Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 18, 2004

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Last week I told you that the Bible comes alive for us and speaks powerfully to us when we bring it into a dialogue with our own personal and collective life experience, that is, with our personal and collective experience of what it means to be human in our time and place in the world. The Scripture’s meaning for our lives comes not out of the Scripture itself in isolation but out of the interplay between Scripture and our lives. Theologians sometime say that meaning arises out of our "encounter" with Scripture. Indeed, all of our literalistic co-religionists to the contrary notwithstanding, that is the only way that meaning can arise out of Scripture, or out of anything else for that matter.

Last week’s sermon was prompted by the Monroe Pastors Fellowship statement on marriage. Today I want to continue to explore the interplay between Scripture and our experience in connection with two other contemporary issues in the life of the church, namely, the role and place of women in the life of the church and the issue of the language we use to talk about God, together with the relationship between those two issues.

To be honest, it feels rather odd to me that I even have to talk about these issues. I mean, we all believe in the equality of the sexes, don’t we? After all, this church had a woman pastor many decades ago, when women pastors were quite a rarity. Beyond that, my two immediate predecessors in this pulpit were women. You’d think the full acceptance of women into the life of the church wouldn’t be an issue here; and yet I am convinced that it is something I need to talk about.

There are three reasons why I need to talk about the role of women and about the related issue of our language for God. First, the lectionary study group told me at our meeting last Tuesday that they wanted to hear me preach on these issues. So, if you don’t like it talk to them. Names and phone numbers provided on request. More seriously, though, there are two realities in the life of the church that make the role of women in the church and the related issue of our God talk important. The first relates to the church universal. Even today, in the 21^st century, well over half of all Christians belong to churches that refuse to ordain women as clergy. The Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox churches, and many conservative Protestant denominations such as the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod do not consider women fit to serve God and God’s people as clergy. And although in the past it has ordained women, the largest Protestant denomination in the US, the Southern Baptist Convention, has recently taken the official position that women should not serve as pastors. In taking these positions, no matter how vehemently they may deny that they do so, these Christian churches devalue the humanity of women, turning all of God’s daughters into second-class humans whose value and dignity just does not quite rise to that of us wonderful men, all of us being, as we all know, perfect in every way.

The second serious issue in the life of the church that makes my topic today timely applies both to the universal church and to us here in our tiny little part of the Body of Christ. It is the issue of our God talk. Here at Monroe Congregational UCC we like to think of ourselves as fully open to and accepting of all people. Yet when we talk about God, we use exclusively, or very nearly exclusively, language and images that give God the characteristics of only one half of the human race, the male half. That limitation in our language for God is, I believe, a remnant of the kind of thinking that says women can’t be clergy and that therefore necessarily dehumanizes the entire female half of humanity.

Now, if we’re going to talk about the role of women in the Christian community, as good Protestants we need to start by looking at what the Bible has to say about the subject. On this issue, however, the Bible, indeed just the New Testament, is full of contradictory statements and stories about the role of women in the life of the church. You probably all know some of the anti-women passages from the letters written by or attributed to Paul. One of the most famous (and one of the few that might conceivably actually have been written by Paul, although even that is doubtful) is 1 Corinthians 14:33b-34: "As in all the churches of the saints, women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says." But then also from Paul, at Galatians 3:28, we read that in Christ there is no longer male or female, for all are one in Christ. On this issue, the Bible gives us very mixed messages.

When the Bible does that, and when, as here, the messages aren’t coming from Jesus (either the historical Jesus or the Jesus of the Gospels) but from some other voice in Scripture, one thing we can do to try to sort it all out is to turn to the Gospels to see if Jesus gives us an answer in his words or by the way he lived and died. When we do that on the issue of the role of women in the church, we find something quite startling. We find Jesus again and again affirming the equal humanity of women, something that was utterly revolutionary in his time, in his culture. One of the most important places where we see Jesus standing the culture of his day on its ear by affirming the equality of women is in that little story of Mary and Martha that we just heard.

In that story, a woman named Martha welcomes Jesus into her home, and she sets about providing the hospitality that her culture expected her to provide to a traveler. She got very busy with tasks around the house, presumably cleaning, cooking, hauling water, etc. Her sister Mary, however, took on the role of a disciple, sitting at the Master’s feet and listening to his teaching. According to their culture, Mary wasn’t supposed to do that. Women did not sit at the feet of rabbis and study spiritual or religious matters with them. That was for the men--only for the men. Women did what Martha was doing, taking care of the housework so the men folk would be free to pursue matters of the faith with the visiting teacher.

So, Martha had every reason to expect that Jesus would be as irked with Mary as she was. I can even imagine Martha standing in the kitchen with a water pitcher in one hand and a cooking pot in the other thinking: "What’s the matter with that Jesus fellow anyway? Why is he letting that pretentious, good-for-nothing sister of mine sit there listening to him just like she was a man?! Why should I have to go say something about it? Oh, well, maybe he just doesn’t see her. I guess I’ll have to go say something about it myself. Hmpf!" So imagine Martha’s shock and dismay when Jesus took Mary’s side! "Mary has chosen the better part." Can’t you just hear Martha: "Well, I never!" Never indeed, for Jesus has just committed a truly radical, revolutionary, subversive act. He has made women the equals of men. Now we have to ask: If Jesus makes women the equals of men, how can the church, any church, deny them full, equal participation in all aspects of the life of the church? It can’t, but it does; and in doing so it betrays the One it claims to follow, the One it calls Lord.

But what, you may well ask, does that have to do with the second issue I talked about, the issue of the language we use to talk about God? Well, recall that I said a few minutes ago that I consider our limiting our God talk to male images and pronouns--Father, Son, He--to be a remnant of the kind of thinking that devalues and ultimately dehumanizes women, the kind of thinking that Jesus so clearly rejected. Just as excluding women from full participation in the life of the church dehumanizes them, so does excluding the feminine from our language about God.

You don’t, of course, have to take my word for it. My thinking on this issue isn’t original with me by any means. In her brilliant book She Who Is the great Roman Catholic scholar and teacher Elizabeth A. Johnson, who is probably the greatest scholar, teacher, and person of faith with whom I have had the privilege of studying over the course of my many--some would say too many--years in school, says this about the issue. The way we talk about God matters. Beth Johnson writes that the way we speak about God

is a question of unsurpassed importance, for speech to and about the mystery that surrounds human lives and the universe itself is a key activity of a community of faith. In that speech the symbol of God functions as the primary symbol of the whole religious system, the ultimate point of reference for understanding experience, life, and the world. Hence, the way in which a faith community shapes its language about God implicitly represents what it takes to be the highest good, the profoundest truth, the most appealing beauty.

Now, it is true, of course, that Jesus called God Father and not Mother. I look at this fact this way. If most of our culture today isn’t ready to call God Mother, why should we think that Jesus’ culture, a culture that was considerably more paternalistic than ours, was ready to hear that word applied to God? Jesus was a great prophet, but he was also a man of his time and place, and his limiting his God talk to a male image reflects that fact. He treated women as equals. That was revolutionary enough.

In our time we have experienced the gifts of women for ministry. We have experienced the liberation that comes for both women and men when the old stereotypes are broken and all people are allowed to show forth their full humanity. Our experience tells us that feminine images are just as capable of expressing our understanding of God as are masculine images. It’s time to let that experience transform our God talk. It’s time that our images of God reflect the equality of God’s people. It time, indeed it’s well past time, for us to proclaim and to sing our God in many names. May our strong Mother God, to borrow a line from Brian Wren’s marvelous hymn with which we began our service, give us the wisdom and the courage to do it. Amen.