to "I believe that there is a God." Instead, the grammar is equivalent to what I did at the altar on March 1, 1986, when I looked at Lisa and made promises to her. "I promise that I will love you in sickness and in health, forsaking all others, 'til death do us part." This is what we mean when we say "I believe in God, the Father Almighty."
Power and Love
If belief is about love, if a "god" is what we give our heart to, then we may be puzzled by the Creed's seemingly incompatible pair, "Father" and "Almighty." How could a God who is all-mighty also be like a Father, and vice versa? I am in the middle of taking a stab at being a father myself; and although I cannot remember the rosy scenario I presumed parenting would be before I got into it, I am certain I assumed I was going to be more almighty than I am. If there is anything a father is not nowadays, it is "almighty."
How shall we say it? God is almighty. We know that God is almighty, but God can't bear to be known only as almighty. Because, were a father or any person to be truly almighty, it would scare the daylights out of everyone, and especially the children. Almighty is intimidating, squashing, fearsome. Before almightiness, we shiver. So how can you love someone who is all-powerful? Perhaps this is why fathers aren't all mighty—because if you're almighty, a despot in your household, then you can't be loved, and fathers want so very much to be loved. Isn't this why God says, "I shall be not just almighty, but I shall be your father"? When Jesus prayed, he did not call God "Almighty." Instead he spoke to God as "Abba," the Aramaic word Jesus beautifully spoke as one of his very first words—not his first words in his teaching ministry, but his first words as an infant groping after the wonder of speech. Jesus, held lovingly in Joseph's arms, looked up into his eyes and called him "Abba," delighting Mary's husband. As a grown man, Jesus had that kind of intimate, tender relationship with Almighty God. The disciples got a glimpse of the grown man Jesus as a little child, sitting on God's lap, looking up tenderly and calling on his Abba. The disciples envied this of him, and they wanted in on it. They said, "We want to have that kind of relationship with God."
The Elusive Father
But wasn't Jesus just as intimate (or more intimate) with Mary, his mother? How much do we really want to invest in the very opening of the Creed, "I believe in God the Father"? We wonder about using a gender image for God that excludes half of humanity—or worse, one that includes half that isn't so godlike. I see this in counseling all the time: people harbor confusion about God, and a lot of it is because they do believe that God is like their own father. You see, if you had a father who is cold or distant, harsh or sophomoric, then you get confused about what God ought to be. If God is like that kind of father, then I don't want to have anything to do with him, or we stumble into a dysfunctional faith. I want to plead that God is the best father imaginable, but aren't our imaginations on this subject a little clouded?
I thought all this past week about being a father myself. When I am a guest speaker, the hosts request a résumé so I can be properly introduced. I really do mean it when I say the only thing worth mentioning is that I have the privilege of being father to these three children. I am continually surprised by how much I love my children. But I can't get too maudlin about it, for I am also continually surprised by how frustrating and numbingly exasperating being a father can be. I have been dizzied by unanticipated delights, and my heart has been broken in places I didn't know were there. Question: is it like that for God? If God is our Father, our "Abba," does God look down at us and at one moment it's an unexpected delight, and then the next moment God's heart is broken? The prophet Hosea speaks directly out of God's heart: "I have been a father to them, I love them, but the more I love, the more they run from me, they bolt away and I can't decide whether to rage with anger or hang my head and weep" (11:9, paraphrase). Is it like that for God?
Closeness. I want to be close to my children, and they to me. But how shall I say it? Even if you have lucked into the best relationship imaginable with your father, or if as a father you have cultivated the best imaginable relationship with your children, the truth is there's some dysfunction in the heart of that, there's some mystery. You may think you know your father thoroughly, but then you look at him and his life again, and there's something profoundly important you'd totally missed, something you flat-out can never comprehend. Indeed, the saddest stories I hear are from parents and children who cannot decipher meaningful connections between what the other one says, does, and means. Norman McLean, in A River Runs Through It, says, "It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us."8 We live with God, God lives with us; we should know each other. Yet God eludes us; we elude God. Did Jesus let the disciples overhear him praying intimately to God as "Abba" so they might get themselves prepared, so we might not throw up our hands in despair when life with God really does mirror life with the dads we have known, loved, wounded, missed, misunderstood, been wounded by, and even lost?
Somewhere over the Rainbow
When my daughter Sarah was just four years old, she went on stage for the very first time to sing in our church talent show. Cabaret style, I perched her on the piano with a candelabra next to her, and I played as she sang "Somewhere over the Rainbow." I can tell you without any bias at all that Judy Garland never sang it so beautifully. The song ended, my church members erupted into a standing ovation (what else do you do for the preacher's daughter?), we took a few bows, and then we walked offstage where no one could see but us except a single crew person, one of my most stalwart church workers. I hoisted Sarah up in my arms, twirled her 360 degrees, kissed her and said "Sarah, I love you so much." Two feet away, the crew person looked at me with eyes I cannot quite describe and said, "I wish my father had done that." A little slow on the uptake, I asked, "You wish your father had played the piano?" With a choked pain in her sixty-year-old voice, she said, "No. I wish my father had loved me."
I don't know if her father loved her or not, but what I do know is that there is some ache at the heart of our lives. There is some place where a father is supposed to be, and I wonder if God didn't anticipate the darkness of that place and decided, "I will be known as father to my children, because I cannot bear for them to struggle with no hope. I will be Father, however dimly grasped, by those who have pretty good fathers, by those who struggle with fathers among the quick and the dead." People have politicized and militarized the term 9/11 as a code, but every time I hear 9/11, I think about children I don't know personally in some apartment in Manhattan or in a bungalow out in Connecticut. It's been three years now, and they go to bed at night where a father used to live down the hall, but now there is no father down the hall, because he went to work for them one day, on 9/11. The politicians and pundits wax with no eloquence at all about 9/11, but for this boy, for this girl, daddy isn't there. They cannot look up at anyone and say "Daddy." "Abba." God knew this. God is always our father.
When Frederick Buechner was five years old, he heard shouts and screams outside his house. He ran down the stairs and saw his father lying in the driveway, people frantically working over his body. Suicide. A couple of days later they found a note his father had left, stuck in the last page of Gone with the Wind. To young Frederick and his mother the note said, "I adore you and love you, but I am no good. Give Freddie my watch. I give you all my love." Thinking back to this unspeakably horrible moment, Buechner quoted Mark Twain: "Losing somebody like that is like a house burning down. It's years before you know the extent of your loss." Buechner suggested that his father really died of heart trouble.9
How shall I say it? God is never gone with the wind. God is our father when we have heart trouble. We see the Father Almighty most clearly in the best story ever told by the Son who knew him best. A man loved his son more than his own life, but the son preferred to be self-made, to indulge in pleasures far from home. So the son bolted, and broke his father's heart. But one day the boy decided, "I won't put up with this two-bit life for one more day. I'm going home to my father." He comes home, not to a father who does what human fathers do (heatedly demanding, "Where have you been? How much did you waste? You'd better apologize and repay every cent!"). This was not the Abba Jesus knew. Instead, and
