onesimus out of a tight spot. By writing to Philemon in an attempt to gain his freedom, Paul intercedes on his behalf. He intervenes, inserts himself, and meddles in the affairs of his new son. Said another way, he takes on the problems of his son as his own problems.

Some of you may have noticed that even in Paul’s day, parenting has a funny way of making holes in your pockets.

I’m reminded of the story Bill Cosby used to tell about sending his son, Theo, to the store for a package of Jobe’s plant stakes. They are mini-fertilizer sticks for use with houseplants that are about the length of toothpicks, seven or eight in a box. Cosby would send his son to the store with $20. When the son returned, he would hand over the plant stakes and a receipt which read $2.98. Cosby would ask, “Where’s my change?” To which his son responded, “There is no change.” When it comes to giving money to your kids, there is never any shame.

Paul is not a symbolic father to Onesimus. He acknowledges the new responsibility of fatherhood when he talks about the price tag. He says to Philemon that if Onesimus owes anything in exchange for his release, he should “Charge it to his account.”

This is not about a dad who solves problems by throwing his money at them. Paul demonstrates solidarity with his son; he stands with him in his time of hardship whatever the emotional or financial cost. When fathers stand beside you when you are in turmoil, when you feel trapped, when you hit a road block, they are loving you. To truly be a father, you have to be invested, engaged, and involved in the life of your child—and not out of a sense of duty or obligation—at least not always—but as a demonstration of love. Good fathers often show their love by making a nuisance of themselves.

The text from Philemon has another lesson to teach—that faithful parenting is not a strictly biological affair. The focus of Paul’s fatherhood here is on the emotional tie and not on the family tie. Paul refers to his son in the letter as his own heart! Paul broadens the definition of fatherhood by stepping into that role for what must have been a very young and frightened runaway slave, which begs the question of why? Why did Paul step in? Why did he intervene? Because he is a great humanitarian or a saint? Hardly. Paul did this as an expression of what he thought God wanted from him. God had intervened powerfully in his life by knocking him clean off his horse and by turning him away from persecuting Christians. He understood this to be how God loved him, through intervention, and so he intervened in the life of another.

Even if you’ve never heard of Philemon or Onesimus, the common life of this congregation strives to communicate that which is life-giving about a father’s love in what we do, emphasizing not biology or gender, but involvement and investment.

Presbyterians do not generally embrace the role of godparents, in celebrating baptism, as the ones who will be responsible to provide for the spiritual nurture, education and development of the child. That is because that is something we all take on as a congregation. We, in effect, extend the family to include us. That commitment translates into preparation of Sunday school lessons and calling kids in the youth group who are going through a traumatic breakup. It doesn’t stop with the church’s nuclear family. 650 tutors come one night a week for nine months, week in and week out, intervening, befriending, investing in their future.

Others from this community of faith have responded to one or more of the thousands of children from Cook County who are in foster care and need parents. These are people willing to risk the parenting relationship, to take on the problems and share the joys of these children for a lifetime. At some level, this place encourages these things because of what it believes God wants from us. And the difference it makes can be astonishing.

Willye White competed on five Olympic track teams. Her family context presented her with great adversity from a very young age and the obstacles that stood between her reaching her goal only became greater as she grew older, due largely to the fact that she was African-American and female. She addressed Fourth Church’s Loop Breakfast Series earlier this spring and she was asked what it was that enabled her to overcome the adversity from within her family and from society in general. She said she was successful in part because of hard work. She went on to say that what made the difference, though, was that growing up she had a He-ro, a She-ro and a God to worship. She said it was these mentoring relationships which helped her begin to form her relationship with God—the action, not the words of her He-ro and She-ro.

I have a hunch that this is right. I have a hunch that most young people will not encounter God because they find the Bible to be scintillating reading. It is more likely that God will become real to them because someone who takes discipleship seriously seeks them out and befriends them, believes in them and invests their resources in them. These relationships help young people to begin to know what God is like, and eventually to know what God wants from them. This often is communicated in ways that are unspoken but speak powerfully.

The other story we heard has long been known both within the Christian community and beyond it, as the parable of the prodigal son. This story conveys an even more basic message about how God’s love is like a father’s love. In fact, it has become fashionable for biblical scholars, if it is indeed possible for biblical scholars to do anything which is considered fashionable, to focus on the father figure in the story rather than the wayward son. Some have gone so far as to suggest that the parable might be more aptly named, the waiting father.

