Holidays can be divided up into three general categories. The first would be holy-days, ecclesiastical holidays. In these, the Church remembers and commemorates the life, death, resurrection, and the continued work of Jesus Christ in them—Christmas, Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost.
Then we have what we might call civil holidays—like the Fourth of July. And third, we have certain cultural holidays and customs like Father’s Day. With civil and cultural holidays, we don’t celebrate them in the Church, but we do live here in this society, and so we may take note of them.
Fathers, as you are honored and thanked in your homes today, live with gratitude before Your Father in heaven, from whom all fatherhood derives its name, as Paul notes in Ephesians. You have the privilege of embodying a pale reflection of His fatherliness. You should receive this gift with gratitude, staggering under the weight of it as you do.
For those of you who are not fathers, and are honoring your fathers today in various ways, this is one of the reasons why your thanks and honor are so important. Thank the fathers in your life for the burdens they carry that God has objectively assigned to them, and not the burdens they look like they are carrying. This is because one of the tasks a father has is to make it look a lot easier than it actually is. I am not talking about hypocrisy here, but rather the sacrifice of taking up the burden for others.
As we do this, we delight in how God made the world.