Sermon by Rocky Supinger | March 5, 2023 | Fourth Presbyterian Church

Second Sunday in Lent
March 5, 2023 | 4:00 p.m.

I Believe in God, the Father Almighty
A Sermon Series on the Apostles' Creed

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 31:1–5, 15–16
John 14:1–14

“I believe . . . in God, the Father Almighty”

I found a little turtle in a puddle on my way home from school one spring day in the fifth grade. Of course, I scooped it up and carried it home. It lived for months in my room, quite comfortably situated in a rectangular Tupperware container half-filled with water and equipped with a rock from the backyard for laying out.

I named the turtle Sammie.

Whenever I would clean Sammie’s makeshift tank, I would take it out to our back patio and set him down to walk around as I sprayed out the container with the hose. One afternoon I forgot to close the sliding glass patio door, and our Pomeranian, Cricket, got Sammie in her mouth while my back was turned. I was able to extract him quickly enough and get him safely back into my room, where he seemed unharmed. But the next morning when I woke up, Sammie was splayed, motionless, on his rock, and I knew he was dead.

I called for my mom. She sat with me for several minutes and then gently suggested we bury Sammie on the hill in the yard. So I scooped him up with both hands and began a lonely funeral procession that would run from my bedroom, down the stairs, through the kitchen, and out into the yard via the fateful sliding glass door.

I’d only just begun the march down two or three of the stairs when my father appeared at the bottom of them. He was just standing there, looking up at me. I steeled myself for a chastising reminder about all the times he’d told me to make sure the sliding glass door was shut when I cleaned the tank. Instead, my dad just extended his arms, and I collapsed into them and sobbed.

This embrace is a part of my story that affects my experience of “Father” language for God. Remembering it, I entrust myself to God’s tender mercy and compassion, like that of a father comforting his child.

This is the kind of relationship with God that Jesus wants for his disciples. In the excerpt from John’s Gospel we hear today, Jesus is speaking words of comfort to his friends on the night of his arrest, gently assuring them that, though he is leaving them, he is going ahead of them to his father, where a place will be prepared for them. His father’s house has enough space for all of them to abide with him for eternity, so the disciples’ hearts can be free from trouble; they can place their belief — their trust — in Jesus and in God as a loving father who waits for them with open arms.

Jesus’ descriptions of God as a father provide some of the most powerful teaching in all of scripture about what God is like. Perhaps no description is more powerful that the story Jesus told about the son who claimed his inheritance from his father prematurely and took off to live his own life, as if his father were already dead, only to return in poverty and abject failure a short time later. There, too, a young and foolish boy finds not chastisement and reproach upon his return but the open arms of a father whose love is so much bigger than his disappointment.

Jesus spoke of God — spoke to God — with the intimate terminology of fatherhood. Abba is the Aramaic word he often employed, which is actually closer to “Daddy” than “father.” He teaches disciples to pray to his father, to “Our Father.” He promises a place for all in his father’s house. And when the hour comes for Jesus to endure the ultimate trial, he throws himself on the ground and prays, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want.”

Jesus believed with his whole heart and mind and strength in his heavenly Father, and he desires his disciples do the same. Jesus entrusts himself to the God of the prophet Isaiah, who says, “You, O Lord, are our Father; our Redeemer from of old is your name”; the God of Moses, who reminded the Israelites of “how the Lord your God carried you, just as one carries a child, all the way that you traveled until you reached this place”; the God of the psalmist, who says, “As a father has compassion for his children, so the Lord has compassion for those who fear him.”

When we speak of God and to God in worship and in prayer and in praise, we employ the personal, intimate vocabulary of children toward a father, just like Jesus did. We pray as Jesus taught his disciples to pray: “Our Father, who art in heaven…” We profess faith in God with the terminology of the Apostles’ Creed: “God, the Father Almighty.”

Not only this vocabulary, though. In our worship and prayer and praise we make use of the whole wide array of scriptural imagery for God; we don’t restrict our language choices to the family of masculine terminology like “Father” and “King.” Much of the tradition of Christianity has made that mistake, and it is a mistake, because it produces a warped apprehension of God as somehow male.

But the God in whom we believe, the God to whom we entrust our lives, is presented to us in scripture in feminine terms. The prophet Isaiah speaks divine words of comfort to his people, saying, “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.” God speaks through the prophet Hosea as the one who taught the people to walk, “who took them up in my arms” and lifted them, as infants, to her cheeks, who “bent down to them and fed them.”

Jesus cried over the city of Jerusalem, “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.” And just before he tells that story about the loving father who welcomes home his prodigal son, Jesus tells another story to illustrate the exuberant love of God, a parable about a woman who finds a lost coin and then calls all her friends and neighbors to celebrate her finding of the coin that she had lost.

