Sermons from Moorpark Presbyterian Church

Fathers, Lovers and Heirs

by Dave Wilkinson

1 Corinthians 2:9, Ephesians 3:14-15

June 15, 2003

Happy Father’s Day. Let’s start with the bad news. Here’s the way Bob Green describes our sad, pathetic lives in The Fifty Year Dash. Green writes: “At fifty, you begin to come to terms with the fact that we’re all just passing through. On the largest of levels, for example, you’re pretty sure that you are never going to end up on the side of Mount Rushmore. That possibility you can with some confidence discard.

“But, two years after you retire, will you be remembered at your office? Will they ever talk about you? Will your name come up in conversation?

“When you are a young adult, you really want your city to sit up and take notice of you. Now you understand that cities can’t take note of anything. They’re not thinking entities. No one can “conquer” a city, because a city doesn’t know or remember anything.

Green writes: “It’s like that idea of going to Paris or Africa someday - that idea that if you do, you do, but if you don’t, Paris will have no idea you were never there. It’s not waiting for you, no matter how you may want to fool yourself into thinking it is.

“And the way to package these kinds of thoughts is to realize that we are all temps. From the CEO of General Motors to the person who is literally working as a temp in the GM clerical pool, the truth that we all must eventually come to accept is that all work is temporary work - that we’re all merely sitting in for a while...All the striving, all the plotting, all the planning - and the world, it turns out, is a temporary-placement agency.”

Are you depressed yet?

Are you ready for the good news?

Here it is.

Despite the words of Bob Green, we aren’t really temps. God intends us to be permanent hires -- and more than that.

This Father’s Day morning I want to highlight three things that God has in store for men. Sure, He has the exact same things for women but this is Father’s Day. I’m talking to the guys here.

First, there is the good news that we are co-fathers -- literally compadres — with God Himself. This is what Paul tells us in Ephesians 3:14-15. In these verses Paul writes: “I bow my knees before that Father from whom, every fatherhood in heaven and earth derives its name.”

Now the Revised Standard Version translates “fatherhood” with the word “family”. So does the New American Standard Version. But that translation doesn’t communicate the full sense of what Paul is saying.

What Paul is saying is that it is from God that we get our understanding, however inadequate, of what parenthood is. When I act as a father in care for my children - and when the citizen of China acts as a father in care of his children - and when the bushman in Africa cares for his children - we are each reflections of what the fatherhood of God is like.

Now Paul is not teaching some vague “Fatherhood of God, brotherhood of man” universalism here. Jesus Christ is the only door to being a son or daughter of God in the fullest sense.

But what Paul is saying, is that wherever parenthood is expressed, we find a reflection of God’s care for His people. It is not, as Freud teaches, that we project our need for a father onto the universe and call the result God. Instead, we find that God has projected the nature of his Fatherhood onto us.

Let me tell you two stories about two men from Chicago. These are guys guys — a fighter pilot and a gangster. I told you this was a guy sermon.

The fighter pilot was Butch O’Hare. He was assigned to the aircraft carrier Lexington during the Second World War. About ten weeks after Pearl Harbor, Butch O’Hare was flying his Wildcat fighter off the Gilbert islands. He and another pilot were the only ones aloft when O’Hare spotted a group of nine Japanese bombers heading straight for the vital Lexington. The other fighters on the carrier would not have time to take off. It was up to Butch and the other pilot to stop the bombers.

The odds were dramatically lengthened when the machine guns on the second Wildcat seized. Now it was just Butch O’Hare and four minutes between the bombers and the 2000 crew aboard the Lexington.

The crew of the Lexington watched as he engaged the bombers. With astonishing skill Butch O’Hare emerged victorious, shooting down five of the nine bombers and badly damaging another. The last three were taken out by planes that managed to get off the decks of the Lexington while the air battle raged above them.

President Roosevelt later described Butch O’Hare’s actions as “one of the most daring, if not the most daring, single action in the history of combat aviation.” Butch was awarded the Medal of Honor, promoted two ranks, and designated the Navy’s first “Ace” of World War 2. Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport was named after Butch O’Hare following his combat death in 1943.

