The comic strip “Funky Winterbean” caught my eye the other day. In the first box, a young woman standing at the front door says, “Hey, Mom! Come on in!” Standing behind her is an older woman who says, “Carla… Welcome! I’m so glad you could make it this weekend!” Box two: Carla, the mother, has stepped into the house. She says to the older woman, “I’m just happy to see these kids getting married… so I don’t have to call Cory my sin-in-law anymore!” Yes, “so I don’t have to call Cory my sin-in-law anymore.”
I’m struggling with what to say about Father’s Day. Generations are growing up in our cities with no father figure, kids assuming a single mom is how things are. In every locality there are fathers who, yes, are at home but abuse their children. Living together before marriage has become so common that “first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Sally with a baby carriage” is not known. And the quality of fathers is so uneven… How can I apply the commandment, “Honor your father and your mother…”?
I’ve concluded Father’s Day is about more than the Fourth Commandment. God-pleasing fatherhood assumes the Sixth Commandment, “You shall not commit adultery.” Like file folders, we gather all relevant scriptures under the given commandment. So, into the Sixth Commandment file goes this, “Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous” (Hebrews 13:4). That applies to the "sin-in-law."
Let’s pull farther back. The commandments have several purposes, and one is to provide order in society. Each commandment in its own way lays out an aspect of orderly society. In the sixteenth century, one theologian wrote, “The opposition and confusion in the order in man’s nature is especially apparent in this life of man in society” (Phillip Melanchthon). That’s truer than ever today, and it makes our life together much harder.
Omnipresent media displays and fosters our societal disorder and confusion. Funky Winterbean is media putting the spotlight upon one trouble. Sermons are media too. As I struggled through this Minute, I decided this is what I would preach Sunday: A good father can recite all Ten Commandments from memory. Order at home, which parents and children will take into society. Wanna take bets on how many church-going fathers can recite all ten?
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