Scripture: Genesis 1:26-27; Isaiah 66:7-13
I have to warn you that I expect my words this morning to be somewhat unsatisfying. They are unsatisfying to me. Unsatisfying like when you sit through an hour television show and at the end it says, “Continued next week”. I didn’t start out to do a two-part sermon, but I came to what really needed in terms of length to be the end of the sermon and I realized I was not finished, in fact hadn’t even really begun. Suddenly what I thought was going to be one sermon turned into two, and much of what I’m saying today feels sort of like preliminary remarks.
I don’t know what you think the sermon title for this morning means. I’m not sure I know what it means. I was casting around for titles, and casting aside most of the ones I was coming up with, and when the time came that I had to put down something, this was what happened. This much is probably clear to you from the sermon title, this much was clear to me from the beginning: that my words this morning were going to be about gender and God.
I am both long past ready and not yet ready to give this sermon. On the one hand, I confess to a feeling that I am long overdue to preach directly on this topic. (I’ll have some more to say on what “this topic” is, because that’s part of what I think we need to talk about—what “the topic” is). But a sermon of any kind discussing gender issues in relation to God directly for a whole sermon—not as an aside, not as a piece, but as the subject of the whole sermon—is, I think, long overdue for me.
I have been engaged, both publicly and privately, with gender issues in the church—and specifically with gender issues in relation to how we think about and talk about God—for just a little bit less than as long as I can remember. I think it was maybe a Unitarian Sunday School teacher who first suggested to me at a very young age that maybe we shouldn’t think of God as an old man with a beard sitting on a throne in the sky. That of course raises the question well then how should we think of God, and if we’re going to think of God at all in human terms then the question of gender is at least implied, since that’s the way humans come, and since I have had to wrestle with my belief in God and who God is for me—well, I’ve been dealing at least implicitly with the gender of God almost all my life.
As a pastor, presuming to speak in some way about God and to God, out loud, week in and week out, year after year, I have had to deal every week with the ways we imagine, refer to, and address God when drafting sermons, choosing hymns, writing prayers of invocation, deciding whether to modify Biblical and secular readings, and so on. For many years now I have been aware that I am making many decisions every week about how to speak of God and those decisions inevitably involve questions of gender. I have not always been happy to make the decisions I have made but for probably at least 20 years I have been aware that I am making decisions, that male images and the language that goes along with them is not to be just assumed, but that maybe I didn’t have the energy to re-write the words to the hymn this week, that I wasn’t going to make the language of scripture an issue in this congregation. I’ve been engaged with these issues at various levels in my personal life and in my professional role for quite a long time. Yet, although I have spoken about inclusive language and lay people have spoken about inclusive language, I have never, to the best of my recollection, preached directly on gender and God. It’s about time to do that.
On the other hand, I’m not really ready either. It’s not, as I say, that I haven’t thought about it. It’s not that I don’t think it’s important. It’s not that I don’t already have lots of thoughts or that I’m reluctant for some reason to express them. It’s none of that. It’s just that I have this very strong feeling that there’s a whole lot more to say than what I can even begin to say. I don’t want to trivialize the issue by treating it superficially, but I have a pretty strong feeling that whatever I say, even over the space of two weeks, is going to end up feeling, to me at least, superficial.
I realized, however, that I’m going to just have to put up with myself on this (and trust that you will too). This is one of those topics where, if you waited until you were ready, you would never do it. And I’ve waited long enough. We’ve waited long enough. Worship committee has waited long enough (we’ve been talking for months, maybe years about having gender and god be the theme of worship and sometime last fall, Padma and I agreed that we would work on something in connection with International Women’s Day, which was last Saturday. We planned it first for the 2nd, then for the 9th, now it’s the 16th. No more delays.
