Janet’s Blog

 

Phil preached a really good sermon on this next installment in our Lent series…

You can find it on the church website  www.boxchurch.org

 

Today here in our church, at Ditteridge and in the Methodist church we are beginning a series through Lent where the same topic will be the basis of the preaching and the study groups in the week.

We decided to look at the Lord’s Prayer. And so today we begin with the beginning of the Lord’s prayer, Our Father.

It has been known, as some of you know. That I do from time to time remove a sermon from the archives, dust it down and repeat it somewhere else. Today held a very special temptation for me with regard to this, because my first ever sermon, just over 20 years ago, was on this topic. The fatherhood of God.

I had thought that I had seen my notes and my visual aids quite recently when I was looking for something else in the attic. So yesterday afternoon found me in the attic, I had given myself a short period, if I couldn’t find it in that time, I wouldn’t go on any further in the hunt.

So I searched, I opened boxes of my past and quickly rustled through them I resisted the temptation to look at too many photos from the old photo box and when in the end I couldn’t find it with the papers I thought it would be with I came back downstairs again, albeit carrying my music stand which had been missing for at  least ten years.

Partly I guess I wanted to find the sermon notes as an exercise in self reflection more than anything else. I was curious to see if I would still say the same thing about the fatherhood of God as I had said all those years ago. Twenty years ago the world was a different place, and I was a very different person, in some ways.

I wonder if you can remember January 1989, We were just beginning to wonder if Glasnost would come to anything, the Berlin wall was still standing, mobile phones were the size of briefcases, well bricks at least, you could usually only e-mail from university to university and it would be another five years before the www would be invented.

So what did I say? And would I say it again today?

The problem with any first sermon is that you really want to get all your theology ever into 15 minutes, you’ve been offered a platform and you may never get it again, so what to say? I was lucky in one way I got to chose the theme, and I chose ‘God our Father’. This is a good start because actually you can fit almost all your theology into that theme. So I had to sit down and work out what I was actually going to do.

This was of course where the rebellion set in, I was brought up in a very straight down the line evangelical church, sermons had three points, the beginning the middle and the end.

I however wasn’t going to do it like that, I made a huge visual aid on string, it said God our Father and hung across the front of the church.

We must have been a hip and trendy church for 1989 because I remember having the clip on radio mike.

So for each of the letters of God our father I had a word, a word which described the Fatherhood of God. The question is of course, can I remember any of them, at the moment I am having trouble remembering where I have put my keys, so I think this is a challenge but I thought last night I’d give it a go.

Grace

Originator

D

O

U

R

Forgiveness

A

T

H

E

R

 

Perhaps that these are the only ones I can remember are a symbol of the journey which I have made, and which all of us make from the fresh faced youth of 18 until we are 20 years older.

Fatherhood is an incredibly complex issue, and it always has been. You only need to look at Abraham’s issues with Fatherhood to realise that it all started being complicated at the very start of civilisation and things haven’t changed very much over time.

I do distinctly remember saying something like, however bad our own relationship with our own Father is we somehow know that isn’t right, we know what a good Father would be like.

Do I still think that?

I think I do, although I wonder what Elisabeth Fritzl and others who have been seriously abused by a Father would say.

 

So why do we call God Father?

We call God Father because Jesus told us to.

I’m not sure that I would actually want to go through the list of twelve points all with their supporting bible verses any more.

Maybe twenty years on either I or the world have moved, or both. I don’t need to tell you why, Jesus said so, and deep down we know why.

As U2 say and I am often fond of quoting, at the crisis point, “what you don’t have you don’t need it now, what you don’t know you can feel it somehow”.

God our Father, God full of Grace, God the originator of all things, God full of forgiveness.

The gospel passage today talks of Jesus being acknowledged by God as his son, this is my Son with whom I am well pleased.

Jesus knows he is God’s Son, he immediately goes into the desert to pray and fast and his son-ship is confirmed to him. Maybe it’s in that time in the desert that he understands that it is not only himself who is and will be God’s child: but everyone.

When Jesus comes up out of the water the declaration is for him.

“You are my Son,” then Jesus goes into the desert.

By the time Jesus comes out of the desert he has changed. We hear that

Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God

.”The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!”

What’s the good news, part of the good news is to do with the fact that we are all children of God, not just Jesus.

In 1 Peter it says this.

For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.

Jesus brings us to God, Jesus brings us to the point where when the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how pray, Jesus replies pray like this.

Our Father,

Not almighty and merciful God in whose presence we are nothing but worms,

Not Omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent being who created the universe look on me the humblest of your creatures.

Jesus said, when you pray, say Daddy.

Theologically that’s a huge step, Jesus here to show us that God is for us not against us, Jesus saying God wants you to call him Daddy.

For the Jews of the time, and for the Greek thinkers including the Romans that is a huge departure for them from any image of God which they held.

We were at a wedding once, and the Father of the groom was going to lead the prayers. This person was a Reverend Professor and I’m not quite sure quite what I was expecting, but what I was expecting was not what he said, he started off along the lines, “Well father God, what shall we pray for this couple, should we pray for a new car, they surely need one, should we pray for a pay rise, because they need that too…” Then he continued to pray a very beautiful prayer about growth in faith and commitment and lots of wise things…

He knew, he had caught the vision of this Our Father thing. We should be proud if we can pray like children, because that’s the way Jesus teaches us to pray.

Mike Riddell writes this

“God wanted someone to play with, so he made children, but they keep growing up, so he has to keep on making more”

One of the strongest images in the Bible about the fatherhood of God is in the story of the prodigal son.

It’s at the end of Luke 15, there are two sons, one runs off squanders the money on the equivalent of Armani, fast yachts and women, the other stays faithfully with the father and is a bit upset when the prodigal returns and the Father is overjoyed. I always used to side with the stay at home brother, well it just didn’t seem fair, why should he run off squander all the money and return home again not to shame but a party…

What does the Father say to the son? He says this

‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.

But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ “

You are always with me, and everything I have is yours.

All these years I have been trying to be a faithful child of God, has it just been a curtailment of fun and experience. God says everything I have is yours, would I have wanted to live even for one day not living in that assurance? Would I have wanted to run away placing myself in a position where I believed I wasn’t a child of God? Would I have wanted to willingly go to a place where I didn’t know my position in the universe? No I wouldn’t, not for one minute. We might not feel prodigal most of the time, but however faithful we are the truth is that we do all stray away at some time and need to come back towards God.

So today we come to God “Our Father”, maybe we come as the faithful child, the child who has lived reassured that we are always with God. Maybe today we come as the prodigal whom God rushes out to meet in an undignified way as we return.

However we come we do not have the option of not praying to God as Our Father, the perfect Father, the best Dad in the universe, our Dad, Daddy, Abba.

 

Matt 6: 8b   your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

9.”This, then, is how you should pray: ” ‘Our Father