All of us aspire to maturity. All of us hope to become mature and complete, grown up in every way, accomplished, respected, and honored. It’s a worthy goal. It’s a proper ambition. But we will never achieve maturity until we come to terms with both our paternity and our posterity. Our paternity – where we came from and who shaped us. And our posterity – where we are headed and who we are leaving behind. We will not achieve maturity until we come to terms with both our paternity and our posterity.
When I came to Washington, more than 38 years ago, it was to be the Baptist campus minister at the University of Maryland. I came with eight years of campus ministry experience, three of them at a college that drew the best and the brightest out of Appalachia, and five years at a major state university. I thought I knew how to do campus ministry. I had succeeded in that discipline, and was ready now to put it all to work again at the University of Maryland.
But of course I did have to work under supervision. Baptists were smart enough not just to send me out to College Park unaccompanied. I had to check in with someone older members of Calvary will remember well: Howard Rees. Rees had been doing campus ministry since before I was even born; he knew everybody worth knowing. So to him I was expected to go regularly for consultation. There I supposed I would learn more about how to develop disciples, how to evangelize, how to build interest in Bible study. I presumed that he would help me connect with the powers that be on the Maryland campus and that he would offer me a bulging file full programs and procedures.
None of that happened. None of it. There were no files. There was no organization. There was no curriculum. There was no apparent discipleship strategy. Nothing of that sort. To say that I was disappointed would be to put it mildly. To say that he did not meet my expectations would be a classic understatement. But to fail to say that I learned from him valuable and irreplaceable lessons would be a travesty on the truth.
For what Howard Rees did for me was to tell stories. Stories of students, professors, administrators, pastors. Stories of ambassadors, scientists, teachers, homemakers. Stories that led me to discover that what ministry was all about was the human spirit. Stories that helped me discern that my powers of administration were for nothing if people were not helped, my grand plans for teaching the Bible were pointless if deep wounds were not healed. Stories that led me to feel both the tragedy and the triumph of the human heart. To a great extent, Howard Rees is part of my spiritual paternity; and if I am anything at all in ministry, I represent part of his posterity. Yet, as you may have already sensed from the way I have told this story, I had to reconcile with his place in my life. I had to come to terms with who he was and what he did before I could grow up in ministry. We will never achieve maturity until we reconcile with our paternity and accept our posterity.
The apostle who wrote to the church at Corinth wrote in a very paternal mode. I suppose some would even call it a paternalistic mode; the distinction is that to be paternal is to be caring, loving, and supportive, but to be paternalistic is to be demanding, manipulative, and just plain bossy. Paul knew how to be bossy!
And worse. Paul could whine. He could whine with the best of them. Even when he tells you, as he does in Philippians, that he has learned to be content in whatever condition he finds himself, there is a certain whine about it. Paul worries that people are not taking him seriously, not according him his due, so he cries out, “Am I not free? Am I not an apostle? Are you not my work in the Lord?” Paul was going to be taken seriously, thank you very much, even if he had to recite for you all his trials and tribulations: three times beaten, stoned, shipwrecked, sleepless nights, hungry and cold, under daily anxiety about the churches. What a litany of complaints!
That’s the mood here in the sixth chapter of II Corinthians. He gives his counsel, paternally and paternalistically, through the filter of his anxiety about his posterity. Hardships, calamities, imprisonments, the whole bit; dishonored, treated as an impostor, disrespected. But, deep down, it is not just all about Paul. It is about his children in Christ. It is not just all about father Paul and his hurt feelings; it is about those he so wants to nurture and grow. And those Corinthian Christians, hearing Paul preach and reading Paul’s pleas, surely had to come to terms with both their paternity and their posterity.
For we never grow up, we never mature, we never become what we could be until we reconcile ourselves to our paternity, where we came from and who shaped us; and until we accept our posterity, where we are going and who we intend to leave behind.
