Although Calvin Coolidge first proposed the idea of a national Father’s Day in 1924, it wasn’t until the administration of President Lyndon Johnson that the third Sunday of June was actually established as the official Father’s Day in 1966. Many of us awakened to phone calls this morning and trays of magnificently prepared breakfast brought to us in bed, right? Many of us whose fathers are still living have called them or sent cards to them, telling them of our love for them.

It is also true, however, that for some, Father’s Day is not an easy day. Perhaps you have just lost your father. Or, you may have lost your father years ago and still grieve his absence from your life. For others, Father’s Day is not an easy day because, in a sense, they never really had a father. Like a waitress who once asked me on Father’s Day, while I was having an early morning coffee, if I had called my father that day to wish him a Happy Father’s Day. I had. I then asked her if she had called her father. This ashen look came across her face, as her smile melted into some kind of deep, dark, sad place. She said, with a twinge of either anger or pain (I couldn’t tell for sure which), "I haven’t seen or talked to my father in years." She didn’t go on to elaborate, but it was obvious to me that there was some dark, painful family secret lingering behind her eyes that she would just as soon forget, especially on Father’s Day.

How about you? What kind of day is this for you? My prayer for everyone is that before you die, you will come to some kind of peace about your relationship with your father, if you have not already. In this day of worship, for all of us, however, is a time just like it is every Sunday, to remember and to celebrate and to worship our heavenly Father.

There were two funerals this past week in Cliff Temple’s life. When Helen Hurst and Florence Tanner, Helen at 91 and Florence at 97, I felt something quiver in this church’s foundation. Although Florence and Helen were not fathers there were still family stories about how they gave their children good guidance. Guidance that, to this day, has shaped their moral and spiritual and even their psychological character into responsible adulthood. I heard grown children this week, on two occasions, rehearsing the stories of about how their parents laid the foundation of their lives for which they are now grateful beyond words.

That what we are here to celebrate as we worship our Heavenly Father. We’re here today to do some rehearsing of family stories. "I beg you," the Apostle wrote to the early Church, "I beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called." Those words take on especially powerful meaning when you recall that they were written to people who were already Christians. Paul was not attempting to convert anyone here; he was attempting to reinforce in the lives of people who already were believers that they were a little bit short on fulfilling their commitment to their Heavenly Father. He was challenging them, challenging us through the living word, to remember who they were and whose they were and to carry out in the day-to-day affairs of life what that means.

If you were to read the entire book of Ephesians, which wouldn’t take long at all, you would note that the Apostle gets very specific about some moral failures on the part of people in the church that need to be corrected. Again, fundamentals of Christian character that Christians were neglecting. Indeed, the entire New Testament takes on a powerful new meaning for all of us when we remember that it was written originally to Christians, to people like you and me. In this particular passage, when he goes to mentioning specific moral failures, he doesn’t mention the things that you and I might think the preacher would jump on automatically.

Helen Hurst, who passed away this week, was the sister of Joy Philbrick, who is here this morning. It was funny to listen to them tell the stories. I had heard Joy tell this story before, the first time I went to see Wally before he died of cancer, in the same house where Joy and Helen grew up. I walked into their home, and just off to the right of the living room was a window that used to be in the girls’ bedroom that both she and her sister Helen had used on more than one occasion to climb back in at night after curfew. Their father had a habit of enforcing curfew by locking the front door. If you weren’t there, you didn’t get in. Except that these two sisters would let each other in when they had failed to make it in time for the door to be unlocked. These good Baptist girls, back in the 1930s, out dancing at night! I saw Joy walk in here on Sunday when Bud had the music turned up just a little big, and she was dancing a jig. I guess she hasn’t quite gotten over it.

Of course, we’ve all laughed many times about how dancing used to be one of the major forbidden sins of Baptist life. We laugh at that now, of course, because things have changed. The Apostle doesn’t list anything like dancing or drinking or chewing tobacco, or those things. What he does mention most specifically, if you listen very carefully, is how we talk about each other. How we rehearse either the good things about each other or the bad things about each other. He says that one characteristic in all of our lives that bears greater witness to the world of whose we are than any of our other confessions. Isn’t that something?

He sounds a lot like his first-century colleague, the Apostle James, whom seems to have been the half-brother of Jesus, who spent a huge portion of his letter, the Book of James, saying basically the same thing. That the human tongue is either a source of profound healing and encouragement and hope, or it is a source of inexplicable evil in the mouth of a Christian. Both James and the Apostle Paul would say to us this morning, and have said to us this morning, that if we claim to be followers of Christ, if we claim with our mouths to be followers of Christ, but spend our time speaking in evil, condemning, judgmental ways of our sisters and brothers in the faith, then the words we speak about each other actually tell the truer story about what we believe about Christ.

