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Matthew 6:9; Luke 15:11-27; Galatians 3:26-4:7
Jesus taught us to call on God in the Lord’s Prayer as “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be your name.” It should not then surprise us that the two oldest statements of what Christians believe, the Nicene Creed and the Apostles' Creed both begin basically the same; "We believe in God the Father, Almighty Maker of heaven and earth." Both creeds and the prayer make the simple statement that we place our trust and give our loyalty to God, a God who has revealed himself by means of Jesus Christ, as Father.
It should tweak our ears just a bit that the first thing we Christians have to say about God is that he is our Father. Simply put, Jesus called him that and instructed us to do so as well. But keep in mind Jesus is also God, God the Son and there’s also God the Holy Spirit. The Three are the One God, but there is a sort of primacy given to God the Father. So, let’s look at that today.
That our statements of fidelity begin with our giving our allegiance to God the Father is important. It means that everything we say after that is informed by who we say God is. That God is Father shapes everything else we have to say about God and creation, salvation, the Kingdom of God, the Church, the resurrection from the dead, and the world to come. Our relationship to God is different if God is “Our Father” as opposed to simply being “the Almighty”. The Christian Faith becomes something altogether un-Christian if we set the Father aside and simply pledge allegiance to “the Almighty Maker of Heaven and Earth.” When Christianity has done that over the centuries, it tends to become a state religion that resembles Nazi Germany.
That God is “our Father” puts a family bond, a family tie, at the heart of the faith. If that bond is ignored or forgotten then we lose what is at the heart of the Christian faith. We lose the reason Jesus, God the Son, became human which was to reveal the love of the Father and make us able to share in the relationship that he has with his Father in the Holy Spirit. The biggest of the big pictures that I can give you of what the Christian faith is is that Jesus came to reveal to us the love of the Father and make us able to share in the relationship that he has with his Father. Simply put, we are adopted into their relationship. Through allegiance to Jesus made possible by our being life-glued to him by the presence of the Holy Spirit coming into us and among us, we are now adopted into the loving communion of the Father Son and Holy Spirit. We are adopted children of the Father, siblings of the Son by the bond of the Holy Spirit who lives in us.
Being siblings who are life-glued to Jesus by the Holy Spirit means that what Jesus is by nature, we are and are becoming by grace – the children of God the Father who willingly trust and live for him because we know the Father’s love. As God's children, the presence of his Spirit in us is changing us to be like Jesus. This change happens now in a change of heart and mind in us to want to be and to do what our Father wants of us and it will become complete after we have been raised from the dead into a new heaven and a new earth. Just as Jesus is in communion with God the Father and prays to his Father, so also, we can stand in the presence of our Father with him and pray with him. With the same love that Jesus has for his Father, so we also can with him love and praise our Father.
This change from being estranged and pridefully at enmity with a God we can’t know to being adopted as our Father’s beloved children is what we mean by salvation. We have been saved by God's own initiative and action from the deathly implication of hearts and minds that are bent on self-destruction through doing and being what we want to be do and be. God created humanity to live in communion with God and one another in self-giving, humble, unconditional love but instead, like cancers, we instinctively and by choice seek to do simply what pleases ourselves and this has broken the communion.
God the Father has saved us from this brokenness by sending his Son to become one of us. The very fact that God has become human and how that played out in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus of Nazareth has healed humanity and he shares this healing with us now by including us in himself by giving us the Holy Spirit. As God's children we can now call out to God in devotion saying Abba, which means "dear Father", and sit in his presence and make requests of him and in grateful praise and adoration, we can worship God our Father. God the Father in his great love for us has given us access to his love through Jesus the Son in the Holy Spirit and that changes us, heals us, restores us to true communion with God and one another. That's the Christian faith in a nutshell.
Now, saying that the Christian faith is really about the love of the Father may sound new to you. I think that many of us have been churched into a Christian faith that is defined by the so-called conversion experience of the Prodigal Son as it is in this parable. You know, here's this rebellious little snot wanting to break off from the family and go and make it on his own. So, he gets his father to give him his inheritance; an act that in essence was wishing his father dead. Then he heads off to the far country and winds up grossly wasting it all away. After hitting rock bottom, he comes to his senses and decides he'll just go make things right with his father. He would be better off being a servant in his father’s house than a starving servant on a pig farm. He plans his little prayer of repentance so that he will be all ready to beg for forgiveness when he sees his father. Hopefully, he can convince his father that he just might be sincere. But if you're really paying attention here, he's not. He's just looking for a guaranteed meal. He heads home to makes things right. That sounds like the Gospel we’re accustomed to hearing: we’re sinners who need to repent and get it right with God so that things will go well with us.
Well, what happens next in the story is unexpected. The father has been watching and waiting and waiting and watching for his son. When the father sees him at a distance, instead of remaining aloof for a few days and then demanding his son come and beg for a forgiveness the father may or may not grant, the old man takes off running across the fields to embrace his son who had wished him dead and then wasted everything. Surprisingly, the father has no interest in the son’s little, contrived prayer of repentance nor with what the son has done with his inheritance. He's just so happy his lost son has come home and very graciously restores him to the family with a robe, a ring, and a feast.
I have heard too many sermons from this parable based on how we are supposed to be like this prodigal son and come to our senses and come home when the parable really is about the love of the father. The love of the Father is so great that he sees past the wasted life of the prodigal and even the hypocrisy of the brother who stayed around. They are still one family whom he loves very much. Too many sermons I have heard telling us to get right with God and come home so that we can enjoy his love when the fact of the matter is that our Father never stops loving us and there is nothing we can do to earn that love. We can blow it, totally blow it, but even that doesn’t change God's love for us.
The immeasurable love of the Father and our inclusion in it by his grace is what the Christian faith is about. No decision or repenting on our part could ever make us right with God. We are already right with God through Christ Jesus. We just have to show up for the inheritance. Too much of Christianity says you are not a Christian unless you've had a conversion experience meaning you've come to your senses about the cruddy life you've been living and are now going to live so God can use you. That's not a conversion experience. Deciding to get it right with Jesus by cleaning up your act so you can go to heaven is not conversion. Please note that the Prodigal Son does not go home because he's realized his father's love for him. He goes home because he knows it's a guaranteed decent meal. He's not converted. He’s just using his father to get by. Conversion happens when we’re slapped in the face with the faithfulness and love of our Father.
I'll get off that, and close with a thought about calling God Father. I am aware that in our day many have great difficulty associating God with the concept of a father. There have been too many fathers who have failed and failed miserably and even maliciously at being a father. They have been so hurtful that many people are not able to associate the word father with any concept of love. On top of that, it's not a very inclusive term. There are many who think calling God Father only reinforces patriarchal systems that have plagued humanity from the beginning of time with the abuse of women.
We do not confess God as Father to reinforce misogyny nor in ignorance of the pain that so many have suffered at the hands of their father or because of the absence of a father. We confess God as Father because Jesus did and Jesus did so to describe a particular kind of relationship he had with his God whom he called Father, a relationship which he brings us into and by which we are healed. I am not a Fundamentalist for calling God Father. Personally, I have come a long way around on this myself. Years ago, I would have whole-heartedly suggested we find another name for God. But I have discovered that if we change the names, it changes the nature of the relationship God has brought us into with himself. God has included us in the loving Communion of God’s self, the loving family-like communion of Father Son and Holy Spirit of which our Fathers sits at the head of the table with a look of love in his eyes that we will never comprehend other than to know that knowing it changes everything. Amen.
