2022.06.12 Trinity Sunday. IT'S THE LANGUAGE!

For years I have squawked and lobbied, consistently and at varying levels of intensity about the need to change traditional theological language—words and ideas we Christians use to describe the image of God.  HE, HIM, HIS, ALMIGHTY, TRANSCENDENT, SUPERMAN OMNI-EVERYTHING. 

We have for millennia worshipped this Divinity, voiced from afar, presiding from above, empowering from without. Oh, I do know that there are many people, especially women, who wonder and protest such a patriarchal Divinity, even as they sing and praise otherwise. I know that many academics teach new ideas. Every Sunday School I ever attended and most preachers anywhere told me God was Love. And, yes, the Bible tells us so, too. 

What’s a girl to do? I fretted and even wrestled with this issue in my waking sleep. In my mind I howled at God, fretting about upcoming Pentecost and Trinity Sundays. What to say in my weekly blog? I thought God was silent because I could take care of this issue by myself. As I tossed about in my half-sleep I heard this: IT’S THE LANGUAGE!

It’s the language? The language?  I already know this. But what if this were God speaking directly to me? I thought it might truly be the bath kol  (Hebrew for the voice of God). If it were simply my own inner voice speaking to myself I’d have heard: “It’s the language, STUPID!”  

But God does not call anyone stupid. We do. 

*  *  *  * 

Feeling spiritually bolstered, I calmed down and considered exactly how and why words matter and words about God matter deeply?  I cringed at the number of times a good editor would write “WC” in my margins. WC= word choice, as in find a better word to make your point.  

It’s Trinity Sunday. I love the idea that God is One, a Creator whose singular divine immensity is shared with humanity and in all living things, yes flowers and weeds.

Now consider the language we Christians use to express this amazing mystery. 

FATHER=GOD  This WC is both gender-bound AND role-bound. Divinity is restricted.

SON=GOD        This WC is also restricted to male roles and gender. Jesus was a man. Christ, his title, is gender-free. 

HOLY SPIRIT = GOD  This WC is more free yet still is masculinized in some liturgies, some credal statements, and, though more mobile, remains exclusive. Some churches change the Spirits’ gender to She, but that feels condescending, a kindly and unofficial nod. 

This Trinitarian formula and its traditional language must be used by Episcopal clergy to baptize.

I used the required formula, adding another such as:  “I baptize you in the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, God, Creator, Christ and Holy Spirit.” My much longer-ordained spouse did the same.

Why quibble and bother? For me, the theological idea behind the Holy Trinity means the joining of humanity and divinity through sacramental grace—in Baptism and in Eucharist. When our WCs  bind BOTH divinity AND humanity into role and gender language, they undermine God the Creator’s immensity, restrict humanity and all nature, and generally fail to communicate what the Holy Trinity—three in one AND one in three— means. 

*  *  *  *

I’m an Episcopal priest, a spiritual director, and pastoral counselor, retired. I believe in the healing power of sacraments, music, and beautiful liturgy. I am not alone in feeling frustrated about the consistently patriarchal imaging of God in Christianity. I am also in my eighties, and I’m tired with not enough stamina to be a Job. 

Michael Hudson, Episcopal priest writes a meditation on cosmogenesis for Trinity:

The union of created life and God

eludes our understanding, but we trust

that here and now and through the sweep of time

we each exist in God. And God in us.” 

It is simply not that hard to get our WC’s together, to accurately represent an already beautiful idea, and to listen to God saying: IT’S THE LANGUAGE,  BELOVEDS.

Not only is the traditional language idolatrous, worshipping not God but the culture from which this language derives, it is also aesthetically clumsy. Try Creator, Christ and Holy Spirit.  

2022.05.15 Easter Five. Risen Indeed? A Risen Rant. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 5/15/22

The great proclamation on Easter Day Sunday, and through the Easter season of 50 days is: Christ Is Risen. Clergy shout it out. People in congregations shout back: Christ is Risen Indeed. It's like a password—our Christian 'open sesame'.   

I never thought of this before, but the phrase is in the present tense and the passive voice. It doesn’t say Christ rose or arose. Or Christ has risen. It says Christ IS Risen. So who did the rising? Was Jesus connected enough to raise himself up, or does he leave the rising to his identity as the Christ, the Anointed One? And to where? Well, heaven, we presume, or to the place where the God Jesus called Abba is.

Who can figure this stuff out? Not me. No wonder my mother became exasperated with all my questions and wondering. 

*  *  *  * 

The gospel of John remembers Jesus being accused of blasphemy, because he called himself God. His closest followers are smart enough to question all this rising/risen/raised up doughy theological language. Was Jesus daring to say that he IS God? Accusers threatened to stone him. Jesus told them to look at the works he was accomplishing in the name of this God. “. . .if I am doing God’s work, there is no need to believe me; but if I am doing God’s work—even if you don’t believe me (and they don’t)—at least believe the works I do. Then you will know for certain that Abba God is in me and I am in Abba God.”  (14:11-12 ff) 

Hearing these words, they again tried to arrest him but he eluded their grasp. God knows how, of course. Still is it not blasphemous to say he IS God? But he says he is IN God. That is different. 

Recall that John’s gospel was written later than the Synoptics and has a theological agenda to promote, rather than a story to tell. John’s is a gospel of remembrance, close remembrance, but based on eye witness material, gathered from the oral tradition of reciting events and teachings of Jesus. By now, Johannine writers must persuade the listeners that the story they’ve heard has profound, and yes, “risen” meaning. It was a very hard sell, and sometimes John’s gospel sounds like the gospel of the losers, going out on a limb to persuade others that Jesus was the Christ. 