This is also one of those subjects (we still haven’t defined it), that needs to be talked about. It needs to be talked about much more in churches in general, churches of all kinds. There are lots of churches that just won’t touch any issue that has to do with gender and god, and I have lots I could say about that, but I think I’ll leave other churches alone this morning. It needs to be talked about much more at Sojourners, because although everyone in the Sojourners community would probably agree that the Christian church has often treated women poorly, and although just treatment of women inside and outside the church is a value we I’m sure would all subscribe to, nevertheless when you get to specifics there are some things we don’t agree on and they can affect some people quite emotionally, and there are some subject areas that we have agreed to disagree on or to avoid so as not to get upset or make anyone else upset. From where I sit there is some opening up on this subject that needs to happen even at Sojourners.
It is also a subject that needs to be talked about by men. Just as the voices of white people must be heard in the struggle for racial justice without disempowering people of color, just as the voices of straight people need to be raised on behalf of justice and dignity for gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgendered people without in any way detracting from their much-needed voices, so men’s voices need to be raised on behalf of gender justice and inclusiveness without diluting the strong voices women need to have in the church and in theological circles and society in general. All of which says I need to talk about gender and God in some way today, even if I do it inadequately, even if all I can do for now is say a few words as part of a much larger discussion.
Now as to what this topic is again. I think one reason I have a little trouble nailing it down or accurately describing it is that it opens out in so many different directions. For instance…
The whole question of gender in how we relate to, imagine, speak of or to God raises for me the question of how in general we deal with and relate to the traditions of our faith. What kind of a debt do we owe to the traditions of a church that has been throughout its history in its language and in its practice male oriented, male dominated, biased against and oppressive to women? How do we honor, how do we even come to terms with a tradition, filled as it is with so much that is good and so much that has been and continues to be destructive? What kind of attitudes do we have toward the traditions of the church, that are such a mixed bag, and how do we express those attitudes? How do we honor our own experience, which may, for some of us, include times shared with others where the traditional language of the church—patriarchy and all—was deeply and lastingly meaningful? But how do we at the same time honor the experience that may be ours, but is certainly the experience of some others, where the maleness of the church and of God has been exclusive and hurtful and harmful?
If this sounds abstract, of course it is not. The question may be joined for some on those occasions when we say the traditional version of the Lord’s Prayer here in church. Traditional version for some who find meaning in and want to honor the long line of people who have repeated the “Our Father” in churches and hospitals and fox holes, maybe almost traditional for others, who may choose to say our God instead, or some other form of address, in honor of the need to change the church’s taken-for-granted male centeredness. Or it may be joined for me when I go to another church and am invited to stand and sing a hymn which manages to point to the maleness of God 15 times in three verses. Do I sing it the way it’s written? Do I stand in respectful silence? Do I just drop out on some of the words? Do I try to do a quick re-write in inclusive language and sing my own personal version of the hymn? Do I sing that version loudly to make a witness to the person next to me, or softly, so the person next to me won’t be confused or offended? Maybe this is not a problem for some of you. It is a problem for me. And I know it’s a problem for some of you that we do not often enough include certain traditional materials in our worship, that many of the hymns have new words, that the Lord’s Prayer is not said nearly often enough, and so forth. Where do we find and express that connection to our own past, to other Christians who are part of that past, to other Christian communities past and present? It’s a large and real matter of concern.
The issue is joined also in how we relate to the Bible, which has all sorts of things in it that I frankly wish were not there, including predominantly male references to God. It is true that there are some passages where some female images have survived—I chose one of them to be read this morning—but there honestly aren’t too many. It also should be said that one way of honoring the scriptures is to give them new expression as Bobbie McFerrin has done in the choir’s offering this morning. Still the question of the rendering of God’s gender raises all sorts of questions about our relationship to the texts of scripture, and those questions are not all resolved by reading from inclusive language versions of the Bible.
