Dr. William A. Ritter
First United Methodist Church
Birmingham, Michigan
Scripture: Joshua 24:14-18
Three kids are in the schoolyard, bragging about their fathers. The first one says: “My dad scribbles a few words on a piece of paper….calls it a poem….and they give him fifty dollars.” The second kid says: “That’s nothing. My dad scribbles a few words on a piece of paper….calls it a prescription….and they give him a hundred dollars.” Leading the third kid to say: “I’ve got you both beat. My dad scribbles a few words on a piece of paper….calls it a sermon….and it takes eight people to collect all the money.”
My daughter is in town for Father’s Day. And I trust she will note that, before the morning is over, it will have taken 24 people to collect all the money.
* * * * *
It’s Father’s Day. Which seems worthy of a word. Or two. Or several. But let me clear the decks before I begin by mentioning a couple of things I could say….perhaps should say….but have no plans to say. Assemble those words under a heading called “Deadbeat Dads.” They exist. They shouldn’t. God expects more of ‘em. I tend to frown on ‘em. The courts ought to go after ‘em. And women….especially those who don’t want to be hurt….ought to steer clear of ‘em.
I’m talking about the abusers and the abandoners. I’m talking about the neglecters and the non-payers. And I’m especially talking about those who won’t own up to paternity or think that paternity has nothing to do with responsibility. In this great garden called “life,” you have your seed planters and your plant tenders. Men who aren’t willing to do the latter, have no business being the former.
Are there a lot of those dudes out there? I suppose there are. But, given the slice of the culture to which I preach, I don’t see many of them. So I do not feel inclined….this morning, anyway….to scold or indict them. Another day, perhaps.
It has occurred to me….in the churches I have served….that I am seeing more and more men taking fatherhood seriously. I see them expressing fatherhood creatively, while maintaining it responsibly. Not all men, mind you. But more, with each passing year.
I don’t know all the reasons for this. But something must be working. Demographics may play a part. The grooms at my weddings are older than they used to be. Which may make them more settled, more focused and more mature when they start their families. It may also mean that they are more rigid and set in their ways. But that’s another sermon.
Certainly the urgings of the Women’s Movement have not been lost on men. “Treat us like equals,” they said. “Learn some new skills,” they said. “Express your feminine side,” they said. And they were right. So we did. Or we tried.
Promise Keepers, too, did its part (quite apart from the controversy that sometimes surrounded its rallies). “Shape up,” men told each other. “Fly right. Give your word. Keep your word. Then live your word. It’s biblical. It’s practical. It will work.” They were right.
Which may account for the fact that I am now seeing males who are softer and more sensitive than before. Not consistently. Not universally. But certainly more than occasionally….even though the field of professional athletes would appear to be ripe for evangelization.
Lest you think I am misreading this trend, Roger Wittrup recently sent me some research results suggesting that “today’s breed of dad may, indeed, be different.” One of the cited surveys was published by Sesame Street Parents Magazine. Don’t laugh. This is serious stuff. I didn’t even know that Sesame Street had a parent’s magazine. But they do. Apparently, a lot of guys read it. So much so that hundreds of them responded to questions about how their roles have grown…. how their tasks have changed….how their skills have improved….and (interestingly enough) how their rewards have magnified.
Today’s dads, statistically speaking, father smaller families….claim that their most important function is to be “role model” rather than “breadwinner”….and suggest that the parental task they most dislike is having to discipline a kid for bad behavior. If I could sum up the survey results in one phrase, it is that today’s fathers give more thought to bonding with their kids than providing for them.
Which may speak volumes about who reads Sesame Street Magazine….who takes time to respond to surveys….or how “flush” the local economy has been for the last two decades. The great majority of fathers I know don’t stress out over “providing,” so much as over “bonding.” They figure that in a full-employment economy, there will always be a way to get milk. But they fear that, in our increasingly-fragmented culture, there may not always be time to get close.
One thing in the survey that made me feel good was that today’s young fathers are not terribly critical of their own fathers….who (by all accounts) did it differently. Concerning the sins of their fathers (real or imagined), they said: “Times were different then. Tougher, too.” Wrote one young dad about his dad: “As for spending more time with us, he may have wanted to. But it wouldn’t have been easy to do, given that he worked two jobs. And we needed every dollar that he made in both of them.”
Which got me to thinking. About my own dad, I mean. He died relatively young. And, as you have heard me say on previous occasions, his last years were certainly not the happiest of his life. But I went back and thought about his early working years. When he could work. And did work. Those were the years he worked two jobs. His first job started at 6:00 in the morning and concluded at 2:00 in the afternoon. Then he came home, took a nap, ate his big meal of the day, and went off to his second job (working from 4:30 in the afternoon to 9:30 at night). That added up to 65 hours per week. Which I don’t think abnormal. But when I do it, I have more control over it….and greater reward from it. At the time, he did what he had to do. Which kept us alive….if not terribly close.
As concerns fathers and church, I am not aware that anybody has surveyed them. But there seem to be more of them. At least that’s what my colleagues say. I can’t say firsthand. That’s because my ministerial experience has been abnormal. All during my ministry, I have seen lots of men…. even when men tended to be scarce in mainline churches.
It used to be that Protestant churches were gender-slanted toward people wearing dresses. Religion was a woman’s thing. Men had chores to do, fields to farm, and (in later years) golf to play. Most men agreed that their kids needed some Sunday schooling, but figured their wives could handle that. Which was how Sunday mornings, in Protestant churches, came to be filled with women and children. Ironically, during most of that era, all of the preachers were men….all of the church officials were men….all of the people collecting, counting, banking and spending the money were men….but all of the Sunday school teachers and Mission Committee members were women. So I guess it evened out. In men’s minds, anyway.
My father always professed great interest in the church, so much so that he never failed to ask “How was it?” or “What did the preacher say?” when the rest of us came home at 12:30. But, for most of his life, he didn’t go all that much. Unless one of us was doing something, then he’d be there to see it.
Coming into the ministry, I took all this for granted, don’t you see. So it surprised me when I saw lots of men in the churches I served. And I took it as a compliment when some guy’s wife would pull me aside and whisper: “I want to thank you for getting my husband interested in church. You are the first preacher he has ever been willing to come and hear.” And while I wanted to protest that “coming to hear me” shouldn’t constitute a primary incentive to worship the Lord, I eventually shut up and accepted the compliments in the gracious spirit with which they were intended. But, I will confess that for 35 years I have ever-so-slightly slanted my sermons so that my subject choices, speech patterns and sermon illustrations betrayed a masculine overtone…. the better to keep husbands attending and the compliments of their wives forthcoming.
Occasionally, over the years, I have heard women say: “My husband won’t come to church with me because his parents always made him go as a kid.” I don’t know where husbands first came up with that line to rationalize their reluctance. But it has worked like a charm for decades. Believe it or not, women buy it. As stupid as it sounds, women buy it. Don’t ask me why. It makes no sense to me.
As concerns those early years of “forced church-going,” his parents probably made him do a lot of other things, too. I suspect they made him go to school, brush his teeth, take out the trash, and write thank you notes for ties he never wore to aunts he never saw. And he managed to get over that stuff. If some guy were to say that to me (“I don’t come to church because my parents forced me as a kid”), I’d probably say: “It sounds like your mom and dad really screwed with your head big time, to the point that you’re still emotionally dangling from their chain. Why not meet me in my office and work through some of that? It must be hell to feel so tied to (and controlled by) one’s parents. At age 47, no less.”
One man actually told me that he’d gladly come to church, but his wife was the soprano soloist (meaning that she sat with the choir). Apparently, it made him feel uncomfortable to sit alone. Mind you, this man ran a mid-sized corporation in his working life. Oh, the stupid lies we tell…. and buy….to avoid coming to terms with what is really going on in our lives.
But like I said, I have always seen guys in church. And I am seeing more of them than ever before. Which is good. For a lot of reasons. One of them being health. Ed Adams clipped an editorial from last Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. Listen to this:
Why go to the gym, when you can go to church?
A remarkable new study by the National Institute for Healthcare Research analyzed some 29 peer-reviewed studies of some 126,000 people and found a statistically significant link between churchgoing and lifespan. You are 29% more likely to live longer if you’re a churchgoer than if you sleep late on Sundays. There are real health benefits to faith, as scientific research has long shown. Churchgoers, synagogue regulars and mosque attendees generally seem to suffer from lower rates of cancer, heart disease, mental illness and fewer bouts of depression.
Believers generally have lower blood pressure and stronger immune systems. (One study compared the death rates of people in religious and non-religious Israeli kibbutzim; the more religious ones had a much lower death toll.) What’s new is the connection between religious observation and outliving the local atheist-club president.
But why? The study doesn’t say, but Dr. Michael McCullough, who led the research, was willing to speculate. It may be that religion confers a tight welter of benefits that can’t be easily simulated in the secular world; a conservative creed that cultivates moderation or abstinence, a social network that sustains believers in these values, and a strong belief system that gives hope in the face of hardship. These things combine to protect the faithful from making dangerous choices and to relieve stress.
This study is an encouraging sign that the 20th century mind-set, to toss overboard any and all religious thinking as mindless superstition, may have more serious drawbacks than we ever imagined.
My friends, I predict two things in regard to such studies. First, we are going to see more and more of them. Second, we will see skeptics work harder and harder to debunk them. But those of us who have long said “This is a better way to live,” will keep preaching the merits of marrying habits with holiness as a prescription for happiness….and there will be fewer deaf ears on which our sermons will fall.
But more than that, we will increasingly see fathers coming to church, not just so they can be healthy for their kids, but so as to be mentors to their kids. You heard me say earlier that today’s fathers place a greater value on the “role modeling” aspects of parenting, than upon any other. But role modeling is multi-faceted. On the surface, it means: “This is how you hold the saw. This is how you pedal the bike. This is how you factor the equation.” But, at a deeper level, role modeling (by fathers) is also: “This is how you love a woman. This is how you serve a neighbor. This is how you follow the Lord.”
Role modeling is as much about letting your kid see you pray, as letting your kid see you cry. Every time you sing a hymn….every time you take a stand….you are saying to your kid: “This life is not just about you. And it’s not just about me. It’s about some things that are bigger than you and me. And I can tell you that till I’m blue in the face. But every time I place my tithe in the envelope….my posterior in the pew….or my life on the line….I am showing you that life’s pecking order doesn’t stop at our front door. I hear you talk with your friends about whose father is bigger. Come Sunday, at church, I’ll show you the answer.”
Thirty two hundred years ago….but who’s counting?….Joshua (having settled in a land where there was, religiously speaking, every choice available) said to the people of Israel: “Choose, this day, whom you will serve. Your choices include the gods your fathers served in Egypt, the gods you encountered in the wilderness, the gods of the people across the river, or the gods of the Amorites that were already in place when we got here. But, as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Which, I assume, meant that he was making a decision that included his kids.
“Ah,” you say, “that was all well and good for Joshua. For in his day….in his time….in his culture….he had more authority over his house and control in his house.” Probably so. But I have learned (by observing how things go in my house) that it is a whole lot easier to talk about what I desire of others, once I become clear….by precept and example….about what I expect of myself.
