Who's Your Daddy?

In the most recent tempest in the Christian blogosphere teapot, Jesus bloggers have gotten their knickers in a twist about some tweaking of the language in the United Church of Christ bylaws.

The UCC, in the event you don't have your old-line denominations down, is a smallish and very progressive fellowship.  How smallish?  About half the size of the Presbyterian Church USA, putting them at just a niblet over one million members.  How progressive?  It's known within itself, occasionally, as "Unitarians Considering Christ."  It's intellectual, reformed-ish, open and tolerant, and susceptible to all of the foibles and distractions of leftism.   These are congregations that are prone to anguishing about whether the free-range Guatemalan llamas that provided the fair-trade wool for their openly lesbian pastor's rainbow stole were fed an organic diet.

Good people, in other words.

Anyhoo, the UCC recently reworked their bylaws, and in doing so, abandoned the use of gendered language to describe God.  Meaning, no more God the Father.  Instead, they've done a search and replace, with the replace term being "Triune God."   This has apparently set off all manner of alarm bells among people who aren't UCC and like to fulminate.  Not God the Father?!  Apostasy!  Flagrantly unbibley bad things!

It does give bloggers something to write about, I suppose, for which I'm truly thankful.

The progressive obsession with abandoning gendered language has never really caught hold with me.  Having suffered through clumsy efforts within my own home church to talk about God as "God the Parent" or "Mother/Father God,"  I've found most of the re-writing and tweaking too clumsy.  It just sounds forced, in the way that academic progressivism so often sounds forced and scared of it's own shadow.

As a people who find their identity in the story and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, Christians of a liberal persuasion are stuck with two awkward truths.

First, when describing his relationship with the Yuhd-Hey-Vahv-Hey/Creator/Maker/Self-Aware-Reality-Engine-That-Is-The-Ultimate-Ground-of-Being, Jesus consistently used the term Father.

Second, that's OK.

This does not mean that God is male.  Or female, for that matter.  Gender, as a category that describes the reproductive identity of living beings and/or the socio-sexual identity of homo sapiens sapiens, well, it means jack diddly squat when coming to terms with God.  Theological squabbling about maleness and femaleness is as meaningless as arguing about whether the radiance of God's Glory is golden or more sun-yellowish in hue.  The terms are not adequate to the task.

That also does not mean that the traditional understandings of Fatherhood within human cultures are somehow cues to grasping God's nature.  God the Father is not God the Dad Who Goes to Work and Comes Home Late And Expects a Martini Waiting.  God the Father is not the patriarch of your family, who day and night scrambles for a living, feeds a wife and children, says his daily prayers, and as master of the house has the final word at home.  That Jesus used the term Father tells us that Jesus stood in intimate relation with the God of Israel, and that his relationship with God was not that of a vassal to a monarch, but deeper and more personal.  The socio-cultural resonances of the term are of lesser importance.

That also does not mean that your personal relationship with your own father has any bearing on your relationship with God.   The leftist canard is often pitched out that calling God "Father" will drive away people who had a bad relationship with their own father or with male authority figures.   Yeah, and calling God "Mother" is better, 'cause we know that everyone has a healthy and totally functional relationship with their moms and/or the women in their lives.   Human beings who aren't hopelessly trapped in dysfunction have imaginations and the ability to emotionally and rationally understand that just because a particular relationship is bad, it doesn't mean that all relationships are bad.

God is not like your dad.  Or your mom.   Our relationship with God goes well beyond genetics and nurture, down to the foundations of our material existence and up past the heights of our awareness as sentient beings.

But from within the limitations of human language, and the conceptual boundaries of how we understand love and care and authority and rootedness and self, Father works just fine.   Which is probably why Jesus used it.

Being a Pastor and a Father

This morning, my Father's Day began the way it pretty much always does.  I woke at a tick before seven am, the last few tweaks to the sermon humming and nudging in my brain.   My wife woke too, and gathered herself up to go rouse the boys.

Father's Day without breakfast in bed, you see, would be a disappointment.  Not so much for me, but for the guys.  So for the better part of a half-hour, I lay in bed, awake, waiting as the breakfast gradually assembled itself.

Then, in came the boys with the coffee and the cinnamon rolls and the vegetarian pseudo-sausage.  Mmm, pseudo-sausage.   I read the card pulled together by the little guy.  The big guy asked if he could hang out and eat cinnamon rolls with me...so of course I said yes.   My 13 year old wants to hang with his dad?   I'll take every moment of that I can get.

We hung and talked and ate for about 10 minutes, and then I scrambled to get ready and out the door and off to a 9:00 AM Contemplative Worship.

Father's Day is always a work day, if you're a pastor.

That, I think, is emblematic of one of the challenges facing any male with offspring who is called to serve a community of Jesus people.   The demands of community and call frequently stand in between you and your kids.   Almost all of the pastors I know are in a state of constant motion, leaping from a meeting to a visitation to a funeral to a counseling session.   We too often live the lives we tell our congregants not to live, out of balance and shimmering with the stress of being reactive to a thousand demands.

For kids of pastor-dads, this can often mean that dad is distant, disengaged, and distracted by the community that consumes them.   Given the male propensity to get completely focused on the task directly in front of them, the relationship between fathers and their Pii-Kay progeny can often be defined by distance, a distance magnified emotionally by the need for those younglings to perform and be Model Jesus Children in the display window of the pastor's smoke-and-mirrors-perfect family life.

It's an unworkable John Edwards-esque balance, being both "married to the church" and having kids with another woman.  But to be effectively a father and a Christian, it means having the courage to stand in the balance.  If you are going to serve the church, there are things that you just are gonna have to miss, just like I missed my sons' swim team time trials this Saturday because I was at a training retreat.   Or how I bowed out of an event to which I'd been invited by a church member, because I had a family gathering to which I had committed.  To be wise and in balance, things must give on both sides.  The most important thing that has to give is your pride, as you delude yourself into believing that 1) you can do it all and 2) you need to do it all.

Being a good father and a good pastor simultaneously means having the confidence to stand firm in both your calling to teach and proclaim and your calling to be present and aware of lives of your children.

For Every Thing, There is A Season

Yesterday evening, I did something I haven't done in years.  I went camping. 

As Saturdays and particularly Sundays aren't really...ah...good days for me, I've managed to miss every single cub scouting camping trip my boys have taken.  The wife has taken 'em instead.  She always comes back with her hair slightly mussed and smelling of woodsmoke and marshmallows.  It's a very appealing scent.  If you really wanted to make a perfume that drew the interest of men, that might be a good place to start.

Last month, though, with the last camping trip of the little guy's season coming up, he began asking if I could go. 

I hemmed and hawed.  Things are challenging at the church right now.  My session usually meets on the second Sunday of the month, and we've got some pretty serious ecclesiastical heavy lifting to do.  And...

And...

And my youngest son, on one of the last camping trips he's may take as a scout, was asking me to go along.  "I just want a chance to hang out with you, Dad," said he, meltingly.  

For a moment, that little demonic meme that misapplies Scripture in ways that make male pastors crappy, distant fathers tried hitting me with something about hating family and even life itself.  But I batted it down.  Most of that is just ego and self-importance, masquerading as spirituality.  Nothing was happening today at church that couldn't be rescheduled, or handled perfectly capably by someone else.  The life of your children, on the other hand, has an unfortunate tendency to pass by.  Just once.  Miss it, and it won't be back.

So I handed some things off to folks, rescheduled others, and left for the mountains with my boy.  We came back just a few hours ago, sleepy and s'more-sated and smelling of woodsmoke.  I love that smell.