June 20, 2010

The Plumber’s Tale

A message delivered by Scott R. Cooper

at St. Andrews Episcopal Church, Prineville

June 20, 2010 (Father’s Day)

My father would have been 71 this year, had he lived.

He was a good man, my father. He was quirky and independent and a model of self-sufficient. And he imprinted his values very strongly on me. For the most part, I liked him, and I remember him fondly this Father’s Day. At the same time, I freely acknowledge that like most father-and- son relationships, ours was complicated.

Dad’s life and mine have taken sharply divergent paths. I enjoy different pastimes than he did. The lifestyle that I have chosen is different than the one he chose. He was very much a product of his generation and his Oklahoma roots. I am very much a product of my generation and my Oregon values. But notwithstanding the differences, I recognize that there is still a lot of him in me. Even though it has been 10 years since I lost him following a cruel, brief and emotionally searing battle with Lou Gehrig’s disease, I still find myself using his ideas, his values and his frame of reference to answer the questions of the world, both big and small.

Let’s take plumbing, for example:

I will be the first to admit that I am a bad plumber. I am not just a bad plumber, I may be the worst plumber you have ever met. I have absolutely no business plumbing anything. I shouldn’t be allowed, required or encouraged to screw together two pipes anytime, anywhere.

But my Dad was an electrician, and electricians are to plumbers as dogs are to cats. As evidence My Dad was overly fond of saying that “Wiring is difficult, but ANY idiot can be a plumber.” It was just one little trash-talking comment that was reflective of the culture of a construction job-site. Anybody in the plumbing industry probably would have seen it for what it was and shot back with something equally insulting: something like my favorite, “How do you know when the electrician is dead? The doughnut rolls out of his hand” or “What do you call an electrician with a hammer? A thief!”

But when my Dad denigrated plumbers to me, I was still very young. I didn’t understand that construction sites are just an amalgamation of too much testosterone looking for a little relief in what can sometimes be a very stressful workplace. I took him seriously. And as a result, that one little comment set the course for my life. No matter how big the job, I just have to take a crack at the plumbing chores around my household. Despite my incredible ineptitude, I just keep going back under the sink with grim determination, pipe wrench in one hand and monkey wrench in the other , in yet another vain attempt to clear each new blocked or leaky pipe.

I have been known to spend eight hours on a single Saturday under the kitchen sink banging up my knuckles, throwing out very words not fit for church or children and cobbling together a combination of metal and plastic pipe held together precariously with pvc cement, an assortment of rings and flexible connectors and a healthy dose of magic putty, only to have the only thing gush like a geyser at every seam when I eventually turn the water back on.

I do this despite the fact that all these incident-- which thank goodness are infrequent--invariably end the same way: with me crawling out from under the sink, wet, tired and defeated. The next steps are always the same: I wearily put duct tape across the sink to prevent further use, and the next morning I do what I should have done in the first place; I call my friendly plumber who cheerfully fixes the original problem plus any new problems I might have created, usually in about an hour.

The power for words… The power of fathers… The power of relationships… How these three triangulate in unexpected ways to influence the future course of our lives.

Here’s an interesting little piece of trivia for you, brought to you through that miracle of modern technology the computer and the internet. Do you know how many verses of the Bible include the word “father?” 944.

“Mother “ by contrast appears only in 299 verses. “Love “ gets 333 mentions. “Faith” shows up 247 times. “Church” gets a measly 76 mentions. “Hell” only gets 64—which is pretty ironic given how much time some people spend talking about Hell while failing to mention Love and Faith!

For certain, the Bible leans toward the image of the Father because it was written by people living in a patriarchal society. But environment alone doesn’t explain this preoccupation with “Father” image. Other elements of the culture of Biblical times don’t attract nearly the same level of attention. Consider sheep for example. We all know that the authors of the Bible talk a lot about sheep. You probably know those stories: The Good Shepherd. The Lord Is My Shepherd. While Shepherds watched their flocks by night. Feed my sheep. And so on and so on. But when you count up the combined Biblical references to sheep and shepherds, the grand total is still 284—a fraction of the number of times the word “Father” appears. This strongly suggests that Biblical authors’ use of paternal imagery reflects something more than simply culture and environment.

