This timely question (as its Fathers' Day!) was submitted as a topic in our ongoing series of ideas you all submitted. I know this formulation of the question is floating around because I've heard it from a couple young men seeking ordination and membership in this presbytery & my last one. And its a question that is close to my heart as a clergywoman who has sought in my whole 30-year ministry to open people to the concept that NO, 'Father' is not God's real name but is among the many metaphors in Scripture for understanding our experiences and relationships with the Divine. It's a rather awkward topic for this day when we remember and honor our fathers, because I need to walk that line between appreciating good fathers, appreciating how the metaphor of 'Father' is a meaningful one for this special relationship with the Divine, and still emphasize that it's not God's 'real' name at all.
Being a parent is amazing
Being a parent is an amazing experience for us, isn't it? We've all read about 1st-time fathers saying how their hearts opened up, or their appreciation for the mystery of life was kick-started, at the sight of their first child. Of course, being exhausted after the heroic (sheroic?) journey of labor and delivery, my own reaction was a little different than the fathers' experiences, yet I dare to think that the amazement and wonder are close to the same. And also similar to the glow in the hearts of adoptive parents. Our love for our children changes every perspective on life. It’s quite the responsibility,
bringing up another human: watching those new little people and their distinctive personalities and gifts grow and develop; helping to form their take on the world & their
outlook on relationships; modeling being a whole person who is functional and
reflective and as whole as we can be at the time; introducing them to God and
faith. Not that they don’t soon have
their own opinions…. and their own reflections on their unique experiences…and
think ours are lame!
Because we have been children, and we have often also been the parent, 'Father' is a deep and wonderful metaphor for understanding our
experience of relationship with God, especially if we are fortunate to grow up with a father who loves us and treats us well. 'Father' is not the only metaphor for our relationship with the Divine, and it doesn't encompass ALL that we experience of God.... yet it is still a vital component.
Seeing ourselves as made in God's image
I
admit that, in my own journey, it was vitally important to my understanding of myself as a woman to explore other metaphors for God, and expand my understanding and appreciation of the hugeness and ultimately totally-beyond-me nature of God. In fact, that is probably a good journey for ALL of us to take, men as well as women. Then returning to this metaphor of 'Father' that is in our Scriptures so much, we can appreciate it again without falling into the idolatry of making this the SOLE relationship and experience of God we can have.
It’s important for EACH of us to know that we are made in God’s
image, that it takes male and female creation to be the image of God, it takes
relationship to be the image of God, it takes dissimilarity as well as
similarity to be the image of God. Men
and women both grow from embracing the metaphor of God as Father; women and men
both grow from embracing the metaphor of God as Mother. It honors our differences as well as our same
humanity for us to examine and experience how it feels to use these metaphors,
and how that enriches our experience of God.
I don’t want to get into a gender thing where we say male
equals this set of qualities and female equals that set of qualities. There’s such a wide spectrum for each
gender. But in a culture that still
tries to stereotype females as being one way only, and males as being one way
only, its healthy for both male and female to see ALL those qualities as part of
the Divine. It was never the intent of
the Christian feminists to take away from God as Father; rather it was – and is
- to invite a broader understanding of God.
Some use the word “Parent” for worship, which can be mom, dad, adoptive
parents, anyone who parents. I like to
bring in all the biblical names for God we can, and more. It’s only by using the great variety of
experiences of God that we let God be God, and don’t stick God in a box of one
experience only.
A few other metaphors for example
To illustrate metaphors, let’s hear some I Googled for us:
-Fishing for a compliment –she’s not standing there with a
literal rod and reel and a baited hook, no, she’s saying things where the polite answer would be,
Oh, but your hair is pretty! or something like that.
- Our hearts go out to him – do hearts literally go out of our
bodies somehow? No – we’re trying to
picture in language the feelings of empathy we have for a person, and
the longing to be able to comfort.
- Emotional rollercoaster - certainly not a literal rollercoaster, but a reference to rapidly changing emotional states.
- Feeling blue – what shade?
Not a literal color
- You light up my life – not a literal lightbulb!
- She broke my heart – hearts don’t break like that, although
they do get disease…
- He’s the apple of my eye – sure hope that's not literal
- And my favorite- let’s get on the ball here! - on the ball? Like at a circus?
