Today's Sermon

 

“Father in Heaven: Talking About God 5"

 

            When many of you were taught to pray, I would guess you were shown to cross your hands, bow your head and begin…“Dear Heavenly Father.” Am I right? You might be wondering if in a series about expanding the ways we talk about God if I would bring up “Heavenly Father” for the sole purpose of knocking it down. Movements toward inclusive language have abounded in the church, and we have embraced that. I am not, however, here to take away anyone’s Heavenly Father, this divine parent, the image of a God there to love, protect, and perhaps most importantly to guide as we would want a good father to do.

            I make no apologies for inclusive language. If no one term could capture God, how could one gender? There have always been expansive ways of naming God, in other traditions and in this one, including around gender. As I heard a seminary chaplain once explain, we want everyone to be able to see themselves in the story of God in whose image the scriptures say humanity is made.

            Any term we use has advantages and limitations. They land with people differently based on their lived and cultural experiences. Some relate to God as father through their own good and loving father. Others who had a difficult relationship with a father, or none at all, find it a painful jab at an unhealed wound. Others still find God as father a welcome surrogate for a kind of father they didn’t have. Do you see how complex relationships to just one name can be?

            Just because we want to broaden our vocabulary, we don’t have to strike an entry that carries meaning and connects us to the past. Sometimes a course correction is in order, but remember, this is a project of expansion. We may choose to retain “father” but revisit what we think it can mean. After all, remember how Jesus address God. When Jesus taught his followers how to pray in the Gospel of Matthew, he said this:

9 “Pray, then, in this way:

Our Father in heaven,
    may your name be revered as holy.
10     May your kingdom come.
    May your will be done
        on earth as it is in heaven.
11     Give us today our daily bread.
12     And forgive us our debts,
        as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13     And do not bring us to the time of trial,
        but rescue us from the evil one (Matthew 6:9-13).

            “Our Father,” we say. You may have noticed lately, some of the time, I have taken to starting the Lord’s prayer with “Our Mother/Father,” a practice I had years ago. I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, Jesus didn’t say to do it that way, and I have a commitment to the fidelity of the text. On the other hand, fidelity isn’t just grammatical, it is conceptual, and I don’t believe Jesus was a fundamentalist about the masculinity of God as some have become. Jesus himself defied many gender expectations of the day. I have purposely not told you what to say nor do I intend to; that’s for you. We’re building vocabulary, recognizing the gifts of expansion, not red lining everyone else’s notebook.

            Here’s what I find beautiful about Jesus calling God “Father”: It’s this intimate, familial term. The Hebrew is “Abba” and the connotation is more like “Papa,” or even “Dad.” If you have Jewish friends, you would have heard them call their own dads, “Abba.” Jesus wasn’t the first, even first Jew, to describe God as a father figure—and a mother one as well[1]—but he did seem to be somewhat novel in directly addressing God that way, “Hey Pops.”

            You mustn’t tell him or he’ll stop, but my son has taken to calling me “Pops” and it’s one of the few things that truly melts my heart. When we use neutral terms such as “God,” we lose some of the intimacy, some of the relatability. This is why instead of abandoning gendered pronouns altogether, I often alternate them. Maybe that’s not a perfect solution for you, but it retains this personal aspect of the divine. Think how close Jesus had to be to God that he would call him “Papa.” And to think we can too. That is good news and we needn’t read every awful thing men have ever done into it even as we make room for plenty of other ways to address this One.

            Of course, masculinity is a touchy issue. From the “manosphere” of online influencers claiming a kind aggressiveness as somehow men’s birthright to those rejecting that but having less clarity about what else masculinity should mean, we are struggling to work this out. Last week one of you lifted up in mourning the death of Gloria Steinem and threw in a line about hoping “we don’t go backwards.” That’s a real fear.

            In Christianity, the biblical treatment of Jesus himself has become hotly contested as to which is the true model especially for men. Believe it or not there’s a whole movement to shelve the gospels and focus on the metaphorical blood baths of the vision of Revelation in which justice is wielded by the sword of Jesus. Others of us not only dispute those particular readings of Jesus but say the Jesus of the beatitudes, the Jesus who was a healer, the Jesus who was constantly moved with compassion, the Jesus who stood with and for the weak is the model for us. The body of Christ itself has become a battle ground of masculinity.

