Poolesville Presbyterian Church
01.18.15; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: 1 Corinthians 8:1-7
Listen to Audio Here:
“Our Father.”
Our Father, begins that prayer Jesus taught us, a prayer I’ve been praying pretty much my whole life. It speaks to a very particular form of relationship, a way of interacting that’s as unique as our own relationships with our parents. While this prayer’s always been a part of my prayer life, I’ll confess that it prays a little differently when you’re a dad yourself.
One day, being a father is an abstraction, a thing that you know must be about to happen because there she is, getting larger month after month in a way that implies something significant is going on. That great rising roundness of her belly moves and shifts and bulges, as the thing that is about to happen gets nearer.
And then there’s that day when it all goes down, messier and bloodier and harder than you thought possible, and the next thing you know, it’s the middle of the night and a tiny little creature is making some pretty impressively large noises that don’t take your need for rest into consideration.
Wait, I’m a father now? This seemed, at the moment, pretty weird. I was the same as I’d always been, just as flawed, just as imperfect, and yet here was first one and then another human being, for whom that word was exactly what I was.
There’s a strange, passing magic that comes from that relationship, at least for a short while when your kids are small. You’re the dad, the daddy, the one who knows everything and can do anything. Got a question? Dad’s got the answer, or at least he’ll mansplain something that makes it seem like he does. Dad can fix anything, mostly through the miracles of superglue and duct tape. A father can pick you up and swing you around like you’re nothing, something I used to do a great deal but that now would require the services of an orthopaedic specialist if I even attempted it. A father can spin out the stories at storytime, casting out entire worlds from the books he holds in his hands. I loved those times.
It’s been a while since that magic has been there. My boys are young men, and I’m proud of who they are and I like knowing them as they’ve grown. But that magic? Snort. They look at their father through young-man-eyes and can’t miss that I am limited and human and fallible, a truth I’ve never hidden but that gets more obvious to all of us as the years have spun on by.
Human fathers are human beings, the simple source of half of our deoxyribonucleic acid, people like we are. Some of them are wonderful and some of them are not, and pretty much everything in between. And all of them are mortal, creatures of flesh and bone, wonderful and flawed and passing.
And yet Jesus says, when we pray that most fundamental prayer, we are to call God “Father.” What does that mean? If “Father” is the term, what are the resonances of it? When we speak that word in prayer, how is that meant to guide our soul?
Some would challenge the idea as being nothing more than projection, our human longing to recover that fleeting, primal magic of childhood. Sigmund Freud in particular was fond of this idea, which he went on about for quite a while in his treatise “The Future of an Illusion.” God the Father, as Freud would tell you as you sat on that couch in Vienna, is just an infantile prototype of your yearning for protection, a manifestation of your subconscious and neurotic desire to be sheltered by the father figure you both fear and require, who protects you and your mother, the object of your libido, while also being a threat to us. You love him, and you want to kill him.
Freud was a...strange...man.
Others, like the more aggressive anti-theists you’ll come across on the interwebs, have another way of saying that. “You and your stupid Sky Daddy Easter Bunny God,” they’ll say, every time I’m fool enough to glance at the comments on CNN.com. Why human beings would be getting into religious name-calling in the comments on an article about a basketball game is beyond me, but hey, the net is a...strange...place.
But the Sky Daddy idea is the same as Freud’s, just more clumsily and simply stated, through the miracle of our internet devolution. God, or so the argument goes, is a projection of our own desires, which we name “Father” because we’re too stupid to see the truth.
Funny thing is, Christian faith has a word for projecting our desires into a false god we’ve fashioned to meet our needs. We call that an “idol.” And while that’s what some suggest we’re doing, it’s really very different.
Paul lays out his reaction to that challenge clearly in his writings to the church at Corinth. They had a problem with idols, or so they thought. That fractious, bitter church found reasons to argue about just about everything. One of those things was the consumption of meat that had been part of a temple sacrifice, which they argued over angrily. Should you, or shouldn’t you? But the deeper issue was simple: they made an idol of their own pride. The god of Corinth was, as Freud himself might say, the ego. The “I.”
The way we understand God as Father, Paul explains, is not like that. In making that statement, we are affirming our Creator as both the source from which we spring and the purpose which defines us.
In that, Paul is faithfully reiterating what Jesus himself taught.
The God Jesus asked us call “father” not because God is a man. The Creator is not a male homo sapiens sapiens who provided us with our genetic material. It does not describe the dynamics or expectations of gender roles in a culture. God is as different from that form of fatherhood as we are from a Volvox or a paramecium or that nasty mutated H3N2 flu virus that has made such a mess of our lives this winter. God is exponentially… no...infinitely different.
We call God “father” because faith pushes us beyond our self absorption, and calls us to realize that we did not just magically appear in the world. There is something that precedes us, and on which we depend, and from which we derive our being. We are woven up into that being, in a way that goes so deep that we as human beings struggle to evoke it with our language.
But what does that mean?
Jesus touches on that in the teachings that are preserved in the Gospel of John, where that wonderful, poetic, gracious language describes how Jesus felt himself as a part of the One he called Father, to the point where it becomes difficult to see where Jesus begins and the Father ends. “The Father is in me, and I am in the Father,” he says, in John 10:38. “The Father and I are one,” he says, in John 10:30. This is not, if we are being honest, the relationship we have with our parents. It is certainly, from the flip side of the equation, the relationship we have with our children. Lord have mercy, is it not that.
Jesus is evoking something more radical, deeper still.
He was spoken into the world, God’s own Word, God’s own self expression.
We are part of that, Jesus says. We are part of that relationship. We are, through the gift of God’s own spirit, knit into the big comfy sweater of being. Our life, our breath, the atoms that comprise our bodies, the light that fills our eyes, the complex neurochemical dance of our minds and memories, the wild umpty-billion year process that gave birth to this moment, all of it is beyond us. We depend on it, completely and at every moment, for the simple miracle of our lives. It is a relationship so much deeper and more powerful than the relationship between a father and a child that it bends and strains the meaning of the word itself. The word bends, but it does not break.
When we pray into that profoundly deep reality, calling out “father,” we are affirming our participation in all of that, and shattering that tendency to make ourselves the center of all things.
We call God “father” because from faith, we have come to realize that the purpose of that ineffable something isn’t random, and that woven into our natures is a call to stand in deep connection to one another. Love stands graciously, quietly, yearningly at the boundaries of our lives, asking us to live it out.
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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