Our Father Who Art in Heaven

I’m writing this on April 23, St. George’s Day, which also happens to be the day my father, George, died. I felt when he died that some of the light and love had gone out of the universe. I’ve been sorrowing over losing him today, even though if he were still alive, he’d be 102 and not that happy about it. Perhaps my heart is softer this year because I’ve been listening to Morning Prayer from Canterbury Cathedral since Easter, and it always ends with “Our Father,” the prayer our Lord taught us (Matthew 6).

I know my local congregation has worked to avoid giving God a particular gender, so we’ve avoided “father”-language. We avoid calling God “Father” because too many fathers have acted like they were God or like their authority, however they use it, is approved by God.

But I realized, after several weeks of saying “Our Father, who art in heaven” that my congregation’s commitment also incorporates a loss as well. One of the amazing things Jesus taught us in this prayer was that we have an intimate family relationship with God Almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth.

This changes everything for people whose main access to God is through priests or pastors. This involves God personally in our lives as a parent is inextricably involved in a child’s life.

St. Paul in Ephesians 3 says, “I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ from whom the whole family on heaven and earth is named…that he would grant you to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” He emphasizes inclusiveness and love and being filled up with God, rooting it in God’s fatherhood. We are all family because we have the same father.

The story of the prodigal son paints a father who sets his child free to explore the world and who welcomes his child home from failure with a party. This is the kind of father God is. (Luke 15)

Dad was a good person and a loving father. Because I projected him onto my
understanding of God, I trusted that I could explore ideas and ask questions without fear. Dad always liked a good discussion and seemed curious about a lot of things and willing to entertain odd ideas. At the same time, he was flawed. Some of those flaws hurt me and made it hard for me to trust God’s love for me. I thought I could embarrass God by my behavior, I thought God would send me away if I was too much trouble, and I thought God would not be with me when I was most needy.

George MacDonald, nineteenth-century Scottish writer and preacher, encouraged his readers to believe that God was better than they could imagine—to imagine the best father ever and then believe that God was better than that. When I pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven,” that’s who I am praying to: The God who is Father to all, with none of my dad’s flaws and with all his good qualities and more, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Series on Meeting Jesus, part 2

2) Jesus Shows Us the Father

The next step in the book was to explore Jesus’s relationship with God.  At the center of Jesus’s life was a profound and continuous relationship with the Spirit of God.  Nothing was more important to Jesus than this relationship.  By living it in front of us, Jesus taught us to think of God as our Father—the way a Father ought to be—and to enter ourselves into a transforming relationship with an immediately present God.

As Dallas Willard puts it, our Father in heaven means that God is immediately with us in the space that surrounds us, the first heaven—God in whom we live and move and have our being, as Paul says (Conspiracy, p. 57; Acts 17:28).

In the following scriptures (and it is all scripture, except the last paragraph), be open to noticing which ones you most connect with.

Love your enemies, bless them who curse you, do good to them that hate you and pray for them who are lie about you and bully you so that you may be children of our Father who makes the sun rise on the evil and the good and rains on the just and the unjust.

Be your best self, just as God is God’s best self, merciful as God is merciful.

Be merciful, give alms without showing off; be private, and let your Father who is with you be your witness and give you whatever reward he chooses.

Pray inwardly to your Father, who is also inwardly with you, and don’t think of prayer as a means of controlling God but instead trust God to know your needs.

Pray to our Father, absolutely near to us, asking that God’s character will be venerated and respected, that God will rule and be obeyed here and now by humans as by the invisible servants of God. Ask for the needs of the day. Ask for what we owe God and our neighbor to be forgiven and to forgive those who owe us. Ask God to lead us around trials that invite us to mistrust or miss the mark, and ask God to draw us close and rescue us from the power of evil. For the kingdom, the power and the glory belong to our Father forever.

Know that forgiving others their moral lapses makes it possible for our Father to forgive yours.  Not forgiving keeps you in the power of tormenters, so forgive from your heart.  This is how our Father’s universe works. Father, forgive them, for they do not see or know what they are doing.

