God’s Sex
Scriptures:
Psalm 138
John 4:19-30
Sermon title caught your attention didn’t it? But c’mon now, be honest: if I had entitled it “The Importance of Inclusive Language” there would have been a lot of eyes glazing over and maybe even some tiptoeing toward the door. You’ve probably already noticed that I tend not to use personal pronouns when referring to God, and I’d like to explore with you a bit why that is so and why it makes a difference.
But first I want to make you an offer (this is not necessarily an offer you can’t refuse, but it is a genuine one). One Sunday back in 1974, when we were just at the beginning of a growing awareness about the importance of inclusive language, I was invited to give a sermon at a Unitarian Universalist church in New York City. I decided to give a sermon I’d given before on the nature of God for the 20th century, and since it was all about God it was pretty hard to deliver it without pronouns. So, I announced before the start of the sermon that, in order not to have awkward locutions – using him/her or he-and-she throughout the sermon – I would use “he” and “him” for God during the sermon and trust that people could translate that in their own minds into more inclusive terms. Well, immediately a woman at the side of the congregation (it was in a ¾ round shape) jumped up and said, “I object to that – that’s offensive to me.” Another women in the rear then stood up and said, “He’s a guest minister, let him do it however he wants” – which led to about a 15-minute discussion among them how best to proceed – which I thought was wonderful, because it freed me up then to deliver the sermon in a way that was meaningful for that congregation. So, the offer I am making to you is that if at any point you want to disagree with what I’m saying – or even just add a comment to it – feel free to jump up and jump in. I really relish the dialogue, and I think it enhances our worship when we’re talking together about those elements of our faith that are truly important to each one of us.
The primary reason why inclusive language about God is important for me is that God is beyond gender. To think of and talk about God as “he” (or, for that matter, “she”) is to think of God as a person, rather than as a Supreme Being, the Most High of Heaven (as we said in our Call to Worship), the “mysterium tremendum” (in Martin Buber’s phrase). What God is is so much greater than anything we can possibly imagine that to think of God with human characteristics is to diminish the Lord who is over us all. There is a word for this that some of you may have heard – anthropomorphism – which simply means ascribing human characteristics to God. We already have enough trouble with a modern scientific world-view, which sometimes says that there is no God but human beings created God in their own image in order to have a kind of comforting “grandfather in heaven” who will look after us. That’s not the kind of a God I want to put my faith in. My God – and I hope your God – is the Creator-Redeemer-Sustainer who empowers us to live our lives as God’s creatures. And our language needs to reflect our understanding of this kind of a God. J.B. Philips once wrote a book that he entitled “Your God Is Too Small” – a book that challenged our limited understandings of who God is and, more importantly, what God can become for us. That’s what I want to do by using language that doesn’t turn God into a “grandfather in heaven” but rather that challenges us constantly to expand our vision of who God is and what God can be for you and for me.
On the other hand (this is going to start sounding like Tevye in “Fiddler On the Roof” – on the one hand, but on the other hand…..), in Jesus’ relationship with God we do see a personal side to God, as Jesus sought to help his followers experience a warm, caring God. Jesus calls God “Abba”, which literally means “Daddy”; and he taught his followers to pray to “Our Father…” Jesus intentionally means to personalize God and thus make God real for the disciples. What’s more, Jesus also uses feminine images to describe God’s relationship to the people, as in Matthew 23:37 when he laments over Jerusalem and says, “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings…..” Here Jesus is reflecting the later Isaiah (66:12-13) who uses this image: “For thus says the Lord…..As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.” Yes, God is personal for each one of us, and we experience both the commanding authority of “Our Father” and the nurturing comfort of a mother with her child when we experience God.
Nevertheless, to know the fathering and the mothering of God is not to make God into a person – a creature. Despite calling God “Abba” and “Our Father”, the defining character of God for Jesus is that which we heard in the scripture today from John: “God is spirit, and those who worship God must worship in spirit and truth.” In the confirmation class Lura and Jason and I have been looking at what the Bible says about God, and as we’ve checked Biblical passages in both the Old and New Testaments we’ve found words and descriptions like “God is one”, “everlasting”, “all around me”, “is like Jesus”, “is spirit”, “is light”, “is love”, “lives in us” (I’ll be glad to show you these Bible passages, if you’d like to look them up for yourselves).
These descriptions of God are all metaphors. Because no mere mortal can comprehend what God really is, we devise metaphors to aid in our understanding. To say “God is spirit” or “God is love” is to say, “this is how I experience God in my life.” In this sense it is perfectly legitimate to say “God is father” or even “God is mother”, because what we are really saying is, “I experience God like a father, or like a mother, to me.” The problem is that the image of God as male has become so engrained in our thinking that we assume God to be male or masculine, rather than that this is a metaphor about God. The wonderful thing about metaphors is that they are not exhaustive – we can think of all kinds of ways to describe how we experience God and Jesus. We can say, for example, that Jesus is a Lion or that Jesus is a Lamb – and both statements are true because both are metaphors. There are all kinds of ways to think about God, because our experiences of God are so broad and varying. To use only masculine imagery for God, then, is to sharply limit how we experience God.
