United Church of Jaffrey
1/5/20
Our shared faith – the Christian religion – is a tradition that makes liberal use of family imagery.
Each week when we recite the Lord’s prayer we speak of God as our father:
“Our Father who art in heaven…”
In this church, in particular, I attempt, on a weekly basis, to balance the paternal imagery of the Lord’s prayer with my prayer of assurance, when I assert that God forgives us “as a mother forgives her child.”
The Christmas season, so recently over, is the moment in the church year that reminds us, more than any other, of the way our religion uses notions of family to understand our relationship with God.
Jesus is, according to the gospels and the epistles, the “son of God.”
This is not really all that surprising.
By its very nature, religion moves to our core, appealing to those things that mean the most to us.
And what, may I ask, moves to the core of our nature more immediately than our intimate family relationships?
Each of us has a mother.
Each of us has a father.
But there is a problem.
To speak of God as “father” may be an attempt to bring about a universal sense of well-being… but if so, it inevitably fails.
This is because fathers, as well as being our fathers, are also human beings – human beings who are capable of being deeply flawed.
When God is called “our Heavenly father” it means one thing to a person who had a loving and engaged Dad, and another thing to the person who had an abusive, violent, or distant father.
As I write this, I see that it’s even more complicated than I expected, because there aren’t just good Dad’s and bad Dad’s.
Each Dad – my own Dad, and, as I think of it – myself-as-Dad too – each Dad is both good and bad.
I’m sure my father loved me, but I don’t fool myself either. He wasn’t mean or violent, but he was distant. Was it his Japanese culture? Or was it the time that he lived in, when men were focused, almost exclusively, on their careers. Or perhaps it was both? Whatever it was, he was often not available to me at times when I felt I needed him.
I would prefer not to think of God that way. As a distant figure, absorbed entirely in other, more important matters.
I would like to imagine God as the kind of father – who my father sometimes was – who gave the full attention of his heart to me.
Needless to say, it is also humbling and more than a little painful to think of my own nature, as a father, being somehow reflective of God’s nature.
I am sure that I’m not the world’s worst father, but neither am I the most exemplary. I hate to imagine God having the same tendency to mean-hearted sarcasm that sometimes makes me feel like an awful parent.
It seems to me that when we speak of God as Father, we want to speak of God as “good” father only.
Not God as bad father.
This good father bad father thing gets right to the heart of a big problem that besets religion.
Not just Christianity, but all theistic religions – religions, that is, that talk about God.
All religions admit that God is beyond what is known.
Yet this does not stop us from wanting to know.
So we use language that we know to talk about something we don’t know.
There is no other way to do it.
The only tools that we have at our disposal to speculate about the unlimited, are our limited minds.
Language and ritual are amazing tools, but they exist within the limitations of human understanding.
If we are not careful, this can get us into real trouble.
One of the most basic assertions of Christianity, for example, is that we humans are made in God’s image.
This is profoundly important because this fundamental assertion teaches us that no matter how downtrodden, distressed, depraved or decrepit a person becomes, that person is, and always will be, something holy — a part of the divine — something of ultimate value.
But when we start understanding God in our terms – when we start talking about God as a father, and think of God as a big old man with a long white beard, we reverse the dynamic, and we begin to make God in our image.
And this, as history has proven time and again, is the most dangerous thing of all.
Too often, when God is made in our image, that God becomes a bad father God. A God who has all the authority and none of the humility. A God who decides who gets to be a member of the country club and who does not. A God who is just as apt to express hate as to express love.
The writer Anne Lamott said it well, when she wrote:
“You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
But even though we smile and acknowledge Lamott’s keen wisdom, we have to admit that it is almost impossible not to create God in our image!
if, as we have already established, the only way we can even try to understand God, is through our limited human tools of understanding, isn’t it simply a given that our God is going to look like us?
What are we to do about this terrible problem?
Human history teaches us that the name of God has been used by people in power to justify the greatest evils of slavery and genocide.
How then are we to be a thinking, moral people?
How can we also claim that we are people of faith?
How can we believe in God without making God in our own image?
**
I have something written here but I thought of something on the way up, and I want to talk about that instead…
When we were doing our cross installation in front of the church, one of the things that was immediately evident to me, was that people were starting to get uncomfortable, and the reason people were starting to get uncomfortable was because of the way we had orchestrated it.
There was a minister who was praying and there were people who were praying, and there was music playing, and each person went up and got on their knees and banged a cross with a rubber mallet into the ground.
And it was taking a long time. It was taking time.
And we realized very quickly that this ritual that we had set was going to take a while, and I realized this quite quickly.
But then, after a certain amount of time it became clear that it was ok.
That in fact getting down on your knees and using the rubber mallet to bang the cross into the ground was something that needed to take time, and as it took that time it made it more clear to us that we weren’t just hammering wood into the ground, but we actually were honoring the people who had died.
So even though our human language and our ritual is clumsy at times, it has the remarkable ability to go right to the core of our nature our understanding of what it means to be alive
what it means to love
and what it means to honor the sacredness of another life.
And that, I hope, is our inheritance that we get from our religion.
An inheritance that is handed down from one generation to another.
An inheritance that we receive as children of God.
Amen