Now the gangster.

Some years before World War 2, a millionaire lawyer known as “Easy Eddie” was involved in the rackets with Al Capone. Eddie had stolen the patent rights to the mechanical rabbits used in dog racing. He was brought into the Hawthorne Kennel Club by Capone as a major partner. The races were usually fixed and, although dog racing was banned, Capone and Eddie kept the matter tied up in the courts. This allowed them to continue to run their tracks. When dog racing was finally declared illegal, Eddie and Capone simply switched their tracks over to horse racing, which was legal, and continued to fix races and rake in money.

In addition to his track interests, Eddie performed a variety of legal services for the Capone mob. He looked after mob members arrested for murder, gambling and prostitution. He set up elaborate real estate and stock transactions for Capone, himself, and other insiders of the gang.

There was, however, another side to Easy Eddie. Eddie was a father. He had a son and daughters whom he loved dearly. The wealth he had amassed allowed him to shower them with everything money could buy. And in many ways, he was good father. Eddie sought out the best schools for his children. He spent lots of time with them, attended their school productions and sporting events.

But there was one thing Eddie’s money couldn’t buy - integrity and respectability. Eddie’s son finished high school and declared he wanted to go into the naval academy at Annapolis. But to get there you needed more than money. You needed the approval of the congressman for your district.

Eddie decided his son’s future was more important than his own. He approached the authorities and said he would be willing to testify against Capone. On the basis of Eddie’s witness, Al Capone went to Alcatraz for 11 years for tax evasion. His stranglehold on Chicago was broken. Eddie’s son got into Annapolis.

But for Eddie the price was severe. Capone swore he would kill Eddie. So in 1937 Eddie was shotgunned to death as he drove his car home from work. In his pocket the police found a religious medallion, a rosary and a poem clipped from a magazine which read:

“The clock of life is wound but once,

And no man has the power

To tell just when the hands will stop

At late or early hour.

Now is the only time you own.

Live, love, toil with a will.

Place no faith in time,

For the clock may soon be still.”

What do these stories have to do with one another? Well Butch O’Hare was Easy Eddie’s son. Al Capone was his Godfather.

You see, the responsibility of a father to his children changed Easy Eddie’s life. Easy Eddie was not a good man. But he had to do the right thing for the sake of his son.

What drove Eddie O’Hare? It was the simple fact that, despite all his sin, he still had about himself something of the image of the fatherhood of God - and he reflected that image in his giving to his son. That’s what Paul is talking about in Ephesians 3:14-15.

You know, it is more than a little bit awesome to realize that in parenting I am, to an extent, a reflection of God. It’s ennobling. It is also somewhat frightening. It certainly makes a difference in the way I interact with my children.

For we are called to be co-fathers with God.

With that, we are also called to be co-lovers of people. God wants to express His love to others through each of us -- not just through the fathers among us but through all of us.

When actress Gwyneth Paltrow was 10 year old her father took her on a trip to Paris. As they were flying back home Gwyneth’s father asked her, “Do you know why I took you to Paris - only you and me? Because I wanted you to see Paris for the first time with a man who would always love you.”

Thinking back on that experience Gwyneth says, “You’ll never be happy if you can’t figure out that loving people is all there is and that it’s more important to love than be loved.”

On a couple of occasions, we have been privileged to have John Ortberg preach here. He writes in his new book, Everybody’s Normal Until You Get to Know Them: “We were made to know oneness. That is why loneliness is so painful.

“In the story of the Creation in the book of Genesis, a little refrain keeps recurring: ‘And God said...and it was so...and God saw that it was good.’ That’s true until the final act - when the song comes screeching to a halt.

God creates a man in his own image. God looks at this man, who bears His likeness, and He says, “Not good.” Why does God look at man and say “Not good”? Because He likes women better?

Not quite. This is a radical comment about the fundamental importance of human relationships.

