Scripture: Luke 9:57-60; Luke 15:11-24
I think maybe that I have never given a Fathers’ Day sermon. Every year, it seems, whatever I might be inclined to say along the lines of parental love or appreciation or sermons somehow related to families or anything at all along those lines, I have tended to say on Mother’s Day, so that by the time Fathers’ Day comes around it’s usually just a matter of saying “Happy Fathers’ Day” and letting it go at that. The short, direct, masculine approach to things. But there’s a first time for everything, and today, I’m going to give what I consider to be a Fathers’ Day sermon. It may not fit everyone’s image of what a traditional Fathers’ Day sermon might sound like, but then you wouldn’t expect that from me anyway, and I wouldn’t expect you to want it. Even so, I give this sermon with some real reservations, that will come out, I think, in the course of what I have to say.
One of my reservations I can say right away, and that is that I will be touching on areas today that I don’t feel particularly well qualified to speak about. For instance, some of what I have to say I suppose could fall under the heading of changing gender roles and identities, and there are certainly many people who have specialized knowledge that would be relevant to that: biologists, cultural anthropologists, sociologists, social psychologists, therapists to name just a few. If I were an expert in all those areas, I would probably feel like I stood on firmer ground in delving into some of what I want to talk about. As it is, I’m an expert in none of those areas and don’t feel on very firm ground at all. That’s ok, I tell myself. I have my own perspective to bring, and besides I hardly ever feel fully qualified to say anything. So this is nothing new particularly, but I do confess a certain sense of insecurity as I go into this.
I chose the hymn we just sang, “God Reigns O’er All the Earth”, because I wanted to use it as a way of getting into what I want to talk about this morning. Many of you recognize this as a hymn whose “real” name is “This Is My Father’s World.” I grew up, as many of you did I’m sure, singing this hymn. I sang it so often that I know it by heart. [recite verse 1]
Those words don’t appear in our hymnal. As with many other hymns in the New Century Hymnal, the words have been changed out of a concern to make the language more inclusive. And the language truly did need to be made more inclusive! In this one hymn with three verses there are 10 references to God as being male. Father, he, him, king. Ten times. I was using the Pilgrim hymnal (widely used in the UCC even now) to check this out. I flipped to another page. Praise the Lord, His Glories Show. Four verses. Fifteen male references to God Two references to human beings as men. Not every hymn was quite that bad, of course, but I remember in the days when I was using the Pilgrim Hymnal regularly, because that’s all I had, I sometimes had a hard time finding any hymn to sing that was not heavily weighted with male imagery—for god and humans. So as far as I was concerned the New Century Hymnal’s concern for inclusive language was long overdue, and I am thoroughly, thoroughly, thoroughly grateful for it!
I realize though that not everyone, not even everyone at Sojourners, is as thoroughly grateful as I am. There may be some of you (I think there are) who are in favor of making our language more inclusive, but who would like to sing “This Is My Father’s World”. And I have to say that although I support inclusive language, and although I believe it is extremely important not only to have our language be more inclusive but to have more inclusive, more varied, larger and richer ways to imagine God than the masculine images we have almost exclusively relied on, and although I believe there are a number of good and compelling reasons to seek out the feminine faces of God and understanding the nature of God to be as much feminine as masculine, and although I certainly don’t want to be understood as having a kind of backlash reaction against inclusive language and what it represents, and although I certainly do not mean to be complaining about a few minor changes in the words of hymns when there are still so many major changes that need to be made in terms of dismantling male privilege, still I do have some concerns, concerns that relate to the fact that “This Is My Father’s World” is not to be found in our hymnal, and indeed very few hymns contain male references to God at all, only those that pair the male references with female references, as Brian Wren does in the first hymn we sang today, “Bring Many Names”.
This is another reason why I had such reservations about this sermon, because I knew it might sound like I am wanting to back off inclusive language or suggest somehow that it has gone too far, or that our efforts to imagine God in various and more feminine ways is somehow misguided, and I don’t want to suggest anything even remotely like that. What I do want to suggest, if I can do that without doing all these things I just said I didn’t want to do, is that what we need to do is not so much to get rid of male language and imagery, not to purge our language of its maleness, but to rehabilitate it.
