Our Father In Heaven

Over the next few months, I am going to be posting some reflections on the Lord's prayer that are the basis of a sermon series I am giving at St. Mary's University on Wednesday nights. Tonight we begin with, "Our Father in heaven." The designation of God as "Father" is always a bit of an issue, and particularly so right now at places like Princeton where the gender inclusive language sprung up again. Is this prayer claiming that God is a man? What about the other questions for people who have serious "Father" issues? Is this prayer somehow a painful reminder for those who have been abused or abandoned? Perhaps. Lets look a bit at the prayer, and see what we can see. To begin with, Jesus is not calling us to pray to an abstract, ideal, Platonic, Father. Rather, the opening of this prayer surprising tells us something of ourselves- we are God's children. The "our" in this prayer is significant. We are God's children, and through Jesus we can call God Father. This leads to the next observation, namely that the designation of Father, is uniquely Trinitarian. Without the Son, there is no Father, and in fact without the relationship between the two that allows them to communicate as Father and Son, there is no Spirit. All of this to say, that while we sometimes hear "Father" and cringe at our own histories of violence and neglect, we are challenged to overcome those histories. We are called to witness this specific Father, of this specific Son, and in the strength of the Holy Spirit, proclaim our Father.

"When Christians pray, 'Our Father,' we are not merely declaring that God created us. We are saying that, in Jesus Christ, God has saved us." (Hauerwas and Willimon, Lord, Teach Us)

The second point worth unpacking a bit is the "in Heaven" portion of our prayer. I believe that when Christians pray the Lord's prayer, to the extent that they ever think about the "in heaven" part, they think of this as a designation of place. We tend to hear "in heaven" as God's address. This is, of course, no doubt true on some level, but we miss the wealth of Scripture's witness if we are content to simply stop here. I am convinced, that if we take some more time with our Old Testaments, we will uncover that "in heaven" is not simply a designation of God's place, but also of God's person. Heaven moves from simply being where God dwells, to being intimately connected to who God is. The Hebrew God of Abraham (Gn. 14:19-22), Moses (Ex. 20:22, Dt 4:39) and Ezra (Ezra 1:2, 5:11-12) is the God who is "in heaven." When Jesus invokes this phrase, and we follow his lead in repeating it, we are conjuring up all of these Old Testament stories right into our simple prayer. Jesus has masterfully carried in the whole of the Old Testament with two simple words: in heaven. It is not simply where God is, it is who God is.
We began by acknowledging the difficulty around this phrase, "Our Father in Heaven," by hearing the real concerns about God being a man's name, and by acknowledging the terrible images that can come flooding in on us when we even mention the label Father. I think the Lord's prayer is able to hear these criticisms, and hurts, and respond in love. To the question of gender the Lord's prayer says lets not talk about all men every where, lets talk about Jesus' father. To the children of absentee Dad's the Lord's prayer tells story, after story, after story of our Father working on behalf of his children. To the victims of abuse at the hands of fathers, we catch a glimpse of our Father in heaven, and are reminded that heaven is not only the place of comfort and hope, but also of justice and judgement. Our Father in heaven will side with the victims, and God can not be bribed or bought off. This God is not an abstract unknown deity, but rather has a long history, a people, has been faithful even unto death, and is more than worthy of being prayed to as "Our Father in heaven."
UPDATE Here is the audio of this talk: