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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
A blessed Father’s Day to all fathers present, including fathers by blood and adoption, both formal adoption and informal adoption! You may be interested to know that Father’s Day as we know it on our secular calendar reportedly was founded by a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd, who at a Methodist-Episcopal Church in 19-09 heard a sermon about Mother’s Day, which had been founded the year before; as a daughter who had helped her widowed father raise her siblings, she felt strongly that fathers also needed such recognition, so she took the idea to the Ministerial Alliance in her city of Spokane, Washington, which celebrated the holiday the next year, and eventually there were observances nation-wide. For centuries before that, of course, different religious traditions honored mothers and fathers on different days of the Church Year, such as the August 15 Feast of St. Mary, Mother of Our Lord, and the March 19 Feast of St. Joseph, Guardian of Jesus. Nevertheless, today we make use of the secular focus on fathers and families and consider more-closely part of a verse that otherwise might be largely passed by when it comes up as part of a longer Epistle Reading in our lectionary series (Ephesians 3:14-21 for the three-year’s Proper 12 B and 3:13-21 for the one-year’s Trinity 16). As we hear these words from Ephesians chapter 3, verses 14 and 15: “the Father, from Whom every family in heaven and on earth is named”, we realize that “Every family is named from God the Father”.
In writing to the Ephesians about his kneeling in prayer for them to “the Father, from Whom every family in heaven and on earth is named”, the Divinely-inspired St. Paul makes a play on the Greek words that usually gets lost when translated into English, for the Greek words for “father” and “family” are closely related in sound and sense. As they typically do, Bible commentators dissect even this relatively-short relative-clause, list a number of possible meanings for the clause, and then disagree among themselves as to which of those possible meanings is actually meant. In general, most commentators recognize that every “family”, a concrete grouping the members of which may or may not be directly related, has the same origin. While St. Paul in all likelihood surely means to say much more than that all families have a common origin in God the Father, even that idea may be controversial in our time.
Many families have one or more family-members that are into genealogy, studying their family’s history and tracing out their family’s lines, with their results often written as a family narrative and/or diagrammed as a family tree. The Biblical genealogy of Jesus in St. Luke’s Divinely-inspired Gospel account goes all the way back to God (Luke 3:23-38; confer and compare Matthew 1:1-17). Do believers in macro-evolution trace their genealogies back through monkeys to their theoretical first single-cell living organism in the “primordial soup” or “pre-biotic broth”? All people ought to trace themselves back to God the Father and call Him “Father” (confer Ephesians 4:6). All people ought to be good children of God and of those parents and other authorities that God has given us. We all ought to treat well our siblings and other “collateral” relatives, such as aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews. We all ought to be good parents and other authorities to our children and all those whom God has put under us.
Yet, like the children of Israel in today’s Old Testament Reading who committed to do all that the Lord had spoken (Exodus 19:2-8), we all fail to keep His Commandments. For, in studying our family history and tracing out our family lines, we must go back to God through Adam, through whom, as we heard in today’s Epistle Reading (Romans 5:6-15), sin entered the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all people because—at least initially in him and then eventually on our own—we all sinned. We have alienated ourselves from Him. We justly deserve God’s temporal and eternal punishment. But, God calls and so enables us to sincerely repent of our sin, and, for the sake of the holy, innocent, bitter sufferings and death of His beloved Son, Jesus Christ, He is gracious and merciful to us poor sinful beings.
Certainly in some sense our families on earth are at least intended to reflect the plurality and unity of the three Blessed Persons in the one Holy Trinity (confer John 17:11, 21, 22). God the Father begat God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son. Out of our Triune God’s great love for all people, the Father sent both His Son to die on the cross for us and His Holy Spirit to call us all to faith. Conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, Jesus is the Son of God and the Son of Man (confer 2 Samuel 7:14). Fully human, Jesus could and did die for us all, and, fully Divine, Jesus’s death could and did atone for the sins of the whole world. Jesus is of the house and lineage of David (Luke 2:4), and in Him, as a descendant also of Abraham, all the families of the earth are blessed (Acts 3:25, citing Genesis 22:18; confer Genesis 12:3). Through Jesus, the Son, all can have access in one Spirit to the Father (Ephesians 2:18), as the Son reveals the Father in the power of the Spirit (confer Matthew 11:27; Luke 10:22). As St. Paul just after his prayer for the Ephesians gave glory to God (Ephesians 3:20-21), people of all families of the earth can worship God by seeking and receiving His forgiveness of sins in the ways that God promises to give that forgiveness: namely, through His Word, in all of the Word’s forms, especially the Word’s sacramental forms.
From the Father every family in heaven and on earth is named. In Holy Baptism, we are given not just any name but God’s Name. We are baptized in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The naming is not just a label, but the naming is also a reality. At the Font we are adopted as sons and heirs; at the Font the Father has put the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, leading us to cry “Abba!”, that is “Father!” (Galatians 4:5-6; confer 3:27). When the sins that we know and feel in our hearts particularly trouble us, we privately confess them to our pastors, our “father confessors”, for the sake of individual Holy Absolution in that same Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. We who are baptized and so instructed and examined in private confession and individually absolved are admitted to the Sacrament of the Altar (for example, Apology of the Augsburg Confession XV:40). Around this Altar not only are we gathered in Jesus’s Name but He Himself also is present (Matthew 18:20), especially with bread that is His Body given for us and wine that is His Blood shed for us for the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. Here in the family meal of the Sacrament of the Altar we are united not only with Jesus but in Him also with all those who commune with us here and now and in every place and time, including those who have gone before us in the faith, all of our brothers and sisters in Christ in God’s family that is the Church.
The author of today’s sermon hymn (Lutheran Service Book 863), Frances Bland Tucker, notably a collateral descendant of George Washington, was born to a family of Episcopal clergymen. He himself was first a deacon and eventually a rector, and he also served his larger church body by working on its 19-40 and 19-82 hymnals. In the process of working on the 19-40 hymnal, he noticed the need for a hymn related to families, and so he wrote the Trinitarian hymnic-prayer that we sang. The opening line, “Our Father, by Whose Name / all fatherhood is known”, attempts to capture St. Paul’s original play on words in our text, though the pew edition of Lutheran Service Book does not list the text as a basis for the hymn and in the process Tucker may change St. Paul’s meaning a bit. Regardless, as we sung and so prayed, so God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit does bless parents and children so that Christian homes can be and are “the dwelling place of peace”. As St. Paul goes on to write to the Ephesians, fathers do not provoke their children to anger but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4). And, as people’s actual experiences with their various “fathers” differ, all live together in the forgiveness of sins that we receive from God the perfect Father and in turn extend to one another.
Sonora Smart Dodd’s early attempts at establishing Father’s Day were aided by President Woodrow Wilson, who in 19-16 spoke at Spokane’s observance; President Calvin Coolidge, who in 19-24 recommended a national observance; President Lyndon Johnson, who in 19-66 signed the first presidential proclamation declaring the third Sunday of June as Father’s Day; and President Richard Nixon, who in 19-72 made that national declaration permanent. Yet, without God the Father from eternity, Who precedes all such naming, we could not speak of any families. “Every family is named from God the Father.” Though we stand in His family line, our sin alienates us from Him, until He welcomes us back as His forgiven children (Luke 15:11-24). As today’s appointed Psalm puts it (Psalm 100; antiphon: v.5), the Lord made us, and we are His; His steadfast love, His “mercy”, endures forever, and His faithfulness to all generations.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +