May 8, 2016: May God’s words alone be spoken, may God’s words alone be heard. Amen.
Does anyone else think we should have heard about Noah and the ark today? I am thinking we might want to start building one.
I want to wish all the women here a very Happy Mother’s Day. I say all the women because, even if you are not a mother yourself, you are a daughter to one. I, for one, got a nice card from my son Bogart, complete with his paw print (sent to me by his grandma – my mother – who adores her grandcat).
But as I note every year, this is also a difficult day, or one that brings about mixed feelings, for many – those whose mother’s have died, or those whose mothers are absent – in whatever way that may mean, or those mothers who have lost a child, for them Mother’s Day can be troubling, awkward, or even painful.
And so, as I also say each year, that is that is why I like to think of today as less about Mothers specifically, and more about women – mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, nieces, aunts, and friends. Women who have been a part of our lives – nurturing, mentoring, loving, caring. That is what we really celebrate today – the journey of women – us, if we are women, and those women who have been a part of our lives. Because family is not defined by blood, but by one thing – loving relationship. That is what we hear about today from our gospel lesson too.
But before we go there, as I mentioned at the beginning of the service, today, in honor of all women everywhere, we are abandoning the all-male language for God in today’s service. In the Gloria we sang “he is seated at the right hand of the Mother…” In the gospel, Jesus was heard saying “As you, Mother, are in me and I am in you…” And later in our Creed “I believe in one God, the Mother the almighty,” and the Lord’s prayer “Our Mother, who art in heaven.”
Of course, most of you know that this is how I say these prayers and creeds every week. I use all feminine language – not because I believe God is female – but precisely because I believe that God is both, and so it is a way of attempting to balance the church’s use of all male language. But today, all of us are invited to participate in this, and to consider our own internal responses to the change. We need to do this today, and really consider the effect of our language for God, and part of the reason why came from one of our own young people.
A few weeks ago, Nadine, a child of this congregation, came up to me at coffee hour. She asked “Why isn’t God a girl?” To which I responded “Who said She isn’t?”
“Why isn’t God a girl?”
What a question. And the church – often called the Mother church interestingly enough, has a responsibility to answer it, because one of the clear messages we get from the gospel today is that Jesus was praying, not for himself on the night before he faced trial and death, but for all of us to be united – to be one with God and one another. And yet, from the moment he died on the cross, we have drifted apart – arguing over theology, Christology, pneumatology, doctrine, dogma, you name it. But one thing the church seems to have agreed upon, one common thread that unites us, is the continued perpetuation of patriarchy. The valuing of men over women as found in our language – united in our love of male dominated imagery for the divine. Somehow, I don’t think that was the unity Jesus was hoping for when he was praying that night.
The unity Jesus was hoping for wasn’t about religion at all – organized or otherwise. It was about relationship. Loving relationship. Look at his words: He prays that “…[we] may be one, as [he and God] are one, […] so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” Jesus was praying for us to love one another as he loved us, as God loved him, and as God loves all of us too.
This is a perfect passage for Mother’s Day, because any loving parent can tell you that they would do anything to enable, empower, and inspire their children to grow up to be all that they can be, and to be loved, as the parents love them. They pray that their child gets along with others, loves their siblings, and is treated fairly, while doing the same.
Which reminds me of two little stories about Mothers, kids, and prayer. When Robert Louis Stevenson was a boy he once remarked to his mother, “Momma, you can’t be good without praying.” “How do you know, Robert?” she asked. “Because I’ve tried!” he answered. And then there is the story about another little kid — one who had been sent to his room because he had been bad. A short time later he came out and said to his mother, “I’ve been thinking about what I did and I said a prayer.” “That’s fine,” she said, “if you ask God to make you good, God will help you.” “Oh, I didn’t ask God to help me be good,” replied the boy. “I asked God to help you put up with me.”
I think that last one is a prayer I should have said every day for my parents to be sure.
But Mothers, and Fathers too, do pray for their children – and Jesus, in the passage we heard today, is praying too. Jesus is praying for us in the same way as a parent would, that we know we are loved – feeling God’s love and God’s desire for us to be all that we can be – being one with God as Jesus and God are one.
This is the same Jesus who also was very clear about his view on religious institutions generally. Healing on the Sabbath, he rebuked those for whom rules, even ones coming from church teachings and scripture, are honored before compassion, justice, mercy, and love. No wonder he prayed so hard for us to be united in the way that he and God were united – bound in love. He sensed it would be difficult for us to live in loving relationship with one another, especially as we became more organized like the dominant faiths of his day. And when folks like Jesus come in and overturn tables, rocking the institutional boat, well…those institutions aren’t happy about it. Jesus paid the ultimate price for what he believed in because of how unsettling his unorthodox behavior and teachings were to those in power.
And so, knowing what lay ahead for those who would be baptized in his name, he prayed. He prayed for them – he prayed for us. And we need his prayer now, as much as those earliest followers needed it then, because we are now a part of the institution, and we must always be diligent that we do not hold so tightly to our traditions that we become less like Jesus and more like the temple elite who feared his rabble rousing ways. We have some work to do.
“Why isn’t God a girl?”
Nadine is doing some rabble rousing herself, and we need to listen. We can become complacent and think…we have female priests – we’re good, right?
It’s funny, or really, it isn’t, but when I wear my collar, even now some forty years after women started to be ordained in the Episcopal Church, I get some strange reactions. Most of the time I get stares, or folks calling me “Sister” (to which I reply that it is “Mother” – not because I think a priest is more important than a nun, but because I know I am far from being able to serve in the way our sisters in Christ do, so I am undeserving of that title). Others ask “What do I call you?” I once was stopped in a Home Depot on the way home from a funeral one day, and standing in an aisle (in my collar remember, and fully in black) a woman comes up to me and says “Excuse, but do you work here?” Really? Maybe I should have said “Yes, I bless the tools.”