If God needs to be more richly imagined, so does what it means to be a man. We wear lots of masks, don’t we? All of us do. And sometimes that’s not a bad thing. Sometimes the masks we wear, the people that we pretend to be are the people we want to be, and putting on the mask, playing the role, helps us to be at least a little more like those people we wish we were. We may feel like imposters, knowing that we aren’t really those wonderful people we are pretending to be. But it just may be also that in playing the part we gradually become the people we are pretending to be.
Sometimes wearing a mask is not so much a positive thing as it is just a necessary thing. We wear the mask of the self-assured, secure, confident, competent, all-around together person, because we cannot afford to give in to the insecure, un-confident, lost parts of ourselves. So we pull ourselves together as best we can as often as we can because we need to. And that too can be a good thing. And sometimes we wear masks just in order to get along in a certain social context or to get hired or stay hired or get to some place you want to be in a job. And that is not so much a good thing, but it just is, and so we just do it. And some of us, I think particularly of people of color and of sexual minorities, may out of necessity be especially experienced at certain kinds of mask-wearing.
So it is not always a bad thing to wear masks, but it is sometimes a bad thing, to have to hide some important part of who you are, to pretend to some identity that is not your own. I have often said that for me an essential part of Sojourners is the intention that we be a place where we don’t have to wear masks for one another, where you don’t have to hide your sexual orientation, or your vulnerability, or your skepticism about churches, or your doubts about the Christian faith. We mean to be a place where you don’t have to pretend to an orientation that is not yours, or a strength that is not yours, or a faith that is not yours, or to very much of anything. We are not completely, in every way, there yet, and we may never be. But I have testified before that Sojourners has been important for me because it has been that kind of a place for me, and as I understand what we are trying to do as church, this is pretty much a core value for us, that we feel free to take off our masks, because they can be so confining and dehumanizing and depressing and oppressing.
In this light, my simple thought for Fathers’ Day is that for the most part the masculine masks we are given to wear fall into the category of those we would be better off without and need to be liberated from. Of course I refer to the masks of control and leadership, the masks of aggression and domination, the masks of being providers and protectors, the masks of strength and will, all the masks of machismo. By now many of those masks are almost grotesque caricatures of masculinity, rather than anything mildly resembling the real thing, but of course many men have worn those masks willingly and gladly. And many still do, even though they are not as comfortable as they once were. And many are reluctant to give them up even if they are uncomfortable, because they may signify a certain status or power that some find it hard to give up.
Of course women would be better off if men didn’t feel the need to wear these masculine masks. Women would be better off without the masks of aggression and control that have so often turned to abuse. Women would be better off if the masks that signified status and power did not belong mostly to men. Women have clearly needed to be liberated from all the systems where men wear the masks of power. But men need to be liberated from the same thing. Men need to be liberated from the roles that have put them in places of power but that have also imprisoned them. Men need to be free to put aside the masks they have been asked to wear in order to reveal a more real, a more human face.
Let me get back to God-talk for a few moments. Men also need to be free from having their gender exclusively or excessively identified with God. God who is all knowing, and all powerful, and all everything, and completely self-sufficient, and in control. And whose default gender is male. That has not been good for women, to have it assumed that the person in control, whether of relatively small things or of everything, will be male. Again I suggest it has also not been good for men. The qualities associated with God have also been the qualities associated with being a man, and those are hard qualities to live up to, being all powerful and self-sufficient and in control. It would be freeing for men to be able to give up trying to live in those roles. And men should be glad for all the efforts to find different ways to speak of God and to think of God in other ways than being all powerful and male.
Jesus told a story. You heard it this morning. It’s a well-known story often referred to as the parable of the prodigal son, but I think it’s really a story about the father. Most people, I think, would say that it’s about a loving father, who in his father love is very much like God, that Jesus meant the father in the story to say something to us about God. And I agree. I believe Jesus was trying to liberate God from being thought of as all powerful and in control and in charge and all those terribly restrictive roles God is expected to play. I believe Jesus was trying to give God a new identity that was centered on love and not power. Maybe he was also trying to do the same thing for fathers, for men in general. Maybe he was trying to offer men the opportunity to find some new identities, based on love rather than testosterone. Maybe he was suggesting to all of us that it’s not so much that we need less male language or less male imagery in our lives or in the church or in our theology but different male language and imagery in our theology and in our lives. I’m hoping we can all work at that task together. In fact, that is my Fathers’ Day prayer, as I wish everyone a Happy Fathers’ Day. Amen.
Jim Bundy
June 20, 2004