Jonathan Gibson’s sermon: Short Changing the Father

Posted by Kendall Harmon

Bill Cosby tells us that there is a difference between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Mothers, he says are much better organized. They give their children a list of the things they would like. They then ask their children to go and ask their father for the money needed. With money in hand “go buy me something nice from this list and come home and surprise me.”

Fathers on the other hand do not have it so good. Cosby says that before Father’s Day he gives each of his kids $20.00. They then pool the money and spend $10.00 on two, three pair packages of underwear. They each wrap a pair separately and give the sixth pair to the Salvation Army. After Father’s Day, Cosby’s kids have done their duty and are then walking around with $90.00 of his money in their pocket. I think Bill Cosby was short changed by his kids.

I want to show you in this essay how we have shortchanged the Father by the way we have reduced the Gospel and its message. He has given us his resources and we have often used them for our self-serving ends.

I will do three things in this essay:

i) Give a Historical Context that will show us how we have over the past 110 we have been short-changing the Father;

ii) Illustrate how the teaching of Bishop Michael Ingham exemplifies this;

iii) Show how we within Essentials are called to recognize this and return to the Father what is rightfully his due.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Anglican Church of Canada • Canadian General Synod 2007

3 Comments
Posted June 21, 2007 at 3:57 pm [Printer Friendly] [Print w/ comments]



1. Mike Bertaut wrote:

Wow!  What a powerful and delightful treatise on the origins of the slippery slope upon which we find ourselves now.  It’s a bit of a long read, but worth every word.  Especially powerful are the classical refutations of Ingham’s position on Scriptural Homosexuality versus the modern “loving” relationship.
thanks, Kendall, for picking up this piece for us.

KTF…mrb

June 21, 4:21 pm | [comment link]
2. Deja Vu wrote:

This is great. I am concerned that he says

If you read the plain meaning of the text on homosexual relation­ships (Romans 1: 24ff.) we discov­er that Paul does not only address homosexuality but lesbianism.

because it is not that plain to me. It makes more sense if it is referring to anal intercouse between men and women. And Brooten’s scholarship confirms it. The meaning is that women allowed the men to have anal intercourse with them to preserve virginity and/or avoid pregnancy.
I don’t think that takes much away from his argument. However, it concerns me because he used the phrase “plain meaning of the text” where there is a legitimate difference of opinion.  So it undermines the whole “plain meaning” movement to use it for the lesbian interpretation in Romans. Sometimes there really is a plain meaning, but the lesbian interpretations isn’t one of them. So, change that one bit and the rest is great.
(For people who haven’t been exposed to this problem, I know it is hard to imagine, but it really exists. I had a second cousin whose husband made her have anal sex. Her family was Catholic and eventually got her a Catholic anullment. Notice also the issue of heterosexual “non-vaginal intercourse” was in CDSP Professor Countryman’s infamous sexual ethics.)

June 21, 4:24 pm | [comment link]
3. Crews wrote:

Saint Patrick’s Breastplate still playing in my heart from Trinity Sunday, I bind unto myself the strong name of the Trinity…

So it is that, on this Father’s Day, the fresh-from-seminary and soon-to-be-priested man climbed into the pulpit and invoked, “In the name of the creator, the redeemer, and the sanctifier.”  He then explained that, it being Father’s Day, he would “appropriately” preach on sin. 

And, and as I heard The Reverend Peter Toon say so often of such things, “there you have it.”

June 22, 9:42 pm | [comment link]
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