God is Not a Boy’s Name

Psalm 22:9-10, Hosea 13:8, Deut 32:11-12, Ex 19:4, John 8:12; Isa 60:2-3, Acts 2:2, John 3:8

We have tried so hard to find God that we have often missed Him.  We human beings are so hungry to hold onto a piece of God, we are so desperate to capture a glimpse of the Holy that when we think we have it, we hold on so tight, so that what we know of God cannot be changed.  Throughout our long and sometimes turbulent dance with God, again and again we human beings have had an experience of God, a real encounter with the Great Mystery, and instead of celebrating the unique ways that God gets to us, often we put our stake in the ground and claim that our experience should be everyone else’s experience too. 

One group sees the face of God on a mountaintop and before you know it, they have built a temple and declared it so holy that no other group can enter.  Another group has an encounter with God on a particular day of the week and before you know it, those who worship God on another day are destined for hell.  Still another group feels God’s presence so fully when they call God by a certain name, but then it isn’t too long before those who know God in a different way are considered heretics. 

We human beings are so hungry to hold onto a piece of God, we are so desperate to capture a glimpse of the Holy, that when we think we have it, we hold on so tight, so that what we know of God cannot be changed.  And sometimes we hold on so tight that we build big expensive buildings or construct humungous statues to prove that we have finally, once and for all, captured God in this moment, in this time, never to be touched or challenged or changed.

Just a few weeks ago, this human need to put God in a box, this longing to protect our image of God from changing, was illumined in Monroe, Ohio.  If I hadn’t read it in the paper, I would have assumed it was taken from the Bible.  In the midst of a storm, a six-story statue of Jesus was struck by lightning and burned to the ground, leaving only a blackened steel skeleton and pieces of foam that were scooped up by those passing by.  They probably wanted a piece of God too.  The “King of Kings” statue, one of southwest Ohio’s most familiar landmarks, had stood since 2004 at the evangelical Solid Rock Church along Interstate 75.  The lightning strike set the whole thing on fire and landed Jesus’ head firmly on the ground.  I’m actually not joking! 

Now, I am not convinced that God works this way all of the time, but there are occasions, like this lighting strike of a Jesus statue, where I find myself wondering if once in a while, God loses it and throws a holy tantrum of sorts.  God has offered us revelation after revelation, trying again and again to tell us that regardless of how great is our need to put God into boxes and confine Her in the tiny spaces of our creedal concoctions, regardless of how great is our need to pin God down once and for all and to declare to the world, that we have finally gotten it right, still God finds a way to remind us how far beyond our small view She really is.  God’s Spirit is simply too vast, too generous, too wide, too deep, too great to be contained in our human categories.  And I think this applies to the way that we talk about God as well.

Calling God Father, has become something like a default for many of us.  In most of our hymns and prayers, we call God Father because it is what we have always known.  When we said dinner grace with our families or knelt at our bedsides at night, we addressed God as Father, both out of familiarity and comfort and also respect.  So, my words for you today are not meant for you to change the way that you personally address God, because I believe that is something between you and God.  Instead my aim is to share with you the crisis that I see, from the perspective of someone who cares deeply about the future of the Christian Church, a church that by most accounts is in dramatic decline.

As you might imagine, in almost every social setting, where I find myself with people my age, I inevitably embark on some kind of conversation about what I do for a living, which quickly leads to talk, not just about the failings of the institutional Church, but about the character of the God we love.  It never takes long for young people to tell me that they believe in God, but not the God that they meet in Church.  They don’t believe that God is a man, and definitely not an old man.  They don’t believe that God operates like a wise shaman, deciding which person is currently in need of a “talking to” and caring more about judgment than mercy.  They don’t believe that God is much at all like the ways that we sing and pray and talk about God in Church.  And this is just where the problem lies.  Most of you don’t believe that God is like this either, but you wouldn’t know it, if you came to church.

As our human minds have expanded and science has introduced us to the profound ways in which the universe works, for the most part our language of faith hasn’t changed much at all.  As Enlightenment challenged our binary thinking and we have grown as people, most of the ways that we have talked about God, has remained the same.  The biblical authors thought the earth was a big dome with holes poked in the top and now we know that there are multiple universes and different galaxies and that the earth is billions of years old and yet the way that we talk about God hasn’t changed much.  Our God talk hasn’t really expanded to create room for these new insights, insights that give more insight to who God is, what God does and how God works in the world.  Some of us might say that this is because we are among the few who care about preserving traditions.  We might say that God should only be called Father because this is the right way or we might say that God should be called Father because it feels like the best way to honor Him, but let us remember that God never asked to us to call Her by a particular name or address Him in a specific way, instead God asked us to seek a relationship, a deep and personal relationship, which means that we are invited to fall in love with God and to address God in the way that is most intimate and real for each of us.

I have heard it said that calling God, Mother or calling God, Light or calling God, Love before addressing God as Father, is unfaithful and even unchristian, but I think that this way of thinking is the very thing that blocks God from being a part of our lives.  And let me be blunt for a minute, if we continue to use Father as the default name for God, the gap between those of us who are a part of church and those of us who are not, will continue to grow.  The Christian Church is in decline in part because we are holding on tight to the ways that we have followed Jesus and forgotten that Jesus wanted each generation to make the faith its own.  My generation and those who come after are hungry for God, but this hunger is an ache for God to be literally with them and among them, which means that God needs to be talked about and spoken of in ways that are real and authentic.

Language is powerful and in this place, language can be the difference between someone sitting in these pews and hearing a faith that is alive and relevant and a faith that speaks only to generations who have gone before.  As you heard in the scripture this morning, God is referenced in myriad ways and has been since the birth of our faith.  From the Psalms we hear that God is a midwife, from the Prophet Hosea we hear that God is a Mother bear protecting her cubs, from the Book of Deuteronomy we hear that God is a Mother, from the book of Exodus that God is like an eagle that carries us on her wings, from the Prophet Isaiah and from the Gospel of John we hear that God is Light, from the book of Acts and from the Gospel of John we hear that God is like the rush of a wind.  There are so many ways that our scripture invites us to image God and yet we human beings are so hungry to hold onto a piece of God, we are so desperate to capture a glimpse of the Holy that when we think we have it, we hold on so tight, so that what we know of God cannot be changed.    And this morning I want you to remember that the way that we talk about God is not something to be worshiped.  God does not want us to make graven images of words and to hold on so tight that we build big expensive buildings or construct humungous statues to prove that we have finally, once and for all, captured God in this moment, in this time, never to be touched or challenged or changed.  Father God can continue to be for many of you, the way that you feel most at home in God’s arms, but part of following Jesus is remembering that your way is not the same as God’s way.  What would it look like to speak about God in ways that honor everyone in the room here today?  What would it look like for us to talk about God in ways that honor those who don’t have an example of a loving father?  What kind of church might we be if we remembered that God is bigger than whatever label we might give Him?  Because the truth is, God is not a boy’s name.  It is a name that is for all of us.  It is a name that transcends gender and class, a name that transcends time and space, a name that longs to extend an invitation to each and every hungry heart. We have tried so hard to find God that we have often missed Her.  We human beings are so hungry to hold onto a piece of God, we are so desperate to capture a glimpse of the Holy that when we think we have it, we hold on so tight, so that what we know of God cannot be changed, but thanks be to God there is hope for all of us.  Even when we hold on tight, God can pry our fingers from the grip and free us to land safely in Her lap.  Amen.