The God Of Our Fathers

With Father’s Day fast approaching, I reached into Bill’s Barrel and found a sermon from 1987 entitled “The God of Our Fathers.” In it, Dad had this to say:

“I’ve been a proud father lately. Last month I saw my oldest son graduate from college. This past week, my second son graduated from high school, and though there was no ceremony as such, my daughter is moving this year from elementary school to junior high. 

All of this convinces me that I am, without a doubt, getting older. When I think of getting older I ponder more deeply about the age-old question of how to pass on my faith to my children and all those who come after me. How is the Christian experience transferred from one generation to the next? How does the God of our fathers become the God of the fathers’ sons?

As I watched the high school graduates walk across the platform to receive their diplomas last week, some of them more than a foot taller than me, looking fit and very adult, I said to myself that these young men and women, though they are in adult bodies, still have many life lessons to learn before they are truly adult. The most important of these lessons comes from a person-to-person encounter with the same God their fathers and mothers met and walked with for generations before them.

When we meet Jacob in today’s lesson (Genesis 28:10-17), he is a young man on the run. Morally and spiritually, he is proving to be a boy in a man’s body. He has just deceived his father Isaac, stolen his brother Esau’s inheritance – all with the help of his doting mother Rebekah – and is fleeing for his life from his family home in Beer-sheba.

Many of us, of course, never take our immaturity and selfishness to the point that Jacob did, but he stands before us today as the epitome of a person who was certainly exposed to the faith of his parents, who grew up in a home where God’s name was honored, who had all the opportunities to embrace the God of his fathers, but whose self-centeredness and drive for worldly things and earthly pleasures blinded him and barred him from taking God seriously. Jacob was in the right family, but as yet he had not really met the Lord, the head of this family.

You don’t have to be young to be like Jacob in this respect. Some of us get busy doing our own thing in life, and we get pretty old without ever having dealt seriously with God. Many of us seem to think that if our mother or our father or our husband or our wife has a relationship with God, we’re somehow covered too. Not so! You might be able to put your car in your wife’s name, or your bank account in your wife’s name, but husbands, your religion can never be in your wife’s name. And the same goes for wives. One of the truest Christian clichés I know is the one that says, ‘God doesn’t have any grandchildren.’ Indeed, God only has children who have worked out their own relationship directly with him in fear and trembling.”

So, how did the God of my father become my God? I was raised in a pastor’s home, went to church every Sunday, and never rejected the family faith in some fit of teenage rebellion; yet, my father’s God didn’t truly and fully become mine until Dad passed away.

It was May of 1989. I was twenty-three. Dorry and I had been married and on our own for less than a year. My adult life was just beginning, and suddenly Dad was gone. His death hit me hard. How could a loving God do this to my father, to my family, to me? Why did this have to happen? Where was God in all of this? I was tossed about by crashing waves emotion -- feeling hurt, scared, angry, then adrift. 

In the midst of that roiling sea of grief, I somehow realized that I faced a choice: I could rage against God and ultimately dismiss Him as a waste of time, or I could cling to this God I couldn’t understand and bring Him my pain, my sorrow, my doubts. I made my choice and prayed that God would see me through the storm. In that prayer, Dad’s God truly became my own.

"The God Of Our Fathers"

Preached at Paoli United Methodist Church

June 21, 1987