Preaching on Mother's Day and Fathers' Day

A recent post over at John Alan Turner's place led me to start thinking about sermons.

Now, I realize that no one's personal experience counts as research. Impressions are not the same thing as statistics. But I couldn't resist the urge to identify what seem to be some trends in preaching when it comes to Mother's Day and Father's Day, especially in the group I know best, the Churches of Christ. Here's what I recall:

When I was a kid (the 1970s took me from age 7 to 17), I don't remember the preachers in my home congregation ever preaching a Mother's or Father's Day sermon. Seems like there were a few years on Mother's Day when the preacher felt compelled to acknowledge the corsages in the crowd, which led to a few remarks of appreciation. But it was never more than that.

I'm guessing that it was in the 1980s that this type of preaching became more common in the Churches of Christ, beginning with a sermon on Mothers' Day, if not one for Fathers' Day. Then, by the 1990s, both had become a bit of a fixture in this fellowship. If, like me, you're old enough to be a sort of walking history book, does my description match up with your own experience?

Here's something else I've noticed. In the Churches of Christ, the Mother's Day sermons I've heard (and, yes, preached) have typically gone something like this: You ladies are great! You certainly deserve a lot more credit than you get. We love you. Please, for our sakes, keep up the good work.

And then there's the Fathers' Day sermon, which has typically gone something like this: Some of us, maybe most of us, had fathers who were deeply flawed. Truth be told, most of you dads out there are a bunch of Homers too. If you only realized your great potential, you'd work a lot harder at being a good father (husband too). So get with it! Oh well, at least God is our father.

Again, does this sound familiar to you? Either way, I'm interested in hearing the experiences of others. A few questions:

What sorts of cultural norms and stereotypes influence this sort of preaching?

With May and June coming up quickly, what do you think preachers need to hear from the rest of us regarding how to handle these preaching occasions?

You preachers out there: Do you like or loath preaching on these two Sundays? And what are you planning to do this year?

Preparing for Fathers' Day

Like most preachers, this week I'm preparing to preach a Fathers' Day sermon. For me, that means poking around in Scripture, but also reading some recently-published stuff about fathers, what they're supposed to be doing, what they mean to children and, consequently, to society, etc.

Last Saturday I was at a library booksale and happened upon David Blankenhorn's Fatherless America. It was first published ten years ago and made a big splash at the time as I remembered. I'd never read it. And now here was a good paperback copy for a buck. So I bought it and started reading.

I didn't expect this or any book to speak so truly and directly to my own situation as a divorced father. But it does. And now I can't decide between the pain it provokes and the insight it provides.

The hardest part for me has been the section, "Can Visitors Be Fathers?" A few excerpts:

On how children think and feel about visits with their fathers:

"From the child's perspective, paternal love without paternal capacity is primarily a reminder of loss. This fact, more than any other, explains why postdivorce visits between father and child are so frequently painful, even traumatic. For the child, those visit-sized doses of father-love do not serve as a vaccine, as a protection from anguish. Quite the opposite. . . . For the child, this well-intentioned, ritualized wounding--this every-other Saturday reminder of what has died--frequently becomes the central emotional dynamic of father-child visitation after divorce."

"Visiting Father" as a contradiction:

"Visitation unfathers men. This phenomenon gradually strangles the father-child relationship. Indeed, the ultimate result of such not-like-a-father visiting is nothing less than the ending of fatherhood. Faced with the inherent falseness of their situation, many of these fathers . . . start feeling like strangers to their children, like imposters."

The necessity of sharing a residence:

"To be a good-enough father--to sustain the dailiness of effective parenting--a man needs to live with his children. When he does not, he literally becomes an outsider. . . As with the rupture of the parental alliance, the father's physical absensce from the home makes postdivorce fatherhood a radically different--and much more problematic--idea than postdivorce motherhood. For this reason, fatherhood after divorce is not even remotely parallel to motherhood after divorce."

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That's all for now. I love and am thankful for my father. I also value my own fatherhood, and I'm trying to make the most of it. But this is going to be my toughest Fathers' Day so far.