PHOTOGRAPHS OF MY FATHER
A sermon preached by
Rev. Dr. Randle R. (Rick) Mixon
First Baptist Church, Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Text: Luke 15:11-24
I don’t usually offer disclaimers for my sermons but this one is less linear than my usual fare. Here is a collection of images, a collage if you will, one set of “photographs” placed next to the other as they might be placed in a family album. Hopefully, you will find a word about fatherhood at its finest, rooted God’s desire for human faithfulness and love and Jesus’ teaching about what God is like.
My father’s voice was clearly the voice of God. Standing tall in the pulpit, speaking in his strong, authoritarian voice, I thought I had been struck by lightening when he simply said the name of his 8 year old son, making mischief on the front row of the sanctuary, when I should have been listening attentively to the sermon. “Rick” was all I needed to hear to know that I had been found out and called out. No other punishment was necessary. That early childhood experience aside, my father was a powerful influence in my life. He was a man of deep faith, whose own faith was built on the faith of his fathers – and mothers.
He made a decision as a young man to answer God’s call to ministry. He entered seminary at 20, took his first pastorate at 21 and spent his entire, too-brief career in pastoral ministry. Among the legendary things I remember about him was his ability to study all week, get up at 6 AM on Sunday, scribble a few words on the back of an envelope from which he proceeded to preach a well-organized, 35-minute sermon, always followed by an altar call. He was a committed evangelical with deep Southern Baptist roots. At the same time, he was also a committed ecumenist. He served as an American Baptist delegate to the first meeting of the National Council of Churches and was the founder of the Idaho Council of Churches. Needless to say, this work was not altogether popular in the venues in Kansas and Idaho in which he served.
I have always considered him an enlightened conservative, one who read widely and thought deeply about things theological and their implications for the world in which we live. Discipleship was a way of life, with personal and social implications to be lived out on a daily basis. In addition, to his carefully reasoned ecumenism, I have two key memories of his ministry that have helped to shape my own. The first was his open advocacy of the civil rights movement in the early 60s; this in spite of his southern roots and our setting in virtually all white Boise, Idaho, where these concerns were not acutely present in the day. The second was his preaching in favor of the Supreme Court ruling forbidding state-sponsored prayer and Bible reading in public schools. There are other more personal and tender memories I carry, but these stand out for the courage they displayed to a teen-aged boy trying to find his way in the world and looking for heroes. I know I was an anomaly for my father as a child, with my sissy ways, but I always felt secure in his love. As my own intellectual interests began to blossom, so did our relationship, only to be cut short too-soon when I was 17 and he 47 on his untimely death from leukemia. It is no small thing that I walked the aisle of the First Baptist Church of Boise at age 16 at his invitation to give my life to full time Christian service. The voice of God had spoken in and through my own father and his ministry.
In the fall of 1965, I journeyed from Idaho to become a freshman at Columbia University. Among my classmates was another preacher’s son. I imagine I met Paul Spike sometime during the flurry of freshman orientation, but I don’t remember. We were from different sides of the country and our pastor fathers moved in different circles, though I’m sure their paths must have crossed over the years. Robert Spike was the son of a strong Baptist laywoman from the Rochester, New York, area. He attended Denison University in Granville, Ohio, where he also served as student minister of the First Baptist Church. All of this and more is chronicled in Paul Spike’s 1973 memoir, Photographs of My Father, which I read only recently while toiling on the treadmill at the gym. By his son’s account, Robert Spike was a remarkable man; a gifted, creative minister; a man of courage and a tireless worker for social justice. Robert Spike was a dedicated disciple of Jesus Christ. Like my own father’s, his ministry was a direct result of his discipleship.
When his son, at age 11, began to wonder if he might be an atheist, he asked his father why he believed in God. His father’s response went something like this, “When things get hectic or very troubled, I have this thing I feel. I suppose I call this ‘God.’ It is just a feeling, very mysterious but I get it, which I can rest inside, feel safe inside. I rest in this feeling of ‘God’ (Paul Spike, Photographs of My Father, p. 35.) Paul Spike goes on to say of his father, “He lived in his words and spent most of his life talking to people. That was chiefly how he ‘ministered’ to them…Impossible as it sounds, my father could heal people just by talking to them. He was a man who believed in his own ‘soul,’ who helped other people believe in theirs: government people in Washington, students in Harlem, people who worked in the White House and people who worked in the White Tower hamburger stand; there were hundreds of members in his congregation” (Paul Spike, p. 34.)
