Romans 1:16-17 – “Yes, We Can!” – May 19, 2019

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It’s hard to know where to begin with Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, better known as Romans. On one hand, it is his most sophisticated articulation of his theology, written late in his ministry after refining his message with years of active missionary work. It also probably influenced the Protestant Reformation more than any other single book of the Bible with its emphasis on salvation by faith alone.

On the other hand, Romans can be a daunting read as Paul takes a deep dive into human sinfulness and the nuances of faith with somewhat esoteric arguments based on assumptions we might not have. Further, anyone who has been a victim of anti-gay teaching and preaching in the church may know that just a bit further on in this same first chapter of Romans, we find a passage that has been and is still used repeatedly to bludgeon, shame, and exclude LGBTQ people. And though we can accurately state that Paul did not have a modern understanding of sexual orientation or knowledge of same-gender romantic relationships that were based on love, it is also probably fair to say that even if he had that knowledge, he would have come to the same conclusions as he did. In fact, that particular passage from Romans 1 is one of the passages that led me in my own journey to conclude there are some things in the Bible that do not reflect God’s will for us today, but instead reflect the biases and prejudices of the flawed, sinful people God used to write the Bible. And though the line between the author’s prejudice and God’s will is not always clear, we as modern people of faith have the responsibility to try to figure out which is which.

Genesis 1:26-30 – “Faith and Veganism” – August 27, 2017

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Genesis 1:20-23 – “Diving Deep and Flying High” – August 20, 2017

We are invited by God to dive deep like the creatures of the sea. We are invited by God to soar high like the creatures of the air. I know that is quite an interpretive and metaphorical leap to take with this passage. But, there isn’t much else to do with it. “On Day 5 God made birds and fish.

We could talk about the structural organization of the 7 days of creation and how the creative activities on Days 1, 2 and 3 line up perfectly with the creative activities on Days 4, 5 and 6. That is very interesting, but what kind of application does that have for us today?

We could also talk about the abundance of animals described in Day 5. The great flocks of birds to fill the sky and the swarms of fish in the sea. We could use that as a reminder of the original abundance of creation, and how we are called to preserve and even restore that abundance. That’s a really good message, but I’ve talked a few times already in this sermon series about the importance of creation care and I will touch on it some more next week.

So, today I’m going to metaphorically dive in, or interpretively take off, and say that Day 5 of creation invites us to dive deep like the creatures of the sea–diving below the surface of our normal consciousness–and to fly high through faith like the birds of the air.

Exodus 12:1-3 – “Black Lives Matter and Communion” – October 2, 2016

There is a vigorous debate happening in American society right now between people who say that “black lives matter” and people who say that “all lives matter.” I think most of you know the reasoning behind both statements. “All lives matter” is actually a response to “black lives matter.” People who want to say “all lives matter” point out that in fact all life is important. It doesn’t matter what color you are, your life is important. Your life matters.

Black Lives Matter advocates actually agree with this, but point out that in reality black lives in our country are valued less than white lives. Black lives are clearly valued less by the criminal justice system at every step of the process, from being stopped by the police, to use of lethal and non-lethal force by the police, to conviction and incarceration rates. Black lives are valued less in the education system when schools with mostly black children have fewer resources than schools with mostly white children. Black lives are valued less in the workplace when people with black sounding names can’t even get an interview. Black Lives Matter advocates say that it is true that all lives should matter the same, but in American society all lives don’t matter same. Black lives are devalued so it must be said that “black lives matter”.

Revelation Sermon Series – “Unveiling Empire” – Chapters 16-18 – July 19, 2015

We are going to look mostly at chapter 18 of the Book of Revelation today. But, just to keep us in context within this summer sermon series I want to briefly walk through chapters 16 and 17.

