I very much doubt that any of you follow the inner workings of the Church of England – after all, we’re in Wales! So you probably don’t know that the Church’s Liturgical Commission (which, according to its webpage, “prepares forms of service and promotes the development and understanding of liturgy and its use in the Church”) has a new project on the go. This is to consider whether it should develop new forms of liturgy – that is, the words which are allowed to be used in its services – which incorporate more inclusive or even gender-neutral language. A Church source suggests that it’s time for a change as its so-called “contemporary” liturgies are now over twenty years old and many people are interested in “exploring new language for worship”.

This project has of course generated criticism, even derision. Giles Fraser, the former Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, asks if it will mean redrafting the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer as “Our parent, who art in heaven” and says, “It has rather lost something, don’t you think? Father has gravitas; it speaks of intimacy, protection, nurture. Parent, on the other hand, is one of those cold, anonymous, bureaucratic words that the school uses when it writes to me about my son. It’s the language of the census, not a warm embrace”.

I’ll come back to Giles Fraser’s views later; but I now want to move to Ian Paul, a scholarly Vicar of the Evangelical persuasion. He believes that the proposed change “will move the doctrine of the Church away from being grounded in the Scriptures”. As far as Dr Paul is concerned, “male and female imagery [about God] are not interchangeable”.  I’ll return to him, as well – I hope you’re noting all this down!

But other voices have approved of the project. Professor Helen King, the vice-chair of the Church’s gender and sexuality group, reminded people that questions around gendered language and God have been around for many decades, yet “still have the power to bring out strong reactions”. And a group called Women and the Church has declared that “a theological misreading of God as exclusively male is a driver of much-continuing discrimination and sexism against women”. The Liturgical Commission has clearly touched several nerves. So, on this Fathers’ Day, I felt it would be useful for us to explore the idea of God as our Heavenly Father – something that we’ve probably never really thought about that. We need to ask if it’s the best Biblical term to use and whether it’s the most appropriate way to speak about God today.

The obvious place to start our study must be Jesus – who, of course, is the second Person of the Trinity, God the Son. So it’s no surprise to read of him calling God his father or, indeed, praying to him using the same words. For instance, in Matthew 15 Jesus calls God “my heavenly Father”; in Matthew 18 he calls him both “my heavenly Father” or “my Father in heaven” no less than four times; and in Matthew 26, praying in Gethsemane, he pleads: “My Father, if this cup cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done” – expressed more intimately in Mark 14 where his words are, “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want”. These are just snapshots from the Gospel; here are a couple more. First, from Luke 10: “All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him”; and finally, from John 5: “My Father is still working, and I also am working” – words which the Jewish leaders regarded as blasphemy, as Jesus making himself equal to God. There are dozens of other places in the Gospels where Jesus calls God his “Father” – I got tired of hunting for them! But there is one last occurrence which I couldn’t possibly omit: as Jesus is dying on the Cross he cries out, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing”.

But it’s one thing for Jesus to call God his Father: does he give us a mandate for us to say the same thing? The answer is clearly “yes”, and not only because he teaches his disciples to begin their prayers with the words “our Father”. For there are many other times, when speaking to people, that he talks about “your Father in heaven”. For instance he says in Mark 11 “When you pray, forgive anything you have against anyone, so that your Father in heaven will forgive the wrongs you have done”; in Luke 6 “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful”; and in Matthew 18 “It is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost”. And Jesus’ words in Matthew 5, “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” is the first of ten times that he uses the phrase in the Sermon on the Mount, ending with the lovely: “Look at the birds: they do not plant seeds, gather a harvest and put it in barns; yet your Father in heaven takes care of them”. Once again, I could give you many more examples of Jesus, especially in John’s Gospel, encouraging his followers to call God their “Father”.

It would be tedious to list all the times that God is called “our Father” elsewhere in the New Testament. Certainly Paul, in both Romans and Galatians, spends a great deal of time not only assuring his readers that God is their spiritual father but also that everyone, irrespective of race and background, who believes in Jesus becomes God’s adoptive child. In so doing, Paul takes us back to an older tradition which said that the Jewish nation alone had a special relationship with God, that only they could call him “father”. What’s interesting is that this is only mentioned explicitly a few times in the Old Testament. So we have Moses, pleading for Pharaoh to release his enslaved people: “This is what the Lord says: ‘Israel is my firstborn son’”; and a little bit later telling the Hebrews, beginning their journey through the desert: “You saw how the Lord your God carried you, as a father carries his son”. Those are encouraging words, but the special relationship isn’t always plain sailing: just a few chapters later Moses is berating the moaning travellers: “Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God disciplines you”. We might want to set this verse alongside a much later one from Proverbs: “The Lord corrects those he loves, as parents correct a child of whom they are proud”.

