Billie Eilish is not who I expected to open a men’s retreat sermon with. But she wrote the theme song for the Barbie movie, and if you’ve seen the behind-the-scenes footage, you know the moment the song was born. She and her brother Finneas had been working for six hours. Nothing was coming. It was eleven o’clock at night, they were stuck, and then — out of nowhere — she opened her mouth and asked: What was I made for?
The whole song came out of that one question. Because it’s the question. It’s the one written on every human heart, whether we know it or not. Tonight I want to answer it — at least for us, at least for men.
You were made for four things: to be a son, a brother, a husband, and a father. That’s the whole sermon. Everything else is commentary.
The Hero’s Problem
Before we get there, let me borrow something from Baldur’s Gate. Yes, the video game. Bear with me.
Baldur’s Gate is one of those enormous open-world role-playing games. Hundreds of millions of copies sold. The reason it sells is because it does something brilliant: it puts you inside a story that matters. Wherever you go, there is meaning — experiences, items, plot lines, companions. The world was designed. Every pixel was placed to advance something. You never wander into a dead zone.
The world is like that, too. God designed it that way. Every person you pass in the grocery store has something for you and you have something for them. Every job you’ve had, every conversation that felt like a detour — it was all part of God forming you. The world is full of quests and adventures and storylines, should you choose to go on them. The saddest possible version of the game is the guy who sits in the cave on level one, watching the wall, drinking fake wine, going nowhere.
Now, when you start Baldur’s Gate, you’re stupid. You can be killed by literally anybody. You know nothing. You’re just trying to figure out how to open a chest. A lot of us sideline ourselves at exactly this point because we don’t feel ready — we don’t know how to do what we’re called to do. But here’s the thing: the men in this room who have the testimonies we all admire? They were stupid too. They didn’t know anything. That didn’t stop them. Growth only happens by going out and doing the things.
And you can’t do it alone. Baldur’s Gate is built so that you need companions — the fighter, the cleric, the wizard, the rogue. Everybody has different abilities. The man trying to do it all by himself isn’t a hero; he’s an idiot playing the game wrong. As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another (Prov 27:17). We were made for one another.
One more thing from the game: it’s an open world. There’s no single path. A lot of us assume that because our life isn’t on the trajectory we expected, we’re failing. I don’t think that’s how God works. He leads us all over the map. But every detour, every “I just want to get there and he’s sending me way over here” — that takes maturity, discernment, and wisdom. And you’ll never navigate without a map. Our map is Scripture.
All of this is to say: you are the hero of your own story. There are quests and adventures and real, significant work for you to do. Now let’s talk about who men actually are.
I. Son
The first and most foundational identity is son, and this is the one you absolutely must get right. Everything else flows from it.
When God created the world, it came from one cause: love. The love between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit was so abundant that it overflowed into the creation of everything that exists — the sun, the moon, the stars, the oceans, the forests, the mountains, the birds of the air, the beasts of the field, the sea creatures, and mankind. He didn’t create us because he needed something from us. He created us so that we could receive his love. That’s the point.
The problem — and we all know this problem from the inside — is shame. Because of sin, we feel our inadequacy deeply. Even people who have talked themselves out of believing in God still feel it. You can see it in how they live: punishing themselves every day for a guilt they can’t name. Each of us knows, somewhere beneath the performance, that we are not worthy of God’s love.
That knowledge is actually useful. Guilt is meant to point us toward our Father. That’s the only thing it’s good for. The prodigal son had the right instinct: Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son (Luke 15:18–19). You have to start there. You cannot go anywhere if pride or fear is blocking your ability to admit that you are not worthy.
But here is the astonishing part: God’s response is not what the prodigal expected, and it is not what any of us would do. The father runs. He doesn’t wait. He puts a robe on his son’s back, a ring of authority on his finger, and throws a party. He kills the fattened calf and celebrates. The son comes back planning to ask for a job as a servant, and leaves as a crowned prince.
That is the God you are dealing with.
