sermons

Summer at Reservoir

Lord or Abba

Steve Watson

Jul 27, 2025

So 2021 was the year I started writing a theological dissertation I just finished. 2021 was also a really bad year for Christianity in America. Christians (white Christians) were all tied up with the January 6th insurrection. And then in March a baptized white Christian with terrible shame and anger and racism issues committed a horrible mass murder of eight people that worked in Asian spas and massage studios in Georgia. And then in the spring of that year, folks started unearthing hundreds of mass graves at residential schools that Christian churches had set up to whitewash indigenous American children in the 19th and 20th centuries. 

The more I thought about these events, and all the bitter fruit of Christian religion in the world – past and present, the more disgusted I became. And the more I realized that these problems, they’re more feature than bug in American and Western Christian consciousness. Like these aren’t horrible things that Christians just happened to do. These are things that Christians did in part because of ugly and sick things that are part of their religious belief systems and heritage.

And so friends, in 2021, I became yet more determined as a Christian pastor to never again mince words about the worst parts of our faith that need rooting out. And in 2021 I became more committed to my little part, to do our little part, to pass on better versions of our faith to our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren’s generations. 

Because So much of the god-talk, so much of the theology, of the Western church is:

• White supremacist – a story white people have told about a whitewashed God that’s most interested in white well-being.
• Patriarchal – centers men’s stories in the image of an all-powerful male God.
• Otherworldly – more interested in heaven than in earth, more interested in the far-off future than in the present.
• Disembodied – abstract ideas that gaslight our real experience. 
• And it’s Individualistic – about me and mine, not about us together.

So friends, I’m trying to write theology because I’m convinced that the world needs God talk and faith and religion that is:

• Humble –committed to mutuality
• Non-hierarchical – partnership-oriented, for everyone, without exception.
• This-Worldly – more interested in earth and grounded in the present,
• Embodied – honors our real lived experience, and 
• Collective – good for each person because it’s good for all of us together. 

And I think the Bible, when read through the lens of the life and the teaching of Jesus, is all these things. And I just wrote a lot about it in a dissertation called All Flesh Shalom – reading the life of Jesus for justice, peace, and embodied flourishing for all of us and for all creation. 

So today, I want to talk about one little piece at the center of this god-talk, which is what is God like after all?

• Who and what is God, most fundamentally?
• What did Jesus think and teach about God?
• And how does that speak to us today? 

We ground our talks on Sunday in scripture from the Bible, of course so let me read two things Jesus said.

First a little bit of Jesus’ teaching about God.

Matthew 7:7-12 (Common English Bible)

7 “Ask, and you will receive. Search, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened to you.

8 For everyone who asks, receives. Whoever seeks, finds. And to everyone who knocks, the door is opened.

9 Who among you will give your children a stone when they ask for bread?

10 Or give them a snake when they ask for fish?

11 If you who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him.

12 Therefore, you should treat people in the same way that you want people to treat you; this is the Law and the Prophets.

Second, a little window into how Jesus prayed to God. This from his prayers in an olive grove just before his arrest and murder.

Mark 14:35-36 (Common English Bible)

35 Then he went a short distance farther and fell to the ground. He prayed that, if possible, he might be spared the time of suffering.

36 He said, “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible. Take this cup of suffering away from me. However—not what I want but what you want.”

And lastly a comment one of the early followers of Jesus made in a letter to the little first century churches in Rome. 

Romans 8:15-16 (Common English Bible)

15 You didn’t receive a spirit of slavery to lead you back again into fear, but you received a Spirit that shows you are adopted as his children. With this Spirit, we cry, “Abba, Father.”

16 The same Spirit agrees with our spirit, that we are God’s children. 

Jesus called God Abba.

We, God’s children, have been taught to do the same. 

What is this name “Abba”? Who is this God Jesus called Abba? 

Jesus spoke a language called Aramaic. And in Aramaic, Abba is what you call your dad. 