I suggest that Biblical authors preferred fatherhood as a metaphor because the relationship that we all have with our fathers is so psychologically powerful. We’re all influenced by our Fathers—both by their presence and, sadly, sometimes, by their absence.

From what I can figure out—and this not good social science; it’s purely my own observation—people experience fathers in three different ways:

There is the father as authoritarians and providers. This kind of father ensures that our physical needs are met. He acts as the family disciplinarians. He “fixes things” when they are broken. He loves their children, but, stoicism being a characteristic valued by this type of Dad, he is more likely to demonstrate that love through actions rather than their words. For centuries, God was presented and largely only understood as being this type of father, and it is from this concept of a father figure that derive our idea of God as omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.

Fortunately, times evolve and with them evolve our understanding. In the last few decades, the old-fashioned kind of father has been giving way to a new kind of Dad. Today we think it is OK for fathers to be playful, fun and engaged. The provider role is less important, and fathers are likely to be co-participants in providing for the household. Contemporary fathers are not to undertake communication with their children less in a “command-and-obey” form and more in a relational way. When today’s fathers must correct their children, they are urged to use only the amount of force necessary to achieve desired behavior, and not to resort to extreme physicality except as a last resort. It is interesting and probably not coincidental to note that this new form of type of Fatherhood has been emerging parallel with society’s understanding of how God relates to his children. Where the God of older times is best summed up in Jonathan Edwards famous sermon, “Sinners In the Hands of an Angry God,” the God of recent times might better be summed up by Joel Osteen’s “You may make some mistakes in life, but that doesn’t make you a sinner.”

There is yet a third type of Father who, regrettably, is increasingly common. This is the absent or uninvolved father—the father who was never known or who, if known, has chosen to be uninvolved in any way in his child’s life. A favorite theme of Hollywood is to have this Father return in a time of crisis and in a heroic moment, set right whatever it is that is wrong. Frequently, this avenging hero father also suffers grief and remorse for his past lack of connectivity with his child and makes up for his previous absence by offering wise advice and imparting secret knowledge about how to navigate the treacherous waters of the world. Sadly, this latter part is pretty much a Hollywood fiction, but for the fatherless, it is powerful and its appeal is tantalizingly even if its unlikelihood is recognized.

These three Father types are all present in scripture. We need look no further than Genesis to find the stern and disciplinary God. He is the one who expels Adam and Eve from the Garden for their misdeeds. He punishes evil and rewards good by rescuing Noah while condemning the rest of the world to drown You know this God-type well from Bible stories told you since childhood.

The contemporary father image appears most often in the New Testament—particularly when we encounter Jesus, who was not only the Son but also was “One with the Father” at his most caring, compassionate and loving. We see the contemporary father in stories like Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead or Jesus forgiving the sins of the woman taken in adultery or Jesus saying “Let the little children come unto me.” Stories like these just make us want to say, “Ahhhhh.”

Of course there’s another side to Jesus, too—side that we tend to gloss over. Like Jesus chasing from the temple with a whip a perfectly legitimate group of businessmen who had been providing a service to foreign visitors for hundreds of years. Or Jesus telling his disciples they must leave their families to follow him. Why, we can even look into today’s gospel with its story of the casting out of a demon. Most sermons on this topic focus on the delivery of the man; few dwell on the destruction of the innocent pigs that happen to be standing nearby.

It’s too bad we hang on to such an “either/or” imagery of God, because God, like mankind and like Fathers, is complex. There are many sides to God, and we try to constrain him in a single box at our peril.