Chapter 16 of Revelation describes the last of three sets of seven plagues. We have heard in this series that Revelation should not be read as predictions about the future. It is not a weather forecast that forgot to mention the dates it was predicting. It is not a schedule of events to come. Revelation is the creative portrayal by the early Christian community of the Roman Empire and the consequences of living by the values of Empire. They saw the Empire as powerful, oppressive, violent, obscenely wealthy and most importantly persuasive and seductive. The early Christians were worried not so much that the Roman Empire would persecute them although that was a concern. They were more worried that the Roman Empire would convince them that power, wealth and violence were the highest values and the values demonstrated by Jesus of self-sacrifice, service, compassion were worthless

Reflections on Trip to Haiti – October 6, 2013

For a variety of reasons, seen and unforseen, our latest trip to Haiti allowed us to see and learn more about the country than on past trips. We enjoyed plentiful time with the girls and boys of Kay Papa Nou and Unity House. In addition, we saw more of downtown Port-au-Prince, drove through more upscale suburbs, and traveled into a very rural section of Haiti.

Compared to previous trips, my impressions were similar or even confirmed. Haiti always makes me think of chaos. However, let me be clear that I’m not saying Haitian culture is chaotic. As an outsider, it seemed chaotic to me upon arrival, but it takes only a few days to notice the ordering of everyday life rising to the surface. People go about their business each day: They do jobs if they can find them. They gather things to sell and take to market. They exchange goods or services for money. They wash their clothes, themselves, their homes and their little spaces of business. Even the harrowing Haitian traffic follows an order that moves people through intersections without traffic lights and gets the elderly across streets without crosswalks. So it is not cultural chaos that keeps rising to my consciousness when I visit Haiti. It is a more existential chaos common to all people of the earth, every culture, every nation. In Haiti, this chaos of existence is more visible and oppressive. The culture developed from the chaos in ways that kept it transparent.

I would compare this existential chaos to an ocean where human culture is a system of rafts tied together floating on the surface. Religion. Family. Friendships. Homes. Jobs. Government. Values—These are the rafts that people tie together to stay afloat on the chaotic ocean of existence. In Haiti, many of these rafts are minimal. They are mere sticks and branches tied together with twine. The chaotic water of life sometimes seeps through and swamps them. The rafts sink perilously beneath the surface and then rise again and again. The lines tying one raft to another that make up the culture are thin and worn. Yet, even this tenuous existence functions to serve the purpose of ordering life, giving it meaning and carrying it forward. This rickety, impoverished structure of the cultural flotilla is not the real issue. The issue is that in Haiti, the flotilla of impoverished rafts are thwarted by larger, stronger, well-built boats crushing through them. In addition, a few luxurious yachts smash about in the midst of the flotilla without concern. The issue is the social and economic disparity. Disparities that exist globally, usually behind a veil of geographic separation, are exposed in terrifying nakedness within the confines of that half an island in the Caribbean called Haiti. The disparity exposes the chaos.

Let me illustrate this deeper reality by talking about some real and hypothetical births of different children in Haiti. Here is the question that haunts me as I reflect on this existential chaos: what reason dictates the circumstances in which any given Haitian child will be born? Working with the children at Kay Papa Nou and Unity House sensitizes me to the place of children in particular. These children are happy and cared for. They are fed, sheltered, loved and educated by David and Dani. Though, as you heard recently, education is becoming more expensive, so they may not be able to send the older children to higher grades unless they have more resources. Nevertheless, the children who somehow managed to get into Kay Papa Nou and Unity House have the things they need to survive and grow.

But, we also went to visit another orphanage to see what life was like there, (the one where we stayed during Govans’ first trip to Haiti, St. Joseph’s). Since that first visit, it was destroyed in the earthquake and has been replaced with a multi-million-dollar facility. St. Joseph’s is well connected to generous Catholic benefactors and skillfully administered by its founder who has a flair for telling their story and opening people’s pocketbooks. And can you imagine how many boys live at St. Joseph’s new multi-million dollar facility? Sixteen. Only 16 boys live in these multi-story, relatively luxurious accommodations—while 40 boys and girls at Kay Papa Nou scrape by without enough to educate all the children. For me, that’s where the chaos comes in. Who decides which child will be accepted into St. Joseph’s? Who decides which child will get into Kay Papa Nou? Who decides which children will grow up on the street? This existential chaos quickly moves us toward disturbing theological implications.

