Mixed Metaphors

Luke 11:1-13

Preached by Rev. Trina Zelle

June 20, 2010

It happens every year.  I flip through the multitude of Father’s Day cards at Walgreen’s  – some religious, some silly, some both – but none of them say what I really want them to say to my father.  It has finally occurred to me that this annual, futile search is a good metaphor for the holiday itself.  Father’s Day cards don’t do the job because the day itself is kind of strange – it just doesn’t have the oomph that Mother’s Day does.

Maybe that’s because Mother’s Day, established by Julia Ward Howe, was less an elevation of women as mothers as it was a statement against war – I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier --- was the song that accompanied that day itself.  Why do you think that is?

Father’s Day seems to have been tacked on as a holiday in order to balance things out – but to the best of my knowledge, there is no underlying value driving the institution of Father’s Day.  Maybe that’s why the cards are so unsatisfying – mainly with pictures of ducks or tools or some other “masculine” thing rather than expressions of emotion.        

Or, maybe we default to ducks because, when it comes to men, expressions of emotion are complicated.  At least for those of us who have our roots in a traditional understanding of what it means to be a male in this culture – strong, nonverbal, and analytical.  Not all that different really, from the way we’ve had to learn to appreciate women’s sports.  We’re fighting powerful cultural messages and values when we connect the words “men” and “emotion.”  Then, when we add the term fatherhood, we really have our work cut out for us.

Men.  Emotion. Fatherhood.  It’s hard to feel comfortable with such a combination.  It just feels awkward doesn’t it?  Greeting card companies and the media reflect that dis-ease and so, over the years we have seen fathers portrayed as remote, a bit irrelevant to daily life but good for paying the bills and distinctly uncomfortable at being the object of love and attention. 

And yet, for all that this portrayal is part of the air we breath, it has never been particularly accurate – at least in my experience.  I have memories of my father’s breakfast pancakes and his puns.  His being there when I needed him.  His nonjudgmental acceptance.  His tears. 

Having said that, I must reluctantly admit that the stereotype does contain a grain of truth.  Emotional expression is difficult for many men.

In my younger years, I took this personally and spent a lot of time and effort try to do the reverse of Professor Henry Higgins who wondered why a woman couldn’t be more like a man.  Then I had three sons, followed by a daughter and from all of this I discovered something:  men and women are different.

Not in depth of emotion nor caring nor love for our children but something far more fundamental – how we see ourselves.  And this difference seems to emerge from our early experiences of our mothers.  Carol Gilligan was a Harvard ethicist who may have been the first one to shed some light on these issues when she described the outcome of her years of research on gender differences.  Little girls grow up learning about who they are through identification with their mother.  In other words, girls discover who they are by connecting with their primary nurturer.

Because most primary care givers are mothers, little boys tend to gain their initial sense of identity by being different from their mothers.  In other words, they discover who they are by distinguishing themselves from their source of nurturance.  What do you think happens then, when no father figure is available to provide the identification and connection that is lost when a boy asserts himself as separate from his mother?  Loneliness wouldn’t you think?  Possibly grief?

Robert Bly, in his book Iron John, traces the deterioration of fatherhood in our culture back to the Industrial Revolution when sons and fathers no longer worked side by side with the son often learning his trade from his father.  Instead, the father began going away from the family to work.  Family cohesiveness and unity was destroyed as the father became an exhausted, shadowy figure, present only at mealtimes.  Father as teacher,  nurturer, interpreter of life, became a thing of the past.

Bly submits that this absence has left a hole in the souls of many men, who long for closeness and intimacy from their fathers – who hunger for a relationship far deeper than the ridiculous sentimentality we sling around on days like this.  His solution?  A call for men to discover anew what it means to be a man.  Not by imitating women and how women approach and experience life – but by reclaiming the richness and depth that has been lost through neglect and life style.  Our sons need it.  They need someone with whom they can identify.  Our daughters need it too. 

Daughters and sons alike need a father who does more than pay the bills and “rattle newspapers in the next room,” as one man bitterly remembered his own.  To paraphrase Nietizsche, “When one has not had a good father, one must create one.”  One of the most violent gangs in El Paso, during the years that I lived there, called themselves, “The Fatherless.” Lacking fathers, they created their own toxic family system.

Lee Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine, writes in My Father, My Son, of the need expressed by many of the men he had interviewed, for a more loving and carrying father and regret that there hadn’t been more overt expressions of love between them.  Salk reported that none of the men he interviewed, wished that his father had been less demonstrative.  No one said, my father was demonstrative but I won’t be that way with my son.”

It is painful to think about all of those lost opportunities for closeness, in terms of attaining our full humanity, in terms of what God must surely intend for all of us.  This loss is even more pathetic and astounding when we consider Jesus’ name for his father – Abba.  It means Daddy in Hebrew.  Not a fearful term for a remote and punitive father, but the name given by a child confident of love and acceptance.

This was the good news that Jesus brought to us:  God loves us the same way that a loving Daddy cares for his children.  He used examples that tell us his audience shared a similar loving view of human fathers.  ‘Which one of you, when your child asks for an egg would give him a serpent?  If you earthly gathers care for your children in this way, how much more will your heavenly father (daddy) do likewise.’

However, once Christianity became the state religion of a military empire, Jesus’ understanding of his heavenly Abba was rather quickly covered over by more limited understandings of fatherhood, and it is this later view of God the Father that has haunted men and women ever since.

Throughout the ages, God as a stern, remote, and  not easily appeased judge, has been a dominant aspect of our religious understanding.  It has driven men and women away from God, away from the church, and away from each other.  If nurturing is mentioned as an attribute of God, it is usually in the context of a Mother’s Day sermon, as one of God’s “feminine” characteristics.

This linkage of attributes to one sex or the other is risky business however, no matter how desirable the attribute might be.  First because there is so much that we do not know about what are and are not gender related characteristics.  And second, because unlike childhood’s ongoing argument, God is not a boy or a girl.  God is beyond gender, is richer and deeper than gender, and from those depths, calls us of both genders to lives that are a testimony to God’s love for the entire world.  Or as Jesus said, “you must love one another.”

Our ability to respond to God’s call is directly linked to our own experience of God’s acceptance of us.  If we understand God primarily in terms of distance and judgment, the likelihood of having such an experience is remote and so our spiritual lives are diminished as are the lives of those around us since we cannot give them gifts that we never develop.

But throughout history there have always been a few who have come to a more intimate understanding of God.  Sometimes we call them mystics --  God intoxicated people who apprehended not only God’s power but God’s love.  “Christ is our true mother,” one of them famously exclaimed.

Others who experienced God in immediate, life-changing ways, responded through action, leading the church and in the process the world to new birth.  To name only two:  Luther, following his experience of justification by faith through grace, reformed the church.  John Wesley, finding his heart strangely warmed, led a movement that brought hope and comfort to the casualties of the Industrial Revolution.

It’s interesting isn’t it – these emotional apprehensions of God seem to fit the stereotype of “feminine” understanding as it has been traditionally defined and yet we find men no less than women having such experiences.  Does that mean that somehow Luther, and Wesley, and the others were somehow different than most men?  Or more sensitive?

But instead of describing these experiences in terms of femininity, what if we say that God’s urgent desire for reconciliation with us breaks through our rigid, self-created structures.  And what if we say that these men were responding to God’s initiative out of the richness of who they truly were as men rather than because they were somehow “different” than most men?

What if we were to free each other from the gender stereotypes that we have used to control and diminish each other since Eden?  What if we were to embrace the knowledge that all of our abilities find their source in God.  We could see ourselves and each other to be who we really are.  We could encounter God without so much of the baggage we bring worship.  We could encounter God in the richness and completeness of God’s holiness.

We can begin right now.  In our relationships.  In our parenting.  In our work places.  We can let go of the notion that only women really know how to nurture or that only men know how to challenge and set limits.  We can relate to each other and our children so that little boys scan experience identity as sameness as well as separation, and little girls can learn that it’s OK to be separate individuals.  This is what can happen when fathers and mothers let go of rigid role expectations even as we recognize, embrace, and affirm the deepest part of ourselves and each other.

That’s what the good news is all about isn’t it?  As we are reconciled to God, we are freed to be reconciled to ourselves and therefore with each other.

If you’re a father, and you’ve always held back a little in expressing your affection for your family, how about showing them a different side of you this Father’s Day.  It doesn’t matter how old you or your children are.   If you haven’t before, start the legacy of deeply sharing yourself with your children.  They and their children will rise up and call you blessed.  Amen.