Approximate Notes for Sunday’s Message; Father’s Day 2018

Scriptures for this Sunday are Deuteronomy 6:1-9.

You can read these Scriptures here: {NIV and ESV}

This Sunday we will celebrate our fathers, and contributions that our father and father figures makes to the society.

Happy Father’s Day!

^NIV2010 Deuteronomy 6: These are the commands, decrees and laws the Lord your God directed me to teach you to observe in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess, ² so that you, your children and their children after them may fear the Lord your God as long as you live by keeping all his decrees and commands that I give you, and so that you may enjoy long life. ³ Hear, Israel, and be careful to obey so that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, just as the Lord, the God of your ancestors, promised you.

⁴ Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. ⁵ Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. ⁶ These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. ⁷ Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. ⁸ Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. ⁹ Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

May God add God’s Blessing
to Reading, Hearing,
Understanding and Living of God’s Word

Shrek: I can’t believe I’m going to be a father. How did this happen?

Puss: Senor! Allow me to explain. When a man has certain feelings for a woman… a powerful urge sweeps over him.

Shrek: I know how it happened. I just can’t believe it.

Happy Father’s Day! Being a father and a dad is emotionally and physically taxing. Being a father and a dad is complicated.

I think that being a dad is about creating a path, a vision for the next generation, passing that vision and the love of God onto them and letting them run with it.

We are making these paths with our own footprints. Every family is unique, and every family lays out these unique paths for their children based on their own interactions with God.

Amazon has an answer to everything and parenting is no exception. Amazon sells books about raising an eco-friendly child, a gluten-free child, and even a disease-proof child. There are guides to teaching children a second language, financial skills, and how to spark their interest in sciences. There is pretty much a guide on how to raise every kind of child.

The authors who wrote these books mean well. But taken together, these books point to a trend in our society: a trend of anxiety about rearing future generations. I think that as a society we are paralyzed by much anguish and confusion when it comes to raising children. Humans have successfully raised children for thousands of years, long before Amazon was selling books by the gross. So, what causes this anxiety?

Roles of fathers and mothers have changed in the last 100 years. The roles of our children have changed as well.

There has been a major shift in the way we live our lives. Until recently, children worked. They worked on our farms, in the factories, mills, mines, and stables. Kids were economic assets.

Child labor was not ethical, but it was reciprocal and shared. Parents provided food, clothing, protection, shelter, and moral guidance to their children, and children in return helped their families’ economic standing and survival.

Sometime between 1890 and 1930, as a society we recognized that children have rights, and we put an end to this arrangement.

Child labor was banned, we focused on education instead, and school became a child’s new work. That is a good thing! This path paid out great dividends. We have people in this congregation with transplanted organs and artificial joints. There are human footprints on the moon, and soon there will be human footprints on Mars. We have little devices that allow us to communicate in real time with anyone anywhere on earth. We can safely fly across the country in less than 6 hours, a trip that used to take months. None of that would be possible without education.

When children stopped working, the economics of parenting changed. I know it sounds harsh, but in the words of Viviana Zelizer[1], children became “economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”

Today sending kids to school is no longer enough. Today, extracurricular activities are a child’s second job, which in turn keeps moms and dads extra busy. Someone must drive the little tyke to soccer practice and music lessons, not to mention that homework needs to be supervised and checked. // (Illustration}

Today, the middle class pours a lot of time, energy and resources into their kids, even though the middle class has less and less of those things to give due to the socio-economic cycle that our country is currently in.

Earlier I said that being a dad is complicated. I said that being a dad is about creating a path, a vision for the next generation, passing that vision along with the love of God onto them, and letting them run with it.

None of us have a crystal ball. We do not know what the future holds. That means that we do not know what portion of our wisdom is going to be useful to our children.

The prophet Joel said it this way, “1:² Hear this, you elders; listen, all who live in the land. Has anything like this ever happened in your days or in the days of your ancestors? ³ Tell it to your children, and let your children tell it to their children, and their children to the next generation.”

{Illustration}

The point I am trying to make is that because we do not have a crystal ball, as a society we strive to prepare our children for every possible kind of future, hoping that just one of our efforts will pay off. We teach our kids chess, thinking maybe they will need analytical skills. We sign them up for team sports, thinking maybe they will need collaborative skills when they are accepted into Harvard Business School. We try to teach them to be financially savvy and science-minded and eco-friendly and gluten-free.

As a result, fatherhood is not for the faint of heart. Today fathers spend more time with their kids than their fathers ever spent with them. They work more paid hours, on average, and the fathers that I know genuinely want to be good, involved dads.

Like I said earlier, it is complicated. And when we are with God, all things are possible.

Our legacy is what we will pass on to future generations. The good news of the Gospel, a relationship with Jesus, the ability to recognize the presence of the Holy Spirit, is not something that is automatically absorbed by breathing the air around us. This faith must be passed on and encouraged. 

The most important thing that fathers can do for their children and for future generations is to demonstrate our faith by our lifestyle and practice, by consistency between what we teach and do, and how we live out each day in the world and at home, while working, shopping, in school, at play, on vacation, in the restaurant, wherever we find ourselves. Faith is important is because when we are with God, all things are possible.

In verses 6 through 9 of today’s reading we heard, “These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.”

• Be consistent and honest in your own relationship with God.

• Be consistent and honest in your love.

• Be Consistent in Discipline.

• Broaden Their Cultural Horizons.

• Serve Others Together.

• Help Them Learn to Stay with Hard Things – nothing worthwhile is easy.

• Celebrate Right Behavior.

• Share Your Personal Stories.

[1] Viviana A. Rotman Zelizer is a sociologist and the Lloyd Cotsen ’50 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. She is a prominent economic sociologist who focuses on the attribution of cultural and moral meaning to the economy. A constant theme in her work is economic valuation of the sacred, as found in such contexts as life insurance settlements and economic transactions between sexual intimates. In 2006 she was elected to the PEN American Center and in 2007 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.