““Lessons from a Whiskey Barrel”

• Scriptural Reference: Ephesians 6:1-4; Luke 15:11-32
• June 15, 2008

In his movie, “A History of the World, Part I,” Mel Brooks, as Moses, comes down from Mt. Sinai with the stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments, pauses, looks over the gathered hordes and says, “It’s good to be king.” So much of the popular mythology of family these days says that if things were the way they were supposed to be, fatherhood would be like that. As in the 50’s TV sitcom, “Father Knows Best,” daddy would calmly listen to everyone else in the family emote hysterically about the latest crisis, and then clear his throat, thereby quieting everyone. Each family member, including mom, would then lean forward with bated breath awaiting the wise and reconciling nugget Father would impart. The issue would then be solved as everyone recognized Father’s authority and impeccable wisdom and set about doing what he said because, as the title said, “Father knows best.” And as everyone scurried to be obedient, he would drink his coffee with an expression that said, “It’s good to be king – ahem – father.”

Yeah. Right.

The problem is that no one I know has had that experience. My own dad wasn’t Charlotte, North Carolina’s version of Ben Cartwright and our house wasn’t the Ponderosa. And try as I may, I could never quite get the humorous line like Bill Cosby always used to produce when he managed the Huckstable Household. And, what humor I did manage never worked because it was always interpreted as sarcasm. What? ME? Sarcastic? I never get sarcastic.

I think our society’s entertainment industry produced television programs like that because they’re good at responding to widespread longing in our culture, and the truth is, we long for healthy families, for loving relationships between parents and children. We just don’t seem to be able to do a very smooth job of negotiating what it takes to get them.

In Ephesians, Paul gives us an outline of how families should relate to one another. “Children,” he says, “obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.” This used to bug me when I heard it. When Dr. Bates read this, it gave me a sinking feeling because I was sure my mother had been talking to him. There have been a couple of times in my own parenting when I’d quote this to my daughter. “The Bible says obey your parents.” It worked about as well with her as it did when my parents used it on me.

I was in a mega-store parking lot not long ago – you know, one of those stores that sell a lot of plastic stuff from China – and a woman was goading a herd out of a dinted Suburban. One kid, about three years old or so, started off through the parking lot and the mother grabbed his wrist, jerked him back, and lifted him off his feet so he hung in the air like a rag doll where she landed a series of sharp whacks on his rump. “I told you to MIND me.” By the time the herd disappeared through the front door, about four of them were crying. I sympathized with both the woman and the children. She didn’t want them squashed by other old SUVs and they didn’t want to go shopping.

When Paul wrote that children were to obey their parents, he wasn’t talking about slavish conformity to senseless rules and the mother had good reason for expecting obedience from her children. She probably had little choice but to take them all with her shopping because it was likely she couldn’t afford any other form of child care. The word Paul uses that gets translated as “obey” comes from two Greek words which literally mean “hyper-listen.”

Children, Paul says, listen carefully to your parents, for this is the wise way. In other words, don’t simply obey your parents because they say so. You listen to their instruction carefully and assess what’s said because they’ve been down that path before and there’s really no reason for you to reinvent the wheel. Don’t rebuild everything. Build, rather, on their good foundation. In fact, the word honor literally means to esteem the value of something. When you honor your parents, you recognize their value and base your choices on that value. You do that, and you’ll live a longer life than if you ignore them and say, don’t use your seatbelt.

If children, though, are going to listen carefully to what we say and esteem the value of what we say, then we better pay attention, especially as fathers, to what Paul says in verse 4: “Fathers, don’t exasperate your children.” In other words, don’t feed them valueless pabulum if you want them see you as valuable. Instead, the verse says, “bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.”

“Bring them up.” When you bring someone up, when you bring anything up, you have some kind of long term connection. You can’t bring something up from a distance. When you bring up children, it’s like raising crops. We even say that we raise our children. When you raise crops, you tend to them. You see to proper nourishment, fertilizer, irrigation, and pruning. You spend time pulling up weeds. You pay attention. You don’t treat the plant with violence by pulling it up out of the ground periodically to see if its root system is good. That would kill the plant. You have to trust that the root system is developing well by insuring the proper soil.

