Rev. Mark Trotter

First United Methodist Church of San Diego (619) 297-4366 Fax (619) 297-2933

“THE FATHERS IN THEIR GENERATION”

The Wisdom of Sirach 44:1-15 Psalm 42 Hebrews 12:1-2, 7-17

This is the third Sunday in June. I am usually not here on this Sunday, because it is during this week that the sessions of the Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church in this region are held. They are continuing today at the University of Redlands. But I have been away for several weeks on vacation prior to this week, so I thought it would be prudent for me to show up here.

Besides that, as you have heard, this is Choir Recognition Sunday, and I wanted to be here also for that occasion. In the past, when Bob Cooper was the director of music, he used this Sunday as an opportunity to work the choir a little harder; they presented sort of a mini-concert for you, and you all appreciated that. But we had the opportunity this year to simply honor the choir, not make them work any harder. I hope that you will join the others at Linder hall to express your appreciation.

Also, I want to express my appreciation to those in the choir who stepped forward during this year. It’s been over a year with no permanent director. Lisa Friedrichs filled in for most of that time. Since then other members of the choir have come forth. It gives you an idea of the quality of this choir, that we have so many people who can step up and direct the choir on an interim basis. We are most appreciative to Carol Aby, who has directed the Contemporary Singers, as well. We look forward now to next month when Stanley Wicks, our new choir director, will be with us.

And a word of appreciation for Dan. Dan took on the administrative and coordinating responsibilities of the church music program. I have enjoyed, especially, working with him and planning the worship of this church this past year. It’s been a time of trial; but so often, with people of faith, it turned out also to be a time of many unexpected blessings.

This is also Father’s Day, and we thought that we would use this opportunity to talk about men’s ministry on this Sunday. That is why we asked Arnie Sheets, one of the leaders of the men’s ministry program in this church, to come forward and say something about it, and to give you an opportunity to indicate the needs that you have and would like to see us try to meet in this program.

I have a confession to make. It is only recently that I have come to recognize the importance of a church’s specific ministry to men and boys. And I give thanks to people such as Arnie who have told me their stories, and then have waited patiently for me to come around.

Also I couldn’t help but be impressed with the phenomenon in our time, seen in Promise Keepers and the Million Man March, of the yearning on the part of men for spiritual depth in their lives. I could criticize the theology of both organizations, but no one can ignore this amazing phenomenon of hundreds of thousands of men who are seeking to ground their lives in spirituality. And so that’s what I want to talk about as we celebrate this Father’s Day.

Richard Rohr is a Franciscan monk. He was here earlier this year, to talk to the Roundtable that meets here from time to time. Richard Rohr speaks all over the world, and is called upon to lead spiritual life retreats. He says that wherever he goes, he’s asked to address the issue of male spirituality. He recognizes it as one of the deep growing hungers of people in our time, especially men.

He says that that hunger stems from the fact that we no longer initiate boys into the wisdom of the Fathers. He said that has been the source of male spirituality in every society throughout history. Every society saw to it that the boys were introduced into wisdom, what it meant to be a man. And the means of doing that was the initiation rite. Every tribe, every nation, in fact every religion, has initiation rites. The purpose of initiation rites is to teach you what life is all about.

Rohr says that there is an amazing sameness to all these initiation rites around the world. They all seem to be teaching the same lessons. And here they are. The first is, that life is hard. That’s why the initiation itself is often a rigorous and dangerous routine. You are not admitted into the society of adults or elders unless you can successfully pass some rigorous test, some “vision quest,” as it was called by the American Indians. All of us must learn as adolescents that life is hard, and there is nothing worthwhile found in this life without hard work.

The second thing that you learn in order to be an adult is your mortality. Some day you’re going to die–which knowledge puts the present life in its proper perspective. And when life is in its proper perspective then everything falls into its proper place, and you can see what is really important and what is trivial.

The third thing wisdom teaches you is that you’re not important. Humility is always the sign of maturity. Humility is the essential ingredient for the forming of any community, whether it be the community of a nation, or the community of a family and a marriage. Unless the individual is willing to sacrifice the self for something greater than the self, there can be no community.

