The father of five children had won a toy at a raffle. He called his kids together to ask which of them should have the present. "Who is the most obedient?" he asked. "Who never talks back to mother? Who does everything she says?" Five small voices answered in unison. "Okay, dad, you get the toy."
Fathers. Fathering. The Fathered. The Fatherless. God our Father.
When you spend much time at all in the Bible, pretty quickly you encounter the idea of fatherhood, particularly the Fatherhood of God. For some that’s a good thing. It opens doors to really understanding who God is and who we are.
For others, it’s something we can trip over and struggle with. Fatherhood as it relates to God is one thing. As it relates to humans, it’s a mixed thing. Some of us have been hurt by our fathers.
Some of our fathers truly failed us - sometimes profoundly. Some of our fathers never figured much out in life, so they were a problem to themselves and, unavoidably, a problem to their children.
For all of us, fatherhood is something that God wants to redeem in our lives. Like every area of human existence, fatherhood needs to be redeemed.
My parents had 4 kids. They meant to have 3, but then there was an ‘Oops!’. I am the ‘Oops!’, I’m proud to say. I’m proud to say it because human ‘Ooopses’ are God’s on-purposes, God’s “that’s how the person I wanted to be here got heres-ses”. I’m sounding a bit like a Tolkien character. Let’s move on.
I’m sure that at least some of us here today, when we think about our dads, are pretty aware of the hurt that we’ve experienced or still experience in relations to our dads. Our idea of father, of fathering, needs to healed. Fixed. Redeemed.
And our understanding of the Fatherhood of God needs to be strengthened because, I believe, it is the key to all of our relationships.
It moves me that Jesus really cared about you and I coming to understand who God really is.
Most of what Jesus talked about had something to do with revealing God’s character - His love, His justice, His righteousness, the things He values, the things He loves. At one point, the disciples, who were people who prayed and who, being good Jews, knew how to address God, nevertheless asked Jesus to teach them how to pray.
It was a key moment. It was a chance to raise the bar. It was a chance to add insight and enrich their understanding. They asked because they were ready to know. People who teach love these moments. As some of you know I’m a jazz musician and I’ve got a good background in music theory. When someone I know who is already a good musician with a good understanding of theory, asks me a question about music theory, or the intricacies of how music works , it’s exciting because I know the person is ready, willing and able to go a lot deeper in their understanding of music. It’s a truly teachable moment. This was a teachable moment for Jesus, and so, speaking to people knowledgeable about prayer, He began by revealing not how to pray, but to Whom they prayed. And how did He begin?
Jesus began with “Our Father”. Jesus, in that moment, replaces a lot of misinformation about God with a key truth about God, He supplants a dominant picture of God with another, very different picture.
Today we’re going to look at how understanding God as our Father is the key to the healing of all of our relationships. I need to credit the writer William Barclay with many of these ideas/the direction of this message.
Our Relationship with the Unseen World:
We know that we live in a post-Christian world. Than means that once the dominant influence nearly everywhere in our society was the Christian faith. Everyone knew about the Christian faith, at least superficially. So the idea of “God as Father” is not strange to most people. It is an idea that is ‘borrowed’ from Christian faith, like, frankly, most of what is good about our culture.
Just an aside: Notions of justice and fairness, the idea behind our free medicare (“we are our brothers’ keeper), equality in the law and many other things have also been ‘borrowed’ from Christian faith - borrowed but not generally acknowledged. So the idea of God as Father is not too weird or revolutionary to us. But without that understanding, we are left with what people once believed and in some places of the world still believe.
Missionaries tell us that one of the greatest reliefs which Christian faith brings to the mind and heart of people and cultures who believe in many gods (animist cultures in Africa, Hindu culture in India and elsewhere), is the certainty that there is only one God. In animism and other religions there is a strong belief that there are a huge number of gods, that's every stream and river, and tree and valley, and hill and wood and every natural force has its own god.
Worse, in many of this type of religion, these gods are jealous, and grudging, and hostile. They must all be placated, and a one can never be sure that he has not omitted the honor due to some of these gods.The consequence is that they live in terror of the gods; "haunted and not helped by their religion." The most significant Greek legend of the gods is the legend of Prometheus. Prometheus was a God.
It was in the days before men possessed fire; and life without fire was a cheerless and comfortless thing. In Pizzi Prometheus took fire from heaven and gave it as a gift to men Zeus, the king of the gods, was mightily angry that men should receive this gift.
So he took Prometheus and change him to a rock in the middle of the Adriatic Sea, where he was tortured with the heat in the thirst of the day, and the cold of the night. Even more, seems prepared a vulture to tear out Prometheus' liver, which always crew again, only to be torn out again. That is what happened to the god who tried to help men. The whole conception is that the gods are jealous, and vengeful, and grudging; and the last thing the gods wish to do is to help men.
So perhaps it helps to remove ourselves a bit from our 21st century context and consider how people lived before there was any understanding of God as Father. Without the knowledge of God as Father, the world was haunted by the fear of a horde of jealous and grudging gods. So, then, when we discover that the God to whom we pray has a name and the heart of a father it makes literally all the difference in the world.
We need no longer shiver before board of jealous gods; we can rest in the Fathers love.
Our Relationship with the Seen world:
Understanding God as our Father settles our relationship to the seen world, to this world of space and time in which we live. It is easy to think of this world as a hostile world. There are wars every day. In the western world there is the threat of terrorism.
Elsewhere there are daily acts of terrorism.
Because of terrorism governments now have nearly unprecedented access to our private lives through social media. Did you know that your Facebook account and your wall gives the government or anyone who cares to peak a ton of insight into your world - depending on how much you choose to put on display there. There is famine, there is suffering and death. There are the iron-clad laws of the universe that we break at our peril (gravity works).