And then John says it plainly:
So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us. (1 John 4:16–19)
Your first job as a son is to come to know and believe the love that God has for you. Not just to acknowledge it in theory, but to actually live out of it. To walk into any room with the expectation that you are loved, because your Father loves you. What is there to fear? They can reject you — they rejected him too. But if you live out of love, you don’t have to claw for recognition and worth. You already have it.
And there is something more. When Jesus was baptized, the Father declared: This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased (Matt 3:16–17). That is the identity God wants to give you. You are his son. If you can’t receive that — if shame and guilt are still holding that door shut — you’ll spend your whole life trying to perform your way to worth you could have received for free.
Sons also receive identity. The name Johnson literally means “son of John.” Every Christian, in the deepest sense, carries God’s name. We share in something of the divine nature — encoded in our very being is the image of God. That changes everything: your authority, your confidence, your sense of what you’re doing here.
Sons are marked by growth. Jesus grew in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man (Luke 2:52). Growth is not optional for a living thing. Biologically, when your cells stop reproducing, you are dead. Spiritually, the same is true. There is no stasis. You are growing toward God or away from him. Every day, there is a choice.
And sons are marked by obedience — not the obedience of a slave who would revolt if he got the chance, but the obedience of a son who trusts his father so deeply that he looks for ways to fulfill his father’s will. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” (Rom 8:14–15). The ultimate mark of sonship is the Son in the garden: Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done (Luke 22:42). That is where we are growing.
II. Brother
The theme of brotherhood is that God is not just saving individuals; he is gathering a people. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers (Rom 8:29). Jesus himself is not ashamed to call us brothers (Heb 2:11). Our first brother is Christ, and he is teaching us how it’s done.
Here is what brothers actually do: they build the impossible together. Brothers built civilization. The roof over your head exists because men got together and built it. The electricity in these outlets exists because men service the grid. Hot water and flushing toilets — which I find deeply moving — exist because men laid the plumbing. Every time men gather with a shared purpose and a unified direction, they are participating in the God-given calling to build the city of God.
When Bishop retires and this diocese transitions, when Saint Michael’s leans into what God is calling it to become — these are not small projects. These are impossible tasks. They require brothers. Not men who show up occasionally when it’s convenient, but men who have been in the room for years building trust so that when the moment comes, they are ready to stand.
Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgment (Prov 18:1). There is a spirit in our culture that celebrates the isolated individual — atomized, self-sufficient, the center of his own universe. I feel it too. There is an oppressive loneliness that comes from the way we’ve organized modern life. But the answer is not another streaming service or another hit of whatever numbs the edge. The answer is brothers.
What brothers do, ultimately, is this: Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13). The ultimate mark of brotherhood is sacrifice — not always physical death, but the daily death of serving someone in a way that costs you something. You are meant to have men around you who will do that for you, and for whom you will do that in return.
III. Husband
Every man in this room is called to be a husband — even if you never marry. Let me explain.
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. (Eph 5:25–27)
Jesus, who never married a woman, is the perfect husband — because we are the bride of Christ. The way he loved and led the church is the pattern. He cherished her, made her beautiful, poured his life out for her, and held fast to her. That is the calling.
If you are married, this is your vocation with your wife. The passage doesn’t say “tell your wife what to do and have dinner ready.” It says become the kind of man whose sacrificial love makes his wife more glorious, more mature, more herself. That is a high calling, and most of us, if we’re honest, have a long way to go.
If you are not married, the money and time and energy you would invest in a wife goes to the church. You are a husband in training. And if you want a wife — become a husband first. Find your mission. Serve the church. Get brothers around you. Stop waiting to be ready, because you’ll never feel ready; start becoming the person who could actually sustain a marriage. God has a lot of grace for men who are young and foolish, but grace is not an excuse to stay there.
One more word for the husbands and husbands-in-training: Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied, and a man’s eyes are never satisfied (Prov 27:20). The pornography epidemic in our culture is not a side issue — it is a direct assault on the husband identity. Like hell itself, it is never enough. It just goes on and on. If you are caught in that, please hear this not as condemnation but as a plea: reach out. Get brothers around you. What God has for you in marriage — a depth of love and desire and beauty — is so much better than what you are settling for.
IV. Father
Finally, men are made to be fathers. And the father identity is really three verbs: build, name, and rule.
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion… over all the earth.” (Gen 1:26). The first thing God said to the first man was: be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Fathers produce life. They make order out of chaos. They build a home for their family — and because a family can’t flourish without a city, they build cities. They build structure, and in building structure they build the kingdom.
Men think about building things constantly. The Roman Empire. Infrastructure. How things work. This is not a cultural quirk; it is a design feature. You were made to build. The question is what you are building and whether what you are building is oriented toward God.
Fathers also name things. That was Adam’s first job. He wasn’t having a naming party — he was seeing God’s reality clearly and calling it what it was. Naming is about recognizing truth and declaring it. In a world that has become genuinely confused about what things are, men who can see clearly and say so plainly are desperately needed. Call the good good. Call the evil evil. Name your children’s God-given identities. Call forth the best in your brothers.
And fathers rule. This is almost embarrassing to say out loud in our cultural moment, but it is astonishing in the best possible way: God wants to share his authority with us. He designed men to be co-heirs with Christ of his kingdom and all of reality. He calls us to dominion — not as tyrants, but as sons who have been shaped by love into the kind of people who can be trusted with power. If you’re still a child, you’ll never be that. But every step of growth as a son, a brother, and a husband is moving you toward it.
All of this — the building, the naming, the ruling — exists for the women and the children. I read a passage recently about “the happy days of sacred youth” and my heart broke a little. There is a culture that is in a hurry to strip childhood from children, to burden them early with the anxieties and ideologies of adults. Fathers draw the line. Fathers say: these children are going to be children. They are going to climb hills, look up at the sky, and feel joy. That protection is not incidental to your calling; it is the point of it.
The Problem, The Guide, and The Call
Here is the honest assessment of where most of us start: we are stupid, undisciplined, and malformed. Not as an insult — just as a fact. And the world has kindly provided us with counterfeits for everything we actually need.
Social media offers fake status and fake community. Pornography offers fake intimacy and fake pleasure. Gaming offers fake significance, fake community, fake romance — all the things you’re supposed to be building in real life, available on demand with none of the cost. Alcohol, weed, nicotine: regulation of the negative emotions you’re supposed to be taking to your Father. Streaming: escapism that keeps you in the cave while the world outside needs you.
C.S. Lewis saw this clearly:
What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could ‘be like gods’ — could set up on their own as if they had created themselves — be their own masters — invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God… God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on gasoline, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
You were built to run on God. Everything else is trying to run the car on the wrong juice.
But here is the grace: God has not left you alone in this. You have a guide — the Holy Spirit inside you, the holy Scriptures as your map, and the Church, specifically your brothers, as the people who will sharpen you when you drift. As the story always goes: the hero is young and stupid, he meets a guide who tells him how it’s done, the guide gives him a plan, and the plan calls him to action.
The plan is the family — biological or spiritual or both. Have children, or multiply your church and have hundreds of spiritual sons and daughters. Either way, you are not sidelined. There is a role for you.
And there will come a moment — probably more than one — where following that plan is going to be hard. A fraternity president I heard about used to ask his struggling pledges three questions: Did you want to be here? Did you think it would be easy? Did you think it would be hard? And then he’d say: this is what hard feels like.
That is what God is saying to you at the fork in the road. Don’t you want to be a hero? Did you think it would be easy? Well — this is what hard feels like. Heat and pressure are how things get shaped. That is how God is shaping you.
Reaffirmation
You are loved. You are needed. There is a plan for your life, and it is better than you could imagine. Not because you are so impressive, but because the God who designed you for this is, and because he is not going to let you stay as stupid and undisciplined as you started.
Take yourself seriously. Stop acting like your particular role doesn’t matter — like nobody will notice whether you show up or not. Somebody is standing at the battle line looking to his right and to his left, and the brothers aren’t there. Be the brother who is there.
Walk down off this mountain and do something with what God said to you this weekend. Every one of us here should talk to someone in the next few weeks — a friend, a priest, a brother — about what God said and what the plan is. You are a hero. It is hard. And there is nothing that God cannot accomplish with men who say yes.