I Believe in God, the Father, Almighty…
Genesis 27: 18-40 and Luke 11:5-13
The Apostle’s Creed begins with God: “I believe in God.” This beginning is no accident; it is the Creed’s way of reminding us that the source, the foundation and the purpose of all our living has a beginning and an end rooted in God. One of my mentor’s was fond of saying, “We come from God, we go to God, and we journey with God every step of our lives.” But to say “God” begs the question: whose God? Which God? What kind of God? After all, there are many belief systems, many religions, and not all Gods are the same. The gods of the Aztecs who demanded human sacrifice are the not the same as the Lord God. The god of Osama bin Laden is not the same as the God we believe is revealed in Jesus Christ. No, the Creed says, before we can speak of God correctly, we must know whose God, which God and what kind of God of whom we are speaking.
To begin to answer this question we should notice that the Creed is divided into three paragraphs: one on the Father, one on the Son and one on the Holy Spirit. This three-fold division is intentional; it is a way of making an important statement about God. We believe that God is revealed as a Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – three distinct persons in one God – distinct but not separate, eternally unified in full divinity. The doctrine of the Trinity is, of course, complicated and often misunderstood and so Christians are sometimes tempted to ignore it or discard it as outdated. But this we must not do! Rather, the Trinity, as the uniquely Christian conception of God tells us something very important: it tells us that the God in whom we believe is a God of relationship. The Trinity tells us that forever and for all eternity God exists in relationship – Father to Son, Son to Spirit, Spirit to Father – and so there is never a time when God is not in relationship. Therefore, when in Genesis we are told that we are created “in the image of God” we are to understand at least this: we are created for relationships. And the Creed begins with the first source, the foundation, the first expression of all relationships: …the Father Almighty….
Jesus' sense of God was so close, so real, and so intimate that his relationship with God was always expressed from the place of a father-son relationship. It is impossible, if one reads the Gospels carefully, to imagine Jesus apart from his relationship with God Almighty whom he calls Father. Again and again the word "Father" drops from the lips of Jesus as it did from no one else before or since. The very first words that a Jewish child learned to speak were abba (which means "father" or from the lips of a child "daddy") and imma (which means "mother" or "mommy"). The word abba was so personal and so familiar a term that no one ever used it to address God--until Jesus did. It has been pointed out that there is not a single example of the use of abba as an address to God in the whole of Jewish literature except for the gospels. Jesus' utter intimacy with Father God is startling. Just think about it: God Almighty, maker of heaven and earth; God Almighty, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; God Almighty, the God of yesterday, today and forever--is our Father!
Jesus' attitude towards his heavenly father becomes interesting when we realize how Jesus felt about earthly father-son relationships. In the passage from Luke we hear Jesus talking about asking and receiving from God. "Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?" "You...who are evil." Wow! We hope that Jesus meant that earthly fathers are enmeshed in a world that is often evil and ungodly. But even so it is a sweeping indictment. Earthly fathers, he seems to be saying, are severely limited by our nature or environment. Now add to this another saying. Jesus was conversing with the Pharisees, who loved their earthly authority. He told them, "Call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father who is in heaven" (Matthew 23:9). Wow again! It seems as if Jesus is attempting to systematically alienate his followers from their earthly fathers...or was he?
The answer to the question of what Jesus is up to lies in the Hebrew concept of the father. To be fair to Jesus, and more importantly to understand him rightly, we need to understand the Hebrew culture and its idiom where the father was the dominant figure in a child's life, the one through whom "blessing" passed to the child. The father's blessing was essential. Today's Old Testament reading reminds us of the trickery of Jacob stealing Esau's blessing and the pathos of Esau as he craved for but a bit of blessing from his father Isaac. Jacob would have done almost anything to secure the blessing, and then Esau almost killed Jacob for having gotten it. For a father to bless a son meant that the son would live happily and prosperously the rest of his life. Of course it was primarily a psychological matter, a state of mind, but who would argue against the importance of a state of mind or its role in determining one's future?
The idea of a father's blessing still has significance today. A colleague once told me, “I realized that I have gone through life looking for my father's blessing I never received. It is the one big thing missing from my life. I am restless and dissatisfied because I never felt I had it. And now my father is dead and I shall never have it." I have heard women say the same thing, that they were frustrated in life because they had never been blessed by their fathers. Their fathers had never given them the full assurance of their love and goodwill. They had never held them and said, "I love you and I bless you.”
Now, I would argue that a mother's blessing is just as important, but mother love and father love are different. A mother's love flows out of her very self, it is organic, from the womb and she carries with her the gift of nurturing that men cannot provide unless we go to the store and buy formula, but even then it is not of our own self. Either way, a father's love and the father's relationship becomes primarily psychological, and it is perhaps for this reason that the psychological blessing of the father is always so important to our children. The child that doesn't receive the blessing, or thinks he or she doesn't receive the blessing, hungers for it for a lifetime. But Jesus knew the state of the world, the way things are. He knew that human fathers are not always reliable, and that even if we do give our blessings these are not always enough to sustain our children through thick and thin.
