August 21, 2011
"Our Abba in Heaven"
W. Gregory Pope, preaching
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Lord's Prayer Series
Hosea 11:1-4, 8-9; Galatians 4:6-7
The first two words of the Lord’s Prayer are crucial to the understanding of prayer, spirituality, and the life of faith in the way of Jesus.
1. We pray as part of the human family to God the Abba-Father of us all.
The first word is OUR. It is a radical word in our culture of Facebook and MySpace - online “communities” rooted less in “we” than they are in “me.” Twitter is even more self-focused, aiming only at what we have to tell others about ourselves in 140 characters or less. Even the video-game “Wii” is spelled with two “i’s.” And while using your iPad, your iPhone will likely ring.
In this culture centered in the individual we are tempted to make the purpose of spirituality and religion individualistic. While prayer can be an individual practice, it is primarily a community practice. The first word of the Lord’s Prayer is a reminder that we are always praying this prayer with other Christians. We pray as the body of Christ, even when we are alone. John Dominic Crossan says, “The Lord’s Prayer is personal but personal-in-community rather than personal-in-privacy.”1 Together with the second word FATHER Jesus tells us this is a family prayer. We are praying the prayer of God’s family, which is our primary family, the one into which we are baptized, the family made up from all families, nations, races, and cultures.
The prophet Malachi asks: “Do we not all have one Father? Did not one God create us?” (Malachi 2.10) Moses refers to God as the “God of every human spirit” (Num 16.22; 27.15-17). Paul quotes the Greek poets who say we are all “God’s offspring.” (Acts 17.29)
Francis of Assisi teaches us to include all creatures, not just human beings, in God’s family. So he wrote: “All Creatures of Our God and King, lift up your voice and with us sing, Alleluia!”
We sing and pray to the Father of the family whom Jesus taught us to address in the most intimate of terms: “Our Abba.”
2. Our image of God makes us.
Abba - the image of God that pictures an affectionate parent smitten with their newborn daughter or son. It is a radical transformative image of God.
What is your image of God? Our image of God is perhaps the most important aspect of our spiritual formation.2
Franciscan priest Richard Rohr says, “Your image of God creates you.” If you believe in a God whose heart overflows with love, you will most likely be a loving person. If you believe the heart of God is first and foremost one of narrow judgment, you will most likely be a judgmental person.3 If your God is violent, then you can more easily justify your own violence or the violence of your country. We shape our gods, then our gods shape us.
3. God of many images (masculine/feminine, etc.); God above all images
The Bible is full of images for God - some masculine, some feminine; some images are drawn from political life, others from nature and the animal kingdom.
This doesn’t mean we can attribute any image to God. The image matters significantly - image is everything, right? - because it will shape the kind of person we become and how we think of God’s relationship to us and to the world.
What a beautiful image of God as OUR ABBA. It is the calling of a young child for her Daddy. Abba.
However, this wonderful image can be and has been misused in ways that distort who God is.
One of the abuses of this image of God as Father is to say that God is male, and that because God is male, men are more like God than women. There are those who will argue very strongly that since God was in Christ and Christ was a male then God must be male. But Jesus was also a Jew; that doesn’t mean God is a Jew. The Bible does not tell us that “the Word became male;” it says, “the Word became flesh.”
God does not have a male body. God is Spirit. Males are not more like God than females. The opening pages of scripture tell us that both male and female are made in God’s image. God’s Fatherhood is not a matter of gender. God transcends the biology of male and female. “Father” is a human image of God that helps us understand humanity as the one family of God.
There are what we would consider masculine images of God in the Bible; however, some images are clearly feminine. But with so many male preachers we hardly ever hear about them.
The ancient Hebrews did not balk at using feminine imagery to speak of God.
In Isaiah we see God imaged as a woman in labor, and like a mother nursing her children at her breast (66:11). Isaiah compares God’s selfless, sacrificial love for us to that of a mother’s for the child of her womb (49:15). He says that God comforts us as a mother comforts her child (66:13).
Even Jesus uses feminine imagery to describe God. In Luke 15 Jesus not only says God is like a father waiting for his prodigal son to come home, Jesus also says God is like a woman turning her house upside down trying to find her lost coin. God is also compared to a shepherd searching for a lost sheep. Jesus spoke of God’s longing to gather the children of Jerusalem under her wings like a mother hen. God as father, woman, shepherd, mother hen. To confine God to one image fails to be true to the biblical revelation of God.
