Father.

Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

March 27, 2022 + Smithtown

I.

When I served a church in Boston I attended a presbytery meeting where they  debated the appropriateness of calling God by the title, "Father."  One side of this debate had people coming to a microphone and waxing sentimentally about how we should call God father because God was a loving daddy, just like their own wonderful fathers who meant so much to them.  The other side featured presbyters tearfully bemoaning the fact that calling God "father" only served to remind them of their own fathers who were terribly abusive and neglectful.  They couldn't call God father.

I felt frustrated by this conversation because, well, when did theology become a referendum on our parents?  My dad was great.  But I never confused him with God, for crying out loud, let alone vice versa; and he was a minister!  I mean, we're Presbyterians: we do not believe God to be merely a super-duper version of a human.  God is beyond our comprehension.  We can at best only try to make helpful analogies and use careful metaphors, images, and symbols; and that hardly even gets us close to beginning to have any hope of understanding God.

Jesus and the Bible use a lot of very different, sometimes even contradictory, images for God, because together they hopefully throw light on the kind of relationship God has with us.  But to assume that calling God a "father" means that our experience of a father defines who God is for us, doesn't make any sense to me.

Furthermore, using a particular metaphor for God is not supposed to somehow validate, or divinize, or authorize, or prioritize the literal thing being used as a metaphor.  At Jesus' baptism, God appears as a bird.  But we don't therefore declare that all birds, or even all doves, are somehow godlike.  Jesus calls God a shepherd, but we have never instituted a "divine right of shepherds," or placed them in an exalted social position because they are supposedly like God.  We certainly have not given hens or, housewives, or lambs, or rocks, or mighty fortresses, some kind of special, privileged divine status either.   

The only instances in which we decide that the literal thing we are employing as a metaphor must therefore be specially blessed and godlike are when we compare God to a powerful man: mainly a father or a king.  In those cases, we manage to declare that because we talk about God as a "father" or a "king," that therefore the human fathers and rulers in our lives are somehow due the reverence, obedience, authority, and status we accord to God.  It should come as no surprise that this interpretation was developed and enforced by... fathers and kings.

In the Western church of which we are a part, this corruption of the biblical metaphors was further compounded by some medieval theologians who decided that not only was God a Father, he was a particularly bad one: abusive, cruel, heartless, and violent, so paranoid and ruthless that he will punish with eternal torture people who dare to cross him, even over the most minor technicality.  This father even demanded the torture, suffering, and bloody death of his own son to placate his psychotic rage over his wounded honor.  For some Christians, this is actually the gospel!  

It is no wonder we have had generations of people who love Jesus, but God?  Not so much.  If this is the God that people think they are praying to when they call God father, I can see why they have a problem with it.  But the idea that God is a homicidal tyrant who implicitly gives some kind of perverse divine authorization to vicious despots is not the God Jesus depicts in the father in today's reading.

II.

Jesus uses many metaphors and images for God in his ministry.  We get three of them here in Luke 15, culminating in the waiting, loving, forgiving father of this parable.  Jesus uses the image of God as a father often, including in his essential and model prayer, of course.  It was at the time a fairly radical thing to do because it claims an intimacy with and connection to God that is close to identity.  Jesus' audiences frequently react with astonishment and even alarm when he talks like this.  When he calls God his Father, people assume Jesus is practically making himself equal to God, and they occasionally say so. 

Jesus uses other metaphors for God, of course, including some explicitly feminine ones.  A couple of weeks ago we talked about God the mother hen.  Earlier in this chapter we see God represented as a housewife.  People understood back then that God's Wisdom and Spirit are both feminine, but that gets lost in English.  The one  he uses probably the most, though, is "Father."

I wonder if this isn't because it describes a figure and relationship in dire need of redemption.  Fathers and kings were the top dogs, front and center in his society.  They wielded the most power, owned most of the wealth, and generally controlled everything.  Therefore, they did the most damage.  He devotes a lot of his ministry to cleaning up the messes of bad fathers and kings.  Jesus lived in a patriarchal culture... just like we do, by the way, for all we have done in the last few decades to slightly mitigate it.  

Jesus knows that the hegemony of men is a big problem.  Three of the gospels make a point of stressing that Jesus does not come into the world because of the will or action of a man; it was between Mary and God.  So there was no man out there who could appear and claim custody or biological parental rights over Jesus.  He even says there will be no fathers in the Kingdom of God, and that we should not call anyone our father, which is his way of saying that his beloved community will have no bosses, no kings, no tyrants, no emperors, no self-important, entitled, privileged, pampered boys who get their own way all the time.  In all the gospels Jesus' authority is exercised in ways precisely and pointedly opposite to the ways fathers usually operated: he was non-violent, non-dominating, non-controlling, and non-owning.  

Given everything his ministry is about, it is inconceivable that Jesus intends that calling God "father" mean he empowers men.  In fact, he more likely calls God "father" to actually negate and critique human fatherhood.  He presents God as like an alternative father.  We call God father because we need to have a good father somewhere.  We don't call God "mother" quite as much because, well, we don't have to.  Human mothers are generally doing just fine.  They're not out there starting wars and exploiting workers and raping the earth and beating up their spouses and sexually abusing children.  Mothers do not need a heavenly replacement.  

III.

In this parable, when Jesus does clarify what he means when he calls God "Father," he confronts us with a kind of father unlike any father we have ever experienced, one whom we would not necessarily approve of as a good father.  This is neither the loving daddy or the abusive tyrant.  What Jesus shows us is someone else. 

I mean, look at this guy!  People in Jesus' time, and also in ours if we let ourselves, would notice what a spectacular weirdo the father is in this parable.  The younger son is so irresponsible, disrespectful, and mean that he demands to be paid his whole inheritance in advance, which is basically wishing his father were dead!  And the father responds by just unconditionally giving him the cash?  Seriously?  And when the son goes off and predictably proceeds to blow it all and come slinking back home, the father not only accepts him back, again unconditionally, but runs down the driveway to welcome him after frantically looking out the window for him every few minutes for the whole time he was away!  For an adult male in that culture to run at all was considered shameful!  And he not only accepts the returning son; he throws a huge, expensive party for him!   

The father in this parable appears to suffer from some kind of dementia.  He is unimaginably, irrationally, impossibly forgiving and generous!  This is not our sentimental memories of our loving daddy.  My dad would not have put up with this.  (Not even from my little brother.)  He loved us and part of that love was providing limits and boundaries and rules and necessary consequences for bad behavior.  Where in this parable is the courageous and difficult "tough love" that real good parenting often requires?  I mean, wouldn't love really mean asking the son to show, beyond the pretty, well-rehearsed speech, that he really had changed and come to himself?

The previous little parables in this chapter are the same.  What actual shepherd jeopardizes ninety-nine valuable sheep to go off to find one that wandered off?  That would be crazy!  What housewife tears her home apart to find a single lost nickel, then invites twenty people over for dinner because she found it in the couch?" 

When Jesus calls God "Father," he means God is like this crazy old guy in the parable who can't help himself: He has to give.  He has to welcome.  He has to cherish.  He has to forgive.  He has to love.  He has to pour out his heart for the beloved, especially when they take the trouble to come home in humility... but you know he would have done it anyway. 

This is what Jesus means when he calls God "Father."  He shows us God's nature as the One who is so wildly profligate and promiscuous and generous that he even makes the rain fall and the sun shine on good people and bad people alike, who provides everybody oxygen to breathe and food to eat.  God's very essence is eternal, self-emptying, unconditional love.  God pours that love out in creation so that it becomes the ground and character of everything.

IV.

That's what is going on on the cross, where Jesus demonstrates for us how God's arms are stretched out in welcome and blessing of the whole creation, and how God's very life-blood gets poured out on the Earth to permeate, infuse, fill, and sanctify everything.  

How tragic is it if we decide to see instead Jesus placating a cruel father who demanded his blood as a condition of forgiving us.  It reminds me of the older brother in this story, who lives with this father receiving this flow of his goodness and bounty every day, and yet who has nevertheless convinced himself he is a slave forced to work for it all!  He chooses to see this same pathologically generous and forgiving father as a merciless abuser demanding incessant labor!  And now he is rewarding bad behavior!    

It is we humans, invariably led by men, who choose to manufacture and live by lies about God's honor and wrath and retributive justice and demand for productivity.  We invent a violent, punishing god who authorizes us to oppress and exploit others.  While the real God, the God of love and forgiveness, we crucify. 

At the same time, even in our acts of unspeakable cruelty and injustice, like the horror of crucifixion, only serve in the end to reveal God's Presence continuing to shine infinite blessing and goodness on the Earth and on all people.  God's love transforms our evil into goodness and our death into life, whether we like it or understand it or not.  The truth always shines through our lies; God's reality always wins over our fantasies.  Sometimes it just takes a while, is all. 

And God is always ready and willing and eager to welcome us back home, no matter how comprehensively we have screwed up, no matter how many times we fail rehab, no matter how much damage we do to ourselves and others, no matter what bad decisions we have made.  This is good news indeed for wayward children and parents alike.  We can't stop God's goodness; working against it only brings pain and sorrow into the world; so why not go along with it?  Why not do things God's way, as counter-intuitive as it seems to us?

In response to the ignorance, paranoia, and hatred we experience from human authorities, Jesus witnesses the true king and true father, the true sovereign and true authority, the true Source and Creator -- and the true Mother, Shepherd, housewife, bird, wind, light, rock -- who overcomes, negates, and overrules our illusory, egocentric agendas, including the belief that anyone gets to dominate anyone else.  As the true Lord, God erases and washes away our self-centered patterns and habits of lordship, replacing them with humility and service.   

That's the God who calls us as disciples and witnesses.  That's the God whose  agents we become by the power of the Holy Spirit.  That's the God who gathers us into one community of believers, who trust in God and follow Jesus' Way of love.

It is through us now, the people who have been redeemed from lies and restored to the truth, that God's love -- God's forgiveness, generosity, compassion, blessing, and joy -- continues to pour into the world.  All we have to do is let it.  All we have to do is come to ourselves.  All we have to do is come home. 

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