“You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts.” Now, before I go any further, as I said last Sunday, this event of becoming all that we are to be in Christ is not something God does to us by acting upon us, but something he asks us to participate in with him in doing. Just as last week, we talked about the event of redemption being a participatory event in the eyes of God, so it is that what we are hearing this morning, rehearsing the fundamentally good things about God and each other in this world, is something we must learn to participate with God in doing, if we are going to become all that God has created us to be.

So, in that spirit, he says, "You were taught to put away [to participate with God in getting rid of, of shirking off] your former way of life. . . and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil. Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy."

He is speaking, again, to Christian people when he writes about thieves. "Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words [which James would say are deeds] may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you." There is no struggling Christian marriage that would not be transformed if the two people in that marriage memorized and lived by that one passage of scripture. The overriding theme of this text is that the true measure of our inner character is to be seen in what we choose to rehearse with our mouths about other people.

Last week, again, I started a new series, “The Four Rs of Meaningful Living.” Last week, we talked about redemption, and this week, we talk about rehearsing. Let me say it again. The true measure of our character is to be seen in what we choose to rehearse with our mouths. About God and each other. We can rehearse bad things, imperfect things, sad things, things that others have done to hurt us. Or, we can rehearse the things about other people we just don’t like, like how they look, or whatever. We can do that. It’s just not really biblically legitimate to call ourselves Christians if that’s how we choose to talk.

When I was growing up in Brownfield, there was a vacant lot behind our house. Some construction had been going on and there were these two pits where some dirt had been dug. We kids had the greatest fun every once in a while, dividing up in teams in the neighborhood and getting into a clod-throwing fight. Did you ever do anything like that? It was great fun. One team would get down in one pit, and the other team would get down in the other pit. We couldn’t see each other, but we would pick up these huge clods of dirt and lob them like hand grenades over into the other pit. The goal of the thing was to both not get hit and to see who you could hit. We had a great time doing it. I guess that’s one thing when you’re lobbing clod hand grenades at a neighborhood friend to make a childhood memory. It’s another thing when we’re tossing verbal clods at people, because they do hit, and they do hurt.

A young mother was trying to teach her little girl about speaking nicely about her friends. She heard her talking badly about her little school friends. The mom would scold her daughter about the mean things she was saying. Before long, the little girl would start saying bad things about her friends again. One day, the mom had enough and realized that her lectures weren’t getting through. She called the little girl aside and said, "Come on, honey, I want to show you something." They went outside, and the mom took a pillow and a pair of scissors. To her daughter’s horror, she began clipping off the end of the pillow. Then, she shook the feathers of the pillow into the wind. As they blew away, some caught up in the trees, some in the grass, and some just kept drifting higher and higher and further away. Then, the mom said to the little girl, "Now, honey, what I want you to do is chase down every one of those feathers and bring them back to me, so we can put them back in the pillowcase." The little girls said, "Mom, there’s no way. Some of the feathers have blow all over. I can’t find them. Some are up in the tree. I’d never be able to catch them all." The mom said, "That’s exactly what happens when you say unkind things about other people. The words you speak blow away like feathers in the wind, and you have no control over where they land, and you can never get them back."

You and I both know, of course, that words spoken in haste or anger or jealousy or fear, or whatever, never land like feathers. They land instead like scalding bricks, fresh from the kiln. They land hard, bruising deeply, cutting sharply and branding hearts with permanent scars. We are constantly shaping the community of people we live with by the way we speak about each other. Every word, like a chisel into granite, eventually making of this community what our words spoke into being. It is also true that we are constantly being shaped by the community in which we live. The primary instrument of the shaping is the human tongue. And Paul is very specific when he says, "Do not grieve the Holy Spirit." In other words, don’t break your father’s heart by the way you speak about someone else. Because whoever you’re speaking about is also a brother or a sister for whom Christ died.

When I first moved to Siloam Springs, Arkansas, in 1991 to be the pastor at First Baptist Church, a man in the church offered to help me get to know the people in the church. He meant well. He said, "Pastor, I just want to tell you a little bit about the men in our church." He had taken a roll of the church membership and started with the As and started working through to the Zs telling me something about every single man in that church. Who had had an affair, who had been divorced, who had stole money from his boss . . . all these stories that were well known in the community, because it was a small community. It took me a while to catch on to what Louie was doing. He really meant well. I’m also absolutely convinced I would have been a better pastor had I not known all those stories unless those concerned chose to confess them.