You don’t bring a child up in the instruction and training of the Lord simply by telling them to do as you say. You spend time in the field yourself. You bring yourself up in the instruction and training of the Lord. You make sure your own life is producing fruit. You make sure you have value yourself. Why? Because how we tend our garden is how they will tend to their garden.

It used to infuriate my mother, my sisters, and me that my dad refused to buy anything that he thought he could make himself. Mom would want a new chair and dad would go make one. He made a whiskey barrel chair once – where a Southern Baptist deacon got, first, the IDEA for a whiskey barrel chair is somewhat understandable, but, second, how he knew where to locate one makes me wonder. Suffice it to say that the chair he fashioned from the whiskey barrel wasn’t a hit with my mother. It was – um – ugly. He did the same with coat racks and toilet paper dispensers. We had little wooden contraptions that often had to be explained to us before we recognized them. It made us SO MAD.

But, you know what? I grew up with this overwhelming urge to write my own music, to create my own stories to tell, to draw my own pictures, and to write my own sermons. And I tell others to focus on their own spiritual path, to make their own way. Is that any coincidence? I don’t think so. I think my dad’s insistence on originality, on using his own brain, skills – such as they were – and putting them to work profoundly influenced me, and was extremely valuable. Listen folks, a whiskey-barrel-chair spirituality is far better than something you bought from a self-help shelf at Barnes and Noble, or gleaned form an Oprah interview.

I don’ think my dad ever realized that he taught me that lesson. I have to trust that the Lord has passed along that insight to him. But that’s the way of it, dads. Most of us don’t really realize that we’re teaching our kids, bringing them up in an environment that we are weaving on a daily basis. We best consciously infuse that environment with our own spiritual discipline, because that’s what our kids will learn.

Think of that lesson that dad taught in the 15 th chapter of Luke. He had two sons. The older one was supposed to be the executor of the estate when his dad died, but along comes the younger of the two sons and says to his dad, “Hey dad! Listen, I don’t want to wait until you’re actually dead to get my portion of the inheritance. I don’t want to wait for brother to dole things out. I want what’s mine, and I want it now!”

The religious law of the day had a profound way of dealing with sons like that, who obviously didn’t know their proper place. Kill them. Deuteronomy 21:18 and following says that if a son, “. . . will not pay attention [to his parents, they] must take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his town at the gate of that place. To the elders of his town, they will say, ‘This son of ours . . . will not listen to us; he is a wastrel and a drunkard.’ All his fellow citizens must then stone him to death.” Pretty extreme, wouldn’t you say? The father in this parable had this option and anyone listening to this story would’ve known of the option and some, if not most, of them would have wanted him to exercise that option. After all, he had another son who would carry on the name.

But the father GIVES the son what he wants. What kind of father is this? It must have looked to the neighbors a little like he was trying to do the parental equivalent of making a chair out of a whiskey barrel. Giving the son what he wanted couldn’t end up producing anything good. After all, look what the son does! Wonder of wonders, he runs off and uses it all up. Spends it all! And who wonders at that? A kid who didn’t value his own dad’s life-work wouldn’t know enough to value what he had control of.

So, there’s the boy, good times gone – along with all his money. Oh, we can party hardy for a while, can’t we, but sooner or later reality grabs us. We can drive our oversized cars at oversized speeds for a while but sooner or later certain economic laws click in, like supply and demand. This boy’s supply had run out and consequently he began to feel the pinch of a mighty persistent and basic demand. He was hungry!

Then he came to his senses. Reality does that, doesn’t it? I think our whole society is a prodigal son of sorts. We’ve lived high on the hog, few of us producing much at all, but coming to see consumption as our basic right. But supply is falling. We have to do something about what we demand, don’t we, if for no other reason than our own good?

