Our Father’s Discipline
Proper 16 C
Hebrews 12:4-6
25 August 2013 – Redeemer
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Where would you be if your parents did not care for you? If your mom had not wrapped you up, held you close and fed you? Where would you be if your parents had not spoken to you as a toddler and recited the ABCs or read Dr. Seuss to you and taught you your numbers? Where would you be if your parents didn’t make you brush your teeth or change your clothes or bathe? Where would be if your mom didn’t make you eat your peas or your Dad didn’t teach you to drive?
Where would you be if your parents left you alone? If they said, “I don’t care what you eat – have Mint Oreo Ice Cream for breakfast with Red Mountain Dew poured over the top. I don’t care when you are home, who you are with or what you and your friends are doing?
Let me tell you where you would be – the National Fatherhood Initiative has studied the effects on families where men father children but are not fathers to them. You are probably not surprised to learn that if dad isn’t there his children are more likely to die as infants, be impoverished as children, and be in jail as juveniles. Boys who are raised without a father caring for them are more likely to be like dear old dad – not caring about the women he meets or the children he creates.
All of that is set up for the words of the text from Hebrews
“My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,
nor be weary when reproved by him.
For the Lord disciplines the one He loves
and chastises every son whom he receives.”
The Hebrew Christians were a suffering people. In the years following Christ’s resurrection and ascension, as the family of Christ grew their struggles grew. They were confident God was their heavenly Father for they had been baptized into Christ, but their lives were tumultuous. You might say these were the teen years of the early church.
You know the teen years – you struggle with your identity. You get bullied and picked on. The last thing you want to do is stand out in any sort of weird or abnormal way. The Hebrews were new Christians. Christianity was new and these Christians stood out. They were not ancestor worshipers or Caesar worshipers. They worshiped a living Lord – the risen and ascended Jesus Christ. They didn’t do good works to please their god or earn a reward. They did good works because their Father had given His only Son for them. These teenage Hebrews didn’t go along with the crowd – they didn’t have female priests like the pagans. They didn’t worship Caesar and Rome like the civil religions. They didn’t call evil good and good evil like the liberal religions. They didn’t cast off the least and the last, but cared for the orphans and the widows and welcomed the prostitutes and tax collectors into their fellowship. They were in a single word – weird.
Sometimes you simply can’t help being weird – you might just have been born into a weird family. And who do you blame? You blame dad and mom. It’s their fault you’re going through all of this. In the tension of the teen years sometimes you hate your parents and you wish you were never born.
That tension was near the Hebrew Christians and it is near to us, especially when we suffer. Especially when we are singled out for our weirdness, especially when the Word of our Father disciplines us against the word of the world.
We are the weird children of our weird heavenly Father and we suffer for it. How weird is it to call sin sin. How weird is it to be expect fathers to discipline the children they create. How weird is it to believe that only a man and a woman can have children and therefore have marriage? How weird is it to forgive anyone his sins? The writer to the Hebrews speaks words of encouragement to those who are weird and suffer – who suffer as they resist the sins that the world embraces, as they confess the Word of God which the world hates, as they teach their children God’s truth instead of the world’s lies.
And like teenagers who blame their parents we blame God when there is a conflict between His Word and what we want in life, when His weirdness puts us in tension with the world. Like teenagers we cry out, “But everyone’s doing it” and He responds “Thou shalt not.” And we cry out, “Why not?” and He says, “Because I love you.” And we are tempted to cry out, “I hate you.” So life is for the baptized children of God, caught between the love of God and the love of the world, caught between the wide path of destruction and the narrow door of salvation, caught between your Father in heaven and your friends on earth.
God’s Word tells us this morning of one truth – Our Father in heaven disciplines us because He loves us. He disciplines us because we are His children. God is treating you as sons. He speaks His Word to you because Father knows best. He puts tests in your way that you might be strengthened in your faith and grow up in Christ.
One of the common refrains in the letter to the Hebrews is “how much more.” The author of this letter was always pointing the Hebrews to Christ and how much more Christ is than anything else on earth, particularly the writer pointed back to the Old Testament. How much greater a Sacrifice is Jesus than the other sacrifices – for they need to be repeated and His was one final sacrifice for all sin. How much greater than the Temple is Jesus – for in Jesus God permanently dwells to deliver His gifts to His people. How much greater is our rest in Jesus than the Sabbath rest of the Old Testament because our rest from sin and death will be eternal in heaven.
And so in our text he says how much greater is our heavenly Father than our earthly father and He is much greater because of Christ. Thanks be to God most teenagers grow up and there comes a time at 25 or 30 or 40 when they look back on their parents and say, “Thank you.” There comes a time when we respect our parents and realize that they were doing the best they knew how. How much more then should we endure the correction and discipline and heed the Word of our Father in heaven and love and honor Him? For He rules over all the spirits and is the author of life. His Fatherhood isn’t for a mere moment in time, but for all eternity. He doesn’t merely love us as sons, He loves us with His only Son and gives Jesus over to death so that our sins would be forgiven and we could be born into His family from above in baptism. How much more should we regard our Father in heaven because His love is great enough and His mercy rich that He desires to gather all nations and tongues to Him, to bring children from the north and south and east and west to recline at His table. His love is great enough to seek you. His mercy deep enough that it covers you. His forgiveness is abundant enough to cover all your sins.
That brings us full circle. Where would you be if God didn’t care for you? If He left you alone? You would be dying on a reckless and dangerous journey that ends with the grave and hell. But God has not left you alone – those He creates He loves, those He loves He disciplines, those who rebel He seeks, those who repent He forgives. That discipline, that Word of our Father, that tension between His weirdness and the world causes to great joy. For He disciplines those He loves and that means He regards us as His sons in the name of Jesus. Amen.
Pastor Bruce Timm
25 August 2013 anno Domini