Do you have a record book like that in your heart? Of all the people who have wounded you? If you do, every time you rehearse the wounds, you break your father’s heart. 1 Corinthians 13 says, "Love keeps no record of wrongs."

I have a record. I made a “C” in Dr. Zambus’ history class at Hardin Simmons. I am to this day humiliated. History was my minor! But Dr. Zambus had this way of giving his tests that, in my memory, had absolutely nothing to do with anything we had been studying the previous weeks. I would study my head off and go to his class to take the test and end up with a "C." I ended up with a "C" on my transcript. If I am ever in a situation where it is important that I made an "A" in history, I’m dead where I stand. I have a record. As far as I’m concerned, if no one ever asks for a copy of my college transcript again as long as I live, I’m fine with that, because I’m so afraid my record will catch up with me.

If we’re having a hard time loving someone this morning, it may be because we’ve kept a record. We remember, when we see their face, everything they’ve ever done to us, every cross word they ever spoke, every offensive thing they said about us to others, and, if we’ve kept a record of their wrongs against us, then according to the word of God, we can claim what we want to about how much we love and believe in Jesus, but the truth is, our commitment to not love his children tells the truth despite our words.

"Love keeps no record of wrongs." If we call ourselves followers of Jesus, yet spend most of our time rehearsing the wrongs others have done to us, then we are asking other people to live by a different standard than we hope God is expecting of us. "Be kind to one another," Paul wrote. "Tender hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ" has erased your record and remembers it no more.

When we rehearse the failures of others, we keep them locked in the prison of their past failures. "Let no evil talk come out of your mouths," but instead, he says, "what is useful for building each other up." Do the words we speak build each other up? Why is it so easy to judge others, to say things about them?

This lesson has been reinforced to me time and time again. I guess I am a slow learner. It seems that, about the time I’ve learned it, I blow it and have to learn it again. But, this is what is true. When the Bible says that we should forgive each other as God in Christ has forgiven us, part of what that means is, God deals with us on the basis of the whole story of our lives. Not just what others see. All of us have a story in our lives no one else knows. All of us. All God is asking us to do is give others the same break he has given us.

There is a humorous car commercial recently on TV right now. A young couple is sitting in a car at a stop light. In front of them is a car that won’t move. The wife is sitting in the passenger seat. She gets impatient when the light turns green and the car ahead of them won’t move. She says something like, "Enough, already!" and then leans over and honks the horn loudly for her husband. Just as she honks the horn, the car immediately in front of them pulls out to reveal the fact that in front of them was a pick-up that was stranded. Out of the pick-up climbs this real burly, muscular, mean-looking guy who is not pleased with being honked at. He’s spoiling for a fight. He couldn’t move because his truck was broken down.

I tell that story because it’s Father’s Day. Normally men would be the ones who honked the horns, but I thought it was appropriate today. The young mother reached across and honked the horn because she didn’t know the whole story of the car that was stranded in front of them. We honk and scream and yell about each other because we don’t know the whole story about why people sometimes behave the way they do. In some cases, they weren’t taught love themselves, by fathers who cared. All God is asking us to do is give each other the same break he gave us. Only he knows our whole story.

We will eventually become like those we hang with most often. That’s why it’s important for us to come to this place on Sunday and rehearse the goodness and grace and mercy and faithfulness of God. It really is true. We become like those we hang with most often. If we hang around cynical, angry, bitter, gossipy people, we will in time become like cynical, angry, bitter, gossipy people. If we hand around people who are absolutely committed to finding the good things in life to celebrate, we will tend to become more like that.

Have you ever noticed that people look like their dogs? It’s true. Watch it and see! I have a brother-in-law. He has a boxer. When we see pictures of the family, it’s really hard to tell which is the brother-in-law and which is the boxer-in-law. You and I will begin to look and sound like the people we hang with most often. People who spend their time with sour people begin to have sour dispositions, as if they spent their time at breakfast, sucking the last little bit of the juice out of a dill pickle jar. People who have been with people of mercy, hope and grace will find that their words spill like honey, with sweet, healing mercy, off of their lips.

You’ve been at church all day long. You’ve been at church all your life. May I ask you a question? Who do you look most like now? After all these years, do you look like the people that you’ve criticized and inadvertently become yourself, or do you look like the Jesus who forgave you and forgot your record? It has everything in the world to do with what you have spent your time rehearsing. The failings of others, or the unlimited mercy of Jesus.

Which is it?