I
In order to do that, we need first simply to understand those who shaped us. We need to begin the work of reconciling with our paternity by understanding our parents, our teachers, our pastors, those who molded us. And when we labor to understand them, we will find out that it is in their very humanity, it is in their frailty, as well as in their strengths, that we are gifted. We are gifted not just by fathers who knew it all, or mothers who were paragons of perfection, or teachers who were always correct. We are gifted by real persons who, in their own struggles with maturing, taught us how to grow. We begin to mature when we acknowledge that our paternity, our origins, those who shaped us, were works in progress, not complete, but in the struggle.
I would hazard a guess that there is not a person here who does not have a degree of ambivalence about his or her father on this Father’s Day. Whether that father is alive or deceased, or maybe in some cases just absent and unknown, whoever he is and whatever he has done, don’t we carry some ambivalence about him? Don’t we feel both appreciation and anger, at the same time?
And if so, that is because as we were growing up, our fathers also were growing up. They also were maturing. They were finding their own way. And it was not always easy. Some of them felt much as Paul did – that they were trying so hard to “put no obstacle in anyone’s way, so that no fault may be found … [and to commend themselves] in every way.” Like Paul, they knew what they wanted to do for us, and really thought they were doing the right thing, but their own immaturity got in the way. Our fathers, our mothers, our teachers, our guides, did what they did for us with mixed motives. It was about their own growth as well as about ours.
Acknowledge that, forgive that, and reconcile with that. For we will not achieve maturity unless and until we come to terms with both our paternity and our posterity, with where we came from and where we are going. That means understanding and forgiving the incompleteness of those who shaped us.
I love to tell the story of my own father and one of his last conversations with me. My father died at the age of 80, more than 25 years ago. But I can still hear this conversation and can feel its pathos. My dad told me that he had professed faith in Christ at the age of 18, and had gone home to tell his father that not only had he become a Christian, but also that he felt called to the ministry. My grandfather, Adam Homer Smith, whom I never knew, but whose picture shows him with folded arms and a defiant look on his face – my grandfather told his son, “We ain’t having any [fill in the blank] preachers in this house.” And my father let that dream die.
A few years later, my dad married. His bride, who was to become my mother, was an only child, the treasured gem of her railroading father, living in Louisville. My dad had developed as a vocalist, and was offered a position as a full-time musician at a radio station in Cincinnati, about a hundred miles away. A hundred miles, but as far as his father-in-law was concerned, it might just as well have been in Timbuktu, for “you are not taking my daughter away from here.” And once again, my father let a dream die.
I wondered, sometimes, when my brother and I were growing up, why our dad pushed us to learn and recite the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, the 23rd Psalm and even Luther’s Small Catechism. He harped on that stuff! And why did he stand over us and browbeat us while we were doing our piano practice? It seemed oppressive at the time. It was not as much fun as baseball across the street or pitching horseshoes in the neighbor’s yard. But it all came together in that last conversation, when not only did my father tell me about how he had wanted to go into ministry, only to have his father squash that, and how he had wanted to be a professional musician, only to have his father-in-law dismiss that. It all came together when he stopped in his tracks, looked me in the eye, and said, “But now I have one son who’s a preacher and another son who’s a musician; I guess my life has meant something after all.”
Do you see? My dad eventually came to terms with his paternity and his posterity. He understood where he had come from, and he forgave the paternalistic voices. And when he told me his story, my story also made sense. It started when I just listened and understood. “We are putting no obstacle in anyone’s way, so that no fault may be found … but we commend ourselves in every way: through great endurance …”
The first step in coming to terms with both paternity and posterity is to understand whence and from whom we came. Just to understand and not to judge, but to forgive. They were human, too, trying to mature. It explains much.
II
But the second step is to open our hearts so that we may not only receive the love that was given us, however flawed it was, but we may also give love. The second step in reconciling with who we are and what we may become is to take the love that has been given us, however imperfect it may be, and turn it into something positive. Paul says to his Corinthian children, “We have spoken frankly to you Corinthians; our heart is wide open to you. There is no restriction in our affections, but only in yours. In return – I speak as to children – open wide your hearts also.” Take the love that is offered, receive it, and then give it away.
Now the problem is that some of us have difficulty identifying clearly the love we have been given. Some of us cannot quite put together love with the way we were shaped. Again, I am well aware that there will be in this congregation a number of issues about our families of origin as well as about the families we have created. Family life is not all fun and games. It’s not all hunky-dory.
