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At the end of last week’s sermon, I touched on the subject of how problematic it can be today to refer to God in the Biblical and traditional Trinitarian terms of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and particularly confession of God as Father. Indeed, with women’s rights issues and the reality of abusive or neglectful fathers one should rightfully question why the Christian church doesn’t entirely abandon our creedal confession that we believe in God the Father. In fact, many within the faith have understandably done just that but since have been groping to find a name for God that reflects the fullness of the relationship we have with God in Christ Jesus through the presence of the Holy Spirit dwelling in us each and among us together.
Moreover and unfortunately, those who still cling to the creedal confession, such as myself, are dismissed as conservative Evangelicals, or fundamentalists, or just plain narrow-minded, uninformed, power-mongering traditionalists. And even more unfortunately, in many cases that dismissal is not uncalled-for. There are many out there who assert the name Father because they are one of the above and have never thought through these painful issues much less acknowledged them and then with narrow-minded authoritarianism they insist upon calling God Father and coercively use the fear of punishment to keep people in line with male dominance in their churches.
On the other hand, there are people like British theologian Tom Smail who in his book The Forgotten Father: Rediscovering the Heart of the Christian Gospel writes powerfully about our discovering who we are as persons. He says: “We find out who we are not by introspection or psychological technique but by an existential discovery of our relationship to God. Far more ultimately significant than the content of our subconscious or the influence of our inheritance or environment is the fact that in Christ God has made himself our Father and us his children. For that to come home to us in the power of the Spirit is one of the most healing things that can ever happen to us…this discovery is a charismatic gift.” He is basically saying that we truly do not know who we are until we discover ourselves in relationship to God and the most healing aspect of that discovery is coming upon the revelation that God has made himself our Father and us his children through Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.
That’s a pretty bold statement and I will readily admit that I agree with him. Myself, when I graduated seminary, I had a very minimal understanding of God as Trinity. I thought, “doesn’t everybody know that God’s just God, our Friend? Why do we need the Trinity and that antiquated if not abusive Father/Son language other than it makes for a good way to organize our talk about what God has done for us?” I was all for confessing God as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer or just God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. My reason truly was that using the Father/Son language was not fair to women and especially to people who have been abused by their fathers.
Needless to say, nearly 25 years ago I had a revelation, so to speak, on the matter. What Tom Smail said hit home. I had lost my own father to cancer, gone through a divorce, and in the midst of all that got into a doctor of ministry program that was centered on rediscovering the Trinity…all were oddly coincidental. Probably the greatest pain that I suffered going through the divorce was that my father, who was probably the most significant relational bond in my life, was not there to talk to. What ensued was not my discovering that since Dad was gone I could talk to my heavenly Father. That’s nothing more than coping out of developing new relationships. In fact, what happened was I found that the need for a father in my life began to be filled by other people and in many cases by my stepfather. What happened was bigger than I had a father-shaped hole. Through the events that ensued I began to realize how utterly and ultimately my life was in the hands of God the Father who was making it clear to me that he wanted what was best for me and was going to make that happen not only through the events of my life but also in helping me heal from many of the wounds I had accumulated in life and he continues to do so. I learned that the only possession I have in life is to utterly trust in my heavenly Father for my well-being and to do what he was showing me to do to the best of my ability. That’s called faith/faithfulness
In the midst of it I learned the nature of what it was to be God’s child and that is to put my own perceived wants and needs and what I thought was best for me on the shelf and just let God be God. His promise was to heal me and to give me the desires of my heart. To be God’s child is to learn the nature of his Son, Christ Jesus, to learn not to assert yourself in the pursuit of your own wants and needs but rather to put the needs of others first as God shows them to you. Miraculously, along the way we start to heal and in time the Father gives what he’s promised.
Now, where I’m going with all of this is to say that we do God and our relationship with God a serious injustice when we project our Father images and “Daddy” issues upon him. What is meant by Father in the Bible and by the early church theologians has little to do with our own ideas and culturally contrived understandings of fatherhood and the male gender particularly as they exist now in the 21st Century. Why we call God Father also has nothing to do with all that. Christianity’s most basic reason for confessing God as Father is that Jesus did and invited us to do so as well.
Now, before someone says “that’s simplistic” we do have to ask what did Jesus mean in calling God Father. What’s this whole Father/Son thing about? In the stories of the virgin birth of Jesus in Matthew and Luke we learn that Jesus had no earthly father other than to be adopted by Joseph, the husband of Mary. Joseph was Jesus’ earthly father for all intents and purposes. With the Father/Son talk Jesus was pointing us to something other than a father-shaped hole in our lives. The answer to what Jesus means with the Father/Son relationship he has with God and our inclusion in it I think can be fairly clearly addressed by looking here at Job.
If you survey the Bible for a definition of the role of a father you will find that a father brings a people into existence, provides them with an inheritance, disciplines or rears them rightly as his children, has faith, and provides for his children to have a right relationship to God. Job, by this definition was an excellent father and as such reflected the nature of God the Father quite clearly. In fact, I think that’s why Job suffered so badly. Satan particularly wanted a piece of him because to get Job, the father par excellence, to curse God and die would be a painful affront to God the Father. Job had a family of ten, a great inheritance to pass on, and most importantly it was his custom to offer sacrifices on behalf of his children should they in some ways have offended God.
These things in particular are what God the Father has done for us. He has brought us into existence by giving us life and by bringing us together as his children through the new life given to us through Christ Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit. He gives us an inheritance, which is nothing short of his very self, the wealth of his great love and provision through Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. His faith is his own faithfulness which he cannot betray. God has provided for us to be rightly related to him through the sacrificial and life-giving death of his own Son and the gift of the Holy Spirit. When we pray to our Father, we notice we have a lot to be thankful for.
So, about the Son language. It is no secret that in the Biblical world sons had rights and privileges that daughters did not. Sons had a relationship with their fathers that daughters did not. Daughters couldn’t hold property and instead they were more or less themselves property that was sold or traded between families in a manner similar to breeding stock. Inheritances almost always passed to sons, particularly the family land. Sons carried on the family name. The oldest son of the family in particular had a special relationship with the father and received the bulk of the inheritance and the land. But this didn’t mean that fathers didn’t love their daughters as much as their sons. It was a different time with different laws and different customs.
The rights of daughters and women have changed greatly but slowly over the last twenty centuries and, believe it or not, the church has played a great role in the trend to equality. In our Galatians passage, translators make a problematic mistake by using the word children instead of the word sons to translate how Paul describes our relationship to God. The word in Greek is the word for son not the word for children. I think Paul is quite intentionally calling everyone in the church, both men and women, a son of God and not just a child of God. The effect of that act was to give women, to give daughters, the same rights in the church, in Christ, as men, as sons.
Paul says we are all sons of God through faith. There is neither slave nor free. Slaves are now elevated to have the rights of sons. There is neither Greek nor Jew. Gentiles are now elevated to the status of sons. There is neither male nor female. Women, daughters, are now elevated to the status of sons. The reason being men and women have faith in God just the same. Yes, we are all God’s children, but more so, we all have the rights of sons, the highest status a child could have in a family in that day…except for first-born son. That status belongs to Jesus and he is generous in what he shares with us. He gives to us what the Father gives to him, the Holy Spirit. The Father listens to us just as he listens to Jesus. This may be hard for you to wrap your head around, but our Father loves us each, us adopted children, as much as he does Jesus, the first-born. Such is our Father in heaven to whom we pray. So, if you want to know the most important thing about who you are, you are a beloved child of God the Father, Almighty Maker of Heaven and earth and your big brother loves you so much as to give his life for you and to you. Trust that love. Amen.
