Is God Our Father?
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Beth Henricks
June 19, 2022
II Corinthians 3: 17-18
17 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 18 And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.
Good morning friends and Happy Father’s Day. Today we are celebrating our fathers and other men in our lives that have been role models, offered care, support and unconditional love through the journeys of our lives. I am reminiscing about my dad today whom I lost 17 years ago (hard to believe he has been gone that long) and miss him every day. The things I miss most are his laugh, his candor, the adoration, and respect he had for my mother, his love of all sports, the prioritization he made of family in his life, how he could eat 13 ears of corn in one setting, I could go on and on. I know many of you sit here and remember the big and little things about your father and other men in your life. I am incredibly thankful that I had a dad that did give me a glimpse into the nature of God and a hint into who God is.
Growing up in a fundamentalist tradition, we talked about God as Father a lot. I have heard many messages on Father’s Day talking about God as Father, about what kind of fathers we need to be, the trinitarian concept of God as father, son and holy spirit and a wholehearted endorsement of many male characteristics of God. Growing up in a home where my mother seemed to “be in charge” I never quite understood the obsession with describing God in masculine terms to convey strength, power, and control.
However, all of my language of God was male, and God was always termed as a “he” and everything I read was primarily male vocabulary. I just accepted this as normal. About 15 years ago I attended a conference at Anderson University and spoke with a woman who changed my perspective on this. She shared in a meaningful way that she had a dad that was a terrible father and identifying God as father or in a male pronoun sent her running in the opposite direction. It was only when she came to terms that God is not male or female that she could step into a relationship with the Divine. She shared that my using male pronouns to identify God was painful for her.
I never thought about this in the terms she presented to me. It makes sense that many people have a negative idea of father in terms of an earthly father and to identify God in these words is offensive and hurtful. Ever since that conversation, I have tried to be careful to not identify God in male terms.
But describing God in male terms is very common among Christians. It became the standard language when Christianity became established as part of the Roman Empire under Constantine. The Apostles creed institutionalized this male language to describe God – I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and in Jesus Christ, His only son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried. He descended into Hell; the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into Heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead….
The identification of God as Father in the Old Testament was less common than in the New Testament. Maybe it was based on a belief and limited understanding of God as a cosmic entity outside of our intimate world. When Moses encounters God in the burning bush God has Moses turn away and describes Godself as I am that I am. There were no human characteristics to describe Yahweh that day.
In Judaism, the use of the "Father" as a title is generally a metaphor, referring to God’s role as Life-giver and Law-giver, and is one of many titles by which Jews speak of and to God.[3] The Jewish concept of God is that God is non-corporeal, transcendent and immanent, the ultimate source of love,[68][69][70][71] and a metaphorical "Father".
Jesus utilized the word Father quite a bit to describe his relationship during his 3 years of active ministry. In the Gospels, Jesus calls God “Father” more than 165 times. As an example, Matthew 18:19 says “Again, I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven.” Maybe in Jesus’ radical way, he was trying to personalize God, to bring God into our direct lives, to help us understand more of the characteristics of God. As humans, language is a way for us to describe something to give it texture, context, and visibility. But the words that describe something should never be considered as the object. There are always limitations to the words we use. Human words can never describe God’s fullness in any adequate way. Identifying God as father or mother are just human characterizations of God shaped by belief and background.
We know Jesus was a radical and turned all of the established norms upside down so his utilization of God in father terms may be a way to help us understand God in a personal way.
The Christian Church has always had a bit of a problem with God's gender. God doesn't have one, but it's hard to talk about God without giving God a gender. To talk about God, we have to call God something, and avoiding pronouns altogether is cumbersome and it seems a bit rude, talking as if God was an impersonal force like gravity or inflation. So, we call God a "He" or "She", and in a patriarchal society there's no contest to how the dominant gender will be. God as father in the Bible and throughout Christianity is shaped by a predominately ancient patriarchal society. Men wrote the books of the Bible, and it makes sense they used the language of the day. However, it does seem like these patriarchal dominance ideas permeated most Christian congregations and in many of them continue today. As The Catechism of the Catholic Church says: "God is neither man nor woman: he is God".
