Sermon: Part 1 – Mark Schneider

Happy Father’s Day. Today I’d like to share some reflections on perhaps the greatest privilege in my intersectionality of privilege, which is having great parents.

In 2024, before I scattered my parents ashes, I went back over their memoirs, photo albums, and keepsakes to better appreciate the people that they became, including understanding more about their childhoods.

My parents were grandchildren and great grandchildren of immigrants, from Sweden, Germany, England, and Canada, and as such, their parents had grown-up in homes with limited financial resources, and a very practical need to be flexible, resourceful, and resilient. As children, my parents were part of families that experienced bad luck, unfairness, and failure before finding good fortune and success as they made their way in the world..

Understanding more about my grandparents helped me see why my parents were so focused on the values of initiative and perseverance, as well as being fair and just in dealing with others.

I also gained a new appreciation for the flexible approach to parental roles modeled by their mothers and fathers. Flexibility born out of necessity.

My mother‘s mother had horrible migraines after having children. For years, most days of the week, my mother’s father would work 12 hour days and come home and make dinner and put the kids to bed, as his wife lay quietly in a dark room.

My father‘s father married my grandmother, a young Quaker woman who had completed a two-year business school degree. My other grandparents had all left school before graduating from high school to help support their families. After my father’s parents married, they left Indiana to start a creamery in Miami Florida. That business failed and they returned to Indiana. They worked and saved and made a second attempt, moving to Eustis Florida and starting Schneider’s Creamery. While my grandfather was great at sales and creamery operations, it was my grandmother with her business acumen who was the CFO, handling the finances, including cash, billing, accounting, and decisions on capital purchases and cost management. My father worked in the creamery after school each day before starting on his homework.

My father grew up in a home where his mother and father were true partners, not only with respect to responsibilities at home, but in business as well. He was not intimidated at all when he met my mom who had put herself through college, and was very smart, assertive and ambitious. They met at a Young Republicans meeting in Rochester Minnesota in 1955.

In 1960s Minnesota, I grew up in a home where domestic responsibilities were shared, and both my parents worked and were involved in many civic organizations. If you did a survey of stereotypical masculine and feminine traits, and my parents names were not on the surveys you might’ve mistaken my mom for my dad or vice versa. They were not overly invested in cultural norms, they came from the pragmatic view that had been modeled by their parents of doing what made sense, and focusing on roles and tasks that played into their natural strengths and interests. They allowed me to take risks, and to fail. There was always personal accountability for my choices.

Deana and I were married in 1978 when we were 20. Financially independent, but poor, we worked part time jobs and finished college together. We became parents after having identical twins in 1985. Deana contracted Lyme disease in 1997, which remains chronic. Conforming to cultural norms of fatherhood and motherhood would not have served us well. Some might have labeled us progressive, but in my view, we were just being pragmatic.

Fast-forward to our three children, two of which are now parents. Looking at roles and responsibilities in their families, it would certainly be labeled progressive. My son who is a professional musician generally works in the evenings and is basically a “stay at home dad”. He can play the most elaborate imaginary, multi-character, multi-chapter, Tolkien-like fairy princess games with his 4 year old daughter. He also takes her hiking and backpacking. My other son, who is a college professor, is a new parent, but already I can see that there will be flexibility and pragmatism in how tasks are divided, and that partner’s strengths and interests will determine parenting focus.

I am thankful for my parents and grandparents who modeled pragmatism, and flexibility in parental roles, and resilience in meeting life’s challenges. Their examples gave me permission to make my own choices, which in turn allowed my boys to trail blaze their own (and different) paths for life and parenthood. In some cases, this is a very different approach than Deana and I used. That’s OK, as grandparents we are committed to supporting our children as they make new and different choices on how to parent their children.

Many studies show that children’ s success in life is most closely tied to learning how to overcome challenges and adversity, not winning the Admissions / Scholarship Arms Race with a high GPA, and endless extracurriculars and enrichment programs.

Remember – there is more than one way to be a great Father or Parent. Don’t shelter your children from life’s difficulties, model pragmatism, flexibility, and resilience as you deal with life’s challenges. Be authentic, lean into your strengths, and model your values in your behavior. Be adaptable, and embrace changing parental roles required in a changing world, and in your own family.

Happy Father’s Day.

Sermon: Part 2 – Rev. Eric Banner

First I want to say thank you to Mark for sharing his family’s story. And I want to pick up on a theme that is, perhaps, part of why we get along so well. Now, in Mark’s case it was pragmatism. And maybe there’s some of that in my family, too. But this morning I want to use the story of my own father to share a couple of lessons I learned from my dad, and one of them is a kissing cousin, to use an old fashioned phrase, of the story Mark has shared.

My father has been gone for some years now, and every year as Father’s Day comes around I think back on what I learned from him, in word and in deed, about how to live life well. I suspect, like most of you, what we learned from our fathers was a mixed bag. I spent some time on Reddit this week reading threads of people talking about what their father’s had taught them, and so, so many of them spoke of what they learned about what not to do by the bad examples their fathers offered to them. And if that is your story, I’m not here to take it away from you, only to own the story of my own life, and hope that it might offer something useful to some of you today.

Which brings me to the first lesson my father taught me. Iin honor of this Father’s Day, I’ll be leading a workshop after church about how to change the oil in your car… Have you checked your oil lately? Ok, that lesson turns out to be less useful now that we are only driving electric cars in our family, but I’m pretty sure I can still get 5 fresh quarts of 10W30 in an engine if I needed to.