Which leads to the fourth point of wisdom; and that is, that life is not about you. It’s about something bigger than you to which you must give your life. In other words, life is about God. That’s what it amounts to. And that means that you don’t find yourself until you find your relationship to God.

And that leads to the final point. This is the height of wisdom, this is the fulfillment of adulthood: admitting that you are not in control, but God is in control. The last task to be accomplished in the fulfillment of life is to admit your powerlessness and to surrender your life to the one who has the power.

I came across a wonderful quote by Evelyn Underhill. You could say Evelyn Underhill was the Richard Rohr of a previous generation. She taught many of us the meaning of spiritual life. She was talking in one of her writings about the importance of silence. She said we need silence so we can “listen to the one who has everything to say to us and nothing to learn from us.” That’s the height of spiritual wisdom; to give yourself to the one who has created you.

It was to introduce them to the wisdom of the Fathers that boys went through these initiation rites. And when there are no formal initiation rites, then we invent them. Or we stumble upon them, like war. War has been an initiation rite, especially in this century, for many. I’ve heard people say, “the army made a man out of him.” And what they were talking about was some person who was self-absorbed, or was confused or rebellious. He joined the military and his life was changed. He grew up. The military made a man out of him.

And it made a man out of him because it taught him that life is hard, and some day you are going to die, and you are not all that important. I was on the plane coming back to San Diego. As it so often happens when you fly to San Diego, you fly with recruits going to M.C.R.D.. I was sitting next to a Marine veteran who said, “In five hours, these boys are going to have a rude awakening.”

They will learn that they are not all that important. They will learn that you’d better be humble, and forget yourself. They will learn that you must give yourself to something greater than yourself. And if all goes well, they will learn, in the end, that they are not in control of their lives–but God is.

Not only is it said of the military, it will make a man out of you, but do you notice how often old men look back on their lives, and say the best years of their life were in the war. Remember, just a few years ago in 1995, the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, all those television documentaries showing men with tears in their eyes talking about those days–how much it meant to them to be bonded with other men, going through the terrible ordeal of warfare. They felt most alive in those days because that’s when they worked hard; when they sacrificed themselves to something greater than themselves; when, in battle, they discovered their mortality; and that they were not in charge, but something greater than themself had taken them through this. It was an initiation rite.

This last week I was driving in my car, listening to the radio. I heard Hugh Selby, Jr., an author, being interviewed. (You won’t want to read his books, but it was a good interview.) He was asked, “When did you start writing?” He said he had a spiritual experience that turned his life around. The interviewer asked, “What was it?” He said, “I realized that one day I will die. And I didn’t want my life to be a waste.”

At some point in our lives, some time there has to be an initiation into wisdom, when your realize life is hard, someday you’re going to die, and there is something greater than I am to which I must give my life.

We read a passage this morning that you probably have not heard before. It’s not in either the Old or the New Testaments; it’s in what is called the Apocrypha. The Apocrypha is in some bibles. It’s a collection of writings that didn’t make it into the Old Testament, but they considered important enough to be gathered in a separate collection called the Apocrypha. And in the Apocrypha is a book called The Wisdom of Sirach. It’s also called Ecclesiasticus. And in it is this famous line, “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers in their generation.”

For the Jews, the “fathers in their generation” meant the heritage, the tradition they passed on to their children. The father in the family was simply the latest in the long line of fathers that extended all the way, 4000 years now, back to Abraham. And the father’s vocation in the family was to represent that whole tradition to his children. This is the way it worked.

The immediate image before the child was the image of that child’s father, and therefore the image of an inadequate, frail, and flawed human being. So the wise father called in help. He presented to his children not just himself, but the “fathers in their generation” as well. That is to say, he told the stories of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph, of David and Gideon, and the prophets and all the heroes of the faith. He told their stories so that their image, their lives would be before the children, as well as his own life. “Let us now praise famous men, and the fathers in their generation.”

To be a man is to live with an image of greatness, and the great men were those like the Patriarchs, and the kings and the heroes. All of them had frailties. But all of them lived heroic lives. It’s always a curiosity to me that the Old Testament tells their stories so realistically. The fathers of the faith were all imperfect men. They all had faults, they were all sinners. You would expect the nation to doctor its history so that the heroes would appear to be flawless. And in fact every nation does that, even this nation does that, it alters its history to make it look better than it actually was. But it was especially done in the ancient world. The stories of the kings and the fathers of the nation were told to picture them as superhuman, even as divine.