But if we can be sure that behind this world there is, not a temperamental, jealous, mocking God, but God whose name is Father, then although much may still remain dark, all is now bearable because behind all is love. Barclay comments that it will always help us if we think of this world as being organized not for our comfort, but for our training.
Our Relationship with Others:
If we believe that God is Father, it settles our relationship to our fellow-men and fellow-women, with all people. If God is Father, he is Father of all. It is our father, not my father. It is very significant that in the Lord's prayer, where Jesus teaches us how to pray and to commune with God, the words ‘I’, ‘me’, and ‘mine’ never occur. It not really much of a stretch to say that Jesus came to take these words out of life...and to put in their place ‘we’, ‘us’, and ‘ours’.
God is not any persons’ exclusive possession. God is not one’s private God. The very phrase ‘our father’ challenges the normal human tendency to put ‘self’ first. We relate to God personally of course, but God Himself, as expressed in the Holy Trinity, is community. Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
The fatherhood of God is the only possible basis of the brotherhood and sisterhood, shall we call it the ‘siblinghood’ of humanity. You and I are brothers and sisters with all of humanity because he share the same Source, our Father. You and I are brothers and sisters in Christ, because God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has adopted us as His children through faith in the shed blood of Jesus Christ.
Our Relationship to Ourselves:
If we believe that God is father, it settles our relationship to ourselves. If we’re honest, there are times when every person take a pretty low opinion of themselves. Maybe even despises and hates himself or herself. We can think of ourselves as lower than the lowest thing that crawls upon the earth. The heart knows its own bitterness and no one knows a man's unworthiness better than the man himself.
Mark Rutherford, an important Christian thinker, wished he could make an addition to the Beatitudes: "Blessed are those who heal us of our self-despising's." Blessed are those who give us back our self respect. When we fail, when we fall. When we behave in destructive ways, often in blindness, often in wilfulness, and then the lights go on and we are led to repentance...like Nathan led King David, like Jesus led Simon Peter...You know, that is precisely what God does.
In these grim, bleak, terrible moments we can still remind ourselves that, even if we matter to no one else, we matter to God; that in the infinite mercy of God we are, actually of royal lineage, children of the King of Kings. God being our Father, through adoption into the body of Christ by faith in Christ, in truth elevates us massively. Turn to the person beside you and say: “In Christ, you are a son/daughter of the King”! Amen.
Our Relationship with God:
If we believe that God is Father, and when we know we’ve entered into that relationship of sonship or being a son or daughter of God through trusting in Jesus sacrifice for us, it settles our relationship to God. It is not that it removes the might, majesty and power of God. It is not that it makes God any the less God, but it makes His might, majesty, and power approachable for us. God is no longer a caricature:
He is not Taskmaster, Faultfinder, Distant, Fearful, Hateful, Angry. Out to get us. Each of those words make us feel a certain way toward God. Among the feelings we may have for a god like the one described above is probably not - “I want to be close to Him”. More than likely we’d want to spend all our time running and hiding from such a being.
There is an old Roman story which tells how a Roman Emperor was enjoying a triumph, marching his troops through the streets of Rome, with all his captured trophies and his prisoners in his train. So the emperor was on the march with his troops. The streets were lined with cheering people. The tall soldiers and guards lined the streets edges to keep the people in their places. At one point on the triumphal route there was a little platform where the Empress and her family were sitting to watch the Emperor go by in all the pride of his triumph.
On the platform with his mother there was the Emperor’s youngest son, a little boy.
As the Emperor came near the little boy jumped off the platform, burrowed through the crowd, tried to dodge between the legs of the Emperor’s guard, and to run out onto the road to meet his father's chariot. The solider stooped down and stopped him. He swung him up in his arms: "you can't do that, boy; "He said. "Don't you know who is in that chariots? That's the Emperor. You can't run out to his chariot." And the little lad laughed. "He may be your emperor," he said, "but he's my father." That is exactly the way the Christian feels toward God.
The might, and the majesty, and the power are the might, and the majesty, and the power of one whom Jesus taught us to call our father.
In a sense the word Father used of God is a compact summary of the Christian faith. The great value of this word Father, of understanding God as Father is that it settles all the relationships of this life.
I love my dad. I really love my dad. He’s been gone for 2 years now, resting safe, I trust, in the arms of Jesus. At the end of his life he said: “I got it all wrong. I put my work before my family. I put art ahead of love.” And you know what, he wasn't wrong. He wasn't perfect. And, I’m glad he wasn't. When I needed him the most, in my teens, he was quite cold and distant, distracted by the pressures of being a self-employed artist with massive government commissions.
You can check out some of his work at www.lewisparker.ca. He carried a ton of weight on his shoulders, and, being human, he couldn’t manage THAT weight and the responsibility of being an attentive dad. But, like I said, I’m glad he wasn’t.
I’m glad because God used my dad’s frailty, my disappointment with not being able to connect with him, to make me aware of the God-shaped hole in me. My dad, completely inadvertently, drove me into the arms of God my Father, who has never left me alone, never disappointed me going on 33 years now, has never dropped the ball or wounded me.
Later on in life, my dad changed. He became known as a warm-hearted, loving, caring man. He experienced the grace of God in his life and became a truly beautiful human being.
Human dads...the absolute best thing we can offer our kids is to point them to God our Father, and to do so intentionally, not only by our words, although words are important. But by our actions, modelling what it means to love God, to serve Him, to honour Him and to obey Him in all things; and when we make mistakes to keep short accounts with God so that our relationship with God stays strong.
May we each understand the fatherhood of God. And in doing so, may we each experience healing in all of our relationships through the Father heart of God.
Thanks to William Barclay in his Commentary on the Book of Matthew for many of the insights in this sermon.