It is easy to see why we know it as the parable of the prodigal son. The action follows the prodigal. We never leave his side during the course of the story. After he wounds his father, by asking for his inheritance up front, effectively treating his father as though he had already died, we follow him to a far away land. We learn about how he wastes his fortune; how he winds up disgracing himself and his heritage by slinging feed for animals which were considered unclean by the Jewish people. And then he models for us an authentic Judeo-Christian act of repentance by literally changing his direction and returning home ready to eat crow.

While all of this action is taking place, we leave the father at his homestead. After his younger son has left, “He is left with his wealth, his wife and his whiney older son,” as one commentary puts it. Some scholars picture the father as unfazed by his son’s departure. They argue that the father lets him go because he is confident that he will return. I find this a hard interpretation to swallow. When little children become frustrated by the rule of law in a household and threaten to run away, however improbable it may be, such threats strike fear in the hearts of parents.

When I picture this father at home, late at night in his house, not knowing where his son is, how he is, or even if he is still alive, I picture a frantic father—a father who paces the floors, who stares at the ceiling, who constantly goes over to the window looking for the form of his younger son to appear on the horizon, in sadness and desperation.

A parent I know, recently told me that whenever he reads this story he thinks of his daughter’s prom night. He spoke with feeling about how much he trusts her judgment and her sense of self and her street smarts, and yet, as the night turned into morning, he said he felt as if he had died a thousand deaths, waiting for her return.

This story does not ask us if God is an older, bearded man, but rather is it possible for a majestic, sovereign, almighty God to care about each of us? It is Cicero who claimed that the “gods attend to great matters, and they neglect the small ones.” The parable of the good shepherd, the woman who looks for lost coins, and the waiting father, challenges the idea of a god who is aloof and uninterested in the everyday. We know this again by what the father does. Primarily that’s how we know who he really is and what he wants most of all.

What does the father of the prodigal do when the two are estranged? He waits. He waits and he hopes that the son will know that whatever he has done, wherever he has been, that he cannot undo a father’s love, that he will know enough to come home because that is where he will be embraced and forgiven.

What the father in the prodigal son does is more than passive waiting. The father actively abides by his son. Abiding with someone means to never give up on them with your heart, even when your head tells you to. The prodigal’s father abides by him even though the odds are long against the son’s return. He is faithful to the son even when the son has turned away.

This analogy isn’t outdated, you know. The notion that God’s love is like a father’s love works, at least for me. It works because I have been blessed with a father who has shown me more about what God’s love is like than he has ever said about it—by suffering along with me when circumstances knock the wind out of me, by intervening at times I wished he had kept his own counsel, by not being too quick to give up when that would have been understandable, by forgiving me when that was hard to do. He made the necessary investment of time in our relationship over the years, making possible a friendship on which we both rely. He has shown me all of this as my father.

It is possible for each of us to reflect something of what God’s love is like to each other. When we do, we learn more about what God wants.

If I had to pull out another sheet of paper right now, two bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree and a whole lot of lessons learned the hard way later, and write at the top of it again, what does Dad want and what does Dad need? I think the axiom would still hold true. What does my father need at age 80, and retired? I’m not sure either of us could even list one thing he actually needs.

The wants column would still fill quickly, but the content might be different. If I had to guess, I would list that he would like to hear from me more often than he does—to hear how I am, with what I am struggling, those things which give me joy about the life I am living. In return, he would want to share with me something of the aches and pains that come with aging. He would want to tell me, if only in passing, how much he misses my mother. He might ask to slip in a word of advice about how to handle a situation that might arise in the future. But whatever the particulars are of what he might want, I know that what he ultimately wants is for me to flourish in this life; for me to form deep relationships with people with whom I work and play and pray, and to grow in my love and concern for them. He would want me to return to him often for guidance, for assurance, and for forgiveness when I fail him.

He stands alongside Paul, and the prodigal’s father, and perhaps your he-ro or she-ro, in his best moments when he reflects what I understand God’s love to be like, and what God wants from each of us.

God doesn’t need anything from you, not your good deeds, nor your tales of success nor your happy endings. God doesn’t need any of that. The God of the gospel frets over your feelings of isolation and paces over your pain. God is wounded when you wander off and calls after you to return. What does God of the gospel need from you? Nothing. What does God the Father want from you? Just you.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church