The gospels are written the more common street language for Greek. But the Greek word for father was more formal, with authoritarian overtones. The Roman culture, after all, had really hierarchical, authoritarian images of fathers as head of the household. So maybe it’s no accident that one of the two Aramaic words preserved in the New Testament is what Jesus called God, which is Abba. It’s a familiar, intimate address that can be used by a child or adult. Where Pater or Father evokes formality and authority, Abba evokes safety, warmth, and trust. Father is the language of kings and thrones, but Abba is the one who is looking for you and embraces you each time you return home. 

Jesus says Abba loves it when Abba’s children ask for things. Abba provides for needs, opens doors, and enjoys being both looked for and found. Abba is something like our human parents or our own experience of being parents. But in relation to Jesus’ Abba, all human parents pale in comparison. We are something like “evil” relative to God’s extraordinary goodness. Jesus’ Abba is a gift-giver. Abba’s gifts are good things and goodness itself. In Luke’s version of this teaching, Abba’s primary good gift is Abba’s gift of the Spirit of God who comes alongside us at all times, in all ways, in all things.

Elsewhere, Jesus says of the God he calls Abba that this God is close to us and sees and knows us all well. Abba feeds the birds and helps the lilies grow. Abba knows the count of hairs on our heads and the needs behind our prayers. Abba is easy to talk with and is really attuned to us. Abba listens well and is responsive to what we have to say. Abba forgives and wants us to know the freedom of forgiving and forgiveness. Abba loves us and asks us to learn to love as well. Abba is glad to call us all God’s children, and when we pay Abba’s love forward, we are also Abba’s friends. Abba inspires us to do hard and important things. And even though we can’t see Abba, Abba is with us always. Jesus’ Abba is deeply rooted in and affirming of the traditions and texts of the Hebrew Bible, while also clarifying some of its ambiguities and diversity of language and material. Jesus’ Abba loves mercy and justice and is disinterested in religious rules and regulations. John Cobb writes that

“Jesus’ Abba is the God of the prophets qualified as love.”

Jesus’ God he calls Abba is attached to masculine pronouns sometimes. But Abba is maternal as well as paternal. The point isn’t the gender – it’s the nurture, the love, the competency and care. Abba, good mother and father to us all. 

As unique as Jesus may be as a person, his relationship with the God he calls Abba is not meant to be unique. Jesus invites all of his followers to participate in our own version of relationship with the one he calls Abba. Jesus’ primary metaphor for the space of this participation is what he calls the Kingdom of God. In Jesus’ context, the word Kingdom is meant to evoke a particular realm, with a structure of authority and relationships and ethics. It is also a subversive alternative to the Kingdom of Rome or its localized colonial expression for Jews, the Kingdom of Herod.

In Jesus’ Kingdom of the one he calls Abba, debts are forgiven and dignity is restored. Trauma and its many death-dealing effects are healed. Children are centered, women are honored, enemies are loved, and enmities are healed. Fair wages are paid and small but beautiful and faithful work abounds in good results. Wealth is shared, talents are invested for the common good, and new communities of love and acceptance are forged. Grace is extended, outcasts welcomed home, extravagant acts of generosity and justice encouraged and rewarded. Jesus’ Kingdom of God is a radical counterculture to authoritarian, death-dealing, extractive, colonial expressions of law and order and organizing of life and labor and land. For Jesus, it is the localized, present, communal expression of awareness and responsiveness to Abba’s presence.

For us, the phrase Kingdom of God can confuse more than clarify. Unlike anything we might call a Kingdom, the Kingdom of the one Jesus calls Abba is borderless. It is also unguarded and grows through love and service, not through conquest or aggression. Given Jesus’ emphasis on a loving God for the common good, theologians have suggested other phrases like the commonwealth of God, or the familial “kindom of God,” or the Beloved Community. I like all of these. 

