A sermon for 21st June 2026: the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Year A Proper 7); also Father’s Day. We read Genesis 21:8-21 and Matthew 10:24-39. Featured image is © Richard Semik downloaded from Dreamstime.com

In the middle of this piece of Gospel is, to my mind, one of the most beautiful and evocative images of God – the God of the sparrows. There are approximately 1.6 billion sparrows on the earth, living on every continent, except Antarctica, which always gets a pass. The sparrow, small but ubiquitous, persistent, sometimes pestilent bird, nesting in the girders of a Walmart warehouse or the eaves of your house, most populous of birds, no bird of paradise, its life is held cheaply; yet God, the God of the sparrows, values it so highly that not one will fall from the sky except that it is caught in God’s hand. 

The promise is not that none will fall. Everything created comes to an earthly end. Yet the love and care of God knows no end, and will not fail even at the end of this life.

That promise is surrounded in our Gospel passage by some other, less reassuring language, and we’ll get to that. But as we do so, remember and consider that our anchor and our hope is the God of the sparrows, the God of almost incomprehensible love.

If in our Gospel, today is Sparrow Sunday, in the secular world, it is Father’s Day. Holidays that celebrate family relationships are fraught, aren’t they? They call into question our experience of parenting, of being parented. They can stir up grief, they can exacerbate loss, they can provoke resentment. They can also be sources of joy – if you are celebrating, I am glad for you.

There are a couple of illustrations of the complications of human family life in the readings we receive today. Let’s look at Abraham, the father of nations, the father of multiple faith traditions. He was not a great role model for fatherhood, was he? He sent his firstborn son into the wilderness, he was ready to sacrifice his second. Abraham, frankly, was not a safe man to be around, not an easy man to be the child of. If you think about it, even before Abraham, the earliest families in our ancestral faith tradition were nothing if not fraught, fractious, and dangerous.

But God, the God of the sparrows, remained faithful to Isaac, to Ismael, to Hagar, his mother. God remained faithful even to Abraham, despite all his faults. 

Jesus, during this passage of Gospel good news, has some words that may be hard for us to receive that compare the love between family members to the love that is between God the Father and the sparrows, the love that is between Jesus and God, his Father, the love that God has for us, and finds us wanting.

Is this a paradox? Only, I think, if we are looking through the wrong end of the telescope. If we look at God, the Father of sparrows, through the lens of our own experience of fatherhood, whatever that might be, we will diminish the love of God; we will shrink the vision of what God’s creative and compassionate and core of love can be. 

For Jesus to call God Father should expand our vision of fatherhood, not shrink our vision of God. 

And the family of God will not fit into our nuclear boxes. Already we know that the biblical notion of family is way broader than our most recent traditions. Read the stories. See the many and different ways of making family. Look at Jesus. Do you remember when he told those who wanted to pin him down, “’Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’ And pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.’” (Matthew 12:48b-50)

Jesus included all of us in his family. He includes all of us in the family of God. Do we do the same for one another? Do we do the same for those who come to us seeking recognition, seeking care, seeking forgiveness, seeking love? 

Do we judge how other people’s families are formed or set up or survive? Perhaps we should remember the God of the sparrows, and expand our imagination of connection and care, and of what constitutes family. This could be read as a timely reminder from Jesus, that it is love that makes a family, and the love of God that transcends our ties and our divisions. 

If we look at the family that God has made through the lens of our narrow divisions, we will diminish the love of the God of the sparrows; we will shrink the vision of what God’s creative and compassionate and core of love can be. If we look at the vision that Jesus shares of the family that God gathers, we see so many more possibilities.

But to address more directly the elephant in the Gospel, I don’t believe that Jesus was advising stirring up family conflict in this slightly confusing passage that we read today. I don’t believe that he means to diminish the love that is shared between family members, nor the pain that is occasioned when that love is damaged or missing. 

If you are celebrating today, I don’t believe that he means to burst your balloon. But if this is a difficult passage for you, if this is a difficult day for you, I think that what he was telling us, from that deep core of love, is that while we will fall out from time to time, while we will fall down from time to time, while all life comes to an earthly end and some never even begin, the God of the sparrows sees it all, and you are worth more than many sparrows. No one will fall without the hand of God catching us up with the compassion that passes our earthly understanding, the love of the God of the sparrows; the love that is beyond compare, and beyond our imagination.