Now here’s another, quite different, subject that reflecting on gender and God may lead us into. Sexuality. I think it’s fair to say that not only has much of the Christian tradition not been very kind to women, it has also taken a rather dim view of human sexuality. Maybe it has something to do with how we imagine God. While on the one hand in the Christian tradition God has almost always been pictured as male and referred to as he, at the same time it’s always been possible to say that we don’t really believe that, that of course we know that God is not really a man, that God is spirit and is neither male nor female, that “he” is just a convenient and a personal way to refer to a God who is beyond all our limited human ideas about God. And so while a “he” god fits well into patterns of male dominance, “he” also fits well into a religion in which sexuality is considered base and unspiritual, where the more spiritual you are the less sexual you are, where the birth of Jesus had to be a virgin birth, and where anything that suggests that Jesus himself was a sexual being causes boycotts and picket lines. This was one of the points made in the exhibit of bronze images from India, that in Hinduism the gods are often portrayed as sexual beings and the guides warned the American audiences that they might find this different from what they were used to, or even offensive. When we begin to imagine God as female, we are moving away from a notion that God is neither male nor female and toward a notion that God can be helpfully imagined as both male and female—which is a different approach—and that sexuality and sacredness can go together, also a different approach from much of the western Christian tradition.
Then there is the whole question of whether words like masculine and feminine can play a constructive role in helping to describe God, given the shifting nature of gender roles, identities, and stereotypes these days. Once upon a time when the gender of God was discussed people would commonly make the point that we needed to be more in touch with the feminine side of God, meaning that the male god had been the god of power and authority and control and judgment, and that what we needed was a more feminine god, more nurturing and caring and creative—the problem with this being, of course, that it assumes or implies that women are not strong or men caring. I appreciate Brian Wren’s hymn that began our worship today for that reason: it begins with the image of strong mother God and then in the second verse begins with warm Father God. I also say to myself that if we need female images of God—and we do—they need to include images of strength and they also need to include images that are other than mother, because there is more to women than motherhood just as there is more to men than fatherhood. So again to bring up the subject of gender in relation to God opens out onto the whole enormous question of gender roles and identities. What is meant or implied when we talk about the female side or the feminine face of God?
I say all this to suggest that it is no wonder that these are difficult matters to talk about. They are many layered and many-dimensional and not all about one thing. They’re about much more than I’ve been able to suggest today. And thus when we are presented with what seems like a specific, limited question—should I say, Our Father, at the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer?—it is in fact neither specific nor limited. There is an awful lot of baggage that is attached to every specific question, and there’s a lot at stake in the answer. So—I hope this has been apparent—this is explicitly and intentionally not a sermon about inclusive language. Discussions about inclusive language in my experience too often take place out of context and easily take on a kind of mechanical or mathematical flavor. Let’s see now. Should we take out all references that attach a gender to God, or should we make sure in fairness that there are an equal number of male and female references, and who’s counting?
What is at the core of all of this for me is how do we imagine God—no, not how do we imagine, but how do I imagine God? It’s not only a question of how we talk and what words we use, though that’s important. But it’s not just a question of whether I refer to God as she or how often I do that, whether our church language satisfies some standard of inclusiveness. I think it should, as part of an overall effort to dismantle the male bias embedded in the traditions of the church. But I also think that referring to God as she has little meaning unless there are female images of God that come to mind when we use the word. And arriving at those female images of God is a much harder and a much more crucial task than making adjustments in the ways we talk, which I say again I believe we also ought to do for good and compelling reasons.
Among the many reasons I believe it is important for me to seek out female images of God is that it invites me to consider with an open mind and spirit just who God is for me, who it is that my soul seeks, who it is that lies somehow at the center of my being, who it is who seeks me. If we hide behind the exclusively male images we have been given, we cannot seek God with our whole heart and mind and soul, and the God we seek will not be whole. When I return to this two weeks from now, I will do my best to put into words some of the ways I imagine God. Until then I conclude for now with a very non-conclusive. Amen.
Jim Bundy
March 16, 2003