Keeping the Faith of Our Fathers

Today is Father’s Day and we celebrate the gift of fatherhood God has granted us: His gift of earthly fathers by which he blesses our families and his gift of spiritual fatherhood in which we are made as his beloved children in Christ Jesus. This Sunday is also Trinity Sunday when we celebrate the Holy Trinity. That also means that it is our church’s anniversary.

Today our congregation is 71 years old. Much has changed since German immigrants that arrived in Canada following the Great Depression got together to establish a place where they could worship. Today, this church continues to serve the spiritual needs of immigrants. But they are no longer only German-speaking immigrants. Today we gather for God’s Service with people that God has brought to this city from every nation! It is wonderful to see how our congregation is beginning to resemble more and more that great multitude of people “from every nation, tribe, people and language, before the throne” of God which the Apostle John saw in his vision of heaven (Revelation 7:9).

As a new generation comes to worship here and as new peoples come here from all over the world, one thing has remained the same: our message has stayed the same. The message that “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16) Unfortunately, many churches in Toronto have watered down that message over time. They no longer preach Jesus as our Saviour from sin, but rather as a great moral teacher and nothing more. We can thank our forefathers in the faith, those who built this church and who kept it going, that they remained faithful to their Lutheran heritage: They refused to substitute or mix the Word of God with the opinions of men. They strove to pass on the faith of their fathers to their children. That is why we are here today, gathered not around a guru or some great motivational speaker, but around the true, life-giving Word of God. Today we praise God for our fathers in the faith and we pray that we would be granted the grace to continue steadfast in our confession of the Christian faith.

In our Old Testament lesson we see how Moses directed the Israelites to ensure that they did not forget the words of God, but to remember them and to pass them on to future generations: “These words that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.” (Deuteronomy 6:6-9) What are you doing to pass on the faith to your children? Unless you “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength,” (Deut. 6:5) you will fail to pass on that faith to the next generation.

It is easy to lose what we have received and to despise what has been passed on to us. Unfortunately that is what we see happening around us today. It appears that our nation is throwing away everything that has been handed down to us by our forefathers. Just last week we saw marriage, defined as “between a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others,” thrown out of the window. Let me assure you that opinion polls, judges and politicians can never change what God has created marriage to be: A life-long union of one man and one woman. It is within these boundaries of marriage that God has blessed us with the opportunity to come as near as is possible on this earth to experience the divine movement of love between the three persons of the Holy Trinity: The love of the Father for the Son and the love of the Son for the Father and the perfect unity of love they share in the Holy Spirit. It is also in marriage that we are privileged to imitate the self-sacrificial, life-giving love that Christ has shown to us, his church. As such, God designed marriage as the natural and safest place for children to be raised and nurtured.

On the other hand, in our society we see this divine design for marriage totally ripped apart. For example, through universal sex education, condom distribution and abortion on demand our children are taught that sex is recreational and not just meant for marriage alone. Also, No-Fault divorce has facilitated the tearing apart of so many families that the single parent or two-home family is now the norm. What we see now with the invention of homosexual “marriage” is just one more step in a long series of steps to dismantle God’s design for families in marriage and for fatherhood. These two institutions are now being rendered meaningless and redundant.

The situation is quite bad, perhaps even much worse than we can imagine—after all, most of us live very protected lives which are mostly unaffected by all the social dysfunctions that many Canadians—both rich and poor—suffer. For example, children are not told in sex-education that the only safe sex is chastity and faithfulness in marriage. They are learning it the hard way as their bodies become ravaged with painful sexual diseases. Boys who are recruited into homosexuality are also not told that with this lifestyle, one third of them will be dead by the age of 30. Girls are also not told that having an abortion carries with it a much higher incidence of mental illness than carrying a baby to term. While the statistics are alarming, I do not want to be alarmist. This kind of liberal socialism that afflicts our nation carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. As the darkness over our land thickens, so also the light becomes more apparent. Let us just pray that we do not fail to keep the light of God’s word shining among us in this depraved generation.

The kind of society we are witnessing today is in many ways similar to that which the early church faced. It was also a very challenging time as the early church grew up in a very multicultural, multi-religious, but morally challenged culture. Because of that the Epistles of the Apostles are especially relevant to us. That is why we have chosen to begin a Bible study series on Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians next week. This study will help us to understand our church’s mission in this critical time and how we are to respond to the challenges we face around us as God’s people.

In this world we find that the church has truly become counter-cultural. It can be scary to realize that we are now part of a despised and hated minority. But the Apostle Paul tells us in our Epistle lesson, that we “who are led by the Spirit of God” are no longer slaves to fear—for we have received the “Spirit of sonship” (Romans 8:5). The Spirit enables us to keep the faith of our fathers and to be prepared to “share in [Christ’s] sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory” (8:17). Unless we are prepared to do that we will fail to be there where God calls us to provide Christian care for the victims of ungodliness: For the children whose lives have been ravaged by parental separation or by sexual abuse, for the young people who are dying of AIDS, for the women suffering from Post Abortion Syndrome and for many more who have been victims of crime, injustice and perversion.

To them God offers his heavenly fatherhood and upon them he pours out his divine love. Even as Jesus welcomed sinners and was known as their friend so must we if we are the true Body of Christ on earth. We must be prepared to bring in all who are weary and to bind up the brokenhearted, and to give them what their souls hunger and thirst for: the true bread of life that comes down from heaven and the springs of living water. “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” As the children of the heavenly Father, we welcome all he came to redeem.

In conclusion, I would like to say a final word to fathers: remember the everlasting love of God. Remember your heavenly Father’s care for you. And so “love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength.” Then the Lord will bless you and your children and your children’s children. And many generations to come will be blessed by the Lord through you. Fatherhood is an important calling God has given through which we see his love reflected. Being a father in today’s world is not easy and as sinners, all fathers fall short of God’s perfect fatherhood. Nevertheless, because God has sanctified fatherhood when he became our heavenly Father through our adoption in Baptism, so let us honour fathers and pray that they may faithfully exercise their vocation so that their children may be blessed with a true faith in Christ, even as we have been blessed by the faith of our forefathers. May the everlasting love of our heavenly Father and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit keep your hearts and minds in perfect peace through Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.