Jesus Scares Me

I recently came across a sermon my father preached when I was two years old. Examining the relationship between parents, children and faith, Dad asked, "Parents, where do you supposed your child first begins to pick up an idea of what God is like? From you, of course. From the way you cuddle and nurse and talk to the child. And as the child grows, his or her concept of God is further colored by contacts with other significant adults. We call God 'father' because we think of God as being like a good father. Children have no other way to visualize God except in terms of adults.

Bill with Phil

The other day, my young son Philip looked at a picture of the bearded Jesus and asked me who it was. I said, 'Jesus.' Philip answered, 'Jesus scares me.' And that set me to thinking about how Philip or any child will come to know God. Not by first seeing pictures or hearing stories, but by experiencing God's love channeled through me."

It turns out that I did come to learn many valuable things about God's nature from the love that was channeled through my father. 

Dad was always concerned for my well-being, was always looking out for me ... and so is God.

Dad was both playful and serious ... and so is God.

Dad was called to serve many others beyond his family. There were the members of his congregations who looked to him for guidance, the grieving who needed comfort, the sick who needed to be visited, the needy who came looking for aid. So it was for Jesus.

And with the many demands that others made on my Dad's time and attention when I was a kid, there was plenty of opportunity for me to be resentful of his ministry ... to wish that he was just my dad and not everyone else's pastor. But I understood -- no doubt because Dad made such a point of it -- that his ministry was our family's ministry. We all were part of it. He wasn't appointed to a church; our whole family was. His work was our work, too. God is like that -- choosing to work with us and through us for the good of others, for the good of all.

Dad ended his sermon by saying, "I thank God, as I look back across my life, for the people who disciplined me, the people who taught me, the people who spoke the words and who gave the gentle shoves that challenged me. I have forgotten the people who didn't care, those who were afraid to advise, the ones who were too busy to teach. I remember only, and I thank God for the men and women who saw to it that I came to love and serve God in Jesus Christ through the church."

Thank you, Dad, for seeing to it that I know and love God. I'm happy to report that Jesus doesn't scare me any more. (Well, at least his beard doesn't.) Happy Father's Day!

From "Lent to the Lord"

Scripture: 1 Samuel 1:19c-28

January 21, 1968

Adams Shore Community Church

Quincy, MA   

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