I knew my father for twenty years, until he died: he was aconstant presence throughout my childhood. He wasn’t into sport so we never attended football or cricket matches; however we did go to classical concerts and, when I was older, to the opera. He wasn’t very practical with his hands, either, but we tried – rather unsuccessfully – to build model aeroplanes and then – even less successfully – to fly them in the park across the road. Because he was a doctor, he seemed to take personal offence if either me or my sister was ill – until I was sent home from school with a raging bout of ‘flu that kept me in bed for several weeks. My father was generous, sometimes to my mother’s despair; he took a keen interest in everything I did although he never really understood how children ‘ticked’; we had the inevitable rows during my teenage years. In many ways he was an old-fashioned man, more nineteenth-century than twentieth; my biggest regret is that he died too soon for me to develop a proper adult relationship with him.

That was my father: I was lucky to have him as I know there are many people who have poor relationships with theirs, others whose fathers died when they were very young or for some reason left the family circle, still others who don’t even know who their father was – although they must have had one! Fathers’ Day, so beloved by the greetings card industry and the Post Office, will conjure up a host of emotions, both pleasant and painful. My own memories have faded; but I know that my dad (we never called him that as it just didn’t seem to ‘fit’) was a real, live human being who was born in a small town in West Prussia in 1910, came to Britain on the last day of 1938, and died in a London hospital one Sunday afternoon in October 1974.

So I’ve been without my father for the best part of half a century – which rather shocks me when I think about it! Nevertheless, during every Sunday service I say, as do you, “Our Father, who art in heaven”. Now we’re not Spiritualists and I’m not a medium, supposedly communicating with the spirits of those who have “passed on” or “gone to the far side”; I’m not suggesting for a moment that we’re speaking to our deceased parents every time we say the Lord’s Prayer! So who on earth are we speaking to? The answer, as we all know, is ‘God’. Yet how can (or dare) we call him ”Father” when he’s quite clearly nothing of the kind! Yet we do and indeed it’s not just an empty word but one which fills us with confidence, respect and the healthy glow of knowing we are loved.

It’s obvious that something must have happened that allows us to call God “our Father”. That’s a title we naturally associate with Jesus and his famous prayer but it actually goes back to the Old Testament where, says an American theologian, “God is called ‘Father’ with a unique sense of familiarity”, especially when it comes to his relationship with the nation of Israel. “Father” isn’t a proper name for God but a metaphor which suggests that he protects and provides for his family, who cares for poor people, orphans and widows and guarantees them justice. Calling him “Father” implies authority, respect, ability and love.

Now Jesus, the second Person of the Trinity (don’t worry, I’m not going to explain that this morning!) clearly had an intimate and special relationship with his heavenly Father. But the Lord’s Prayer, given in answer to the disciples’ question “How should we pray?” begins with the words “Our Father” which I don’t think was a slip of Jesus’ tongue nor a mistake by the Gospel writers! Muslims would think it blasphemous and disrespectful to speak to God in such an informal way – indeed, Bilquis Sheikh’s testimony of her conversion from Islam to Christianity was titled “I dared to call him Father”. But Jesus invites his followers to use the term as their very own: so how can we enter into that kind of familiarity with our Creator, the Lord of the universe?

Well, we can find the answer in Paul’s letter to the Romans where he says that we have been “adopted” by God as his children. That’s a notion we’ve probably never thought about, yet one writer has called it “The heart of the Gospel”. For Paul says that we have been adopted into God’s family – which means we can cheerfully say, “Father, my Father” – and also that the Holy Spirit endorses our inner conviction that we truly are God’s children. Paul goes further still in his letter to the Ephesian Christians, where he says that this adoption was no after-thought but part of God’s divine plan for humanity.

Before I go further, I must explain that adoption in the Roman Empire was rather different from the process we know today. In particular, it had nothing to do with finding secure homes for children who, for whatever reason, aren’t able to live with their birth parents. In Rome, adoption was basically about inheritance: if a family had no son to inherit their property (and the process does seem to have only applied to males), they could adopt a boy or even a young man – quite possibly a relative from another branch of the family – who would become the heir of their property and carry on the family name. This was nothing unusual: Julius Caesar adopted his great-nephew Octavian, who became his son and, later on, the emperor Augustus. It’s interesting to notice that everyone benefitted: not just the host family but also the person being adopted, who usually saw a substantial rise in his social status.