Feminine imagery of God is not about making God into a goddess. God is not a woman, just as God is not a man. Both male and female are a reflection of God, but none more so than the other.
Now some of you may feel that this is irrelevant and unimportant, that inclusive language about God and humanity is just an issue of political correctness. But it’s a matter of being true to the biblical witness and forming a healthy spirituality. It’s about making sure we do not make an idol of our image of God, believing our image captures the full essence of God. It’s a correction that the church has needed for a long time.
For far too long the language used in church has given the message to some women that they are less than fully human, that God is more accessible to males than to females, or that God is like your earthly father.
For a significant number of people, father has never meant provider, teacher, or guardian. It has meant only an aching absence or an abusing presence. And when God is referred to as “father” there are those who cannot help but transfer to God all those negative feelings and ideas about their earthly father. For many, because of their experience with fathers and men it is impossible for them ever to relate to God as Father in a way that does not harm their understanding of God and sense of self.
There are others with violent untrustworthy fathers for whom the image of God as father is comforting. God becomes the Father they never had. Some are able to look at it that way, but others are not and they need another image of God.
In a healthy spirituality, our images of God change over time and with experience. Sometimes we outgrow them. Sometimes we grow too comfortable with them. A healthy image of God should enable us to know God’s unconditional love for us, to approach God gladly and feel that we are warmly welcomed, to live with a sense of mystery, and to call forth from us selfless acts of sacrificial love for others.4
4. We address God in the most intimate of terms: Abba.
Jesus gives us such an image, teaching us to pray to God as Our Abba.
Even with all these difficulties I would still not suggest we forsake this beautiful image of God as Abba. There’s not anything wrong with the image of God as father, as long as we understand it as Jesus revealed it - in terms of loving trust: God is a father we can trust.
The God that Jesus called Abba, Daddy, is the Father who know us intimately and loves us unconditionally and is always present with us. We can approach God not with fear, scared of an angry, violent, abusive God, but with confidence entering the presence of a loving father’s grace.
Our Abba “in heaven” is not an earthly father. Our Abba redefines fatherhood. Frank Tupper translates Abba as “motherly-father, fatherly-mother.”
5. Be not sentimental. This Abba is “in heaven” and is the ruler and creator. Where is God?
But lest we get sentimental about God there are two other words in this prayer that need our attention: IN HEAVEN. This is not a phrase to locate God, to say God is here and not there. The psalmist pondered the limits of God’s whereabouts and concluded there was nowhere she could flee from the unbounded presence of God’s Spirit.
In Jeremiah 23 God says, “Am I a God who is near and not far off? Can someone hide themselves in hiding places so that I do not see them? Do I not fill the heavens and the earth?” Yes, God fills the heavens and the earth. God is both near and far beyond. There is nowhere to go to hide from the loving sight of God. Paul Tillich is right when he says we are always in the sanctuary. Every place is a holy place simply because God is there. As Teresa of Avila said 500 years ago, “Wherever God is, there is heaven.”5
God is not sitting upon some ivory throne in a palace that has never heard of sin or felt pain. God lives on the streets of inner cities, and homes in the ghetto. God lives in the midst of the brokenness of a middle class family and in the poverty of a family barely surviving. God is everywhere with arms outstretched.
As Merton would tell the young monks of Gethsemane: The presence of God is like walking out of a door into the fresh air. You don’t concentrate on the fresh air. You breathe it. And you don’t concentrate on the sunlight. You just enjoy it. It’s all around you. When you swim, you don’t concentrate on the water. To be in the presence of God is, in a certain sense, like being in water.
Our Abba God who is near is at the same time “in heaven” - the transcendent Holy Other, the Mystery who is greater than we are, high above us in every way, beyond anything we could ever imagine. To call God Abba does not remove the mystery and majesty from God. God said through the prophet Hosea: “For I am God and not mortal. I am the Holy One in your midst.” God is never “buddy, buddy.” We do not relate to God as equals. But we do live in relationship with a God who knows and loves us intimately.
It is good and right to meet the intimate Abba, but we must also meet the One “seated on a throne, high and lifted up” (Isaiah 6). Our Abba “in heaven” is the Source of all life, the One Who rules the whole cosmos.
When a Jew calls God Father he or she almost always adds some other words which conserve the majesty and the glory of God - like King or Lord or Ruler of my life.6 The great Jewish prayer Abinu Malkenu has 44 petitions all beginning, “Our Father, our King.”
