Call to Worship:
Leader 1: Then God said,
Congregation: “Let us make humankind
in our image, in our likeness,so that they may rule . . .
Leader 2: That’s what God said.
Leader 1: So God created
Congregation: humankind in his own
image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
Leader 2: And God blessed them. That’s what God did.
Leader 1: Better together.
Congregation: Better together.
Leader 2: Better together.
Leader 1: And we look to the Bible
Congregation: to understand and encounter this God.
Leader 2: And we are surprised at what we find.
Leader 1: Our God is a lion.
Congregation: Our God is a lamb
Leader 2: Our God is a Father
Leader 1: Our God is a Mother
Congregation: Our God shouts as a Warrior
Leader 2: Our God shouts as a woman giving birth
Leader 1: Our God loves us.
Congregation: Loves us.
Leader 2: Loves us.
Congregation: Of whom shall we be afraid?
The New Testament scholar, Tom Wright, tells a funny story
about his time as a chaplain at Oxford.
He would often try to meet with each first-year student to welcome them to the
college. Most, he says, were happy to meet him but would often say, a bit
embarrassed, “You won’t be seeing much of me; you see, I don’t believe in God.”
He would often respond, “Oh, that’s interesting. Which god do you not believe
in?” This response would catch the student off guard. They believed that the
term “god” always meant the
same thing to everyone and would stumble off a few
phrases about the god they didn’t believe in: an old man who lived up in the
sky, ready to smite at a moment’s notice, sending bad people to hell and good
people to heaven. Wright would respond, “O good. I don’t believe in that god either.” Wright acknowledges that despite the best
efforts of many atheists, many people continue to believe in god but have
little sense or commonality about who that god might be. The pressing question,
then, for many people today is not, “Is there a God?” but “What kind of God is
there?” While Tom was telling a story about atheists, I find his words also
true about many of us as Christians. We must ask ourselves continually, “What
kind of God is this god? What does the Bible say? Who does this God reveal
himself to be?” And last week we saw that God’s first revelation of God’s self,
God’s very “image,” is illustrated by the adam (humankind) - male and
female, created together, at the same time, equally, to rule over all creation
(Genesis 1:26-28). That helps us see
God, Genesis teaches. Mother Theresa
wrote, “But why did God make some of us men and others women? Because a woman’s
love is one image of the love of God, and a man’s love is another image of
God’s love. Both are created to love, but each in a different way. Woman and
man complete each other, and together show forth God’s love more fully than
either can do it alone.” So today I would like to explore the more neglected
side of that image of God – the female or feminine aspects of God revealed in
Scripture and why we should incorporate them into our understanding of who this
God is.
1. Female
imagery is a part of Scripture’s revelation as to who God is.
The Bible reveals God’s character and actions through female
imagery in at least 26 different places using analogies and metaphors, spoken
by prophets, as well as God’s own voice.
- Numbers 11:12
- Deuteronomy 32:18
- Ruth 2:12
- Job 38:8
- Psalm 17:8
- Psalm 22:9-10
- Psalm 90:2
- Psalm 91:4
- Psalm 123:2
- Psalm 131:2-3
- Proverbs 8:1
- Proverbs 8:22-25
- Isaiah 31:5
- Isaiah 42:13-14
- Isaiah 45:10
- Isaiah 46:3
- Isaiah 49:15
- Isaiah 63:15
- Isaiah 66:7-13
- Hosea 13:8
- Matthew 23:37
- Luke 13:34
- Luke 15:8-10
- John 3:3-8
- 1 Peter 2:2-3
The Lord will march out like a champion,
like a warrior he will stir up his zeal;
with a shout he will raise the battle cry
and will triumph over his enemies.
like a warrior he will stir up his zeal;
with a shout he will raise the battle cry
and will triumph over his enemies.
14 “For a long time I have kept silent,
I have been quiet and held myself back.
But now, like a woman in childbirth,
I cry out, I gasp and pant. ~ Is. 42:13-14
I have been quiet and held myself back.
