16 Jun SUNDAY, JUNE 16, 2024
The main takeaways from today’s gospel readings are these: We do not know how God accomplishes things. The first thing we become aware of as humans is knowing that in the grand scheme of things, we play only a small part. Throughout the entire scope of an individual plant or person’s development, we observe God at work.
This is most certainly true of fatherhood. To become a father requires minimal contribution. In fact, it requires no more than donating scattered seeds in an initial act from which two humans may reproduce themselves.
The second takeaway is this: People and things are formed and make progress as God wills. Of themselves, they may produce something, but only as God wills will their lives mature by degrees in ways that are both noticeable and measurable. At the last, God will deem when a person is ready for harvest, when God feels they are fully prepared to take their place in the kingdom.
Today’s parable of the mustard seed holds many parallels to fatherhood. The responsibilities of fatherhood start out small. You can’t do much during pregnancy but inform yourself and become aware. You can’t provide anything directly to the growing fetus, but you can offer indirect support by caring for your pregnant partner. Like a mustard seed, your role seems small, yet it grows in size and has potential to become great.
In order for a father to grow in stature up to his potential, he must allow God to work in him. He must change and reorient himself to become more than who he once was. To grow, he must adapt to the needs of his growing family. He must respond and reflect upon what is needed from him and what may be expected of him. The path is a steep curve fraught with many stressors: lack of sleep, an increased workload, the need to be more patient and understanding than ever, becoming increasingly more unselfish and sensitive to what others need.
Like a full grown mustard seed, you are expected to provide a much needed place for others to live and sleep. They need to find shade and protection in you or else they will be without, flying loose in mid-air, subject to becoming prey, dying from lack or exhaustion.
Yes, fatherhood is a tall order for men or those who aim to fill that role, grandfathers, uncles, brothers, and single mothers with no choice but to parent without a partner.
Parenting itself is a parable: a storied experience that teaches us lessons that were previously hidden, a thing that makes no sense at the outset, but proves to reveal much as elements of the story are explained or as we experience them firsthand.
There is much imagery in what God proposes to do to and for us through his will and by taking action. He will take and break off a tender one from among the young and plant it himself on a high and lofty mountain. How many young men have been transformed by being transplanted, by being drafted into military service, becoming their family’s main provider, or by entering fatherhood?
The Lord God says that by doing so, this was the only way they could produce boughs of their own, bear fruit or become noble. Being transplanted or transformed was the only way that man would learn how to provide shade or a home for others to live and nest.
By this, all men and the families of which they come from or families which they form with partners and children of their own, will come to know the Lord. By this, all will come to see that the Lord may elevate the lowly or bring low the high and mighty, may make green dry wood or dry up what once was flourishing.
The psalmist offers advice to fathers on Father’s Day by saying, “It’s a good thing to give thanks and sing praise to the Lord, Most High. It’s a good thing for you to herald love in the morning and faithfulness at night, to give thanks because of the works of God’s hands, to be thankful for being spread abroad and planted in the house of the Lord.
For those who never marry or become fathers, God promises that you shall still bear fruit, even in old age. You shall be green and succulent so that you may show how upright the Lord is, how He has been your rock, and in whom there is no injustice. In other words, you don’t begrudge or remain envious of those whose life experience was different from yours or different than you once hoped for.
Finally, let’s listen to Paul as he speaks to the Corinthians and claim his encouragement as our own. We are always confident, though we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. Parenting, and life itself, is a walk of faith, not by sight. Aim to please he who will sit in the judgment seat and will recompense us for whatever good or evil has been done while in the body.
Don’t be afraid, but know what it means to revere the Lord. Listen to your conscience. Commend yourselves to each other. Don’t boast in outward appearance, but in your heart where the love of Christ urges you on. Having died for all so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.
On Father’s Day, regard no one from a human point of view, from the standpoint of where they measure up, whether they have grown to full stature as a man or provider. See that anyone who is in Christ is a new creation; everything old has passed away. There are those among us, including myself, who have complex and not always pleasant memories about our fathers.
Our fathers were all too human. Though they provided for our families in some ways, they disappointed us in other ways. Though they may have loved us, they failed to prove love according to our personal needs or level of satisfaction. Paul says, “Let everything old pass away; see, everything has become new!”
What becomes new today is a way to see how progress has been made, how God did accomplish something in a thing or a person we once deemed insignificant. Perhaps in the past, you weren’t able to give them regard or appreciate what they did. But, like a small mustard seed, they still did accomplish what God intended.
For one thing, they did play their small part in the grand scheme of things. Throughout the entire scope of your life and development, God was at work. Someone observed this and noticed. Their role extended beyond their initial small contribution even if they were not actively involved in your life as you wished. God formed them and helped them make progress according to His will, maturing them by degrees, making them ready for harvest.
In God’s kingdom, there are places for all, places for every creature that requires rest, every creature looking for a home, every creature that needs shade for protection. Not every man grows up to become a father or succeeds at becoming great, but every young man, if he’s lucky, does grow up, and if he’s luckier still, grows up to become old.
Sometimes in life, we’re the ones who provide and at other times, we need to be provided for. God is the only one capable of being a sole provider. While God doesn’t need anything, God does have desires.
God desires for every person to grow, for every person to mature and thrive, for every person to do their part, to observe what God aims to do and to allow God to raise them up as individuals to higher heights. As sovereign, God will plant a tender sprig upon a mountaintop, or dare I add, within a valley, in order that that tender sprig may produce boughs, bear fruit and become noble. Why?
So that under it, every kind of bird will live; in the shade of its branches winged creatures of every kind will nest. Not just of one kind, but of every kind. Think about your family tree. It contains every kind of winged creature, right?
Tall birds, short birds, cute birds, ornery birds, song birds and birds of prey, ones who spend time in cages or act like pets, ones best at laying eggs or building nests, squawkers, comics, one’s that fly the coop or bully other birds. It takes all kinds to fill the branches.
And every generation is a work in progress. What one individual or set of parents can’t accomplish will be pursued by others to come or still others who may be recruited, transported or transformed according to God’s ultimate will and purpose.
Here’s the image God and Jesus leave with us. They will do whatever it takes: Bring low the high tree or make high the low tree. Dry up the green tree or make the dry tree flourish. As the Lord speaks, the Lord will accomplish.
We sleep and rise, night and day, not knowing how such things are or will be accomplished. For now it is our job to hear as we are able and to continue asking Jesus to explain things in private to his disciples. Let us pray.
Lord, you simultaneously make us aware of our limitations and smallness while pointing to our great potential. Grow and form us as your children and your church according to your divine will, according to what must change in order for us to become more useful to you.
Help us to provide for others, to become persons of peace and a place of sanctuary. And when the day comes that we require care, make us tolerant of those trying to provide it who may look, speak, and act differently from us. IYHNWP, Amen.