Speaking of Father’s Day …
(Posted June 12, 2025)
When I noticed the other day that Father’s Day coincides this year with Trinity Sunday, I said to myself, “how fitting! The very Sunday where we celebrate the three “faces” of God – the Creator, or Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
God the Father
Of course, with last Sunday’s focus on Pentecost, we’ve already spent a good deal of time getting to know the nature of the Paraclete, and God knows we’ve just come out of the long post-Easter season with Jesus, our Savior. So we’re really overdue to think about and talk about God the Father, the one who creates all, who designs all, whose work solves the mysteries of the Universe. And, if we’re lucky, when we think of what it means to be a father, we also think, “Problem Solver.”
When I think of my own Dad, most of the time that name would apply. To be honest, all Dads are, at the root, just human beings trying to do their best to raise kids, and those kids don’t come with an “owner’s manual.” My own father, Jack, had a penchant for coming up with some creative solutions to problems, but always took things one step further. One year the trees in back of our house became infested with tent caterpillars. My Dad’s friend at the hardware store told him to pour a little gasoline on the nests from the tank he had for the lawn mower. That would dispatch them, the friend said. But what he didn’t tell Dad at all was to set a match to them. When Dad lit them ablaze the resulting small forest fire brought the fire department out very quickly.
A Father Unbound by Human Flaws
Fortunately, our Divine Parent, God the Father, is not bound by human flaws.
As the Architect of our beginning, and ultimately our end, the Universe we gaze out upon is both ending and beginning. The light that reaches our eye from distant stars comes from celestial bodies that disintegrated long, long ago. At the same time, clouds of gas in the constellation Orion are just now being born into new stars.
To us preoccupied humans back on our tiny ball that is earth, we seem blind to the wonders and gifts God gives us. We’re too busy fighting with people over the most ridiculous minor things, instead of praising God our Father. Jesus himself, toward his last months with his disciples, spoke some frustrated words to men who should have spent more time loving one another instead of bickering. Jesus told them, “you have neglected the more important matters of the law -- justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.”
On this Father’s Day, let us gift God our creator with acts of love, not criticism; with gratitude for kindness, which is the currency of our faithfulness with each other.