Another child is born to a family that can barely support her. She is born in a bare one-room cinderblock house; it has no windows or door. In a run-down part of Port-au-Prince, it is not the worst slum, but it is very poor. The child’s mother has no job but sells a few things from a basket on the side of an unpaved dusty road. This child will one day do exactly what her mother does, perhaps with the same basket on the same dusty road. Education is not a possibility for her. Even sufficient food is uncertain. Life is lived on a tightrope. Who decided she would be born in these circumstances?

Another child is born to a family in the middle-class neighborhood of Petionville in Port-au-Prince. Her father provides for his family with a job as a customs agent at the airport. Her mother runs a store that sells drinks and household goods. The child born to this family will be well fed and educated. She will have some expendable income for a few luxuries. She will also have access to the family’s connections and, therefore, one day will get a job to support her own family. Who decides she would be born into this kind of family?

Another child is born three hours from Port-au-Prince in the rural Haitian countryside in a one-room house made of sticks with mud walls, a dirt floor, and a rusty metal roof. He will enjoy the richness of the natural world and the bounty of the land, at least when it rains. But, limited access to markets or education will define this child’s life. He will mostly eat when the land produces, supplemented by what little they can sell in far-off marketplaces. Who decides that this child and the millions like him should have these challenges?

Another child is born in the uppermost class of Haitian society—the one-tenth of one percent. His family owns a large company. He will have expendable income all his life and will spend it on luxuries like brand-name clothing, expensive phones, and cars. He will live most of his days walled off from the poor neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince and protected by armed guards. Sometimes he is driven through those poor neighborhoods, but the car windows are closed, doors locked, and air conditioning on. His family will have access to the highest offices of government so they can insure their continued prosperity through public policy decisions. Who decides which child gets into the highest one-tenth of one percent?

This offensive disparity is the chaos I’m talking about. The universe at a deep level seems to be totally chaotic, so we try to order our little part of it on the surface by tying together our little rafts of jobs and religion and families and culture just above the tumultuous depths below. We all do this. But in places like Haiti, the contrasts are jarring. Around every corner some new injustice vomits itself onto our consciousness. The rafts provide minimal sustenance as they float beside strong boats which occasionally cross paths with elaborate yachts. And the oceans of injustice heave and lurch beneath it all as everyone tries to hold it together.

Many people believe that our fortunes and prosperity are determined by some divine will. God blesses some with wealth. Money is a blessing, and every level of society believes this. Even the most impoverished person can believe that God gives blessings with dollar signs or an extra meal.   But, if that is how God operates, then that God appears to me to be a master of injustice. Such a God would seem to be a sadistic distributor of blessings given the injustice of the world. I don’t believe in such a God. Given the evidence made so plain in places like Haiti, I don’t always know what kind of God I do believe in, but it is not one who decides one child will be born into extreme wealth, a few will be born into  the upper class and multitudes will be born into extreme poverty. I attribute those things to chaos.

However, one thing is clear. The choices we make as individuals, communities, and societies define how we will float together on the surface of the chaos. It is true that we don’t need that much to stay afloat and stay together—some logs tied together, some strong lines to bind us to one another. But, though we don’t need that much, we should all have access to the same raft-building materials. And we don’t get that access by our birth. Therefore, our choices do matter. We can choose generosity. We can choose to share our raft-building materials. We can choose compassion and selflessness and the common good. We can choose to govern ourselves by laws that protect the most vulnerable, so that those in the yachts don’t pull sticks out of the most rickety rafts sinking into the chaos. But, that is the really tough part. Governing and organizing is not easy. It takes courage. It takes hope. It takes faith. It takes all of these to believe that such efforts can work, that such choices can make a better, more orderly life for all of us as we float along the surface of the chaos.

We may be mistaken when we think that God is the ocean that is the universe.  We may be mistaken that God is the all powerful divine will behind it all. We may be mistaken to think that there really is some order to the chaos that we just can’t discern.

Maybe our thinking about God is too big for our britches. Instead, maybe God is here on the surface of the chaos with us, in the sharing we choose, in the way we protect and honor those born with no raft. God is in the way we pull together and stand up to the yachts and require them to share even when they refuse.

