Stephen Palmer
Second Presbyterian Church
Sermons: June 18, 2006 - Father's Day

"Some Trust In Chariots"

Our lectionary reading from Mark’s gospel today is the familiar story of the scattered seed. The remarkably good news for you is you are not going to hear another traditional account of that parable. Instead, let me shock you, and tell you the scattered seed we will be thinking about is not the seed that produces wheat and weeds, but the human seeds that produce people – semen. Lest you worry that I am trying to lead you astray, let me remind you that our very respectable word for where ministers learn to be ministers is a "seminary" – literally, the seed bed of the church. But enough of literalism, let’s talk about fathers – since it is Father’s Day. But you see how seeds and fathers go together.

First, listen to what some adult children say about their fathers. And while I’m trying to tell you where I am going, let me also tell you that I am departing from the normal structure of a traditional Presbyterian sermon which gives you three points and a poem; rather, I will use three poems and a point.

Enid Bagnold speaks for many daughters when she says "a father is always making his baby into a woman. And when she is a woman, he turns her back again."

Alan Valentine speaks for many sons when he writes: "For thousands of years, father and son have stretched wistful hands across the canyon of time, each eager to help the other to his side, but neither is quite able to desert the loyalties of his contemporaries. The relationship is always changing and hence always fragile; nothing endures except the sense of difference."

Mary Jarrell, who called her father by his last name, says "Jarrell was not so much a father. . . as an affectionate encyclopedia." Sad, but I suspect that may be true of other dads.

In contrast, actor Carroll O’Connor has been quoted for saying: "People see Archie Bunker everywhere. Particularly girls; poor girls; rich girls, all kinds of girls are always coming up to me and telling me that Archie is just like their dad."

Natasha Josefowitz writes for many of us: "My father died many years ago, and yet when something special happens to me, I talk to him secretly, not really knowing whether he hears, but it makes me feel better to half believe it."

Fathers are more than a fact of life; they are a fragile bundle of conflicting feelings – some sweet, some painful, some confusing. No wonder so many of us on Father’s Day want to tip our hat to dad, buy a tie and let life go on normally – whatever that is. Few are brave enough to search again through the rubble of memory for meaning and love, even the skewed love of human fathers. The hard work on Father’s Day begins with a search for love, and poet Ronald Wallace in "Off the Record" talks about his search for his father and what he finds.

In the attic I find the notes
he kept in college
over forty years ago: Hooray
for Thanksgiving vacation! he wrote
in the margin of Psych 102,
And for a moment I can see him there,

feel the exuberance surge through
that odd cell of his body
where I am still
a secret code uncompleted, a piece
of DNA, some ancient star-stuff.
And then I find a recording of me

from 1948, when he was twenty-two
and I was three, and I can see,
from my perch up on his shoulders,
him stopping at the gaudy arcade,
plugging his lucky quarter into
the future where we’d always be.

Maybe imagination is just
a form of memory after all, locked
deep in the double helix of eternity.
Or maybe the past is but one more
phantasmagoric invention we use
to fool ourselves into someone else’s shoes.

It is not my voice I want to hear
on memory’s fading page, on imagination’s disk.
It is my father’s in the background
prompting me, doing his best
to stay off the record, his hushed
instructions vanishing in static.

Anne Sexton had it right when she said "It doesn’t matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was." It is the picture or the pictures in the mind which deeply shape us as much or even more than genetics. For even before the stuff of life is planted, before birth or adoption or relationships with children, there was a search of love, a search for meaning, a search for pleasure, AND I hope a search for purpose – trying to find a place to fit in, or as the Shakers say it so well – "to turn, turn, turn in the land of delight, until by turning you come ‘round right."

Even though it was almost 40 years ago, when I was in my late 20's, I remember a sensitive and painful time of life where I was turning, turning, searching for love and family. Most of us know that experience, that love-sick struggle of moping, or funk, or whatever you want to call it. For some it comes earlier in life; for others much later; and the duration varies. And while there are a lot of "love potions" for sale – the search takes time, patience and courage. The poet Rod McKuen says "love is worth the time it takes to find." And that is true for both human love and finding God’s love.

It was during this lonely, dopey, mopey period of my life – almost 40 years ago – that Rod McKuen’s sentimental poetry comforted, guided, and distracted me through the knotty, fragile world of feelings, frustrations, and unsatisfied longings. For a while, it seemed as if his stuff was everywhere – in books, grocery-store magazines, records, live performances and TV spots. His poems are marked by startling clarity and warmth. I was bewitched. Perhaps the best of the best was: "Some Trust In Chariots." This was before I was a father, before I was married, before seminary and before I even knew about verse 7 of Psalm 20. Here is Rod McKuen’s poem, which invites us to trust HUMAN love as the ultimate wisdom:

Forty years later, I am still thinking about chariots and the richness of human love. I also know a few things more now. Human love is good at its best, it’s wonderful; but God’s love is better. Let me repeat that. Human love is good at its best, it’s wonderful; but God’s love is better. Some trust in chariots, some trust in human love and some trust in family, but the Psalmist gets it right by saying "our trust (our ultimate confidence) is in the name of the Lord our God." Contrary to Rod McKuen’s view, the poet in Psalm 20 offers us some spiritual wisdom, which I believe trumps, and is better than the appeal of human wisdom.

Psalm 20 can be read in a couple of very different ways. On one level, we can hear it to say nothing more profound than God is on our side, God will help us win. It is both an ancient and modern idea, that suggests God will sanction whatever we or our nation does, and will label all our opponents as evil or evil empires. That kind of self-serving reading is both wrong and dangerous.

A better way to hear this psalm is to notice that the primary actor in the psalm is God, not the king, nor the people who pray to God for their king. Remembering that God knows best -- not the king, not fathers, nor presidents, nor governors, not even us – we gain the twin insights that 1. we depend on our leaders and our fathers and ourselves in many ways – but – 2. our leaders and our fathers and all the people, even us, are more dependent on God. We are warned: Don’t give away the trust we owe to God, and God alone, and God above all, to anyone or anything that is less than God.

God’s love for us transcends gender; it is the personal parental love of mother and father and beyond. It is a cosmic love that is eternal – but is also incarnational: God so loved the world – not the church, not the Americans, not the males – that he sent his only child to willingly die for the sins of all, so that we might be reconciled to God. We have been brought back into a right and healthy relationship with God by Jesus. Today, friends, I invite you to look at the cross of Christ in a new way. Don’t look at the cross as a torture chamber – don’t look at the empty cross and think that Christ’s resurrection has cancelled out the pain on the cross – rather, look at the cross as the place where God showed his amazing, steadfast love for us all. In the cross and at the cross, God’s love finds us.

Today we are glad for all the men who are here worshiping with us, or in other churches, or synagogues or on the golf courses or home doing the laundry, wherever. The Good News is God loves men – all fathers and non-fathers, the great ones, the good ones, those who are above and below average. Hard to believe, God even loves the men who are jerks. Scripture reminds us God came into the world to save sinners, all kinds of sinners, even fathers who are far less than perfect, as we all are.

In the name of God, our father-mother, his son and the holy spirit – who teach us spiritual wisdom. Amen.