“Fathers and Sons,” the June/July Lutheran Witness article by John W. Oberdeck, was pervasively profound and gives a prophetic punch that deflates the advertising windbags of our day.
There never was a greater need for real fathering. Read the daily resume of deadbeat dads who run away from their responsibilities. Every week my little Lexington, S.C., newspaper describes dads who are arrested for failing to meet court-imposed financial requirements. Indeed, it is a broken story–and a familiar story–across the length and breadth of this land, one that even includes President Obama’s early life.
In my professional career, hundreds of my students came from homes bereft of a father, and my work in prisons, with the homeless, and on Death Row convinced me that without a caring father any of us could be vulnerable to the constant beguilements that confront us.
I will never forget my friend, Lutheran Hour Speaker Ozzie Hoffmann, saying to me, and to others, that the “Joe Six Pack” father was a fraud, and that too many young males needed to follow the true male models of a “Joe, who forgave his brothers; a Joe who sheltered a teenage girl, and thus became the earthly father of Jesus; and a Joe, a rich Christian Jew, who was a member of the Jerusalem Supreme Court, but still put clothes on the naked human body of the dead Jesus.”
Finally, single mothers, as listed in the sidebar story, are precious, and in a pornographic, morally polluted society, it is more important than ever that true fathering and true mothering again be rooted in the promises of God’s Holy Word and Sacrament.
Dr. Albert E. Jabs
Lexington, S.C.
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