God is not the chaos. God is the order we create by our choices. God is great when we choose order and fairness, generosity and sharing. God is great when we choose justice. For the Haitian people, we can’t choose those things for them; they have to make those choices; but we can help supply good rope and logs for their rafts. At the same time. We can choose that kind of order and justice for ourselves. We start right here in our own lives, our own church, our own community. God is great when we all have access to the same raft-building materials. We do have a choice.

 

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20 – August 11, 2013

Presbyterians recently made a little news. The biggest organization to pick up the story was USA Today followed by stories in smaller papers, the Huffington Post and Glenn Beck’s online blog. Unfortunately, the story was not about Presbyterians doing high-risk mission work or taking a prophetic position on today’s social topics.

It concerned the newly published Presbyterian hymnal—about a contemporary song that has been left out. The song is called “In Christ Alone,” not an old hymn, as we might expect there to be some interest in an old favorite getting left out. But this excluded hymn was first published in 2002 and apparently is so popular among many of today’s Christians that its absence is noteworthy. More important is the reason it was left out, which is also what makes it newsworthy.

The committee who is putting together the new hymnal had concerns about a particular phrase in the hymn, “Till on the cross as Jesus died the wrath of God was satisfied.” It is a traditional theological view of what happened on the cross when Jesus died. The idea is that when Adam and Eve sinned they broke God’s law. Since they were human and God was God, there was no way they could make that up to God. They broke God’s perfect law and they couldn’t fix it. In fact, even their death could not make it better. The only way for God’s justice to be satisfied would be for a perfect human being to die. According to this particular traditional theology, that’s where Jesus comes in. The technical term is substitutionary atonement. Jesus substituted himself for us and satisfied God’s need for someone to die.

Significant problems arise with this understanding of the crucifixion. For instance, didn’t God know that the human beings God created would not be able to obey a perfect law? Doesn’t God love human beings like a parent? If so, what parent would need to kill her children when they make a mistake? How is it really justice for someone else to be punished on your behalf anyway? And if Jesus is God, how does God dying satisfy God’s wrath? And these questions could go on. The hymnal committee felt that there were enough problems with this doctrine of substitutionary atonement that they asked the authors of the hymn if they could substitute another line for the one in question. So instead of “Till on the cross as Jesus died the wrath of God was satisfied”, they wanted to sing, “Till on the cross as Jesus died the love of God was magnified.” These words they felt would express that the love of God was made greater in the willingness of Jesus to give of himself for others. And if Jesus is God, then the crucifixion shows that God is willing to give everything of Godself for humanity. There are still issues and questions. Going back to the parental metaphor, why does anybody need to die when a child messes up? But, still, the committee thought the alternate wording presented less theological problems so they asked the authors of the hymn for permission to change the words in the new Presbyterian hymnal. The authors of the hymn said, “No.”

Then the committee had to decide whether to leave the hymn in the hymnal or leave it out. They decided to leave it out. The chatter on the blogosphere centers around the question of whether this demonstrates that there is no place for God’s wrath in mainline Christianity. It is newsworthy because apparently a lot of people think it is very important for God to be wrathful. And most of these people I imagine, believe that they are immune to God’s wrath because they believe in Jesus. But, everyone else is in big trouble with God and that is really important to their view.

To be fair, the Biblical God is often expressed as wrathful in both the Old and New Testaments. God is also expressed as loving and forgiving in both testaments but, to reiterate, God’s wrath is plentiful. For instance, it comes up clearly in our reading this morning. The prophet Isaiah starts out by bringing up the quintessential expression of God’s wrath by calling his readers, “people of Sodom and Gomorrah.” By the way, this reference in Isaiah to Sodom and Gomorrah is one of several places in the Bible where the destruction of those cities is connected to their social injustice and not to their sexual immorality. After calling his readers the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, Isaiah then quotes God as saying things like “I cannot endure your solemn assemblies” and “your appointed festivals my soul hates” and “when you stretch out your hand I will hide my eyes from you” and finally, “if you refuse and rebel you shall be devoured by the sword.”

Ironically, considering that we are talking about a hymn or a worship song, the thing that has Isaiah’s God so angry is the way the people worship. God is sick and tired of worship services being enacted by people who do not “seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan and plead for the widow.” Isaiah’s God is angry because people are coming to worship and going through the motions but they are not acting justly in their daily lives outside of worship.

