A sermon for Father's Day at Heath Street Baptist Church, Hampstead, 16th June 2024
It’s Father’s Day, and to celebrate it, I am going to explore with you four words from the Lord’s Prayer. These are Father, Heaven, Hallowed, and Kingdom. Father’s Day as celebrated on June 16th, rather than with St. Joseph in March, began in America 116 years ago. Over time, it has been much mocked as just another commercial gambit, but as is the way with such things, it is now accepted by almost everyone. Richard Nixon made it official in 1972. The founder, Sonora Smart Dodd, was an Episcopalian Methodist. In her pioneering feminism and her independent spirit, I am quite sure that she found common cause with the Baptists. I am a Catholic convert from Anglicanism, but for more than two decades, I too have been drawn to the Baptist church, inspired by your conviction that just everyone has direct and implicit access to God. Like Sonora, I am content to be an ecumenical work-in- progress. As an Anglican, I once asked to be ordained. The answer came back: “No, Charles, or at least not in the way you hoped”. Instead, I found fulfillment in pastoral psychology, a discipline of listening and relating to others in pursuit of understanding and healing. It is this approach, with something added by my instruction by the Dominicans, that I bring today. Thank you for making me welcome.
Father
It’s worth considering how the idea of God we have can owe a lot to our experience of our own dad ... as a role model, and as a relationship while we are growing up. How generally satisfactory was yours? Mine was fair-to-middling. Yes, he was decent and kind and reliable, but through no fault of his own, he was not quite what I wanted. I was ambivalent about him, and this was true too of my feelings about God. His story is soon told. In 1943, as a volunteer in Burma, he was seriously ill with malaria for about nine months. With a jeep and four men, he then took part in the Japanese retreat, going ahead of the troops to clear landing strips. He was often at risk. He described enemy leaping in the dark over the trench in which he was trying to sleep. In a photograph I have, he looks exhausted, like the waking dead, absent and drained. Returning home, he obviously needed and deserved plenty of rest and time to recover. He wanted to be an actor, going one better than his flamboyant am-dram mother. But then his father had a near fatal heart attack, and he found himself inheriting responsibility for a large and thriving factory, manufacturing hand tools. With reluctance at first, he did his duty by his family calling and became a businessman. (It is also true that later he chaired the committee that created the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield.) I have to admit that, growing up, I was very unhappy about his choice to follow his dad, and given my conviction, I could only suppose that God shared my view. I did not like it that he worked in a pinstriped suit, with telephones and typists, and not in a boilersuit with dirt and flames and steel. It’s easy to see that this was absurd, but it was my phantasy. It was mostly unconscious, as these things are, occurring in powerful dreams and in the choices that I made about the games I played. Looking back, I think that I too wanted him to be an actor. As time went on, Dad did his best to understand me. I was given a boilersuit and invited to hang out in the maintenance department during the holidays from my boarding school. I was a teenager though, and I continued to pick fights. He supported Sheffield United, so I had to be Wednesday. He was pals with the local Tory MP and embarrassed and exasperated when I said I would vote for Harold Wilson. I tried to study economics for him at university, but that was a hopeless failure. Eventually it was a good woman who came to our rescue. I married her aged 22. Dad bought us a smallholding and came to watch me get my hands dirty with chickens, a pig and a milk goat. Babies soon followed. His wedding present to us was a saw, a screwdriver, a hammer, a vice, and a spade. (I wonder if you have felt my love for him in this account?) I think that God’s blessing can also be attested by the fact of my account existing at all... In my twenties, the only God I could worship was found in the likes of William Blake, Bob Dylan and the Maharishi. He would never have fitted in at an Anglican Parish Council! He was a poet and a lover, not an administrator. But it is also true that it was my father and my grandfather in their tool factory who provided the means for my lovely romantic God to exist. Let me say, at this point, that I am aware there may be among you those who never knew their father, or who had a very hard time with the one they did have. In such lives, the search is for a father figure outside the family. It’s a very important search. If it is yours, I wish you God’s blessing in it.
Heaven
My Dad kept good boundaries between the Works, as we called it, and his home life. He would leave well before eight and arrive home when we were at supper. Inevitably on occasion he was tired and preoccupied, and we knew not to approach him until he had washed and changed and poured himself a gin and tonic. This daily negotiation between the dad who disappeared to go somewhere more important and then reappeared, having donned slippers and a cardy and smiled on us, left me with a firm assumption that heaven is very much elsewhere. And God is far too busy there, and impatient as well, to want to listen to me. Well of course this doesn’t do heaven justice in the least. Let’s be grown-up and try instead to think of those moments ...when they occur ... probably not that often ... when we exclaim Isn’t this heaven! [At this point I gestured to the three musicians who had, as an introit to the service, played Telemann for us on recorder, viola da gamba and baroque clarinet. They were then sat about four feet from me, and my thoughts had been ... birdsong ... and meditative dance.] [We can also note here that Ewan had earlier recited George Herbert’s poem Prayer, with the words ‘heaven in ordinary’. Neither of us knew what each had been preparing. Mine follows.] What is going on here? Clearly, it’s a special moment, filled with deep pleasure and delight. Surprise is present. One is filled too with a desire to share it. What else can we say? There is satisfaction… completion, perhaps. “If only it would last forever!” Can you see how potentially present a benevolent God is at such a moment? How easily too can He be imagined to be interested in what’s going on? How attentive to our excitement? My Dad - Tony was his name - died aged 84, full of well-earned contentment, and cradled by sailing, sun, sea and sand, at Hayling Island. His trajectory is proving a comfort to this 75-yearold. It has continued beyond the grave. Of this, I am sure.
Hallowed
Let’s pause here to note how talk of heaven can create among us an atmosphere of, well ...holiness. (I was close to tears just then.) I am interested in the task of protecting such an atmosphere, and its capacity for blessing and growth, from attack ... by hubris, or self-righteousness or embarrassment, or worse, rivalry, egoism and sarcasm. Hallowing – taking God seriously ... as unbelievably precious ... openly worshipping Him out of a bursting heart – this requires a state of innocence that is hard to find, and once found, hard to maintain. It is why the Church exists. Via shared experience as people of faith, we can provide not only companionship but objectivity. This is what I found at Blackfriars. Church helps with the continuity that gets us past the awkward coming down moments. It’s two thousand years of coffee and tea after the service, of residual calmness and confident chatter. A person who has explored this is Elizabeth Oldfield, a former director of Theos and author of Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times. I found her reviewed in the excellent Catholic weekly, The Tablet. How far we are, she says, from Irenaeus’ vision of the glory of God as a human fully alive! Our society is marinated in irony and skepticism, and Christianity is perceived as a sort of boring background noise, like Radio 4 turned down low. Her visionary word is Connectedness, and sin she sees as everything that is working against it. Oldfield is a charismatic Anglican, and while she is plenty willing to voice her anger, she is shy of committing herself in print to what we are calling the innocence of hallowing. Who can blame her? It’s all too easy to try too hard to be convincing and descend into guff. In the final chapter, however, she finds herself kneeling in prayer. I quote: “The other I believe I am kneeling before is not a distant deity demanding obsequiousness ... this Other is meeting me, and the image that rises unprompted is of us kneeling forehead to forehead ... which implies that He is kneeling too.”
Kingdom
We end with possibly the trickiest word of the four. With its echoes of religious tyranny, and with despotic wars even now raging, the idea of God as rival to an ersatz king is ... well ... more problematic than His being a businessman! My wife and I say a Daily Office, and recently we followed the battles of Joshua against the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebuites. It left me feeling grumpy, but a book has since revealed my ignorance and changed my mind. It’s Reading Genesis by the American novelist Marilynne Robinson. You may know Housekeeping and Gilead. Robinson glories in the familiar stories of Creation, the Fall and the early history of the Jewish people, seeing them – in the King James translation – as great works of literature. They evolved and survived in oral folk memory for millennia before being committed to writing just 500 years before Christ. The power in the region at that time was Babylon, and their creation myth, the Enuma Elish, has survived. It stands in stark contrast to Genesis, and it has occurred to me that if the Hittites, Perizzites and so on shared its outlook, then one can quite see why Joshua found it necessary to protect his religious heritage. The gods of the Enuma Elish suffer hunger, terror and loss of sleep. There are generations of them, born of one another. In this, they are like my dad! The great mother Tiamat is a serpent monster who, provoked by the noise they make, determines to kill them all. Terrifying though she is, the young god Marduk is able to defeat her. He splits her corpse like a fish, uses half to make the sky, the other half the earth, and her two weeping eyes become the Tigris and Euphrates. Robinson comments: “This could hardly be more remote from the infinite serenity of ... ‘let there be ... and there was!’” She goes on to draw a crucial distinction, and indeed the meaning of the Cross is present here. All the evil in the world is accounted for by the gods in the Enuma Elish. Created Dis-order produces and justifies a cycle of violent, paranoid (everyone is frightened), schizoid (everyone is blaming, hating, idolizing, envying) chaos ... and we are resigned and helpless in its grip. We can find it now in Ukraine and Gaza. On the other hand, the way in which Genesis depicts God - and the witness of the nails driven through His Son’s wrists and ankles—is as a deity who holds Himself un-accountable to human beings, who does what pleases Him. And what pleases Him is Goodness and Love. But they are His, not ours, to take for granted. And that is the nature of His Kingdom.
Charles Hampton