There are other Christian groups that have gone further than this though. A church in third-century Syria seems to have been in the habit of praying to the Holy Spirit in female terms. One of their holy books, the Acts of Thomas, tells of St Thomas presiding over a communion service, and calling on the Holy Spirit, saying: "Come, she that manifests the hidden things and makes the unspeakable things plain, the holy dove that bears the twin young. Come, the hidden mother… Come and communicate with us in this eucharist".
We know that God also has female imagery in the Bible. As we try to imagine and begin to have some minute glimpses into our understanding of God, we humans, we need something concrete to help in our comprehension and the mother/ father characterizations give us metaphors as humans. Here are some examples
· “You deserted the Rock, who fathered you; you forgot the God who gave you birth.” (Deuteronomy 32:18)
· “The LORD will march out like a champion, like a warrior he will stir up his zeal; with a shout he will raise the battle cry and will triumph over his enemies. For a long time I have kept silent, I have been quiet and held myself back. But now, like a woman in childbirth, I cry out, I gasp and pant.” (Isaiah 42:13-14).
· “As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you; and you will be comforted over Jerusalem.” (Isaiah 66:13)
These human metaphors and descriptors can help us gain a deeper understanding into God but too often they have become concrete and limiting. As John 4:24 says God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. This sense of mystery and awe is one of the reasons that I have embraced Quakerism for the past 30 years. The descriptions the early Quakers said of God were with words like Light, Inner Seed, Christ within, that of God….And Quakers embraced women in ministry right from their start and honored inspiration from all. Both men and women were valued and honored as instruments of the God we can’t adequately describe. The patriarchy that has dominated so many Christian denominations was limited with the Quakers. I want to replace the male/female descriptions of God with words like these.
I have been rereading the classic book of Thomas Merton, The Seeds of Contemplation. While Merton uses male pronouns to describe God reflective of his time, he puts so beautifully the inexpressible and mystery of God, a mystery that we begin to experience in contemplation. I share some of his words with you.
“Contemplation reaches out to the knowledge and even to the experience of the transcendent and inexpressible God. It knows God by seeming to touch Him. Or rather it knows him as if it had been invisibly touched by Him…. Touched by Him Who has no hands, but who is pure Reality and the source of all that is real1 Hence contemplation is a sudden gift of awareness, an awakening to the Real within all that is real. A vivid awareness of infinite Being at the roots of our own limited being. An awareness of our contingent reality as received, as a present from God, as a free gift of love…. It is also the response to a call: a call from Him who has no voice, and yet who speaks in everything that is, and Who, most of all, speaks in the depths of our own being: for we ourselves are words of His.” (pg 4-5) “in the end the contemplative suffers the anguish of realizing that he no longer knows what God is. He may or may not mercifully realize that after all this is a great gain, because God is not a what, not a thing…There is no such thing as God because God is neither a what nor a thing but a pure Who. He is the I Am before whom with our own most personal and inalienable voice we echo I am.”
“In all the situations of life the will of God comes to us not merely as an external dictate of impersonal law but above all as an interior invitation of personal love. Too often the conventional conception of God’s will as a sphinx-like and arbitrary force bearing down upon us with implacable hostility, leads men to lose faith in a God they cannot find it possible to love. Such a view of the divine will drives human weakness to despair and one wonders if it is not, itself, often the expression of a despair too intolerable to be admitted to conscious consideration. These arbitrary dictates of a domineering and insensible Father are more often seeds of hatred than of love. If that is our concept of the will of God, we cannot possibly seek the obscure and intimate mystery of the encounter that takes place in contemplation. We will desire only to fly as far as possible from Him and hide from his Face forever. So much depends on our idea of God! Yet no idea of Him, however pure and perfect, is adequate to express Him as He really is. Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.” (pg 15)
Friends, as we enter our time of waiting worship, I ask you to consider these queries –
Do I limit God to fit my boxes?
How might I expand my understanding of God?
In what ways do I need to deepen my contemplative practices to experience God more fully?