The language of faith is personal. We pray to God not as a thing but as a person, a parent. And we take care to appropriate the full range of personal terminology for God the Bible gives us, not only the masculine ones. You may have noticed, too, that we resist the grammatical convention of exclusively masculine pronouns for God when we read scripture, particularly when we read psalms. You may not know this, but the psalms we read in worship are not taken from the New Revised Standard Version or any other biblical translation but rather from the translation of the psalms that is in our Book of Common Worship, which has arranged them all quite nicely without the use of any gendered pronouns for God. You probably never even noticed.

Why does this matter? Because an over-reliance on the Bible’s masculine language and imagery projects onto God culturally conditioned elements of masculinity, and our appropriation of that language is itself conditioned by the norms of the culture we live in. The same is, of course, true of the Bible’s feminine imagery, only we have never had a problem of over-reliance on that language in our worship and our prayer.

We worship God with the stuff of our life — our thinking and feeling and wondering and, yes, our talking. We use the language we have, and our language is analogy. When we pray to God as “Father,” we are not praying to one who is a biological male, just as when the Hebrews prayed to God as “Spirit” they were not praying to a biological female just because the Hebrew word for “Spirit” is feminine in gender.

We English speakers get tripped up here more than speakers of languages that assign gender to nouns as a grammatical matter that has nothing to do with sex. English doesn’t assign gender to nouns (these chairs are not feminine or masculine — they’re chairs), so, for us, gender is only about sex.

But an analogy reveals what is dissimilar about its object as much as (if not more than) what is similar. When we pray to “Our Father,” our words appeal to those points of contact in our experience with the love and care of fathers, but those same words also appeal to the opposite: experiences of fathers that are not loving and not caring.

My father put a full trash can in my bed one night when I was in high school, because, despite being told numerous times to take it out, I didn’t. Instead, I went out with my friends and returned home to find chicken bones and butter wrappers on my pillow.

This, too, is a part of my story that affects my experience of “Father” language for God. Yet it is an experience of the dissimilarity between fallible human fathers (myself included) and God as Father, rather than of the similarity.

When we speak of God — and we must speak of God; this is our worship and our witness — we employ the words and the expressions of our lived experience to the task. This is how the psalmist speaks of God as “my shepherd” — not simply a shepherd in the abstract, but my shepherd, the shepherd who leads me by still waters and who comforts me. It is also how the scriptures speak of God as a mighty king and a towering fortress, a mother eagle who bears us up on her wings, a devouring fire, a mighty wind, and even as a still, small voice. It is how we speak of bread as Christ’s body and some juice as his blood.

When we give voice to our encounter with God and our trust in God, we can boldly bring our lived experience as children of parents, both the loving and nurturing elements of those experiences and the painful, alienating elements too, to speak of God as our mother or our father. Just like Jesus did.

And as we speak of God in the words of the ancient creed — “I believe in God, the Father Almighty …” we learn over time to also bring our experience of God into the way we understand our own lived experience.

We construct a faithful image of a mother from the prophet Isaiah’s image of God as a woman who cannot forget her nursing child and thus will show compassion for the child of her womb. We construct a faithful image of fatherhood from Jesus’ words to his disciples about his father’s house, where there is space aplenty for all, from Jesus’ story about a wronged father who fiercely welcomes home the wayward child before the child can even ask. We construct a faithful image of our father from Jesus’ prayer on the cross, “Father, forgive them …”

We bring the language of our experience to God, and we bring God into the language of our experience, which is considerably more difficult.

Take the word Almighty.

It’s 2008, and I’m speaking by phone to an eighth grader from my church about her participation in Confirmation class, which is an opportunity many churches provide for young people who were baptized as babies to profess faith for themselves. She is not so gently explaining to me that she will not be professing faith, that she simply cannot not bring herself to believe that God is “almighty.”

Her father is sick. He had been sick her whole life, terminally so. He is going to die before she reaches adulthood, she knows, has always known, and so he will not see her graduate from college or get married or have children. And she will not claim belief in God as “almighty” when that same God appears powerless to heal her father.

That was in 2008. He died in 2013.

And so I’m speaking gently into the phone about how the power and might of God are made perfect in human weakness, quoting 1 Corinthians. I’m trying to describe Jesus on the cross as the image of how God exercises might, even quoting an ancient hymn found in the New Testament that talks about how Christ “emptied himself,” though he was in the form of God.

I’m trying to give her images and words for “almighty” that begin with what scripture says about God to derive meaning from there, instead of the other way around, instead of coming to God with an established definition of an idea like almighty — God can do whatever God wants, so if someone suffers it’s because God permitted them to — and testing God with that definition. It’s not really working.

I don’t know that it ever worked, because allowing the imagination of our faith to form our understanding of everything else is holy work that comes with time and suffering and maturity and discipline and … grace. Wherever she is today, I’m certain that eighth grader could teach me something about all of that.

Maybe helping one another to perceive the ways in which our sufferings are caught up in the almighty-ness of God is one of the things we are called to as a community of faith. I believe it is, and so I am grateful for you being present in whatever way you can be to do that important work together.

Amen.