Fathers' Day

Good morning and welcome to the First Church of Subtlety’s Annual Fashion Day. [Editor's note, we were pretty much ALL wearing Hawaiian Shirts.]

If you are visiting us this morning, please do not be alarmed. We do not always dress like this. It’s true that some of us do, it is only once a year that we all do it, and that’s every Fathers’ Day.

Welcome to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stanislaus County.  We are glad you joined us this morning.

We are a congregation of people who gather each week, and sometimes more often than that, to share our lives, our joys, our sorrows and the days that are just regular. We are a non-creedal, non-doctrinal religion with no required belief systems. There will be no test, and no one here will ever tell you what you should believe.

We will, however, in keeping with our covenantal faith, encourage you in your spiritual growth, expect you to grow as a human being, which also means helping you when you stumble or your stuck.  

We welcome you into our church home, no matter your financial status in life, or your first language. You are welcome here no matter where you are on your spiritual journey, from “I don’t really know what I believe” to Humanism, Buddhism, Goddess worship or some blend of all of the above and more. You are welcome here no matter who it is that you love, how you define your gender, and who your ancestors are.

We hope that you will stay after our service today for our Father’s Day Potluck, and don’t worry if you either didn’t know about it or forgot about it, we always have plenty to pass around. It’s a good time to get to know us and for us to get to meet you.

We bid you welcome.

 

The first thing I’d like to do this morning is to wish Happy Father’s Day to all of the Dad’s out there. 

I’d like to lift up two new Dads, and they would be Rev. Dan Kane and Darin Jensen, who on Friday officially adopted their daughter who had previously been in their Foster Care.

They were supposed to be on a plane to Hawaii today celebrating the adoption, but on Thursday they got a phone call from Social Services and they are now caring for a 6 day old little boy who has neither a name nor a birth certificate yet. So Hawaii went out the window and three became four. The little boy is their daughter’s biological brother.

Dan Kane is the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Community of Lake County. On Friday Denis and I drove to the First Unitarian Church of Oakland to celebrate their successful adoption of their daughter Ella. Also on Friday 14 people from Darin’s congregation drove 4 hours to take part in the adoption ritual at the Oakland church.

It was quite the way to kick off what has become kind of a big weekend for Fatherhood.

Yesterday, we held the memorial service for Dave Waterman. I mention this because over the course of planning his service, I got to know his daughter Jean, and meet both Dave’s son, David, and Grandson Kitri. I also got to meet Margaret’s other two daughters, having met Carol on one of the occasions where she came here to service on a Sunday morning.

It was sort of a hard service to plan, with Jean being in Oregon, and trying to navigate the complications of a blended family. One should, and Jean did, thoughtfully navigate the waters of invitation and obligation when dealing with death and step-siblings. 

Yesterday as we were making the final preparations for Dave’s Memorial service, we received word that Margaret had died on her way to the hospital. When Margaret’s daughters arrived during Dave’s Memorial service, we took a moment of silence to honor her, and to welcome Anne, Carol and Joan. The family gathered together, and supported each other in a very beautiful way.

These flowers here are from yesterday’s service.

For me, these two events, the beginning of a legally recognized fatherhood, and the death of a man who cared for these 5 adults were very tempting to use as bookends on a day like Father’s Day.  

But Fatherhood is more global than these three men.

This weekend, Superman opened, and that’s a whopping story about Fatherhood I’ll tell you.

Well, I’ll tell you later, first I want to tell you about a blog post I read this week. It’s called Why I Hate Father’s Day.”

He starts of by saying: 

I hate Father’s Day. I know that as a father I should like it, but I don’t…. Beyond the flawed, Valentine’s Day-esque premise behind it (“You really need one day of the year to show someone you appreciate/love them. Don’t you dare show them on any other day of the year. Don’t. You. [Bleeping]. Dare.”), Father’s Day and its surrounding hullabaloo show just how flawed our society’s view of fatherhood remains.
Even with father’s staying home with their kids more than ever, with more women than ever being the primary bread winner in a household, at a time when the constriction of traditional gender roles is easing up a little bit, along comes Father’s Day, where all the stereotypes of the emotionally distant, non-nurturing father trot back out like some aging hair metal band starting yet another tour to pay for rehab and alimony for the band members’ eight ex-wives.
Father’s Day commercials and gifts all have the same underlying message. “Thanks for not abandoning me, Dad. And occasionally you did stuff with me that was manly and didn’t involve caring for me in any way.”  None of the loving messages Mom got last month.

And then our Blogger friend who remains anonymous goes on to list the most common Father’s Day gifts and what they represent, one example: “A tie. Real message: go back to work and do your only important duty, providing for us financially.”

Ultimately, Father’s Day is just a symptom of the profoundly low expectations society has for fathers right now. All you have to do in order to be a good father is not abandon your child. Everything else makes you father of the year.

This post coupled with the release of the latest version of Superman, who has two fathers with very differing agendas, has put Fatherhood front and center this weekend for me.

Many years ago, when I had a long term girlfriend, my own Dad told me, when I asked him if I’d ever have my life together enough to have children of my own, my Dad told me “No one ever has his life together enough to have children, but you will just work it out, like we did.”

Truth be told, it didn’t sound like much of a plan to me. On the one hand, I believed my Dad. On the other hand I thought his strategy could use a little work.

And this past week, this is what happened to our friends Darin and Dan. They had worked for years to adopt their daughter, and then, without any notice whatsoever, suddenly there’s this other child who needs a home.