By way of context, my parents were among the last of the silent generation. Both of them were born during WWII, both of them had fathers who were out in the Pacific theater for the war. Both of them had mothers with college degrees, at a time when most Americans didn’t have college degrees.

And for most men of that generation, and for most men of the generations that came before, the model that was handed to them was rooted in a structure of male power and domination. But in the last 80 years, our nation, and the world, has watched as women’s roles in the world, and women’s independence in their lives, has grown and grown. For all too many men, this was a loss. Of power. Of privilege. Of what they understood to be their rightful place in the world, on top and dominant.

The religious implications of that view of the world are known to us all. We hear it in phrases like God the Father, and the implied connection when people warn us about making your father mad. If you just do the right things, he might give you some of what you want, so be good, and stay in your lane. And if you were born a boy, the message was clear, to be a man meant to be in charge. Just like God.

But that was not the message my father, a lifelong atheist, handed down to me. Like Mark, I grew up in a household that offered a different way of being together. The lesson that we, as a whole society, keep having to learn, is that what it means to be a man, a husband, a father, need not be confined to a model over power over, but rather one of partnership with.

I’m not 100% sure of this, but I believe it’s true that my father never out-earned my mom, their whole married lives, certainly not after she got her job with the state. I know for sure, because he told me, that my own first year out of college, working as an environmental scientist, I was making more in a year than he was making, or had ever made in a year. Not that my parents were wealthy. She was a social worker, child protective services, and he was a musician, and a musical instrument repairman. Like I said, not wealthy, but still a divide between their earnings.

And for some men, that would have been a problem. It would have been a way of saying that somehow he wasn’t the breadwinner in the family, and that he was outshined, somehow less of a man than if my mom had earned less than him. But not for my dad. No, he taught his children to understand that in every relationship, in every family, there are just different things that different people do, and the question isn’t who is on top, the question is, how do we all help out in the ways we can. When I was in kindergarten my mom was working as a civil servant, but my dad was working at a clock shop, so when noon came and school let out, it was he who took me to our sitter’s home before returning to work.

But it was more than that. More than just the physical tasks that got split between them in ways their budget could manage. It was about not letting other people’s ideas and rigid ways of thinking get in the way of becoming so much more. He was never one to let common expectation get in the way of what he believed his children or his wife could do.

I’ve asked my mom over the years about how they got together. I think most of us as adult children come to that place at some point in our lives. We look at our own lives, the twists of fate that have brought us together and made the families we have, and know enough of our own foibles and shortcomings to wonder, to marvel that anyone chose us.

Not all the time, but just on those days when we know we really lucked out. And what she’s said to me, again and again, is that this man believed in her. Believed in her in ways her parents never expected from a daughter. Parents who wanted desperately to rise into a social class that prescribed ways that daughters and wives ought to behave, but a social ideal that never felt welcoming or right for her.

What my mom has told me is that this man, who had been raised by a mother whose name was on dozens of scientific research papers, believed in her capacity to grow and serve and lead. To help her name the things that she felt somewhere deep in her soul, but didn’t have the words for.

Her success was their success. And it never made him less than. And that was a lesson I carry with me every day.

Now, in my notes for this morning, I have a lot of other things I thought about sharing, so I guess it’s a good thing that Father’s Day comes around every year, because there isn’t time for all of them. But part of the values I live my life by, part of what I hope I impart to my own children, is one of the big pieces of the heart of a liberal world view, the idea that there are many ways to be and live life, and it is not our place to tell others to be more like us, but rather to take the gifts that we have, and help others give of their own.

When I think about it, I think about something that came much later in his life, after a lot of years of hard work, and long after my sister and I had moved out of our parent’s home. It’s the lesson that says, in the words of the agnostic gospel singer, Susan Werner, when you’ve got plenty and then some, you go out and help somebody. The whole of this story is too long for this morning, but what helps it make sense is that my father’s brother, Alan, died tragically as a young man while serving in the Peace Corps. Alan had been a biologist, and was working with local fishermen to set up co-ops that could help them lift up their families by bringing their goods to market more effectively.

After many years of hard work, and after his own children were grown, my parents looked at what it meant that they had come to a place of some financial comfort in their lives, through thrift and long-term planning and a modest inheritance from their parents, and realized that there was something unfinished in his family story. Now, as I said, my father was a musician, not a biologist, as were his father and mother, his brother, and his son, but he knew that education changed lives and he wanted to make it possible for others to get that too. So my parents established a scholarship at his alma mater, the University of Hawaii, to help pay for college for people whose lives looked nothing like their own.

The fund, named in honor of his brother, is available not to people like my dad, musicians living in Kansas, or even like his brother, Alan, the sons of the academics at important research institutions, but instead is available to students from across Oceania, and looks first and foremost for young people who attend college first in their communities, who intend to return to their communities, but who don’t have access to a four year degree program where they live.

What do you do when you have plenty and then some? You help somebody. It’s not a large scholarship. But every year it helps, at least a little. And it’s rooted in this message that he offered to me, that gifts, true gifts, are not meant to make other people be more like you, but to help them be more of who they are, where they are, and who they are called to be.

On this Father’s Day these are some of the things that keep me doing what I have been called to do, where I am, with all of who I am.

My father taught his children that our job is not just to make our own lives glad, but to build the common good. It is not just to be filled with bliss and ignore the challenges of the world, but rather to ask what we have that can be put to work building the world we dream about.

For most of us that won’t be a scholarship fund. It might be any of a hundred different things. But what my father taught us was that the gift comes when we release our own need to center ourselves, when we learn to play with the whole band, and make room for everyone to shine.

What a gift it has been.
Happy Father’s Day everyone.

Rev. Eric Banner
Senior Minister