Whatever we call it, though, the Kingdom, the kindom, the commonwealth, the community, it’s the place we join Jesus is calling God Abba, and where we try to live with and imitate the spirit of God’s goodness. 

This is what Jesus had to say. 

And sometimes this lines up with what our religions or our churches or families have taught us about God and sometimes it really doesn’t.

I think of myself as a child. I was taught by religious people that God was loving and good and that the spirit of God’s kid Jesus could always live in my heart and help me. That sounds like Abba to me. 

But I was also taught that God was powerful and mighty, that no human being measures up to God’s standards, and that if we don’t fall on our knees and seek God’s mercy, we risk judgement and death and punishment in this life and for all eternity. 

And whether any of this is true or not, it does not sound like the God Jesus called Abba at all. It sounds like the God that the church called the LORD God Almighty!

I got both of these Gods in my house. 

In my basement, there was a ratty little office. And that was the room I was sent to when I was going to get punished. My dad would meet me there. And I’d get spanked, or I’d get a long and serious lecture about my failings and about the kind of person I needed to be. I don’t think God came up very often in those lectures, but my father’s office was filled with religious books, as was his father’s before him, and probably his father’s father’s before that. And the image of God I got there was that God was powerful and stern, righteous but kind of mean. God was important but hard to reach, emotionally distant, aloof. And if I were to ever make this God happy, I’d need to really raise my game. And this sounded like the God the church talked about when they talked about the Lord God Almighty!

It was somewhere else in my house that I learned about the God Jesus called Abba. My parents had a record player upstairs, and they had a 1979 record by a Christian folk singer that I started listening to, sometimes when nobody was around. It was called Gotta Tell Somebody. And what that singer had to tell somebody were stories about Jesus taking care of a worried mom and dad and their terribly sick, little 12-year old girl. And that singer talked about how God loved it when people were kind and decent and had simple integrity, how God didn’t care if you were important or impressive but would be so proud of you if you had a good heart and tried to live a decent life. He sang that God’s

“been beside you, every long and weary mile, if you just let him lead the way, he’ll be your friend. His love never ends.”

This is the God who liked to say:

No matter what will happen child, I’ll never let go of your hand.” 

I still remember these songs, 40 years later, because they were one of the places I met the God Jesus called Abba.

This tension between Lord and Abba is one of the big tensions of the Christian tradition. 

Some scholars tell us it’s a language thing.

After all, the word God is called most in the Bible is Lord, which means master, ruler, boss. And to be fair, Jesus’ disciples and the early church did call Jesus Lord. “Jesus is Lord” is the most basic creed of Jesus’ early followers. But they said this for a couple reasons. Partly they were respecting Jesus, saying

Jesus is a good leader. Jesus is what God looks like. I will listen to Jesus. I’ll do what he says. I’ll honor him, even worship him.

But partly they were dissing their human overlords in the Roman empire, their corrupt and violent political leaders and if they were enslaved, the people who beat them and used them and claimed to own them. To say: Jesus is Lord, was to say all the other pretenders are not. All those puffed-up, lying, violent human pretenders do not get my respect and allegiance. So Jesus is Lord is a life-giving, liberating phrase. 

But most of the time the Bible calls God Lord, it’s just a mistranslation. Jews had an intimate, personal name for God that means

“I am who I am.”

You can’t define me. I will be who I will be. I will keep becoming all that I am. Mysterious, powerful, but also personal to them, intimate. But over the centuries, out of respect for God, and out of a desire to not trivialize and misuse God’s special name, Jews developed a tradition of never saying or writing this name, but just referring to it as “the name” and calling God by more generic names. In our English Bibles, that means that the word Lord is all over the place. A mistranslation. 