That’s when the son does his reflection. “Shoot, my dad’s hired help get at least a little better than minimum wage. At least they can go to the new Chick-fil-a. I know what I’ll do: I’ll go home and tell him that I’ve done badly. I’ve not honored either him or what I learned in Sunday school and church. I’ll ask him to hire me on at minimum wage.” And he sticks out his thumb for a ride home.

Then comes one of the most arresting verses in any of the world’s religious literature. “While he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion.”

Do you feel like you’re out in left field? Maybe you’re not even in the ball park? You’re a long way off? Your heavenly father sees you; recognizes you. And he isn’t mad at you. Hear that. HE ISN’T MAD AT YOU. He’s filled with compassion.

What’s more, you’ll notice that this son’s prayer isn’t exactly like the prayer of St. Francis. St. Francis prayed, “Lord make me an instrument of your peace. Let me seek not so much to be consoled as to console.” This son prayed, “Lord, make my dad an instrument of my satisfaction. I’m sorry and all that, but let me be filled again.” In other words, this isn’t the prayer of a saint. It’s the prayer of an arrogant but broken and spiritually immature upstart. In other words, it’s our prayer.

It’s fascinating that the kid rehearses the prayer. “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired men.” But like most of the speeches we rehearse to repeat to the ones we love with whom we’ve had disagreements, it doesn’t go as planned. When he gets to the end of the line about not being worthy, the dad interrupts him.

You see, the son didn’t expect his dad to be watching for him. He didn’t expect his dad to come running to him. He didn’t expect an embrace and a kiss. I think he probably stammered as he began his rehearsed speech. “F-f-f-father, uh, I have, uh, sinned – yeah, that’s it! – I’ve sinned.”

But dad interrupts before the kid can ask for a job. In fact, the father doesn’t hire him on at minimum wage. “Hurry! Hey Mac,” he yells to one of the paid workers, “Mac, run out and fire up the grill and throw on the sirloins. Go get my finest dinner jacket. Get a family signet ring to replace the one the kid’s hocked. Get some slippers. My boy’s home!” He doesn’t hire him at minimum wage: he makes the boy a partner.

And the party began.

The older boy didn‘t like it. He had wanted his dad to exercise his earlier option. When he discovers that dad’s throwing a party for the returned younger brother who had been a high stepping strutter who landed in the gutter, he can’t take it. His sense of fair play rips his guts out.

When his dad learns that the older son isn’t in any mood for a party, he goes out and the older boy essentially says, “Dad, I don’t like your whiskey barrel chair parenting here. I’ve done my faithfulness the old fashioned way, and I think I’ve earned it. I’ve earned a party. I’m entitled!”

“Son, is our relationship, our camaraderie not enough? Is the fact that everything I have is going to you not enough for you?” I think this guy is a little like that person that Gore Vidal used to talk about when he said, “It’s not enough that I succeed. Other people must fail.” It’s apparent to me that this older brother had that attitude. And in our society, it’s perfectly the norm. We have this ideal that the universe ought to work on the basis of quid-pro-quo. You get what you deserve. You don’t get what you don’t deserve.

The problem is, the universe has never operated that way. Never. Sixteen year old, church going girl on her way to a youth group activity gets broadsided by a drunk driver. She dies. He loses his license for a while. Or a 50 year old, dedicated Sunday school teacher contracts pancreatic cancer and dies six weeks after diagnosis. Or 12,000 children who didn’t ask to be brought into this world die of malnutrition before we go to work tomorrow morning.

It might be whiskey barrel chair thinking, but there isn’t any way to make the world work except through compassion. We can never make it work out fairly. We CAN be compassionate.

Dads, if you want your children to honor you, then bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord who told this parable – who raised compassion way above the accepted rules of the religiously correct people of his day.

I love this story because it assures me that no matter how many rules get slaughtered by our children, not our judgment on them, but our compassion for them will heal us. I love this story because Jesus was telling us that that’s precisely how God relates to us. How could we aspire to anything less?