Water from the Sky

Dave Brisbin 6.16.19 Father’s Day: It’s impossible to overestimate the influence our fathers have had on our view of life and ultimately of God. Fathers tend to be less present to small children than mothers, more the disciplinarian who expects acceptable performance for approval. Even given all the variations in families and fluid parenting roles today, we still learn primarily from our fathers the way the world works in terms of the judging of performance and consequences of non-approval. And in a patriarchal culture, our institutions and especially our churches reinforce the traditional role of the father, and as we transfer that lesson learned to our Father in heaven, trust becomes very difficult. But Jesus is painting a very different picture of his and our Father. When we look at his stories and teachings, when we look at the Aramaic words he used in the first lines of the Lord’s Prayer, when we consider how he lived his own relationships, we see an exuberant extravagance, an overwhelming abundance always flowing from Father that can’t be stopped or slowed in any way. Just as a desert dweller living in a culture built around the scarcity of water can’t conceive of living where water falls from the sky, Jesus is trying to show us that the scarcity of love and acceptance on which our lives are built can change in an instant once we experience a love that literally falls from the sky.