Toward Fatherhood

My wife and I have been looking for a church to settle into for four years now. We’re searching for the triune elements of a steady “home” church: a welcoming community, a relatable worship style, and challenging teaching. The first two we find in abundance; what we’re hard-pressed to find, however, is the latter. We might visit an old-school, hard-knocks Baptist church, or a hipster-loving, Starbucks-serving reformed Vineyard congregation, but the same problem pops up everywhere we look:

These church leaders seem to think that God is hard to know.

Old-time-religiony pastors in starched hair and pressed shirts preach holy fire and unapproachable splendour. Fall on your knees and hear the angel voices!

They present a God who is too hot to touch and too bright to look at. He is holy, and utterly unapproachable.

Modern and post-modern co-pastors (ever the team players) in faded denim and snap shirts teach love and…love and love. And acceptance and good will and love. They never dive any deeper than that, because they strive to be “seeker-friendly,” and any truth deeper than that might frighten away newcomers.

They present just a bit of a single facet of God, because the rest of him is just too scary. He is loving…and simply unapproachable.

But I know otherwise.

And you want to know otherwise.

Now…there was this guy featured on WBEZ’s This American Life a while back, who swore up and down he’d disproved Einstein’s theory of relativity. He was a tradesman, unqualified to speak on the subject; but he’d read as much as he could, thought really hard about his position, and he stood ready to argue with anyone who would listen.

Of course, he was totally wrong.

He was just a guy with a limited understanding of physics, who took his inability to understand advanced science to mean that advanced science had it all wrong.

I feel a bit like that guy when I say, “Um…hello? All you pastors, teachers, and leaders God’s people? Uh…I think a lot of you have missed something. Something big. You’ve forgotten…the thing about God is…

…He’s really easy to know.”

I feel like a plumber telling a board of directors that their underlying approach to business is flawed. Nonetheless, I say it: God can be known - he wants to be known - and known well.

“As the Heavens are above the earth,” cried the preacher, “So my ways are above your ways, and my thoughts above your thoughts.”

His point was that God is so huge and ancient and mysterious. Which is true, in the sense that my one-year-old son has no idea how I make our truck take us places, or how I cook food on the stove or throw a football higher than the top of my head. He doesn’t understand a lot of what I say. He has no idea where I go when I leave for work.

He knows very little of how or why, but he knows me - his dad - very well. He runs to me in times of danger or need. He looks to me for encouragement and direction. He finds deep comfort in my presence at naptime, and trusts me to come get him when he wakes. When he gets older, I expect we’ll interact on increasingly important topics, like school and girls and the meaning of being a man. But we’ll also talk about what’s on TV and what’s for dinner and those new shoes he’s been diggin.

Because that’s what all good relationships are: the deep and the shallow, the memorable and the mundane, all jumbled together, all of it mattering and carrying significance because of love. All of them metaphors pointing us to the great, one, original love.

See, the hugeness and mystery, fire and love are all true, but none of them are the whole truth. The whole truth is so much lovelier and life-giving. Why would God call himself “Father” and call me “Son” if our relationship was to be anything less?