A second important reason to use inclusive language is because of what is happening in society. For far too long we have been patriarchal in our approach to people – men feeling superior to women because they have had a privileged position in society – and our religious language has contributed to this. Make no mistake about it: language does have power to affect people’s lives. The most untrue adage I know – and I wish we could get rid of it – is “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” Names don’t hurt, huh? What happens when you call someone “nigger”? Even now, after all these years of that word being discredited, and even though I’m using it here as a negative example, it sends something of a chill up my spine just to speak it. When we use words to denigrate we give them power. And when we use words to confer privilege we also give them power. To refer to all of humanity as “man” is to give the masculine more power than it deserves. And to call God “he” and “him” is to solidify the position of privilege and authority that men have felt is rightly theirs throughout the past several centuries. Certainly, in Jesus’ time and for many centuries before that, a patriarchal society was the norm. But Jesus cut through much of that way of thinking. His encounter with the woman at the well, from which our scripture passage was taken today, is but one of many examples of how Jesus encountered women on a basic level of equality and wished for them equal roles in the realm of God on earth. For those of you who were here last week, the parody that I read of Ten Reasons Why Men Should NOT Be Ordained was a good way of showing how inane the arguments are that are used for why women should not be ordained. The United Church of Christ, incidentally, should be justifiably proud that it (or its predecessor denominations) has been in favor of ordaining women since the 19th century.
Now, I am well aware that in-grained habits die hard, and that the ways we are used to hearing and speaking in church about God have great significance for us. To hear, as we have over the years, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul,” is to bask in a sense of spiritual well-being that probably goes back to our childhood (and, by the way, the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible hasn’t changed those particular personal pronouns). In 1983 when the National Council of Churches brought out an Inclusive Language Lectionary there was a great hue and cry – and not just from conservative Christians – about changing the Bible in order to pursue a particular political agenda. There may have been some truth to this objection, but I believe the effort was sincerely motivated as a way of helping churches to deal with the dominance of patriarchy as they worked through the lectionary readings each year. Again, what the Lectionary represented was the power of words. As Burton Throckmorton, Jr. wrote in The Christian Century about a year after it had been published, “the Lectionary touched a raw nerve. Deep-seated fears that cut across the theological spectrum have been exposed. Much more is at stake than the elimination of some pronouns and the loss of some cherished appellations. The anxiety and the virulent clamor are caused, I have no doubt, by the recognition that the Lectionary has put the theological foundations of the status quo under siege, and that traditional perceptions of God, and of the power arrangements of men and women that are sanctioned and confirmed by those perceptions, have been threatened.”
In other words, when we use inclusive language in our Bible readings, in our hymns, in our liturgy we are changing the way we think – and that’s scary stuff. One of the places where it’s particularly troubling is in our hymns. Many of us have sung the familiar hymns so often that the words are second nature and much beloved – and they (and the language they use) are central to the faith that we feel. I don’t want to deny those feelings or the faith that is thereby expressed. Yet, even the old hymns can express the grandeur of a God without gender, as does the one we sang at the beginning of the service: “Immortal, invisible, God only wise…Most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days…” – great metaphors for a God who is beyond human comprehension – and even when in the fourth verse it uses masculine language: “Great Father of glory, pure Father of light”, the response brings us back to the greatness of our God: “O help us to see ‘Tis only the splendor of light hideth thee.” My point here is that even when we are singing the old hymns with their often non-inclusive language we can find ways in our hearts and minds to make the translations and find more inclusive ways to not only sing the old, old story but also tell it with eyes and ears and tongues that include all of humanity and all of the images and metaphors of God that we can possibly imagine.
Here’s something you might want to try. It’s a small step toward understanding the trinity in an inclusive way. You may have heard me singing the Doxology (after the offering), when I happened to leave the microphone on, in a slightly different way. Instead of singing, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow; praise him all creatures here below, praise him above ye heavenly host; praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost,” I will sing: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow; praise God all creatures here below; praise God above ye heavenly host; Creator, Christ and Holy Ghost.” If you like, you might want to sing that version along with me. It might surprise you how such a little change can open you up to a different experience of God the three-in-one in your own life.
What I’ve tried to do today is express why inclusive language about God is important to me. To experience God in this way, without regard to gender, is central to my own faith experience. Yours may be quite different. But that’s why we are a faith community that can take our differing experiences of the one God and share them with one another. I invite you to share your experiences of God with me and with one another as we continue the journey of faith together.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, Nevada
April 30, 2006