Now the status of Christians is a central theme of this letter, and I don’t think that’s simply because the Roman Christians, living at the heart of Empire, saw themselves as a “cut above” lesser mortals from other places. No; it’s because most of the Roman Christians were Gentiles – that is, they weren’t Jewish. You of course know that Jesus, his disciples and most of the first Christians were Jews; indeed the book of Acts tells the tale of this new religion breaking free from its background and becoming a true world faith, open to everyone whatever their race or nationality. However many Christians still had the nagging feeling that, if they weren’t ethnically Jewish, God thought of them less favourably than those who were; in other words that they were “second-class citizens” in his eyes. More to the point, Gentile believers knew that God had often called the Jewish people his “beloved children” – so where did they fit in? At the end of the day, were they only foster-children with no real standing before God, accepted into his family circle but never regarded as bona-fide members?

“No”, says Paul, “That’s not the way you should be thinking at all! For you’ve been redeemed by Jesus, at great cost to himself: not perhaps the emotional or financial costs, or the demands on time and energy, entailed in human adoption, but the cost of his life. That’s the mark of how much God values you, it shows the strength of his desire to bring people into relationship with him so that they aren’t just his creation but his children”. In fact Paul later goes on to say – with tears – that his own Jewish people who refuse to believe in Jesus are in fact rejecting their inheritance which has now been passed to the Church. In other words, all Christians, wherever they come from, have equal status before God, both legally and in their relationship with him. As Paul makes clear in Ephesians, “Through Christ, Jews and Gentiles are all able to come in the one Spirit into the presence of the Father. Gentile Christians are no longer foreigners or strangers but citizens together with God’s people and members of the family of God”. I have no idea how many Christians today do not have Jewish ancestry, but it must be well over 95%. What Paul says is good news for them all.

But does all this matter? The theology may be interesting, but does this language of “spiritual adoption” say anything of value to today’s Christians? I believe that it does. Here are three thoughts.

The first is that is gives us identity. I think that there are many people who aren’t really sure of who they are, for many different reasons. Perhaps they were born in one country and are now living elsewhere, possibly as exiles or refugees: they’re not really sure of their nationality and feel caught between two cultures. Perhaps they were disowned by their parents or perhaps there’s been such a rift in their family that they no longer feel part of it. Perhaps they had worked for so long in a particular job or profession that everyone knew them as “the doctor” or “the driver”, but now they’ve retired or been made redundant and can longer be described in that way. Or perhaps they are struggling to discover their gender or sexuality. There are lots of reasons why people may not know who they are: but Christians can say, “I am a child of God: forgiven, loved and free”. That’s our identity or label, that can help us to feel secure in ourselves as unique and remarkable individuals.

Second, this language of adoption tells us that we are part of Jesus’ family, the Church. By this I mean more than turning up on a Sunday morning, sitting quietly and returning home without having really spoken to anybody: being part of a family means working at being a community in which we can find deep fellowship, openly share our joys and sorrows, find compassionate support and even – because you can’t choose who else is in your family – weather the odd disagreement without it souring our relationship. I realise that there are some people who want to remain “private”; I also realise that there are some churches which seem “stuffy” or “suffocating”. Nevertheless, when we compare most church life today with the first church in Jerusalem, where the believers enjoyed each others’ company, spent a lot of time socialising, breathed worship and prayer, shared their possessions, and called each other ‘sister’ and ‘brother’, we see that they had a much greater sense of being a family than we usually see today. Admittedly they lived at a time when family relationships were different to ours; we also know that they they could be hot-headed and had blazing rows – but that’s part and parcel of family life!

Finally, the language of adoption gives us a sense of security and privilege, for both the New and Old Testament give us the sense that it’s God who takes the initiative to “seek and save the lost”, who chooses those who will believe in him and obey him. Now that’s a difficult idea to stomach as we want to ask the unanswerable question, “Why does God choose some people but not others?”. On the other hand this thought does allow us to think that our salvation and security don’t depend on us successfully managing to cling hold of God’s coat-tails but on God lovingly wrapping his arms around us. And it takes us still further, for it allows us to think, “Wow! I’m a child of the King”. No Christian is a commoner any longer: God has turned us all into princes or princess. Isn’t that a wonderful thought? Let’s hope that we will live in ways that befit our new and elevated status.

I know that there are many people who have a negative view of God as father because their own experiences of being fathered have been poor or even non-existent. That’s understandable but it is also desperately sad. At the end of the day, God isn’t “Our Father” in any literal way; those words are only a figure of speech which helps understand his love and care, her power and authority, above all us his sheer dependability. We shouldn’t let our notions of God be shaped by what we know of human fathers; rather we should base our fathering (or grand-fathering, or uncle-ing – and all the equivalent female terms!) on what the Bible and, in particular Jesus, tell us about God. There was a hymnwriter, 250 years ago, they:

“The soul that on Jesus hath leaned for repose,
I will not, I will not desert to its foes;
that soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake,
I’ll never, no, never, no, never forsake”.