But not Israel. Because in biblical faith the model is not perfection. The model is wisdom. The heroes in the bible, not one of them, is perfect. They have become wise, however, by learning the lessons of the fathers in their generation–that life is hard, and they are not all that important, and someday they are going to die. And most important, that they are part of something much bigger than themselves. They are a child of God who has entered a covenant with Israel to be their God–and the purpose of their life, therefore, is to give themselves in trust to the God who has chosen them.

That was the lesson learned from the stories of the fathers. They were not superhuman heroes whose lives were to be worshipped, but human beings who made the journey before us that we have to make, and have shown us the way.

I read an analysis of our culture back in the 60’s when the center no longer held things together. The old certainties were being questioned, the old institutions challenged or neglected. I read that for the first time in history, back then a generation ago, it was said that the fathers no longer had anything to give to the children. What a sad statement.

The reference was in large part to vocation. It recognized the fathers traditionally taught the sons the business that the fathers were in, so the sons could enter that business. Or they paved the way for them by giving them advice on how to get along in the world. But since the 60’s the world has changed. And that meant the children were going into a world that the parents knew nothing about, and into vocations that never existed before. And thus the fathers had nothing to give to the children.

That may have been true; but there is something even deeper than that. What was not being passed on to the children as well was a spiritual heritage. Which is why, I suspect, there are so many middle-aged men searching for spirituality in their lives today.

I can’t help but mention that at the same time in the 60’s church patterns changed. Suburbia created the pattern that exists to this day in churches: parents and children no longer go to church together. Children are dropped off at Sunday School, parents go to church. But it’s in church, in worship, that the heritage is rehearsed and celebrated, year after year, Sunday after Sunday, week after week. Church is where a father or a mother can get help from “the fathers.” Sometimes a mother has to be both a mother and a father; but that’s not a new phenomenon. That’s always been true in history. But in the past, if the children didn’t have a father in the home, they still had fathers in the heritage, and they were exposed to the images of adults who were on the same journey that they were on, and who learned wisdom on that journey.

Some people object to the presence of children in the church. They say, the kids think its boring. I think that our generation must be the only generation in the history of the planet where parents consult their children on how to raise them.

But you look at pictures, you visit other cultures, you look back into ancient society, you look at primitive societies, you look at sophisticated societies; it’s always the same: when the rituals are observed, when the sacraments are celebrated, when the stories are told, the children are there, because the parents know that this is too important for them to miss. Because the parents know, I can only do so much in preparing my children to live their lives. Because the parents know that, even though my child is distracted, even though my child may be asleep, even though my child uses a child’s kit and colors through the service, at least he or she knows this is important. And some day he or she will be grateful that my father or my mother took me to the place where they praised famous men and our fathers in their generation.

If you’re trying to be a role model for your children, then you’re carrying a burden that’s too heavy for anyone to carry alone. In attempting to do so, and this gets to the heart of the problem of being a parent, you will be tempted to be dishonest, and to hide your imperfections, a task that gets increasingly harder the older the children get.

A better example is that of the Jewish father, who had the freedom to be himself because he didn’t depend on himself alone to be the sole model for his children. He offered the fathers in their generation. He held up the images of greatness to his family. He measured his own life against those images of greatness. And he offered them to his children.

Burt Prelutsky was a writer in Los Angeles. His father was a Jewish immigrant who came to this country to make a better life for his children. He worked day and night. He finally ended up owning a cigar stand in an office building in downtown Los Angeles. His was not an illustrious life; it was a lackluster life, really. It was simple and hard. Burt Prelutsky, one Father’s Day, wrote an article in tribute to his father. In the tradition of The Wisdom of Sirach, he praised his father for what he had meant to him. He concluded the article with these words: “He was not a great man–but he was the best man he could possibly be.”

There is no greater legacy a father can leave his children.

—————————————————————————- —-

Help us to be masters of ourselves, that we might be servants of others, through Christ our Lord. Amen.

—————————————————————————- —-