So in the Lord’s Prayer we pray not only to our Abba Father, but to our Abba who is “in heaven,” the Creator of all there is, whose name is to be held sacred.
6. Our Abba
The great miracle is that the Creator of all that is, the One high and lifted up, our Abba who is “in heaven” has come down to earth and is in our midst. God comes immanently near and walks among us, sits beside us, intimately cares for us like we were a vulnerable child.
Jesus teaches us to call God “Abba,” likely to be a child’s first word to a parent. The God who gives us our first breath is also our first word.
This was, in some ways, for those in Jesus’ day, a radically new understanding of God. Though God is referred to in Hebrew Scripture as “the Father of Israel,” Jesus moves beyond the formal “Father” to the almost incomprehensible “Daddy,” leading us toward the tender nearness of God, prayed from a deep awareness of our dependence and need of God.
Thinking of God as Abba doesn’t mean that we’re always to have a childlike relationship with God. God wants our relationship to grow and mature.
God is called or addressed as father 15 times in the Hebrew Scriptures. In all cases, the prevailing structure of patriarchy is presupposed.7 Jeremias says there is not a single instance of God being addressed as “abba” in Jewish prayers. Abba has nothing to do with patriarchy.
Its significance is intimacy. Its intent is to establish a bond of deep affection and familiarity between God and creation.
And what a difference this makes in our prayer life. Many times we are hesitant to come to God in prayer with our sin and guilt. In the deep places of our hearts we wonder if we will even be accepted by God.
But as Paul wrote so beautifully to the Galatians, we no longer need to enter God’s presence as frightened slaves, but rather as God’s sons and daughters. We have been adopted by God and enjoy the freedom of calling God “Abba.”
In the words of George Buttrick. Jesus made the address “redemptively intimate.” We come to God whose very heart is love, a love that is accepting, giving, and forgiving; a constant and unconditional love. God’s thoughts toward us are good and loving and gentle and understanding. We can come to God, fully expecting compassion and kindness, understanding and affection, strength and comfort.
How wonderful it is to know that there is Someone who really understands; One who knows all about us, even the very worst, and loves us anyway. As the psalmist says, “You have searched me, O God, and known me. You are acquainted with all my ways.” And God loves us anyway.
Merton writes: It is God’s love that warms me in the sun and God’s love that sends the cold rain. It is God’s love that feeds me in the bread I eat and God that feeds me also by hunger and fasting. It is God who breathes on me with light winds off the river and in the breezes out of the wood.8
Did you hear those words from the prophet Hosea, words from the heart of God to Israel and to us?
When Israel was a child, I loved him.
It was I who taught Ephraim to walk,
I took them up in my arms.
I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love.
I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks.
I bent down to them and fed them.
Yet the more I called them, the more they went from me.
My people are bent on turning from me.
Oh, how can I give you up?
How can I hand you over, O Israel?
My heart recoils within me.
My compassion grows warm and tender.
This is the God to whom we pray. We therefore never have to doubt our worth. In baptism your identity was made known. Like Jesus, so also for us: The Abba experience begins in baptism. The voice from heaven says: “You are my beloved daughter, my beloved son, in whom I take delight.” God has deemed us worthy to be members of God’s own family.
To know God as Abba is to feel as though God were cradling you in tender arms and holding you tight. It is to feel divine tears of compassion flowing over your heart.9 What more could we ever need!
Is this the God to whom you’ve been praying? Or are you still searching for a God different than the one who judges your every move ready to punish and shame you? Are you searching for the God who made you and loves you without condition and waits ready to embrace your wounded heart?
Well, the One you’ve been searching for, the One you’ve always wanted, is really here - our Abba in heaven - and our Abba cares for you more than you could ever imagine.
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1. John Dominic Crossan, The Greatest Prayer: Rediscovering the Revolutionary Message of the Lord’s Prayer, HarperOne, 2010, 47
2. Albert Haase, Living the Lord’s Prayer: The Way of the Disciple, InterVarsity Press, 2009, 20
3. I heard Rohr speak of this in a seminar at the Center for Action and Contemplation, Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 5, 2011
4. Haase, 17, 25
5. Teresa of Avila, The Way of Perfection, written 1565-1566, published by Paraclete Press, 2009, 114
6. William Barclay, The Lord’s Prayer, Westminster John Knox, 1964, 42
7. Herman C. Waetjen, Praying the Lord’s Prayer, Trinity Press, 1999, 51
8. Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, New Directions, 1961, 16
9. Haase, 24