Isaiah’s God is losing patience with festivals, sacrifices and convocations.
Eugene Peterson in his translation of the Bible interprets the same passage for today with these words:
“Quit your worship charades.
I can’t stand your trivial religious games:
Monthly conferences, weekly Sabbaths, special meetings—
meetings, meetings, meetings—I can’t stand one more!
Meetings for this, meetings for that. I hate them!
You’ve worn me out!
I’m sick of your religion, religion, religion,
while you go right on sinning.
When you put on your next prayer-performance,
I’ll be looking the other way.
No matter how long or loud or often you pray,
I’ll not be listening.
And do you know why? Because you’ve been tearing
people to pieces, and your hands are bloody.”

Peterson is eloquent and convicting. But, I think he lets us off easy by focusing on the meetings and business stuff. I think Isaiah’s God is focusing on worship. I, Tom Harris, interpret the passage more like this:
“I’m sick of all your hymn singing.
The band and the pipe organ are hurting my ears.
And the sermons make me want to throw up.
Your offerings are pathetic and I don’t want them anymore.
Why? Because you are a bunch of hypocrites.
You come to church to be better people,
but you never actually get any better.
Get out of here and come back when you know how to treat each other.
If you can’t straighten up,
you won’t be around to sing a hymn anymore anyway.”

And so it is ironic that this mini-controversy in the news is about God’s wrath being left out of a hymn when, according to Isaiah, it is not the words we sing but the justice we fail to enact that earns us God’s wrath. Because what matters is not the words we sing or say inside the church but the justice and righteousness that we enact outside these walls.

That may raise the question, what are we doing here? Why do we bother to come to worship if it doesn’t please God and even perhaps makes God angry? The answer may be that Sunday community worship is not for God; it is for us. We come here because we think that listening to the Bible and hearing a message about it and singing together and praying together will empower us to live better. We think it will encourage us to go out and keeping fighting the good fight. We think it will teach us to love better. We think it will be a place to practice that love in a controlled environment. And maybe coming here will do all that.

But, we should not let the idea surreptitiously slip into our heads that because we are here God is happy with us and, by inference, God is not so happy with people who are not here. Apparently, God doesn’t care where you are. God is happy when people anywhere “learn to do good, seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan and plead for the widow.” God is happy when people act justly. When we give up our power and share with the powerless in every relationship from interpersonal to global, from face-to-face to Internet, from acquaintances to family, God is pleased and wants us to continue to share power and love each other. And if we can’t do that, then no amount of singing or prayer or preaching will matter.

The hopeful part of the Isaiah passage (verse 16) is also one of the most theologically interesting. It says, “Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my sight, cease to do evil.” This is theologically interesting because, unlike St. Augustine or John Calvin or other church fathers, Isaiah does not seem to believe that God is going to do these things for us. Just because we believe in Jesus, God is not going to come in and wash us and clean us up and remove evil from us and send us on our way as good and moral people. God wants us to do it ourselves and apparently believes we can. Whereas St. Augustine would say that we are incapable of doing good because of our sin and only through God’s grace and power can we do anything. Isaiah says, “get up and do it. Make the changes in your life. Figure out where you can be more just and good and start being more just and good. You can do it, so get out there and do it.” So, don’t think that a well-sung hymn or an earnest prayer or hearing a great sermon is going to please God. According to Isaiah, God wants right actions and right living out in the world and God believes we can do it.

Lord’s Prayer Series: “Father” – January 27, 2013

Sometimes the word “imagination” gets a bad wrap. We use the words “imaginary” or “imagination” to dismiss something. “That’s just your imagination” or “Your just imaging that”. When we say it that way we usually mean that we think something is not real and therefore not worth our attention. A child is afraid there is something in the closet at bedtime and so we look in the closet, find nothing there and say, “It was just your imagination.”  And so we start to train the child to be dismissive of things that can’t be seen. We teach them to devalue that which is in their minds but that can’t been seen or touched. We also help the child get to sleep, so it’s a trade off.