My Dad has always sort of reminded me of Superman’s Dad, well, his Earth Dad, Jonathan Kent. Jonathan and his wife Martha had really wanted a child, but nature had not given them one. Then out of the sky falls this rocket ship with a baby.

That’s not the part of the story that reminds me of my Dad. I did not come to Earth in a spaceship, I arrived in the very ordinary way that has been happening for tens of thousands of years.

Pa Kent, as he’s known in the comic books, is a simple man, a farmer; a real salt of the Earth kind of guy.  He does his best to impart good life lessons to his son. He loves his son, and it doesn’t matter that he and Clark are not biologically related.

This is the kind of guy that you can admire.

My Dad, too, spent most of my life, well has been spending all of my life to date, trying to teach me lessons about how to navigate the world in a way that is honorable and has integrity.

I do my best to do him proud.

There’s a lot in Superman about nature versus nurture. Clark Kent’s Dad is a Kansan Famer, 6th generation. Kal El, Superman’s other name, Kal El’s father is Jor El, and he is a distant task master. Depending on the version, Jor El mostly thinks that his son, Kal El will be worshipped on Earth and become its ruler.

In the film released this week, Kevin Costner plays Pa Kent. In order to protect his son’s secret, he faces certain death, all the while looking at his son, his hand motioning Clark to stay put, telling Clark that he would rather die protecting his son’s secret, than force Clark to save him and expose himself to danger.

Our blogger friend, Name, will be happy to note that the Dad who does the nurturing has the greater influence on his son.

And I don’t think that Pa Kent ever got a tie for Father’s Day.

So where are all the images, the iconic images of the Nurturing Father?

Happily, you needn’t go looking into comic books for them, you only need to turn your face to humanity. Real life men.

Dick and Rick Hoyt, for example, are a father and son.  Rick was born without the ability to move or speak, and his father, Dick, has done extraordinary things with his son. For thirty years Dick has competed in marathons, triathlon’s and other endurance races all the while keeping his son with him. This means, that in a recent triathlon in New England Dick swam the 1 mile, all the while towing his son in an inner tube behind him, he bicycled 24 miles with his son in a special chair that hangs secured to the front of his bike, and ran pushing his son in a three wheeled cart. Their fastest time in a marathon is only 30 minutes behind the world record. 

THE REAL WORLD RECORD, run by a man who isn’t accompanied by his son.

Dick credits his son, Rick, with inspiring his father for 48 years. The doctors recommended that Rick’s parents institutionalize their child, but the Hoyts refused.

Rick asked his Dad to run in their first event to benefit a local high school athlete who’d been paralyzed during play. This was in 1978. Since then, Dick had to get on a bike for the first time since he was a boy, and learn how to swim, so that they could eventually work their way up to triathlons.

Dick did all of this, he says, because his son, after running their first race together, told him “Dad when we run I feel like my disability goes away.”

In 1989 Dick and Rick Hoyt completed the Iron Man Triathlon, which is a 2.4 mile ocean swim, followed by 112 miles of bicycling and then a full marathon.

(I’m finding it hard not to use the world Superman right about now.)

I would hope that it would go without saying that there are men in our lives who we are not related to by genetics who influence our lives.

Just to show you how pervasive this is, when I was writing this sermon, I was going to reference the time we spent together on Mother’s Day speaking into the air the names of the women who have nurtured us, and I was going to say  “Please speak aloud the names of the men who have mentored you.”

Even when you think you’re thinking about these things, with an eye and an intention on not repeating them, still we repeat them.

In the next few moments, I would ask you to speak aloud the men in your life who have nurtured you and mentored you. Those who have made you feel safe and valued. Those you look up to. 

As with Mother’s Day, there are wounds and scars left us by our male parents, too. We need to make space for those feelings, too. Unkind words, or actions, by the very men whose job we understood it to be to make us feel safe.

Parenting is of course, a very complex job. It is often difficult for both the parent and the child, as each of them is merely a human being with gifts and deficits, and even when there are the best of intentions, there are mistakes made.

On Mother’s Day I encouraged you to love your Real Mother, not the romanticized version of who she is supposed to be. I’d like to encourage you to do the same for your Father.

All those fictionalized father figures, are just that. Fiction. Harper Lee’s father was not Atticus Finch. There is no real Pa Kent. These characters don’t have to live a real life with real pressures, and so they can be heroic and magnanimous all the time.

But we can be inspired by these father figures, both real and fiction, we can be inspired to build relationships in we men are the nurturers, in which we men can lift up those who look to us for leadership and guidance, and we can tell them, with a deep honesty, about the gifts that we see in them, and that we look forward to watching them grow into their fullness.

Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John, during one of the many times they were separated by his work to help form this nation. She wrote to him once, regarding suffrage, “John, don’t forget the ladies.” Listening, as one should, to wise women as well as men, I want to heed her advice.

Ladies, you can teach your sons that nurturing is not only the realm of women, but also of men. You can teach your boys that there are other ways to engage with the world other than to pummel it.  I realized that in a room like this sanctuary I am probably preaching to the choir about this.

In seminary, they are constantly training us ministers to consider what our churches look like to the first time visitor, and so for our visitors today, I want to re-state that we are not a weird cult of people who wear….loud shirts… all the time.

We are merely a gathering of human beings whose fashion sense varies, 

who struggle to be the best people we can be, 

who search for answers theologically, 

who show up for each other in times of need, 

who bring food to the sick, 

who celebrate the victories of our children

and who, despite the messiness of our humanity, really do love each other.

May we continue on, in our own clumsy way, making this would a better place.

Amen.

© The Rev. Joseph M Cherry

Written for and Delivered to

The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship

of Stanislaus County