Father’s Day

June 15, 2008

“Heir Conditioned”

John 15:9-17

A story by a columnist in The New York Times told of a little boy’s bewilderment when his father lost his patience with him. While riding on an uptown bus, the columnist had observed the little boy asking his father questions nonstop, as children often do. However, for some reason, the exasperated father’s patience wore thin and he said sharply, “Will you hush!” The boy was stunned into silence and sat dejectedly looking down at the floor of the bus. Then he hesitantly tugged at his father’s shirtsleeve and said, “Daddy, it’s me! It’s your Tommy!”

The boy was discovering early how no one makes it in life alone, how life, as God meant for it to be in all its fullness, only comes alive for us in a world of persons who communicate toward understanding, who stand against the darkness together, who suffer together, who play and laugh together, who sing and pray together, who grow on together!

Jesus claimed that truth for his own life and translated it into an important theme of his teachings. It’s so clear how he gave high priority to personal relationships and savored the joy and peace that come from sharing and caring. Not without reason did Jesus speak those beautiful words that come from this morning’s reading from the Bible:

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love … I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete … This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

And not without reason did Jesus, praying for his followers, say, “… As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.”

As daughters and sons of God we are heirs, rightful inheritors, to the grace God would offer us through Jesus Christ. What better take-home word for us on this Father’s Day than to gratefully affirm what it means to be rightfully related to God! Consider two important expressions of such love and of what it means to be “heir conditioned.”

First, to love is to listen and to respond to each other. Ignazio Silone, the Italian novelist, once suggested that our spiritual situation today is something like a refugee camp. Silone asks, “What do you think refugees do from morning until night? They spend most of their time telling one another the story of their lives. The stories may not be amusing, but they tell them to one another, really in an effort to be understood.” And then Silone says, “Two persons must be together, talking softly to one another, with many pauses.” Talking together, sharing feelings, hopes, and fears. Talking together, asking questions and raising doubts. Talking together, exploring ideas and gathering courage. Talking together, but with many pauses, in order that listening and hearing will occur. Not the kind of listening that takes place with just half an ear, that presumes to know what the other person has to say; not the impatient, inattentive listening prompted by morbid curiosity or grudging obligation, but listening that comes from concern and respect and leads to true understanding.

The kind of listening we find in Jesus, who listened to people (as I’ve mentioned before) with the “third ear”—with his heart. That’s how he listened to Peter, to Bartimaeus, to the woman of Samaria, and even to Pontius Pilate. That’s why the Gospel writer says of him, “He knew what was inside persons.”

Our technological age has produced some rather sophisticated equipment with which to listen: seismographs by which we listen to the slightest tremor in the depths of the earth and powerful receivers by which we listen to signals bounced off satellites in outer space. We listen to the animal world, to our own heartbeats and brain waves and to the movement of sub-atomic particles. How strange then that we seldom listen to each other. So countless persons walk the streets of our communities, dwell in our neighborhoods and even under our own roofs, persons who yearn for someone—anyone—to listen to them. Communication between persons is rare and so often our conversation ends up empty, with messages uncompleted.

The listening we need to have is more than passive and superficial acknowledgment; it’s more than the echo of our own preconceived notions and feelings that we project on others. Real listening must be attentive and active. Real listening involves patience, openness, and the desire to understand. We must learn to get ourselves out of the way enough so we can understand not only what the other person is saying, but also what she or he is feeling. And we need to learn to listen to what is not being said and what cannot be spoken because the inner pain is too great. Such listening is practicing what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “the ministry of holding one’s tongue.” We must learn to listen and wait long enough for hiding hearts to emerge and meet.

An undergraduate student at Harvard received word that his father had died. Shortly thereafter, his class work began to slip sharply. Deeply troubled and depressed, he went to his adviser who listened with loving patience and attentive concern. Gradually the student could share the painful feelings of alienation that had existed for so long between him and his father. He told the adviser how guilty he felt for the shabby feelings he held toward his father and how he had wanted to bridge the separation between them, but now it was too late. He then went on to say that he thought he would drop out of school for a term, travel about and try to get his head together. The adviser replied, “Yes, you probably need some time and if you feel that leaving school will help, do it. But I want to stay in touch with you, so let me know your whereabouts so I can write or telephone you.” At those words something unexpected happened. Tears welled up in the student’s eyes as his deeper feelings were released. When he regained control he said, “I’m sorry! But no one ever listened to me before or cared how I felt.” To be “heir conditioned,” to be rightfully related to God through Jesus Christ, we must listen and respond to each other.

To love is to not only listen and respond to each other, it’s also to believe the best about each other and to adventure it in life together. That’s our other word. A whole new world opens up for us the day someone comes along who believes in us enough to challenge our best, who walks beside us and stays with us when the road is long and the struggle thickens, who doesn’t give up on us, but who sticks with us and keeps accepting and encouraging us. As one writer put it, “If we take people as they are, we make them worse. But if we treat them as if they were what they in God’s love ought to be, we help them become what they’re capable of becoming.”

We find such constancy in Jesus, who believing in people, “believed in them to the end,” as Scripture declares. It’s not surprising how Jesus called forth the unknown best in persons like Mary Magdalene, Thomas, Nicodemus and Zacchaeus, until their life-long fears and self-imposed littleness became the courage and love that forever changed the world.

Still it happens! I’ve seen it happen in others and I’m who I am this morning because it happened to me. The memories of persons through whom it happened are still vivid and vitalizing for me; persons who walked beside me when I needed them the most, who were patient with me and kept on supporting me even when I let them down; persons who still believed in me when the darkness fell, reassuring me that my dreams were worth another try; persons who entrusted themselves and their confidence to me; persons who laughed and cried with me because they cared; persons whose knowing silence challenged me to be responsible and face the truth about myself; persons who were ready to venture with me into the unknown future, who made it plain they were proud of me and grateful that we could share part of this life together. Persons like my parents—especially my father—who sacrificed so much to give his children opportunities that he could never have; certain teachers and mentors whose quest for the highest made me want to seek it too, and whose affirmation of me kept me at it; Martha and our daughters and son, whose graceful love makes life a song; and persons in the churches where I’ve served through whose forgiveness, concern and commitment God drew near to bless and beckon. That’s part of the process of being “heir conditioned.”

Many years ago around Father’s Day there appeared the syndicated column of Ernie Pyle on a subject that underscores what I’m trying to say this morning. Ernie Pyle, most of you remember, was the famed World War II correspondent who was killed by enemy machine gun fire on an island off Okinawa. The column, written years before the war, was autobiographical and becomes our closing word. It reads this way:

One winter night a few years ago I was sitting in the dark cabin of a westbound plane. Word had come that afternoon that my father had had a second stroke, and they said over the phone that he might not live. I was in a desperate hurry …. perhaps I felt it too much, for my flight took on a touch of drama to me, and I created a scene of my homecoming in my own mind somewhat as though I were seeing it on a screen.

I was proud of myself in those days. I don’t mean that I was bigheaded or thought I was better than anyone else. I was looking at myself more by the standards of those who stay at home in the neighborhood than by any specific accomplishments. Only you who have come from the intimate confines of a Midwestern farm community can know in what fear parents live of their children bringing shame and disgrace on them.

In 20 years my father had not seen me a total of two months. But I had been good about writing, in later years I had been able to send a little money, but best of all I had never brought disgrace upon my parents. And so, thinking of these things, I pictured in my mind my return to my father’s bedside. I saw him lying there, I saw myself rush in and take his hand. I could hear him whisper, just in his last moments, “I’m proud of you!”

A car met me in Indianapolis that dramatic night and rushed me to the maple-hidden farmhouse where I spent my youth. My father was conscious, but the stroke had wounded his tongue and he couldn’t speak. I stayed on and helped nurse him, taking the night shift. My mother and Aunt Mary were usually up at five in the morning and then I would turn in for some sleep. I had been there almost a week and one cold morning Aunt Mary came in and awakened me. “Your father wants to see you; get up and come in quickly. He can say a few words.”

So I jumped out of bed, threw on my robe and went to his room. His worn face went into a small smile as I came in, and his eyes shone. He reached out his hand to mine, and I sat on the side of his bed and he squeezed my hand until it almost hurt. His words came with great effort, and I had to lean over and listen closely to make them out. And what my father said, there so white in bed, laboring to produce each whispered word was this, “Are you proud of me?”

In that one blinding moment I knew I had come too late. I knew that inside I had always been too late. A great choking swept over me and I could only squeeze his hand, give him a slap on the knee, and then I ran to my room and I, for the first time in 20 years, lay on my bed and wept.

Ernie Pyle concludes this touching story by saying:

I went alone yesterday to the graveyard and stood in the sharp wind over my father’s grave. As I stood there it seemed to me that he and I were alone in the world and I could speak to him and there was only one thing I could say to him and that was, “Too late, Father. You waited a lifetime for it and I couldn’t tell you. But I was proud of you, always. Always! You know I was.”

Jesus said, “Keep on loving one another as I have loved you.” To be heir conditioned is to love, listen, and respond toward understanding. To be heir conditioned is to affirm the highest in others, and to work at making it possible. To be heir conditioned is to be proud of each other and to say it and show it. It’s to realize how God draws near. It’s to abide in Jesus’ love. Let us pray.

Deliver us, O God, from our self-imposed limitations. Deliver us from that which keeps us down or holds us back, from that which chips away at our self-confidence, from that which obstructs or aborts the birth of your gift of life and hope in our hearts. May we dare to become what you created us to be and to strive always for “the more excellent way.”

O God, who makes all things new, transform our trembling wills into the smiling confidence of one who lives not for oneself but for your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, in whose name we pray. Amen!