Grace and Peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
I was a big fan of the “Dancing with the Stars” series, and I was impressed especially with Layla Ali. Layla is a beautiful, statuesque woman who like her Dad, Mohammed Ali, is a professional boxer. Len, one of the judges, remarked that the thing that impressed him most was that Layla was unique combination of strength, power, feminine beauty and allure. She replied to him that in her mind there was no contradiction between power and femininity. Her response intrigued me because at age 56, I’m pretty traditional. I like my girls, girls, and my guys, guys.
But society changes, for example, one of Eliza’s, my 18 year old daughter’s favorite movie is about a woman boxer, “Million Dollar Baby”. I tried to watch it but left the room. Girls hitting girls was too much for me. It stretched me farther than I was able to go. I have trouble thinking about girls as boxers. In my antique mind it troubles me. Yet my daughter, an avid athlete, though she doesn’t want to box herself, sees no contradiction. Times change.
Forty years ago, we started to ordain women. It caused quite a controversy. The church very wisely led us into it by welcoming women to serve on church councils and girls to be acolytes. Some folks railed against the change and some congregations left the denomination to go to the safety of a group that “believed in the Bible” or some other justification.
No one raises an eyebrow today, and some of the best preachers and theologians in the church are women. Why not? God creates all of us in the Divine image. As our lesson from Genesis says this morning. “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them, in the image of God he created them male and female he created them. The church has always proclaimed that we are made in the image of God; you may have heard the Latin phrase “imago Dei.”
Our question today is: “What does this phrase mean?” What is it to be made in God’s image?
Naturally, when you hear the word image we think of the sight sense and how a person looks. We think of God as a person, which of course we should, so the image question presses the issue does image have to do with looks? Does God look like us since we are made in God’s image? If we think of God as having a body, God’s body would have to be enormous. Obviously, such an image doesn’t work very well or take us very far.
Yet, image can man other things. My children have a passion for justice and a heart for the needy. They inherited these characteristics from us, or were trained them to have them. Their values are the “spitting” image of Debbie’s and mine. Image doesn’t have to be physical – image means to reflect or to be patterned after. It is in this sense of the work “image” that we reflect divinity. We are like God in character, in possessing reason, in being able to feel, in being able to create more just systems.
We attach labels to characteristic and regard them as gender specific. “Power” is a male characteristic. To be “nurturing” is a female characteristic. But in reality we want our Dad’s to be nurturing and our Mom’s powerful, don’t we? Both characteristic are life supportive and are not restricted to one gender or another.
In the same way, we talk about God as though God were a guy, a male being. Yet in fact, our talk is only metaphoric, the reality of God goes beyond gender. In fact, the God of the Old Testament always remained a mystery for Israel. When pronouns were used for God masculine ones were always employed, mostly to differentiate Israel’s God from the God’s of Egypt, Canaan, Babylon and Rome. Israel is really the first nation and people to understand God as a single divine being, complete and of himself. The people’s who surrounded Israel worshiped Gods and Goddesses to explain the mystery of creation and to explain the mystery of fertility, growth and food production that was so necessary for life. Israel confessed and proclaimed that there is only one God who contained in the Divine Self all that we humans label male and female. Israel’s most profound confession was the Shema “hear O Israel, our God, is One.”
Throughout scripture many metaphors are used for God’s reality. “God is our fortress and our strength” says Psalm 46. Other psalms call God our “Rock”. God appears to Moses as a burning bush and communicates to Moses directly. In our lesson from Proverbs, God’s wisdom is personified and presented to us in womanly guise. Israel was never afraid to refer to God or God’s attributes as feminine because she knew that her God was a God beyond gender. Israel thought of God as Spirit as a being or entity that was incorporal, without a body. Modern Jews do still.
The difference between us and Israel is that Jesus taught us to refer to God as Father. It was a true innovation at the time which scandalized many of the pious folk then. In fact, he taught us to pray in the Lord’s Prayer using the Aramaic word “Abba” which we would translate as “Daddy.” His goal was not to make God male but to draw us closer to God, to make our relationship with God more intimate, more personal.
How we think about God matters very much. God wants our closeness. God craves our company. Simply being in God’s presence in worship or in prayer gives God joy and brings us peace. Human beings crave answers and are uncomfortable when someone as important to them as God cannot be defined. Yet God is always mystery and God is always partially hidden from us. We are finite and God infinite – there is a great gulf. St. Paul said to us in 1st Corinthians 13 “for now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we shall see face to face.” the word we translate mirror can also be translated as glass or interestingly enough “as a riddle.”
“Well, interesting enough Pastor, what does all this mean to us” you might ask? Here are several ramifications. Suppose you never had a father or your father was an alcoholic and abused you and your mother. If we were restricted to thinking of God only as a father how would that affect your feelings about God? If we were limited to thinking about God only as a guy, as “male”, what would that do to you as a girl or a woman? Isn’t there a sense in which you would inevitably feel left out of the divine program and scheme?
God is not a man per se.
God is like a Father.
God is not a woman per se.
Yet God is like a Mother.
God is not a fortress, or a rock, or a burning bush that is not consumed, yet God somehow is like all of these.
And God is above and beyond all our attempts to describe the Divine reality. St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the “heaviest heads” in the entirety of Christian history wrote volumes about God in a work called the Summa Theologia. Yet toward the end of his life, he had a life-changing, mind-altering experience of God that was so profound and so moving he put down his pen and said “I’ll never write another word. God’s beauty and being is beyond all description.” He suggested that the church’s best response was to get lost in “wonder, love and praise” as the old hymn says.
It’s Trinity Sunday, a day to remember that the God we worship is so vast and great that all our attempts at definition fall apart, but at the same time, this God comes to us incarnate in a body we can touch and hold – the body of Jesus.
Amen.
Who We Are