And sometimes that word Lord gets accompanied by a second word Almighty, as if God is some sort of lightning-bold slinging powerful overlord in the sky, like the Greek God Zeus. But that’s a mistranslation as well. The Hebrew phrase behind it is El Shaddai, which is hard to translate. It’s an ancient phrase. But it either means God of the mountains or God of the Breasts. If you go to the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming, you can have it both ways and say it’s God of the holy tetons. Either way, it’s an image of nurturing strength, of a God you can lean on when you’re weak, who will hold you or hide you or nourish you when you’ve lost your way. 

Mighty, mother God. Abba who loves God’s kids. 

Other scholars, like the theologian John Sanders, tell us our misunderstandings of God are a psychological thing. 

The theologian John Cobb looks at research on parenting styles and notices that our two main views of God tend to reflect two very prominent cultural expectations of parenting, which he calls authoritative or nurturing.

Authoritative views of God center God’s power, believing God is in control of all things and demands obedience. This God loves order and provides rules, rules which exist to be followed.

Nurturing views of God emphasize God’s love, which includes forgiveness, grace, mercy, and acceptance. Rules God has exist for the sake of healthy relationships, both human and divine. 

Believers in an authoritative God are often loyal and optimistic about the future. They can be scrupulous about certain ethics, such as cheating, but resist changes to the social order, unless it is to return it to a real or imagined order of the past. They are also less concerned for others who are different, less tolerant of difference in general, more fearful of God, more anxious, and less humble.

“The quality of relationships with others is not as strong and they have lower degrees of attachment,”

Sanders says. By contrast, believers in the nurturing God are

“more cooperative, agreeable, and have better social relationships.”

They volunteer to help others more, treat those who are different better, are more humble and less dogmatic, and live with greater meaning and purpose. They feel more secure in God’s love and so

“have greater life satisfaction and less loneliness,”

Sanders says.

It is perhaps no accident that people with authoritative visions of God are drawn to powerful, authoritarian leaders and are more likely to be distant, but authoritarian parents. People with authoritative visions of God may also scrupulously follow their moral principles while struggling to establish warm, intimate relationships. By contrast, people with nurturing visions of God are drawn to inclusive, benevolent servant leaders and are more likely to be nurturing parents who maintain warm, intimate relationships throughout their lives. The implications of these different views of God are enormous. They impact our parenting and our politics, our religion and our ordinary relationships. As the scriptures suggest, we become like what we worship.

And other scholars tell us it’s a cultural thing – a bad habit of the Western Christian tradition. We’ve gotten used to picturing God in the image of our aloof, distant father-figures. Or we shaped our image of God in the image of our mighty but tyrannical landlords and kings. 

In my dissertation, I explore some of the ways that people outside the Western Christian tradition explore their image of Abba God. A God who above all else walks with us at the speed of love, a three mile per hour God. A god who sings over us, constantly leading the great call and response chorus of creation. A god who can’t stop the great creative dance behind all movement, all love, all that flows, all that is dynamic in creation. A god who isn’t distant and stern and demanding but who guides and nurtures and beckons us home, the mother of all mothers and wisdom keeper of all wisdom keepers, a God who is a black woman. 

I think these folks are right about Abba God.

But how do we know? 

How do we know what’s true about God after all? 

If we mean how can we be certain or how can we prove it, well, we can’t. God’s not like that.

But we can know what God’s like in a different way. We can intuit it. We can believe, and we can hope and we can trust. 

We can keep reading and praying and wondering, keep asking:

What is Jesus like?

And what did Jesus say?

And we can join the ancestors in the faith and believe that God looks like Jesus. God sounds like Jesus.

And we can ask:

what is love like?

And trust with the ancestors that God is love. 

And we can join the best of the Eastern Orthodox church and our artists and ask: what is most beautiful? Because God should be the very most beautiful and beauty will show us the way to God. As Dostoyevsky wrote, beauty will save us. 

Jesus called God Abba.

Abba is many things, but Abba is first our wise and good and ever-loving mother and father to us all.

And Abba is beautiful, everything about Abba is worthy of love and trust and jaw-dropping wonder. 

This, friends, is what God is like.