But now, like a woman in childbirth,
I cry out, I gasp and pant. ~ Is. 42:13-14
For instance, in our passage this morning, gendered
metaphors are used to describe God’s determination and deliverance as a
shouting warrior but also as “a woman in childbirth” gasping and panting to
give birth. Such
metaphors for God in Scripture serve two key functions. They
help us both understand God and encounter God. They seek to illumine the
unknown by the use of the known and the infinite through the finite but also
draw upon personal experience to produce an emotional response. So the Bible
promotes powerful female images: a woman in labor, a nursing mother, a mother
comforting her child, a
mother eagle, a mother bear, a mother hen, a woman
searching for a lost coin in ways that reveal God’s character and which link
God’s love and redemptive activity to the female experience.
Let me reiterate. There’s nothing wrong with male language
for God. It’s good and Biblical. And yet, there are also many Biblical passages
that use female metaphors and analogies to also describe God’s work and
compassion. So restricting ourselves to masculine images for God may distort
our comprehension of God and women’s connection to God and all of creation. So
the question is not whether using female images for God will draw us away from
the God of the Bible. The question is whether using exclusively male metaphors
will so distort our view of God as to render our concept of God unbiblical.
You might at this point imagine that I as a pastor and
student of the Bible would therefore have no problem speaking about God using
such feminine metaphors and analogies. And you would be wrong. I do struggle
with these images. While I am convinced by Scripture’s use of female imagery as
being important and acceptable, I struggle to speak about God in this way. If
the Bible uses them, what’s my problem?
2. I
struggle using female imagery for God. Where does my uncomfortableness come
from?
a. It’s
not my culture. Culture is a funny thing. When it’s
yours it’s hard to see and can masks or hide other ways of thinking or doing
things. It touches upon everything (language, customs, what we wear, eat, how
we greet each other, music, institutions, etc.) and can even acquire the status
of morality (right vs. wrong). Don’t think so – then try changing something
that’s a part of your family culture, a holiday tradition, for example. When we
were living in France my kids all attended French schools. One night our three
high schoolers related a story about the challenge of cultural differences. The
three of them had mentioned to their French friends that they were sometimes
uncomfortable kissing others on the cheeks, as is French custom. When the
French high schoolers heard this they asked, “Well, how do you greet your
friends when you are in the United States?” Our children responded, “We hug
each other.” The French students’ response was awesome. They were aghast and
said, “Wait, you touch whole bodies?” My kids laughed because at that moment
they understood that from a French perspective such a greeting was far more
risqué. My own Christian upbringing was one that was very focused on the Bible
and steeped in male culture, which doesn’t mean it was bad. I loved my church
but they believed that the Bible taught that drinking any form of alcohol was
wrong, only hymns should be sung, that women should not speak or pray from the
pulpit because men were above women, created by God explicitly to lead. This
meant that the female metaphors for God were never used, despite being in the
Bible. In fact, I imagine that they didn’t even see them and if they did they
would have thought the use of them as New Age(ie) and wicked. The power of
culture is that most people don’t see things as they ARE; they see things as
THEY are. So despite the many Biblical passages which spoke of God in female
ways or gender neutral ways, my own culture has prejudiced me to filter out
such images and to struggle adopting them. They sound “wrong.” This isn’t an
excuse but a reason and one that I must deal with if I am to bring my culture
in line with Scripture. But as I struggled with myself this week, I also had to
acknowledge a bit of a darker reason for my unease.
b. It’s my idolatry.
In our passage from Isaiah 42 the Lord is revealed as a “champion, like a
warrior” immediately juxtaposed to an image of a mother giving birth. Both, of
course, are images of delivery but remain particularly striking when placed
side by side, which I suspect was sort of the point. What follows are a
veritable cornucopia of different images of destruction and creativity. It then
gives a warning in 42:17: “But those who trust in idols, who say to images,
‘You are our gods,’ will be turned back in utter shame.” One of the chief
threats that Israel continually faced was the temptation to confuse Yahweh with
the polytheistic deities worshiped by their neighbors. These gods were sexed
beings (both imaged in wood and stone and imagined as either male or female)
with very human appetites (they ate, had sex, slept) and with wild emotions
(raged, fell in love, misbehaved). They demanded that people cater to their
needs (sort of like divine teenagers). The Israelites, however, were forbidden
from creating such images and were offered images that clearly aimed to reveal
God without allowing God to be imagined as the image itself. The God of the Bible
is by nature gender-transcendent – he is neither a man nor a woman. God is not
a human being and cannot be fully captured by human language or categories such
as gender. For example, the Bible says, “God is a rock” in Deuteronomy
32:18,
and then says, “and the God who gave you birth.” But focusing on this image
alone or taking it literally would be to engage in idolatry and would fail to
provide a true sense of who God is. As I sat with my discomfort this week,
explored why I never use female
imagery for God, a dawning realization came
upon me that left me a bit startled. I began to recognize that my ways of
worshiping God employing only male imagery has led me to imagine in some ways
that God IS male, that God is in some way Wright’s old man in the sky.