Fast privately, not obviously, and your intimately present Father will see and reward you.

Our Father who is immediately present with us knows you need food and clothing and will take care of you, so you don’t need to give all your energy and desires to those things.  Instead, give your energy to craving for God, to pursuing God as King, to doing things God’s way. Even flawed earthly parents give gifts to their children that are healthful rather than harmful, and how much more will our good Father give good things to those that ask?

It’s not enough to call Jesus “Lord,” or even to do powerful deeds in Jesus’s name; what is important is to do the will of our immediately present Father.

It isn’t what a person eats and excretes that defiles the person. It is ignoring what God says to do in favor of human tradition.  Every plant which our Father who is right here hasn’t planted will be rooted up.

Our Father wants not one of the little children to perish.

When we are in conflict with another person, whether that person is offended by us or he or she offends us, keep it private, or at most two or three persons go with you to talk.  But if you two can agree on what to ask for from God, who is right there with you, God will do it.

We follow Jesus, drinking his cup and baptized with his baptism, but our Father decides how to distribute reward; likewise only our Father knows our last day and hour.

When our Father does reward, it is because we imitate God’s actions: we give food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, clothes to the naked, companionship to the sick and imprisoned.

Recognize that really only God is our true Father.

Pray like Jesus to our Father when we face suffering: Papa, Daddy, You can do anything, so please let me avoid this; nonetheless, not what I want, but what you want for me. Father, I entrust my spirit to you.

Write down one or two experiences in which you have experienced the immediate presence of God.  If this is not your experience, feel free to say so.  Perhaps you will have opportunity to share your experience with someone else.

Series on Meeting Jesus, part 1

I recently read the book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time by Marcus J. Borg.  I was very interested to discover in it his own version of personal faith, but even more interested in the organization of the book and how it might work to organize my thoughts as I prepared to lead a camp of seasoned Christians. Borg himself was challenged by someone who said, “Talk to us about Jesus, and make it personal” (p. 3).  So my first step was to think about my own journey with Jesus through the images I have carried at different times.  

1) How We Imagine Jesus

Here is a short version of my own growth in the way I imagine Jesus. 

As a very young child, I remember less about Jesus than about God, and I saw God as likely to abandon me if I messed up, which I surely did over and over daily.  Then in grade school, the Christmas song “Jesus, our brother kind and good” came to live in my imagination. In a missionary boarding school for high school, I roomed with several Pentecostals, including a girl who cut her own body when she despaired.  She challenged me to find where in the Bible it said that God loves her specifically.  I told her the Bible says in many places that God loves us, and that she was included. At another time during my time with her, we were praying after lights out, and I saw myself as one of the crowd that crucified Jesus, and I knew that Jesus prayed for God to forgive that crowd who didn’t know what they were doing. So my “kind, good brother,” Jesus forgave me.

Slightly later in my adolescence, I expressed publicly my desire to love God completely and experienced more completely the extent of God’s love.  So I came into young adulthood with a picture of Jesus as a brother, kind and good, with whom I shared a loving Father.  This was confirmed by my study of the book of Hebrews, which identifies Jesus as our elder brother. The next really significant development was several decades later, when I read and reread the book of Mark 3 times, start to finish.  The Jesus I saw there was good, to be sure, and kind, to be sure, but also expressed anger, spoke his mind, and had determination and a sense of calling that made him so much more rounded as a person, and so much more compelling and attractive.  I thought, if I’d known him when he was historically here, I’d have followed him.  Reading The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard also added to my imagined picture of Jesus.  Willard said that Jesus is smart and capable.  And then I added to that picture the warrior on the white horse of Revelation who defeats evil and the evil one and invite us to an eternal wedding supper surrounded by trees that bring healing to all the nations.

So when I imagine Jesus now, I see a sturdy, strong, opinionated, smart, wise, available, communicative, loving, tender, forgiving winner who is the older brother I always wanted and who is the exact image of the Father we both share. 

You might like to take some time now to note down the important steps in how your inwardly held picture of Jesus developed.  If you feel comfortable doing so, share it with someone.