What is striking is that the Fall has not yet occurred. There is no sin, no disobedience, nothing to mar the relationship between God and man. The human being is in a state of perfect intimacy with God. Yet the word God uses to describe him is “alone”. And God says that this aloneness is “not good.”

Ortberg writes: “Sometimes in church circles when people feel lonely, we tell them not to expect too much from human relationships -- that there is inside every human being a God-shaped void that no other person can fill. That is true. But apparently according to Genesis, God creates inside this man a kind of “human-shaped void” that God himself will not fill. No substitute will fill this need for human relationship: not money, not achievement, not busyness,

not books, not even God Himself.

Ortberg concludes: “Community is what you were created for. It is God’s desire for your life. It is the one indispensable condition for human flourishing.

“According to Jean Vanier, “ A community is not simply a group of people who live together and love each other. It is a place of resurrection.”

And this word resurrection brings us to our third and final kind of “Co-”. As Christians we are called to be co-heirs with Jesus Christ Himself.

We are not temps in God’s eyes. We aren’t even close. Jesus said, “I have appointed you to bear fruit and that your fruit should remain.” Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15 that we are to be “steadfast and immovable” for we know that our work in the Lord is not in vain.

C. S. Lewis observes in Mere Christianity “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” There is another world - a world for which you, as a Christian, have been claimed.

We are eternal beings. It may be true that Paris is not waiting for us. But it is also true that both our work -- and we ourselves -- will outlast Paris. We will outlast the Rockies.

You have been made for another world. So even if you are sometimes frustrated and unfulfilled, you don’t have to get whiny. And guys, you also don’t get to have a mid-life crisis. Because, as a Christian you don’t have a mid-life.

Eternity has no mid-point. You have a great future. Paul writes in Philippians 3:20 that “our true citizenship is in heaven.” In Romans 8 he assures us that we are “heirs of God and co-heirs with Jesus Christ.

Now what does it mean for us to be “heirs of God”?

Think of it this way.

Suppose you are a poor orphan on the streets of Seattle. You’re kicked around. But then, one afternoon, Bill Gates drives by in his BMW and sees you there. For some reason, he adopts you and make you the heir to the Microsoft Empire.

What would that mean to you? Maybe not a whole lot at first. You would be conditioned by your own past. As you were escorted for the first time into stately Gates Manor, you might not have any concept at all of what has happened to you - who you really are. A servant might cause you to cringe in a corner for fear that he was going to throw you out.

But once your began to realize your new role, you would know that you no longer had to be afraid. You would gradually begin to assume the dignity, authority and responsibility that belong to one who is the heir to the empire.

It makes a real difference how you view yourself.

How do you see yourself as a Christian? Are you God’s probationary employee or the bosses’ son?

Paul says you can have confidence because you are God’s son or daughter through Jesus Christ. You are a child and heir of the most high God.

Did you know that God is even richer than Bill Gates? That’s amazing, but true. And God wants to give to us out of His abundance. In the words of 1 Corinthians 2:9: “Eye has not seen and ear has not heard, neither has entered into the human heart, all that God has prepared for those who love Him.”

We are told that one feature of our inheritance is that we will rule with Jesus in His Kingdom. Important authority is promised us. Paul told Timothy, “If we endure, we will also reign with Him.”

Another blessing is that we will be made like Jesus Himself. John writes about this in his first letter, using language similar to Paul’s in Romans 8. “Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not been made known. But we know that when He appears, we will be like Him, for we will see Him as He is.” It is hard to imagine a greater inheritance than to be made like the Lord Jesus Christ.

But above all this, we are also told that we will have God himself in a direct intimacy of relationship.

God gives us heaven because that is where He is and He is what we need. That, above all, is what we need. For only God is finally able to meet our deepest needs.

Only God is big enough to meet your deepest needs. And God will give you His fulfillment - whether we face the big death or are grappling with the small deaths - the frustration of dreams - that come from the temporary nature of this world. This isn’t all there is. We have a great hope. We are co-parents, co-lovers, and co-heirs. It is all ours. Everything we need for life and godliness is ours. Every promise of God, the Bible says, “is yes and amen in Christ Jesus.”