3. How
might we move forward as a congregation?
a. Seek
balance
Using male gendered metaphors for God is not bad or harmful.
But, God’s nature is too immense to be captured by one image and our lives too
varied to be tapped by one metaphor. Thus we should take our cue from the Bible
which offers a variety of images comparing God to inanimate objects, forces of
nature, animals, people in various roles, and both human genders. None of
these, of course, should be taken literally or alone because focusing on just
one might lead us to a form of idolatry, to confuse the metaphor with the
reality and make absolute something that was meant to be illustrative. Rather,
following the lead of Scripture, we should allow these images to balance and
enrich one another in the same way that we eat different and various foods as
part of a balanced diet, even food we don’t like. Isaiah 42 offers us just such
a balance: God’s determination is like the shouting warrior and like the mother
crying out in childbirth. The parables of the Lost Sheep (male shepherd) and
the Lost Coin (woman cleaning her house) depict God’s determination to seek out
and care for wayward individuals. If we wish to think of God rightly, we should
try and employ more gender neutral and female images. Not to be hip but to be
biblical.
b. Explore
female images and sit with discomfort
Explore female images of God and Scripture and reflect on
them. One of the startling images of Scripture is the recurrent one of God as
being pregnant or about to give birth. Ironically, one of the struggles of
Christianity has been to contend with deism – the belief that God created the
world, set it going, and stepped away allowing it to function on its own. I
began to realize that such a problem connects to male
sorts of creation like
the watchmaker and the watch. However, the Bible constantly speaks of God’s
ongoing relationship with creation, sustaining it while being separate from it.
But if God’s relationship to us is like a mother giving birth then a different
theology emerges which can be helpful to expressing the Biblical reality.
Jurgen Moltmann describes God’s connection to creation – sustaining it, giving
on-going life to all that is by using the Bible’s image of a mother and a
fetus. The world and all that is in it, he says, is like a fetus which exists
apart from the mother (e.g. the world is not God) while at the same time
utterly dependent upon the creative powers of the mother as God also sustains
the world. These might make you uncomfortable (I’m with you) but your own
comfort is not the most important thing to being a student of the Bible and a
follower of God. God used these images, don’t you think he had a reason?
c. Remember
otherness
In the end, however, I also wish to make one last remark.
The varied uses of gender, while illustrative and helpful, should also be used
to think of God’s otherness – that God is beyond and above such imagery. So one
of the reasons that we might employ both images, as Scripture does, is to
problematize our understanding of God and gender. God is neither male nor
female. God is not like us. In Psalms 50, God names an idolater as one who
“thought that I was one just like yourself.” God is not like you – God is both
is/isn’t male and female, both is/isn’t rock and lion, both is/isn’t fire and
whisper and by maintaining all of these images we remind ourselves of that
transcendence. I’d like to end with a story. One year I was at a Baptist
Student Convention where the theme was, “Putting God First!” The first speaker
was this old, almost curmudgeonly, pastor who got up into the pulpit, looked
back at the banner behind him and then responded to all of the students with
the haunting question, “What makes you think you can put God anywhere?”
What guides you in your thinking about who God is? Which God
do you not believe in? If the Bible is your source for answering those
questions then receive this in good faith – Behold you Father. Behold your
Mother. Behold the lion. Behold the lamb. Behold the rock. Behold the One who
is beyond our comprehension and yet calls to us to follow. Behold this God.
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