I Am a Father to Israel

Today is Father’s Day, and the Fifth Commandment has something to say to us before the Gospel does: “Honour thy father and thy mother.” That commandment does not ask us to admire our parents from a distance. It asks something harder. It asks us to receive what we did not earn and could not have given ourselves: a home, an authority, a love that was already there before we knew enough to be grateful for it. That is the posture the whole day is built around, and it is not natural to us. We would rather be self-made. We would rather find our own way home and tell the story afterward as if we had planned the route.

The Collect will not let us keep that story. It begins, “O Lord, we beseech thee mercifully to hear us; and grant that we, to whom thou hast given an hearty desire to pray, may, by thy mighty aid, be defended and comforted in all dangers and adversities.” Read that carefully. We are not asked to work up the desire to pray. It is already given. Before we open our mouths this morning, God has already done something in us. The prayer that follows is not the cause of grace; it is the evidence of it.

That is the thesis for today, and I want to put it plainly before we go any further: the desire to pray is God’s gift, not our achievement, and it bears fruit only through humility, the humility that lets him seek us out instead of insisting we found our own way. Pride forecloses the very grace that brings heaven’s joy. Humility receives it. And what is true for one soul this morning is true for St. Barnabas as a whole.

Peter tells us why pride is the obstacle: “God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble.” Notice that this is not a moral preference God happens to have. It is closer to a law of how grace moves. Pride is not merely unattractive to God; it is structurally incapable of receiving what he offers, the way a closed hand cannot receive a gift. Humility is not groveling. It is simply the posture of a hand held open.

We see pride’s resistance acted out in the Gospel before we hear a word of doctrine about it. “Then drew near unto him all the publicans and sinners for to hear him. And the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them.” The publicans came close enough to listen. The Pharisees stood at a safe distance and complained about the company Jesus kept. I wonder, honestly, how often we do the same without calling it that. We can sit in this room every Sunday and still keep our distance from the very mercy we have come to receive, content to watch other people need it.

Against that murmuring, Jesus tells two short stories. A shepherd loses one sheep out of a hundred and does not write off the loss as acceptable. He goes after it. A woman loses one coin out of ten and does not decide nine is close enough. She lights a candle and sweeps the house until she finds it. Neither story is gentle about the cost. Ninety-nine sheep get left in the wilderness while the shepherd is out searching, and that is not a detail Jesus expects us to overlook. The math does not balance the way the Pharisees would have balanced it. In both stories, notice who does the finding. Not the sheep. Not the coin. The sheep does not strategize its way home; it does not even know it is lost until it is found. It gets carried. That is not a sentimental detail. It is the whole theology of the day compressed into a parable. Grace goes looking before we ever turn around, and it keeps looking after every reasonable person would have called off the search.

And when it is found, look at what happens: “I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.” Heaven keeps strange math. It rejoices harder over the one rescued than over the ninety-nine who never wandered, or at least never admitted they had. Augustine, who preached on this very text, wrote elsewhere of the restlessness underneath it all: “our heart is restless until it repose in Thee.” That restlessness is not a flaw to be managed. It is the very thing grace is answering.

So here is where the day’s three threads tie together, the thread I want you to carry out of this room. The Collect gives us the desire to pray as a gift already planted. The Epistle tells us that gift can only be received through humility, because pride simply cannot hold it. And the Gospel shows us what happens when humility receives it: heaven rejoices, and a sinner who could not find his own way home is carried there anyway. Desire. Humility. Grace. Not three separate doctrines stacked on top of each other. One movement. Take any one of them away and the other two stop making sense.

I want to say plainly what that movement is worth, both to you and to this parish. When humility receives the grace that is offered, two things happen at once. Individually, a soul that has spent years anxious about its own adequacy is finally allowed to rest, the restlessness Augustine named finding the home it was always reaching for. And corporately, a parish that lives this way stops being a building full of people quietly comparing themselves to each other and starts being what Barnabas himself was named for: a people who go looking for the one who is missing, because someone first went looking for us. I have watched this happen here. I have watched people who came through these doors certain they were the ninety-nine quietly become the one being carried, and I have watched the room rejoice when it happened. I have also watched it fail to happen, when a pew quietly hardens around its own sense of having arrived, and the silence that follows is its own kind of murmuring. That is not incidental to who we are. That is who we are supposed to be, and it is worth asking, honestly, which posture this parish is practicing this morning.

Which brings us back to Father’s Day and the commandment we started with. Jeremiah gives us the deepest reason the Fifth Commandment can ask what it asks of us: “I am a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn.” Before we are asked to honor any father on earth, we are told whose children we already are. Every earthly father who has gone looking for a child out past curfew, who has carried a sleeping child up the stairs rather than waking him to walk, is acting out, however dimly, the same pattern as the shepherd in the parable. We honor our fathers rightly only when we remember whose fatherhood theirs was always borrowing from.

This is also, finally, why the Collect asks for defense and comfort rather than the removal of every danger. A father does not promise his children a life with no adversity in it. He promises to be present in the adversity: his hand at the back of the neck in a dark hallway, his weight on the stairs reminding you that you are not carrying yourself up them alone. That is what “by thy mighty aid, be defended and comforted in all dangers and adversities” means for a people who have already admitted they cannot find their own way home.

If the desire to pray was already planted in you before you walked through these doors, then you did not come here today to manufacture a devotion you do not have. If grace resists the proud and finds the humble, then the safest thing you can do this morning is stop defending yourself and let yourself be sought. And if the Father who said, “I am a father to Israel,” was speaking the truth, then every door you have ever walked through carrying more than you could carry alone was a door he was already standing behind.

Come to this altar the way the sheep was carried: not because you found your own way here, but because you were sought, and found, and are being carried still.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.