Chapter 17: Can We Talk?
A sermon on Matthew 18 and how to deal with conflict.
Chapter 18: Can We Still Call God Father?
A sermon on the issues around using a male figure for God.
“ The problem isn’t so much the way God is Father. The problem is the way I’m a father. It’s time for men to become the kinds of fathers that God is. If they all were, the question of what to call God wouldn’t go away, but I’m not sure it would seem quite as urgent as it does right now.”
When Jesus uses the word Abba, it is does not mean father in the sense we usually associate with father. “What calling God “Father” really means is that the inner life of God is always a relationship, always an intimate, trusting, dynamic exchange, and so when in the miracle of grace you and I are invited to be in relationship with God we’re invited to join a relationship that’s already going on.” The trinity is not a hierarchy, so God the Father is not at the top of the pyramid.
The constructive characteristics of God the Father are often more associated with females than males (compassion, mercy, etc.) God is NOT a father in any human sense.
Co, why call God Father? “What’s the point of using the term Father if God the Father is so very different from most human fathers? There’s really only one simple reason: Father is the word Jesus used. Father is the word the Second Person of the Trinity used to speak to the First Person.”
“Our own intimate and diverse experiences of God are not what the language of “Father” is finally about. The point is, to say “Father” is to celebrate that we’ve been drawn into Jesus’s experience of being part of the Trinity. And it’s that experience, rather than our own, that saves us.”
Excerpt From: Samuel Wells. “Be Not Afraid.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/_CksC.l