            This would be a good time to remember femininity and masculinity are merely two names for differing traits—forces, energies, powers—that dwell within us all, regardless of our gender or biological sex. Neither is superior; both have shadow forms and both sacred forms. Having only two categories may be too few, but there is something elegant about the coupling of difference, symbolizing interdependence and balance. Just as the church still has a long way to go on fully honoring the sacred feminine, it also needs to discover what sacred masculinity looks like, else we cede it to the perversions of the manosphere.

            So, what shall we do with “Heavenly Father” beyond merely uttering it. We can reimagine it. We can let Jesus work on it. One of the things Jesus does best is redefine the titles he’s given and maybe also he uses. He is called both “Prince” and “King,” yet he acts like preconceived notions of neither. He is proclaimed, “Lord” but looks nothing like the lords of his time or those that have followed incidentally. Maybe his address of God as “Father” could not only define how we think about God, but redefine how we think of fathering.

            Our companion theologian for this series is Matthew Fox and Fox includes in his book of 89 names for God the title, “God is Father, Abba.”[2] He calls “Abba” or “Papa” Jesus’ favorite name for God. He talks about how a good father “protects and directs, offers pathways and teaches the ways of the world to his offspring.”[3] Fox also points out use of “Father” for the divine outside Christianity and Judaism, including the Hindu Vedas and the archetype of “Father Sky” that appears cross vast swaths of human cultures. “Father Sky,” I like that, at least as a complement to “Heavenly Father.” Heavens and skies, by the way, are the same word in the Hebrew Bible. The problem is the “heavenly” of Heavenly Father is unfamiliar and distant. “Father Sky,” is right there; we can see it covering us, blanketing us not only with power—thought it does that—but also beauty. Remember what we spoke about a couple weeks back finding God in the sunset. The light shines through it and the rains pour fourth from it to give life, merging “Father Sky” and “Mother Earth.”

            Father Sky, watching over me, guiding me, maybe even directing things around me in ways I can neither fully see nor understand. I came across an example of that this week, when reflecting on all the giants we’ve lost. I mentioned Steinem, and there was Dolly Parton, whose death brought a universal outpouring the likes of which I’m not sure we’ve seen in a long time. Those are two examples of powerful femininity. Then there was Wendell Berry, who had lots to teach us about many things, and I think among them masculinity. Berry was a poet, an essayist, but if you ask me, if you want to know him at his finest, read his novels, which capture a small town America that has been lost. In his book, Jayber Crow, he includes this passage in which the main character is reflecting on his circuitous path and the unmistakable sense he did not travel it alone. He doesn’t explicitly use the term “Father,” or even “God” but it’s there. I’d like to read it to you now:

If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line—staring, say, in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceeding by logical steps through Hell and Purgatory and into Heaven. Or you could take the King’s Highway past appropriately named dangers, toils, and snares, and finally cross the River of Death and enter the Celestial City. But that is not the way I have done it, so far. I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circle or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I have deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back. I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led—make of that what you will.[4] 

            Let us pray, Dear Heavenly Father, it is good to know you are there, blanketing over us, showing yourself in splendor of both beauty and power. Watch over us, guide us, wash us clean when we dirty it up, pick us up when we’ve fallen. Love us, and tell us you’re proud, not because we are perfect but because we are trying. Let our allegiance to you be vehement but not violent, our paths pointed but not narrow or narrow-minded. Let us use the words by which we know you best while not dishonoring the ways others’ speak of you, for we just trying to be your children living under the same sky. Thank you, God. Thank you, Pops.

            Amen.

[1] See:

• Deuteronomy 32:6 — “Is not he your father, who created you, who made you and established you?”
• Isaiah 63:16 — “For you are our Father… you, O LORD, are our Father; our Redeemer from of old is your name.”
• Isaiah 64:8 — “Yet, O LORD, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter.”
• Malachi 2:10 — “Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us?”
• Jeremiah 3:19 imagines Israel addressing God: “You shall call me, My Father.”
• Hosea 11:1–4 depicts God explicitly in parental terms toward Israel: “When Israel was a child, I loved him…” The imagery is arguably both fatherly and motherly.
• Isaiah 49:15 — God compared to a nursing mother who cannot forget her child.
• Isaiah 66:13 — “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you.”
• Deuteronomy 32:18 — Israel forgets the God “who gave you birth.”

 

[2] Matthew Fox, Naming the Unnameable: 89 Wonderful and Useful Names for God….Including the Unnameable God, 74.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself, p. 133.