The third type of father, the absent father, also appears in the Bible. We find him in the story of Joseph, cruelly sold by his brothers to passing slave traders, only to be dramatically reunited with his father years later at a time when his father needs him most. We certainly find the absent father in the book of Job, who spends 37 miserable chapters crying out for God only to be met by deafening silence. Most notably, we find the absent father at the crucifixion when Jesus cries out to his Father, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

So the idea of God as Father and the relationship between a Father and his children is a central narrative of Christianity, both Old and New Testaments. It is a recurring theme in the text of the Bible, and as we have seen, the different natures of God as Father don’t evolve in a linear way but like Father’s themselves are an amalgamation of the different styles of Fatherhood. And that which is true of text is also true of church history. As our ideas about Fatherhood have evolved, our ideas of the relationship between church and congregant has also evolved. That, I think, is the point to be taken from today’s Epistle. The relationship of the Christian to the Church is not unlike the relationship between children and their Fathers. And just as the relationship between Fathers and offspring is complex, so is the relationship between the Church and its spiritual children.

Let’s take a second look at Paul’s words to the Galatians:

“… the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came... but now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian…we are all children of God through faith. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female…[we] are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Are you catching this? Did you hear Paul talking about that conception of God as disciplinarian? Did you hear Paul talking about the blurring of the lines between concepts of male and female? Christ’s coming cleared the way for a redefinition of the relationship between God and his people, much as the emancipation of women and the rethinking of traditional gender roles cleared the way for a rethinking of the relationship between Fathers and their sons and daughters.

Let me hasten to say that I am somewhat plowing new ground here. This is not the way this passage is usually preached when it comes up in the liturgical cycle and anybody bothers to preach on it at all. More often, the passage is interpreted in one of two ways: either in its historical context or in a context of social justice.

And it is true that on some level this passage is a description of an historical controversy. It’s context is very much a reference to a fight within the early church between the Jerusalem faction led by Peter and the Greek-speaking faction led by Paul. The former believed that Jesus had come to reform, purify and fulfill the Jewish faith and to restore the ancient faith of Moses. The alternative explanation was that Jesus’s purpose in coming was to build upon the foundations of Judaism to create an entirely new faith. If that’s all this passage means, then you simply note that Paul was correct and think no more about it. But if that’s all there is to it, you might wonder why it is included in the scripture at all.

That’s why some people have attempted to give the verse additional meaning. Often this verse is tackled by focusing on the element of unity. “ Neither male nor female,” “neither Greek nor Jew”, “Neither slave nor free”…There is great material there contemporary Christians. And why not? We are coming off an amazing century where, after enormous amounts of social capital were spent establishing as an accepted truth that equality is a right given by God and which should not be denied based on unalterable factors such as gender or color or nationality. If we read this passage as simply an endorsement of that which we have already concluded, then it is a wonderful opportunity to parade triumphantly into coffee hour and congratulate ourselves on our enlightened status.

I do not, however, think this is a deep enough explanation for the passage. After all, while it makes perfect sense to us, it would have made no sense to the 1900 years of Christians who came before us. It would have made no sense to Paul or the Church of Galatia, who accepted that social division based on race, gender or ownership of one human being by another was a fact of life. Directing a message of social justice to the Galatians would have been planting seed on barren ground. I still believe there must be more to this verse.

But that said, I could never see it before I happened to draw this verse on the fortunate coincidence of its reading coinciding with Father’s Day for me to get there. In that context—in the context of an institutional relationship like family dynamics or church dynamics, suddenly it makes a lot of sense to me in a whole new way.

In this passage, Paul is giving permission to the early church and to us to rethink our power relationship with God. Religion before Christ came was pretty straightforward, regardless of whether it was Judaism or the religion of the ancient Greeks and Romans. One honored God, one sacrificed to God, and was obedient to God because one feared God and because hoped that through observance God would either extend blessings or withhold his wrath. (Come to about it, that sounds a lot like the theology of some contemporary churches.)

