Our Father

I don't know what your experience of prayer is, but if you're anything like me prayer is a constant struggle. My prayer life at times can seem as dry as the desert and my heart filled with a growing sense of guilt for I know that spending time in prayer should be far more honouring to God and refreshing to my soul.

Jesus clearly was and is a man of prayer.

Jesus prayed at his baptism; he prayed for a whole night before choosing the Twelve; he prayed with thanksgiving before feeding the crowds; he prayed in anguish at the Garden of Gethsemane, and he prayed “Father forgive” as he hung on the cross. Jesus prayed.

But so did his disciples: as good upright Jewish men, prayer was not an alien concept but part of their own experience of what it meant to worship God. Yet in Jesus they saw a life of prayer that was radically different from anything that they had previously experienced.

Prayer is not a righteous ritual, nor a public performance, neither is prayer a torrent of mechanical and well-versed phrases. Prayer in its true essence goes much deeper than words.

I was recently speaking at a Youth Alpha Course in Bradford Abbas when I was asked to comment on what it meant to live a life of prayer. In response, all I felt able to say was that for me prayer reflects my relationship with Joanne my wife, in that when we first met, every minute of our time together we talked. Then, after a while, silences began to creep into the relationship – which at first filled me with dread. But gradually we became used to the silence, we became secure in just being with each other. Occasionally words were shared but we were content to rest in the presence of each other. I think prayer is like that because ultimately prayer is all about relationship and, as you fall in love with someone, over time that love deepens and all you want to do is simply be in the presence of the one you love. Jesus loved his Father and longed to be in His presence.

In my view it was that intimacy of relationship between Jesus and God that prompted his disciples to ask in Luke's gospel, “Lord, teach us to pray.”

And so we come to the Lord's Prayer, which is recorded in both Matthew's and Luke's account of the Gospel. The Lord's Prayer provides a framework and rhythm for our life of prayer. Indeed, according to Rowan Williams, “ If someone said, give me a summary of the Christian faith and write it on the back of an envelope, the best thing I could do was to write the Lord's Prayer .”

The prayer itself can be broken down into sections, each one rooted in the Old Testament, revealing familiar concepts that reflect the nature, character and faithfulness of God. However, the one phrase that is strikingly different as well as shocking is the opening phrase, “Our Father.”

I think that it is fair to suggest that in our modern, western, secular world there are a number of significant issues raised when talking about fathers and fatherhood. We often hear of absent fathers, abusive fathers, estranged fathers, ‘fathers for justice', as well as attitudes to patriarchy, marriage, parenting and male heirs that make the loving fatherhood of God a complex issue to study.

Indeed some of us here this evening may be scarred by the experience of our own fathers, making it quite uncomfortable for us to comprehend the idea of God being our Father. If that is your experience then we pray that God in his great mercy will heal the memories and hurt.

Biblically and theologically, however, we cannot get round the idea and concept of God being “Our Father.” It is clearly Jesus' preferred name for God, referring to God as Father 65 times in the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke and over 100 times in John's Gospel. Jesus clearly understood his relationship with God as being like that of Father and Son.

But what about the idea of God being Mother? You need to work out for yourself whether you are comfortable with the concept of calling God ‘our Mother'. God never describes himself being a mother or wife, though he does use female imagery of himself. In Isaiah God compares himself to a pregnant mother; in Psalm 22, God uses the image of a midwife; in Psalm 123 God likens himself to the mistress of a household and in Matthew 23, Jesus speaks of being like the mother hen, gathering chicks under her wings. God is not afraid to use such imagery, though God is above gender and, in the words of St Anselm, is “ that which nothing greater can be conceived.”

Yet we cannot avoid the reality that Jesus doesn't call God, ‘master', ‘creator' or ‘Lord', but Father , and through our adoption as sons and daughters of God, heirs of Christ, we too are invited to come into the presence of God and address him as Our Father .

It is a relationship in which God himself defines fatherhood – he is in the words of J. John, “ the original, perfect, ideal Father and the Bible describes the characteristics of love and faithfulness that make up his fatherhood .”

Not only are we invited to address God as Our Father: the term Jesus uses is “Abba” – daddy , dad , an even more personal phrase. So much so that today we don't quite understand how shocking it would have been to address God in such terms, and the only comparison that I can think of is that if the Queen invited you for tea and as you came into her presence you bowed and said “Your Majesty” and she replied ‘Call me Liz' – you would be shocked.

But in Christ and through Christ, we are invited to call on the name of God, with the simplicity of the phrase “Abba”.

Yet the next phrase “ In Heaven ” places that relationship in its right context: any relationship with God must begin with God. God alone is above all else. God alone is all powerful, all knowing, all present. God is not only “our Father”; he is “our Father in heaven”. In our galaxy there are 100,000 million stars, like our sun. Our galaxy is one of 100,000 million galaxies. Yet in a throwaway line in the Book of Genesis the writer tells us, ‘He also made the stars'. Such is his power. The Christian writer, Andrew Murray, once said, “ The power of prayer depends almost entirely upon our apprehension of who it is with whom we speak .” Our Father in heaven reminds us of our appropriate smallness in relation to His appropriate greatness.

It is from that place of complete dependency on God as our Father in heaven, that we find the freedom to grow, to leave behind our childish helplessness, to take risks in the knowledge and the confidence that our Father will be there to catch us when we fall.

Rowan Williams writes, “ Jesus' own life is a measure of that. He is completely dependant on God, and yet he's as free as anybody could be. Free to take risks, to face suffering and death because the Father is there. So “Father” is also what he says on the cross. “Father into your hands I place my spirit. ”