Modern atheism is big on referring to God as imaginary. If you google “God and imaginary”, you will get a lot of atheists blogs and articles on the topic. They say that God is imaginary the way that unicorns or fairies are imaginary. Therefore, the idea of God should be dismissed the same way that ideas about unicorns and fairies should be dismissed.

But, I think we should embrace the idea that God is imaginary because we all imagine God. We just have to get rid of all the negative value we put on those words. The American Heritage Dictionary defines imagine as “To form a mental picture or image of, to think, conjecture, to employ the imagination, to make a guess.” All of those can be applied to how we as Christians engage God. We form a mental picture or image of God. We think about God. We make conjecture about the nature of God. We employ our imagination. We make a guess about God.

But, there is one definition of the word that does not apply to how engage God. It says, “To have a notion of or about without adequate foundation.” There’s the rub. Our imagination about God does has adequate foundation. It has adequate foundation through our own internal experience of God. It has adequate foundation in our collective experience of God. It has adequate foundation in the communal experience of God throughout history as recorded by many spiritual writing, the most foundational of which for Christians wrote the holy scriptures.

All those experiences of God point to the same reality: a God that can be seen, heard, felt, touched and known but not in a way that can be reproduced in a laboratory or measured objectively. Therefore, some say that God is not real, because only things that can be reproduced in a laboratory or measured are real. But, we say, no. We can see, hear, feel, touch and know God and we have faith in others who have had those experiences, but because we cannot reproduce it in a laboratory or measure it we have to use our imaginations. We have to imagine God. We have to create images for God that allow us to express what we see, hear, feel, touch and know and share those experiences with others.

That is a lot of explanation to get us to the second word of the Lord’s Prayer: Father. Father is an image of God. We imagine God as Father and lots of us agree that the image of a loving Father is a good image for what we experience individually and collectively. It is a good image because it emphasis a relationship with God. It emphasis a hierarchal relationship with God where God is an authority by whom we should be guided and to whom we should listen. It reminds us that God knows things that we as children do not know. The image of God as Father also emphasizes that the hierarchical relationship is defined by and inseparable from God’s unconditional love for us. Further the image reminds us that we are related to God just as a child is related to a parent. We share the same DNA if you will. We are not identical to God just a child is not identical to her father or her mother, but we are not totally different than God either. God as Father is a very good image for God. It is not the only image for God in the Bible or outside the Bible in the imaginations of faithful people after the Bible was canonized. But, it is a very good image and one that Jesus taught his followers to use.

However, like any image, Father also has limitations. It is not a perfect. It does not completely or even adequately capture the nature of God and it presents serious stumbling blocks for some people. Let’s look at the stumbling blocks first. A major block for imaging God as Father is that some people have had very bad experience with their human fathers. Others have had good experiences. In fact, there are as many experiences of fathers as there are children. Some had relationship with loving, nurturing, strong, present fathers. Some had no fathers or even no good father figures. Some had fathers who were in the house but not present, zoned out on TV or drugs or totally consumed by work. Some had fathers who never I said “I love you” or showed that love through affection. Then, some had fathers who were simply evil. They were verbally abusive or physically or sexually abusive. Some still carry deep, painful, debilitating wounds inflicted by their fathers.

Most of us have fathers that are probably somewhere in that big middle between saintly and satanic. Still a significant stumbling block for some can be trying to imagine God as a father when the images of father that we have been given are not perfect or totally positive or worse are deeply painful and evil.

Some people will make the argument and it is a good argument that this is part of the spiritual journey. If we have been harmed by our father, part of our journey is learning to see him as a flawed human being in need God’s Grace and learning to forgive him and learning to receive the fatherly love we need from God since we did not receive it from our dad. That is all true. That is part of the spiritual journey.

On the other hand, some people are able to have wonderful relationships with God only if they don’t imagine God as a Father. Maybe they should be ready to see God as Father but because of their pain they are not ready for that yet. They are not there yet. Fortunately, Father is just an image and there are many other images that people can use. We can call God Mother, Shepherdess, Queen, Rock, Redeemers, Spirit, Creator or even Goddess. Whatever works. Because on the spiritual journey it is much more important that we have a lively, engaged, nurturing relationship with God, than we use an image for God that is painful to us and blocks that relationship. In the end, Father is one of many images for a spiritual reality that is much more important than the image itself.