This is important, because the human development people tell us that most of us will parent the same way we were parented. Even though we tell ourselves that we will never, never, never do to our children what our parents did to us, just watch yourself in some unguarded moment, and out it comes. The old, fruitless, pointless stuff. My wife is not here today to defend herself, but she would tell you that part of the way she was raised was to be called “stupid” by her learned father, he the author of fourteen books on science, theology, philosophy, and the like. She had trouble with math, and he would go off, “How could I have such a stupid daughter?” Margaret said that she would never, never, never do that to anyone in our family, and I think she did succeed with our children. But not too long ago, she became frustrated with one of our grandchildren, and out came the “S” word. Our daughter called up, “Olivia says her grandmother called her ‘stupid.’” My wife had to say, “Guilty as charged.” We do perpetuate the issues that were dumped on us. If we felt abused or neglected or disempowered by our families, and if we are not careful, we’ll perpetuate that pattern of abuse or neglect or disempowerment.
But Paul has an alternative for us. Paul urges us to see that if we have issues with those who have preceded us, it may not be all about what they have done. It may be about our own receptivity. It may be about our own anxieties, about our own immaturity. He told the Corinthian church, “There is no restriction in our affections, but only in yours … Open wide your hearts also.” To come to terms with our paternity is to focus on our posterity, on what we can learn and what we can share with those coming after us. We do not have to be imprisoned in the mistakes of our parents; we can be something more, something new, something redemptive. We can open wide our hearts.
“Open wide your hearts ...” We have a matchless opportunity to be more than what our parents or our mentors made us to be. We have an opportunity to transform all the mistakes of the past and all the resentments we carry. For the apostle, in his magnificent catalog of contrasts, tells us that even if we seem to die, we have life, that even if we sorrow, we have joy, that even if we seem to have nothing at all, it is not true. We possess everything! Everything! “Poor, yet making many rich, as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.”
Oh, brothers and sisters, we think we are impaired and bruised and discounted by the voices we hear in our memories. But it is not so. We possess everything. We possess a heavenly Father, who empowers us, and there is no end to what we can accomplish! We possess a loving Lord, who enables us so that there is no emotional barrier we cannot surmount, no deficit we cannot make up. We possess a Christ whose life and teachings give us new insights and whose death and resurrection give us new courage. We possess a Christ who makes all things new. “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new.” Everything. Possessing everything.
We do not have to be seized up in the dismal past, nor are we limited by our paternity; we are those who, thanks to the redemptive Christ, can open wide our hearts, we can give the generation to come the gift of unbounded love, and we can be windows into the heart of God. Our paternity is not only the man who spawned us, our maternity not only the woman who bore us; our parentage is in God Himself, in Christ our redeemer, in the Spirit our empowerment. And when we come to terms with that paternity, then our posterity becomes clear as well: unrestricted affection, wide open hearts, loving the next generation into the possibilities God has prepared for them. Seeming to have nothing, we possess everything!
A friend of mine was dying. The pastor of her church was, sad to say, all wrapped up in his own issues. He did not reach out to her; he did only perfunctory visits, nothing substantial. We who were her friends did what we could, but we knew that better pastoral care was needed. Her pain was intense. We were pleased to learn, however, that as her days wore down, at her bedside frequently there was an old friend and spiritual confidante. He had taught her in times past; he had watched her grow and marry and have her own family. He had never held back his care for her, and now, in her last days, he was constantly present, this mentor. When she did pass away, some of us felt some anxiety about her funeral, for we were aware that her pastor would have nothing significant to say. At the church, when the door opened, I breathed a sigh of relief to discover that the funeral service would be led by that very mentor: Howard Rees. He whom I had wondered about and had even chafed under had not spared his affections. And I saw as never before the meaning of my spiritual paternity and thus my posterity as a pastor. It’s about getting over the past and embracing the transformation God wants to give us. “Open wide your hearts also.”
Whatever voice you hear on this Father’s Day, open wide your hearts to a Christ who will make a gift of your paternity and who will give you a magnificent posterity. For we mature when we accept, understand, and receive both whence we came and who we are becoming.