Sam Keen is an author and theologian who had received his father's blessing throughout his life. Father and son had always had a wonderful, secure relationship. In an essay, Sam writes about "how warm and friendly the nights of childhood were because my father had a great, booming voice that could hold at bay the very hounds of hell." After his father died, Sam traveled home to the little town in East Tennessee where he grew up, and while he was there he began to weep. He himself was now middle-aged, and he thought,
Father, father, who does not want a strong and wise protector? Who is so grown up as to have lost the desire for protection against the terrors of the night? The beasties and things that go bump in the night don't wear faces of bears and burglars as we get older. They all begin to wear the mask of death. And in the presence of that old man we flock to Master-Father-God who promises us protection.
Sometimes not even the blessing of a good earthly father is enough. Jesus understood this, and that is why he counseled his followers, "Call no man your father here on earth." Not in the Hebrew sense. Not in the sense of one who provides ultimate protection and blessing. He wasn't against fathers. He merely knew their ultimate inadequacy. He knew that no earthly father can love enough and give enough to suffice for all our needs, at every moment of our lives. Jesus wanted to encourage his followers to crawl into God's lap and receive God's love, comfort, healing and strength. He wanted us to discover the Father that cannot and does not fail so that we can laugh freely and weep copiously and be held openly in the arms of Abba, our Father God Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.
For Jesus to call God our heavenly Father was to make the most audacious theological statement that could be made. Think about it--God Almighty who created the world and cast the nebulae in space; God Almighty who heard the prayers of the first man and woman on earth and who sees the intricacies of the future; God Almighty whose majesty is seen from the highest mountain and who inhabits the jeweled depths of the darkest ocean; God Almighty who led the Hebrew people out of captivity in Egypt and who spoke when Jesus was baptized saying, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased”; this God Almighty is our Father.
God Almighty who fashioned the giant sequoia tree and plants the tiny seeds of pearl in all the oysters; God Almighty who called Abraham into the Promised Land and who made Paul the Apostle to the Gentiles; God Almighty who imprisoned energy in coal and who whispered the secret of relativity into the ear of Einstein; God Almighty who set the oceans a rocking and shaped the crescent beaches of the Pacific Islands; God Almighty who blessed the world with language and then confounded it with many tongues; God Almighty who ordained the very existence of mortality and then raised up Christ from the coldness of death; this God Almighty is our Abba. To think that the Creator of heaven and earth, the God of all this depth and power and resourcefulness, should be our Father, the one with whom we are privileged to live in an attitude of intimacy and relationship, is enough to stagger the mind and convict the heart.
The whole of Jesus' life was a prolonged Abba Father experience with God Almighty. He would go apart to be with Abba. Jesus understood that the maker of heaven and earth was the caretaker of the human spirit in good times and in bad. Always there. Always blessing. The real test of Jesus' Abba experience, of course, came on the cross. If Jesus was wrong about his life, it would have been seen here. No crueler tool of torture ever existed. As a deterrent to crime, the Romans lined the Appian Way with crosses on which criminals and freedom fighters were crucified, reminding everyone of the price of rebellion. Jesus saw the cross before him. In Gethsemane he prayed, "Father, if it be possible let this cup pass from me!" But it was not possible. The crowds cried out for his death. How close, real and intimate was Abba Almighty then? As the final hour approached, would Jesus abandon the notion of God as Abba? If Jesus was ever going to renounce this Father as a figment of faith, it was then as his body was nailed to the cross. Yet, even from the cross he prayed, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do." Before he breathed his last breath, he prayed, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit."
John Fountain, a Chicago journalist, wrote eloquently of God the Father in his personal statement on NPR’s This I Believe of November 28, 2005:
I believe in God. Not that cosmic, intangible spirit-in-the-sky that Mama told me as a little boy “always was and always will be.” But the God who embraced me when Daddy disappeared from our lives – from my life at age four – the night police led him away from our front door, down the stairs in handcuffs.
The God who warmed me when we could see our breath inside our freezing apartment, where the gas was disconnected in the dead of another wind-whipped Chicago winter, and there was no food, little hope and no hot water.
The God who held my hand when I witnessed boys in my ‘hood swallowed by the elements, by death and by hopelessness; who claimed me when I felt like “no man’s son,” amid the absence of any man to wrap his arms around me and tell me, “everything’s going to be okay,” to speak proudly of me, to call me son.
I believe in God, God the Father…the God who allowed me to feel His presence – whether by the warmth that filled my belly like hot chocolate on a cold afternoon, or that voice, whenever I found myself in the tempest of life’s storms, telling me (even when I was told I was “nothing”) that I was something, that I was His, and that even amid the desertion of the man who gave me his name and DNA and little else, I might find in Him sustenance.
I believe in God, the God who I have come to know as father, as Abba – Daddy…It wasn’t until many years later, standing over my father’s grave for a long overdue conversation, that my tears flowed. I told him about the man I had become. I told him about how much I wished he had been in my life. And I realized fully that in his absence, I had found another. Or that He – God, the Father, God, my Father – had found me.
That’s what Sam Keen was looking for, wasn’t it? A Father beyond all fathers, a Father who would not die, a Father who would be there always, forever and ever, world without end. An Abba Almighty. And that’s what we want, too.
And that’s what we find when we trust ourselves to him.
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