From Moses’ time we jump a thousand years to find further mentions of God as Israel’s father – although the idea was, I’m sure, lying in the back of everyone’s mind during those intervening centuries. And, with many of the Hebrews now feeling abandoned as they live in exile and yearning to return to their homeland, these mentions come thick and fast. In Isaiah, God cries: “Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth – everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made” and muses, “Surely they are my people, children who will be true to me”. In response the people declare: “You, Lord, are our Father; our Redeemer from of old is your name”. I could cite other verses from Jeremiah and Malachi; but surely the tenderest and most moving passage comes in Hosea:

“When Israel was a child, I loved him
    and called him out of Egypt as my son.
But the more I called to him,
    the more he turned away from me.
Yet I was the one who taught Israel to walk.
I took my people up in my arms,
    but they did not acknowledge that I took care of them.
I drew them to me with affection and love.
    I picked them up and held them to my cheek;
    I bent down to them and fed them”.

Could there be a more beautiful description of God’s fatherly love?

Well, we’ve had our “coach tour” around the Bible – I’m sorry that we didn’t have much time to look around at each stop. But I hope we’ve seen, again and again, and especially in the New Testament, God (or, at least, the first Person of the Trinity) being called “Father” – with the love, authority, care and discipline that the word implies. “So”, you might well want to ask, “why on earth should anyone want to amend the word? Doesn’t that go against the Bible and against 2000 years of the church’s practice. And aren’t the folk who suggest change merely kowtowing to the spirit of the age?”. Those are very valid questions to ask; and I’d want to respond to them in three different ways.

My first response is based on human experience. For we know that, for many people, the very word “father” immediately conjures up negative thoughts and painful memories (the same can of course be true of the word “mother”, but we won’t go there today). Sadly, there are fathers who are cruel and abusive, fathers who are too fond of strict discipline but rarely show love, fathers who are feckless and unreliable, fathers who may smother their children with love and in the next moment beat the living daylights out of them, fathers who push their children to achieve the unachievable and chastise them when they fail, fathers who splurge the family finances on reckless projects but don’t provide for their offspring, fathers who bring home a succession of short-term partners who the children are told to call “mother” – and that’s not counting fathers who have never taken any part in the rearing their children or see them as irritating constraints on their freedom. There are also fathers who have to work long hours or in distant places and so rarely see their children; equally there are fathers who sadly died before their children ever knew them. All these situations can influence children’s view of God. Christians may seek to model human fatherhood on God’s; but for many people it’s the other way round: their picture of God the Father is irreparably tarnished by their own experience and they can’t do much about it.              

That’s the personal response. But there’s another, which is Biblical. First, I simply want to say that there are a few Bible passages which talk about God in female terms, for instance Isaiah 49 where God asks, “Can a woman forget her nursing-child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you”; Isaiah 66 where he tells Israel that it will be nursed, be carried on his arm, dandled on his knees and comforted “as a mother comforts her child”; or Matthew 23 when Jesus says of Jerusalem, “How have I desired to gather your children as a hen gathers her brood under her wings”. These are surely “motherly” rather than “fatherly” texts. There is also the creation story in Genesis which states that “God created human beings in his own image”, both male and female”. Ian Paul, who I mentioned earlier, calls this “a striking statement” which shows very clearly that neither gender on its own is the image of God.

And there are other texts that are somewhat ambiguous.  A Jewish writer notes a passage in Deuteronomy 32 about God caring for the Israelites on their desert journey which includes words that can be translated literally (and I don’t speak Hebrew!) as him having “laboured” to give them life and “nursed them” with honey, phrases which the writer describes as “strikingly feminine”. Another Jewish writer investigates the name “El Shaddai”, often translated as “the Almighty God”, which occurs fairly often in the OId Testament. There is general agreement that this name is hard to translate. And, while it can also be rendered as “God the Destroyer”, “God is the Wilderness”, and – wait for it – “God of the Three Breasts” or “of the place called Three Hills” (and if that last one puzzles you, go and find out why the Mumbles are called Mumbles!). The scholar who uphold such views remind is that the Bible begins at a time of ancient prehistory – is it too much to suggest that these first Jews picked up ideas of a fertility god from the people around them? It seems at least possible.

I have one final response to that Church of England suggestion about using gender-neutral language for God. It’s simply to say that God, as a spirit being, does not and cannot have “gender” as we understand it – however our language makes it almost impossible to describe him in any other way. As Giles Fraser (remember him?) puts in: “No-one thinks the Judeo-Christian God is a man. Father is a metaphor, as is burning bush, fountain, lamb, shepherd, rock or river. Words are inadequate to describe the author of life. But they are all we have”. And Fraser cautions us, “Language matters. And gendered nouns do influence the way we think about the reality of the thing to which they refer. This can easily be extended to how we describe the Almighty: the gendered nature of God-language could easily be a way of projecting male superiority”. While Fraser believes that attempts to use inclusive language for God are a ridiculous surrender to modern culture wars, he does recognise that thinking of him as an old man with a long white beard is naïve and definitely needs to be disturbed.

At the end of the day, it may not really matter what we call God. He is always bigger than our language, always greater than our imagination, always wiser than our thinking, always more loving than we can ever conceive. Whether we call him Father or not, that is who our God is.