Starting this sunday, we’ll be entering into a whole new chapter in the Antioch story. This new chapter involves a shift in our schedule as we will now join each week for worship. This is a big evolution for the Antioch community, one that started 2 years ago meeting only once a month. Since those first sunday evenings, Antioch continues to experience God’s move and guidance as we enjoy the community and vision God is giving us to Know a Big God, to Life life more Fully and to LOVE everyone we encounter.
It’s really great timing to start this new chapter because this week we will also start a new series on the Bride of Christ. We’re going to take the next two weeks to explore this metaphor and what it means for us as followers of Christ in 2011. The first week we’re going to talk about God’s role and the second, we’ll talk about the response of the church. It should be a really exciting study and my prayer is that it will help us to understand more fully the love of our God.
As I’ve thought about this series, I’ve wrestled with the obvious limitations of language and idea. I’ve discovered that metaphors alone are intimidating. I think the reason for this is because that they are, by their very nature as metaphors, short lived and dependent upon context. Indulge me for a second…
God is Spirit. God is not a male, nor is God a female. Yet, throughout Scripture, God is revealed to us in masculine terms and pronouns. When the second person of the trinity is made known to the world, he comes in the person of a man, Jesus. Jesus is fully the embodiment of God but that doesn’t mean that God is a man. It means that the “fullness of God was pleased to dwell fully” within this man.
Jesus continued to reveal the Godhead’s character and identity by referring to the first person of the trinity as Father. Now many folks struggle with this language and many don’t. Some struggle because they, rightfully, want to further open our eyes to the fact that God is not human but is Spirit and engages creation fully. Other folks struggle with this conception of God as a Father because they’ve had a really awful example of what a Father is. Their father was disassociated, or abusive, or absent all together and to think of God in this way is really difficult.
I understand this completely. Thankfully, I had a great dad who adopted me and raised me as his own, but my father left when I was little. My father didn’t want to fight for his family and he let us down. That’s not a good picture and it could very easily cloud my understanding of God and it would have had I not made a different choice.
The metaphors that are used in Scripture are there not to enhance an idea that we humans have but rather to give the example for us. I can’t thrust my concept of a father upon God because I’ve seen a bad example. Rather, I can look at the example of God as father and see where my father strayed and went wrong. I can look at the example of God as Father and know that example as I try to father my kids. My understanding of God as Father isn’t based on the scene I have experienced first hand but instead on the scene that Jesus knew and invites me to know.
The Father Jesus knew was one that loved and cared for his children even when those very children lived in complete rebellion. The father figure Jesus showed us was one that provided and was completely trustworthy – even when things weren’t going well! The father figure that Jesus showed us was also warm and caring – more like our cultural understand of a mother who longs to hold her children near. This Father would never leave us or turn his back but would continue to reach out – even at incredible cost!
This takes me back to the metaphor. Scripture speaks to us in metaphors to capture our imagination and invite us into a much better story. Many of our stories are bad and confusing and when we hear of God as Father or Groom, we are reminded of our negative examples. But that was never the point. The point was that we would see those negative examples and be able to judge them off of who the best example is!
My prayer for you today is that whatever your example, good or bad, that you would know that this God is more than a metaphor. I pray that you would see that it is this God who is with us in the midst of our pain and that it is this God who loves us as no human father could ever fully replicate. I pray that as you continue to journey with this God that you and I will be more fully drawn to how great, how wide and how deep this God’s love is for us!
– Grace and Peace!