But the best was when in a store, a woman had tears in her eyes and came over to me, and in a sort of quiet aside, as though what she was saying was somehow subversive, “When I saw you in your collar, I was brought to tears – it made me so happy.” That moved me nearly to tears thinking of how radical a statement this collar can be, and then it made me angry that it is still so strange to so many.
My male colleagues get none of this, of course. No one asks them what to be called, everyone just automatically says “Father,” and most don’t get stares, and likely never get asked where they can find the gardening section. Wearing this collar is in many ways a justice statement, but none of this is really about me or the folks I encounter…it is about the culture that both the church and society has created…and it begins with language rooted in exclusion and steeped in the history of a long patriarchal society out of which our scriptures were created.
Now some, both men and women, often argue that they don’t believe God is a boy, and that it hasn’t had any affect on them. The language is just the tradition of the church, familiar and comfortable, so there really isn’t any need to talk about it, or change it. After all we know Father really doesn’t mean that literally, right? So, what’s the harm?
There’s a poem I heard once called “Am I your child too, God?”, and it goes like this:
I hear you are a boy,
but I am not.
I hear you are Father,
but I cannot be.
I hear you are Lord,
but I am told to be a lady.
I hear I am created in your image,
but I do not see it in the mirror.
I hear I am loved by you,
but your Church ignores me.
I am a little girl, God.
Do you hear even me?[1]
Folks, we all know that the old children’s song about “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” isn’t really true, don’t we. We all know words can be deeply painful when used to marginalize – there are some that are unspeakable they are so hurtful. And while we all know the intent of the current church is not to marginalize women and girls with a bombardment of “Father, Lord, King, He, Master” in worship services every week, intent does not negate the overwhelming subtlety of exclusion from the divine conversation.
We have a responsibility to accept the consequences of our speech. We also have a responsibility to stand up against the result of our patriarchal society, a patriarchy perpetuated in some large part by religious institutions. Because unfortunately, we see the result of our words that have been the life blood of misogyny and violence against women. We see it in the rates of domestic violence & sexual assault – and in the way we devalue the work women do by paying them less money for equal work. This must stop. And the way to do it is to begin with ourselves – to step outside the boxes in which we live. That is what all the prophets call us to – biblical ones, and those of today. And the crazy thing is, that when we do that, we can sometimes be surprised by what we find.
Awhile back in one of our Theology on Taps at the local bar and grill, we were talking about this very subject, and one of the participants had this to share: “I could never understand how God loves everyone. I just couldn’t understand loving a murderer. But when you talked about seeing God as mother as much as father, I suddenly got it! As a mother, I could never not love my child, no matter what they had done. It all makes sense now!”
Sometimes taking a detour, choosing a different path, looking at something in a new way, can bring about changes in ourselves that are not only surprising, but life changing.
And so Nadine’s question is another voice of prophetic witness, resounding loudly:
“Why isn’t God a girl?”
That is a question of identity, of longing, of exclusion. And I am grateful to all of you for raising up children in this church who not only have these questions, but feel empowered enough to ask them. And when they do – we need to listen!
“Why isn’t God a girl?”
What we are given in the life and teachings of Jesus is an example of inclusion, rather than exclusion; loving those who others had cast aside. Jesus prays that we might live as he lived – loving one another, opening our hearts to the workings of the Holy Spirit, that we might be as one with God and with our brothers and sisters in the world. A prayer every parent likely has for their children. And yet, we seem to be better at division than unity, hate than love, oppression than empowerment. Jesus fought against those who worshiped the letter of the law over love – can we not consider the letters we cling to in our names for God in much the same way – something idolized? Is it more important to use the familiar than to ensure that all are included?
“Why isn’t God a girl?”
That is a question that should wake us up to see the idols in our faith – the words, traditions, and doctrine we worship.
At the Last Chance Mass…on the Grass, we use a contemporary reading, in place of the second scripture reading and psalm, as a way of proclaiming that God is still speaking to us. And tonight’s reading will come from “The Sin of Hiding” by Susan Nelson Dunfee. It was sent to me several years ago by my friend and colleague in collar, the Rev. Lisa Green. I want to share a part of it with you:
“…And as woman refuses to hide herself behind the walls that patriarchy has built to protect itself from her; as she dares to name the reality that has lived unnamed within her for countless generations[…] then she knows the courage to demand that the world be transformed, that oppression and bondage be named and fought wherever they exist, and that a vision of a reality beyond fragmentation, beyond violence, and beyond guilt, be born.”
Nadine’s question is in many ways a “demand that the world be transformed.”
So on this Mother’s Day, as we honor the women in our lives, let us see the divine in them – that Christ that is in each of us – and commit to loving them as we love God – the God that is as much She as He, as much Mother as Father.
Perhaps one day, no child will ask “Why isn’t God a girl?”
But until then, let us all answer “Who said She isn’t?”
Happy Mother’s Day!
Amen.
To listen to the audio from the 10:30am service, click here:
[1] Diana Wilcox ⓒ 2010.
The Rev. Diana L. Wilcox
Christ Church in Bloomfield & Glen Ridge
May 8, 2016
Fifth Sunday of Easter – Year C – Mother’s Day
1st Reading – Acts 16:16-34
Psalm 97
2nd Reading – Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20-21
Gospel – John 17:20-26