Metaphors suggest that dissimilar things have something in
common, and enhance the more unknown thing trying to be communicated, by using
another, usually more known thing. For our sermon purposes today, God is the more unknown thing, the experience of which we are attempting to describe through the use of more common human experiences. There’s a quality of God we are trying to explain, capture,
communicate. God our rock – we’re
not saying God is a rock, we’re saying God is strong like a rock, enduring like
a rock, unmovable like a huge rock.The good shepherd – that brings in the experience
of God as protecting and leading. The bread of life – not literally a loaf of bread,
but pointing out the similarity of how God nourishes our life, sustains our
life, is necessary to life.
Jesus calls God 'Father' a lot.
Jesus obviously chose the relational metaphor of “Father” in the gospels to be his main metaphor. The question is, how did he mean us to take it? Since God is a Spirit, God is not literally a male, female or a human of any gender, so those can't be the meaning. Since male and female are both made to image God, it can't be that the maleness is the point of the metaphor. Ah - perhaps Jesus is pointing out in a human way that sense of family, kinship, connectedness, intimacy and closeness in good
familial ties! That, indeed, is a vital understanding of God that fits with Jesus' teachings about God's welcome of us, God's deep love for us, and God's desire for relationship with us. It's also a corrective to the common understanding of God as a remote, punitive figure that tells us the rules and coldly punishes us for disobedience. In the relationship of Jesus with God the Father, love and unity of purpose are intertwined - and we are called into the mix. That is indeed very good news.
Our Christian forbears have made some mistakes in understanding this metaphor that
Jesus uses. We have taken the
cultural understandings of 'father' from Jesus' time and other times to be literal, and
missed the great thing Jesus was telling us about kinship and relationship with
God. We've taken the whole business of human fathering literally - I've actually heard people argue that God must be male because he made Mary pregnant. That's among the silliest things I've heard people say, and I've heard some doozies. We've even taken the word 'Father' and said it is NOT a metaphor but God’s very name, like the mysterious name
YHWH in the Old Testament.
What Jesus is saying with this vital metaphor'
So what qualities about “Father” was Jesus using to explain
God’s mystery?
Jesus’ actual word in Hebrew was the young child’s word, Abba-
like Dada, Daddy. If you’re an NCIS fan,
which by the way is still the #1 show on TV with 12 seasons so far, you might
remember the emotional episode when Ziva’s father was shot and killed – even
with all the mixed emotions of their relationship, what does she call out when
he’s shot? Little Ziva cries out that
first name of her childhood, “Abba, Abba.”
The little child to her daddy, a connection of deep love.
That same love is the key feature in the parable we read as our text this morning, where actually the father of the story is the first mentioned and key
figure, not either of the sons. And the
father’s love for his sons, plural, is the main feature of the story, no matter what
they did – to go off and be profligate, or to stay and be obedient and sour. The connection of God as Father is God’s
love for us, which is at least as deep and intense as our love for our own
babies. And it invites us to love God back in that way
as well.
Jesus’ choice of this familal love as his central metaphor
while on earth is for the purpose of the deep connection, the deep love, the
family ties, the kinship and strong connection of God for us. On OUR part, there is that deep and primal
love back, the knowledge of our origin in God’s family, knowing who we are in
God; there’s that utter dependence of a human child on its parents for survival
and for teaching; and although we gradually grow more self-sufficient as human
adults, that tie to the parent is always there.
Note the many, many, many books and movies focusing on the relationship
of a child to a father or mother – good, bad, in-between, but always central
and straight to the heart.
So...human fathers?
It’s quite a compliment to human
fathers that Jesus chose this earthly relationship as a central metaphor about
God. Jesus must have had a very
positive experience with Joseph, for one thing.
Knowing that most Christians reading the Scripture will first picture
their experience of their earthly father and reach for connections to God’s
loving relationship, we see it's also quite a challenge to human father. I’d think it is also rather quite humbling to
realize we are not always up to the comparison…yet quite encouraging for us to be
so. It might make the parental
relationship to a child almost holy, as we get to participate in a relationship
that Jesus used to communicate about God.
Our human experiences and our human concepts are what we have to work with as we speak of God – as we try and express the divine in mortal terms. Instead of the common mistake of taking our cultural ideas of fathers and putting them on God, let's take the picture of God from the Scripture and attempt to live into that as fathers and mothers. Let's take God's acceptance, forgiveness, welcome, love and gentle teaching as models for how we can accept the challenge of this metaphor on this Fathers' Day. AMEN
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