But Paul is urging us to give up seeing God that way. He’s telling us that the time of the “disciplinarian” has passed. He is calling us to a new understanding of God—one not dissimilar to the way contemporary ways of Fathering are starting to replace traditional approaches. Instead of God being all about rules and regulations, about keeping our feet on the straight and narrow, we as Christians are to understand God as one prefers snuggling to struggling, as one who prefers coaxing to coercion and as one who loves us unconditionally. Like wayward children, no matter how pig-headedly we persist in erecting barriers between us and our heavenly Father, God is always there for us, waiting with his arms outstretched to clutch us to his breast and to command the slaughter of the fatted calf as he rejoices at our return.

Because God’s love is not conditional, it frees us from some of the restraints that the imperfect Faith of our Fathers may still be imposing on some of us. We react the way we do to some ideas because we think the traditions of the church require a certain kind of reaction. It’s not unlike the reason I still head for the sink, wrenches in hand, at the first sign of a drip. The mere fact that a particular way of doing things worked for my Father doesn’t mean it’s going to work for me.

So here’s what I think this means in practical terms:

As Christian people, we need to be careful about how we set up the rules and apply them to God’s children and to God’s church. We need to be careful about saying that you have to live a certain lifestyle, or God won’t approve. We need to be careful about saying that God only approves of a certain type of service on Sunday mornings. We need to be careful about using selected Biblical texts as weapons of mass destruction rather than as spiritual guideposts. that God demands strict adherence to

The day of the disciplinarian is past. We are all one in Christ. We are all a part of the Christian family.

That’s not to say we can’t disagree on some things. Families do that.

We can still discuss seriously the role of women in church, as some in the Anglican communion are still doing. We can argue our respective cases for high-church liturgy versus low-church liturgy. We can disagree with each other about sexuality and its relationship to the live of Christians in general and clergy I particular. We can differ in our views about the role of the laity versus the sanctity of the priesthood. But after we have these discussions, Dad doesn’t come along and throw any of us out of the house, nor do any of us demand Dad do such a thing. Instead, we sit down together as a family, we offer our thanks to God, and we break bread and drink wine together at one common table filled with love for one another.

Our epistle today is not a story of the ancient church. It is not a justification of modern thinking that just happened to lie undiscovered for nearly 2000 years. It is a roadmap to manage struggle within the church: to manage the tension between the old and the new; to manage the tension between dogma and reason; to manage the tension between the ways of Fathers and the ways of children. To manage the tension between the most capable members of our congregation and those who need a little more time to think things through.

We all see Fatherhood a little differently, and how we understand Fatherhood to some degree may influence how we relate to our Heavenly Father.

Some of us are more comfortable with the Old Testament Dad who lays down rules and strictures that we use daily to guide our decision-making. If that God works for you, that’s okay.

Some of us are more comfortable with a New Testament Dad who is our playmate and comforter than inaccessible disciplinarian. If that’s how you understand God and that works for you, that’s okay.

And then there are those of who fall into the camp that wonders how it is that a loving God who cares about his people and his church could at times be so noticeably missing from the equation as the world, the church and all God’s children inflict injury, hurt and pain on each other. If you have these questions and you secretly resent God’s absence and you wish he would hurry back and straighten out this mess once and for all, then I’m going to suggest that you’re in good company. You keep right on believing that, because that’s okay.

We all experience God our Heavenly Father differently. We all idealize our Heavenly Father, just as we idealize our earthly fathers, in different ways and for different reasons. And that can lead to conflict, just as it led to conflict for the early church.

Fortunately, we have good Father, and he has given us the tools that we need everything we need to work out our differences. He has given us Word, the traditions of his church, our reason, our compassion and our consciences. Like any family struggling through a rough patch, we must bear in mind that we are tied together by our common heritage and therefore as we struggle, we must do so in an environment of mutual support, mutual discernment and mutual love to find answers to the tough questions of our daily lives and our spiritual lives.

In the name of God our Heavenly Father we pray this day, Amen.