IMAGINE Job 38:1-11; 2 Cor. 6:1-13; Mark 4:35-41 Our Christian faith is derived from Hebrew religion including its traditions of patriarchy. Patriarchy means generally the supremacy of males in society and in particular the supremacy of the father in clans and families along with the dependence of women and children on the father. It is possible to read the origins of Hebrew religion as emerging out of the battle for the supremacy of one God over other gods and in some cases over other gods that possessed certain feminine characteristics. How did those ancient Hebrews think about this supreme God? They looked around them and saw everywhere the dominance of men over women according to the traditions of patriarchy by which they lived and in this found a guiding analogy: God is supreme in all things in the creation as a father is supreme in his household. The legacy of this analogy was extended to and, we should say, enthusiastically embraced by the Christian church, both for its thinking about God and for its organization as an institution. God was conceived as a Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, all male, although sometimes the Spirit would be cast in feminine terms. But for the most part, the dominance of male images for God in Christian thinking was absolute, reinforced by an all-male priesthood whose maleness was understood to be of critical importance for bearing the teachings and mysteries of the faith. 1
It was not nonsense that Jews and Christians would have used male images as means to think about God, living as they were in a patriarchal culture. What is nonsense is the belief that God is actually male! The implications of the sacred name of God, Yahweh, which means I will be whom I will be, points to the infinity of God, the absolute unboundedness and indefinability of God. It is impossible to comprehend God. At best we find images from our experience by means of which to think about God. These images will be more or less appropriate, but they are inevitably limited by our limited capacities to understand what we are talking about when we refer to God. Religion provides us with certain guiding images that have been tested over time, but, no matter how enduring and venerable these images, they are limited, not by God surely, but by us who use them. Beyond the problems endemic in patriarchal culture for the lives of women, the use of patriarchal images to refer to God became a special problem for religion when people mistook these images as God-given rather than simply products of limited human imagination. These images came to be used exclusively and were made orthodox, which is to say, the correct teaching about God. It was forgotten that patriarchal images had their origin in patriarchal culture and were no more than the reflections of that culture. Thereby the exclusive use of these images became a kind of blasphemy, limiting God to the terms of maleness, making God as small as the characteristics that mark a single gender. Nor can this error be corrected by replacing male language for God with female images, God as mother, God as she. God is no more she than God is he, and no less. It s simply not appropriate to apply the limits of gender to the infinite God. This has always 2
been and will always be a falsification of God, something which in the name of God we must outgrow. Recall with me the terrific biblical sarcasm in Job, where God says: Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined the measurements surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? In other words, Do not limit me, mortal, to your span of thinking. Don t imagine that I am no greater than your imagination allows. Don t think that there is not more of me to see than you presently see. Sticking with the metaphor of sight, you can only see as far as you can see. But try a set of binoculars. Now you can see things you couldn t see before. Try a telescope. You can see farther still, and with a more powerful telescope still farther. Unaided you can see but a fraction of what you can see with these optical devices; with them you can see things you did not even know were there. And the same is true if you go the other direction and instead of looking farther and farther away, you use a microscope to see what is close in ever more minute detail. This is how it is with our thinking about God. There is always more to God than meets the eye, and the way of faith is to have one s vision ever extended and expanded. For this there are no special devices that are the equivalent of telescopes or microscopes. For this, all we have is the platform of our faith to inspire us to think about the greatness of God, and the community we have with one another to enhance and challenge and criticize our thinking about the One in whom we live and move and have our being. 3
On this Father s Day, I especially regret that the church has spoiled the image of a father s love for our use in thinking about God. I had a wonderful father, and I miss him. He gave me things that have stayed with me all my life, including devotion to the Christian faith and the love of the ocean. And although he had a hero s medals from World War II, he was a most gentle man who hated fighting. He had no education, but he had character. He was in so many ways a model for me, and I am sure that my thinking about God is colored by my thinking about him. I ll go farther and say that he is for me a model of godliness. But not everyone has been so fortunate as I have been. There are those who have grown up with bad fathers or absent fathers and who have no reason to think of God as father, except out of longing for something they have not had. But even for those of us who have been blessed with good fathers, surely we know that our fathers are only human, limited creatures and limited not least of all by only being male. In our faith, the speaking image of God is Jesus. We acknowledge this when we say that Jesus is the Word of God. As a word communicates what is in the mind, so we believe that the life and teachings of Jesus communicate godliness to us and that we know the nature of God by knowing Jesus. The genius of the Christian Gospels is that they give us enough of Jesus to convey the message but not so much as to bog us down in a biography of a man living in first century Palestine who had certain physical characteristics and cultural prejudices. The most obvious exception to this is his maleness. But even this is blurred in the Gospel account. Jesus maleness is not celebrated in the Gospels. It is incidental to who Jesus is, and there is nothing in the portrayal of Jesus that would encourage us to think of God in male terms, with the 4
exception that Jesus calls God Father. That, of course, is the legacy of patriarchy which the Gospel-writers inherit and which doubtlessly Jesus inherited as well. It is a legacy to be resisted and rejected, not because there are no good fathers to reflect godliness, but because the image of Father has been made an idol and thereby a distraction and stumbling block for any who would wish to think about the living God. At the end of the story of Jesus calming the storm on the water, the disciples ask one another, Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him? As always in the New Testament, the disciples stand for us; they are the church. Like them we come here asking who it is we are worshiping, in an effort to grow in our understanding and our vision of who God is, seeking the living God beyond dead images, the God beyond gods, a quest that goes on for as long as we live, as we grow in wisdom so that we do not, in the words of St. Paul, accept the grace of God in vain. Amen. Third Sunday after Pentecost, June 21, 2009 Emanuel Lutheran Church 5