But, there is another limitation about the image of God as Father. I’m especially aware of this now that I have children. I’ll phrase it as a question: What is the message we send to our children when we first teach them that God, the Creator of the Universe is a man? In our house we explain to our kids that God is not male or female because God does not have a body and you have to have a body in order to be male or female. We say you can call God anything you want. But, then we come back to this prayer that we say every Sunday and often we include in our prayers at night. “Our Father.” It’s like we are teaching one thing and practicing something else.

Maybe this wouldn’t be a big deal if we did not live in a such male dominated world; a world where males hold the power still. A world where men have held power for thousands of years across most of the globe and led us into war after war, and massive amount of inequality and environmental destruction. A world where millions of women are the victims of violence at the hands of men. A world where men and women are simply not equal under the law. Men rule the world and continue to destroy it. And here we are, acknowledging that we are using our imaginations as we develop images for God that help us to be better people. And we choose to continue to imagine God as a man in our most basic and foundational prayer. I just wonder what does that teach my daughter about what it means to be a woman (or a man) in this world and what does it teach my son about what it means to be a man (or a woman) in this world.

Its not quite same problem as the educational placemat that we have on our dinner table that has pictures and dates of all the US presidents and they are all men. With that placemat we can say that women have been treated unequally for a long time and that is why there are no female presidents but that is wrong and women can do anything men can do. There should be women presidents and there will be women presidents. With the placemat the future is open. But, with the Lord’s Prayer we can say all that and then we close the future slightly by continuing to say “Our Father”. Its not like our kid’s ever aspire to be God the way they could aspire to be President. God is not job that men or women can have. But, God is God and we close our children’s mind just a little by continuing to only use the image of Father so routinely in our most basic prayer.

I guess, ideally, I would rather say, “Our Mother and Father” or “Our Heavenly Parent” or something gender neutral when we say the Lord’s Prayer. But, I also know that the words of the the Lord’s Prayer as they have been learned from the time we were children are deeply nourishing to us as men and women. Saying “Our Father” touches something deep in our souls. So, maybe this is a topic for community discussion. It won’t be solved from the pulpit. If we ever were to change it, we would have to think it through as a community and decide as a community. The adults would have to decide it was worth sacrificing something meaningful to them for the sake of the children, assuming we agreed that it was important for the children. So, just in case you were waiting for my permission to have the discussion, permission granted.

This is a longish sermon already but I want to close with one other way to imagine God and this is offered by the author John Dominic Crossan in his book on the Lord’s Prayer. This image is pretty, academic, unemotional and unpoetic, I admit, but it is worth raising because it will help us frame the prayer in a new light. Crossan says the best way to express what Jesus meant by Father in his time and culture, was Householder. A householder is responsible for the well being of the entire house and its people, animals and property. A householder is the head of the house and makes sure that everyone has enough and no one has too much. A householder makes sure that the sick are cared for and the land is not abused. A householder makes sure that everyone has work that is suitable for their ability and skills. And to tie this back into our previous discussion, a householder is not by definition male. That’s why we read what is commonly known as the Ode to a Capable Wife from Proverbs 31. It describes a woman who buys wool and flax, brings food from far away, provides food for the household and directs the servants in their work. She considers a field and buys it, she oversees the planting of an entire vineyard. She opens her hand to the poor and reaches out her hand to the needy. She provides for all the clothing of the household. It says, “She opens her mouth to wisdom and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.” Because she is such an excellent householder her husband is praised in the city gates.

It is this kind of administration of the household that is being evoked by the word Father. God is a householder and the earth is the house. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer we ask God to be sure that everyone has enough and no one has too much. We ask God to provide for the sick and be sure the land is not abused. We ask God to administer a world that is just and prosperous for all the members of the household and gives us all work to do that makes a difference. From the strongest to the weakest everyone is cared for and everyone thrives. Our Householder. I invite you to try it. It might feel awkward at first. It might never catch on in any translations or be adopted by any community. But I think that is what Jesus means by Father. Not that God is male, but that God has the ability and the authority to manage the household of this earth and to do so with mercy and justice so everyone can prosper together. Imagine that.