After graduating from Colgate Rochester Divinity School, in the late 1940s, Robert Spike became pastor of the aging, struggling Judson Memorial Church in New York’s Greenwich Village. Spike gets much of credit for turning that historic congregation into the radically progressive congregation it became over the next 50 years. He reached out to the artists and poets, the young people in gangs, the people who inhabited the neighborhood and made the church a living reality for them. Robert Spike went from Judson Memorial Church to working in Congregationalist national offices to being the founder, in 1963, of the Commission on Religion and Race of the National Council of Churches. He said of the 1963 March on Washington, for which he mobilized church leaders from all over the country, “…for the first time in my ministry…the church was where it belonged, in the middle of the street” (quoted in Paul Spike, p. 31.)
Late in his brief life, Robert Spike, shared with his son and others his attraction to men. Though Robert Spike seemed to be comfortable in his own skin, there was little if any support at that time for gay or bisexual identity, especially in the church. Like my own father’s, Robert Spike’s life was cut tragically short; unlike my dad, however, Robert Spike was brutally murdered. The case remains unsolved until this day. The big question that remains is whether Robert Spike was murdered by a mysterious figure from the gay subculture of Columbus, Ohio? Or was he a victim of the FBI or the CIA? There are shreds of evidence that could be followed in either direction. Robert Spike was a significant figure in the Civil Rights movement. Many of the white clergy, lay folk and students who rallied and marched throughout the South came at the call of God in and through the witness of Robert Spike. He was connected both to the poor and the powerful and he helped to build bridges across which many protestors and witnesses walked.
Spike was both a complex man and committed minister of the gospel. Whether we ever understand all that shaped his short life, his son writes assuredly of his father’s unconditional love for him. In our words of preparation, Robert Spike writes in his own volume, To Be a Man, “God’s relationship to [humankind,] his love for us, tells us something about what earthly love is like. In the biblical view, God takes a terrific chance, a daring step into the midst of creation and makes a covenant with his people, and though [humans] break the trust and betray the confidence, God never leaves. He is long-suffering. He is beyond the darts of contempt and the weapon of hatred” (quoted in Paul Spike, p. 184.)
And that is how the writer of Luke’s gospel describes the father in this morning’s Ancient Word. We call this the Parable of the Prodigal Son, but the central character here is the patient, gracious, loving father. This is the kind of character that Robert Spike speaks of in describing God and God’s love for humanity. In fact, the great Swiss preacher, Helmut Thielicke, called this story as the Parable of the Waiting Father and Tom Wright suggests it might be called the Parable of the Running Father. In a fashion highly improbable for the time and the setting, this aging, Semitic patriarch waits patiently by the side of the road, scanning the horizon for the return of his wayward son, and, when he sees him in the distance, he breaks into a most undignified run to embrace his wandering child.
Though these are not exactly photographs, the images from this parable are etched on our minds and hearts. The callow, self absorbed son, shaming his father by demanding his share of the inheritance; then striking out on his own for exotic and exciting foreign lands; the boy’s fall from celebrity as his resources disappear; the absolute bottom the young man hits when he is reduced to living with the pigs and eating their slop; the moment when that little light bulb comes on in his consciousness and he remembers home; the humility with which he makes his return journey, including the speech, rehearsed over and over along the way, urging his father to take him back as one of the hired hands – all are vivid images of the young man’s dissolution and repentance. But it is the images of the father that poignantly portray the heart of the story. He wants his boy freely to choose home and their loving relationship. However, the son cannot truly make that choice if he is not free to make the other as well. So, the father with heavy heart watches him go, not knowing the outcome of the young man’s travels abroad. It is the father who lovingly and hopefully waits for the boy’s return and it is the father who proclaims the feast to celebrate this son who was lost and is found again.
This is father love. It is not the only word on love or necessarily the final word, but it is a great word. At their very best, fathers are complex, sometimes demanding, sometimes struggling, always loving figures, who reach out to their children with open hand giving good gifts and lasting legacies. My intention in opening these albums that have meant much to me is to share some photographs of fathers – my own loving and committed birth father, an iconic spiritual father of great heroism and faith, the father of Luke’s parable. I am not saying that any of these figures fully represents God. They are from snapshots, images, captured in passing and developed on the memory, of what it means to be a father at one’s best – to act with courage, to model discipleship, to live in faith and hope, to practice justice and hospitality, to love with unquenchable love and to reach out with an undeniable grace that forgives the repentant, restores the wanderer, embraces the lost and celebrates the lives of all children.
I wonder what other photographs of fathers any of us might add to the album this morning? I know that they would not all be as engaging or affirming, not as gracious and loving. I know there are fathers who fail and fail miserably. I know it is risky business to hold up a parental ideal and compare it to God. Still, I offer these photographs of fathers so that any of us who wrestle with fatherhood from any angle might find here some hope and some inspiration for the kind of fatherhood that these photographs attempt to capture. Amen.