God is in me and I am in God.

How ironic that the same biblical words that persuaded Jesus’s accusers that he was certifiably phony and blasphemous are the very same words that first assured, and still assure, me years later that Jesus is my guru/Master. These words secure my own Christian faith: “God is in me and I in God.”  I am completely convinced by these words. Why?

First, because this is my own experience of God Immanent—closely, deeply present within me.

And second, because, historically and still, these are precisely the words that persuaded the institutional worshipping Churches that it is very important to keep this image of Divine Immanence out of the liturgy, away from the God who dominates our liturgical worship, the One we regularly worship and consistently clothe in patriarchal language. We may not pray these words privately, but we continue to publicly worship a God who is consistently imaged as distantly transcendent, dominantly almighty. Check the Collects, prayers almost all directed to Almighty God and exclusively masculine. Even Christ is masculinized. Jesus was a man, but the Christ IS risen above any gender identity.

Such images of divinity simply do not affirm the God within me. Nor do they affirm the God within whose love we all move and have being. Yes, I can change the words in my personal prayer, but that is not enough. Without conscious awareness, we Christians are reinforcing, through our regular communal, liturgical prayers, a patriarchal image of God. This is the God we worship, the God we hear about most frequently, the God to whom we pray. To me this sexist imagery is idolatrous. 

          *  *  *  *

I can focus on my mostly good works, as Jesus said, and know that God is manifest therein. But I cannot say ‘God is in me and I am in God’ when this God is imaged in this alienating way.

OK, my ire has never been enough to cause me to leave the Church, to bag Christianity, to devalue the historical Jesus, to stop seeking wisdom from the Bible, or renounce my holy orders. But it is enough to cause me pain. And enough for me to liberate God’s image in my personal prayers as well as to seek and create inclusive translations of Scripture. I am not alone. 

*  *  *  *

Way back in 1975, just when I was drawn to follow my own stirred heart, this summary statement from the introduction to Liturgy for All People was written as part of the attempt of some post-Vatican II Roman Catholic clergy to examine theological language:  

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me” says the old proverb. We know now that this is a lie. Words can wound, alienate and degrade people.  Language can also affirm and express love. Care for language is a show of concern for people and a revelation of the attitudes of the speaker.    .  .  .  Church language is predominantly masculine. Male terms, images, and stereotypes, so-called sexist language, dominate church expression. Such usage is no longer adequate. It is time to build gender equality into the very fabric of church life. The effort to build new gender-balanced ways of speaking helps us toward gender equality for women and men.”    (from the Preface to The Inclusive Bible, First Egalitarian Translation, published in 2007 by Priests for Equality)

This is the translation I use now. It is not perfect, yet it is written with integrity and faithfulness to the earliest biblical texts. I’m grateful to these Roman Catholic scholars, clergy and lay, for their effort. And of course we are not done yet, and will never be done, trying to follow the Holy Spirit whose wisdom and lithe movement almost always leave us lagging.

Let’s remember how many times the Holy Bible itself has been translated, each time imperfectly. Chasing God is always playing catch-up. Nevertheless………..

God is in you and you are in God. 

2016.04.10 Dear Atheist

Dear Atheist,

Some years ago I gave a talk to some Episcopalians about God, or some such mysterious topic. I announced I was an atheist. I explained that I was an a-theist, not because I did not believe in a Divinity named God, but because I did not believe in God’s linguistic wardrobe we proclaim in Christian churches as if it were divinity itself. 

After the gasps settled down, I went on to speak of the God I did believe in, though I’m pretty sure many ears were slammed shut to whatever wisdom I thought I was going to impart. I was young and foolish then, you see. BUT now I am old and foolish, and I still do not subscribe to the traditional, and still dominant, imagery and language attached to Divinity: Father, Son, He/His/Him/Himself, King, Almighty, Lord, Prince—masculine images transferred like decals onto Jesus, the post-Easter resurrected one whom we call Christ, the One who has, so far as I know, transcended any gender.

So if you tell me you do not relate, intellectually or emotionally, to a deity that sounds so domineering, patriarchal, and male-gendered, I’m with you.

It’s not as if I want to castrate divinity. I never recall feeling penis envy myself; in fact, it seemed like it could be rather an anatomical nuisance, albeit quite necessary for procreation and pleasure. 
 
For me the telling biblical wisdom about the nature of God is in Genesis in which the Creator-God of the cosmos (not just our own earth, sun, moon and stars but multiple universes) made  life happen in many forms—suns, moons, stars, seas and all lands, vegetation, nature and human nature (male and female, and every combination thereof.) 

Do  you think divine creativity stopped with our galaxy? Do you think God meant to create rigid rank-ordering of biological life? Or did God, simply and deeply, potentiate evolution? Later, Darwin, a faithful man himself, would verify this process and prove that the test for survival was not fitness but adaptability. We are now adapting to an enormously wider and deeper view of BIO-LIFE and of GODDE.  Have we forgotten to look at the stars?
                 

In 2016, Americans elect a new president who will put his or her hand on the Holy Bible and swear in God’s name. To what? The American dream or God’s dream?

Republican presidential contender, Donald Trump, waves his Bible around – though he is apparently unable to name a single verse from it when asked – and talks a lot about making America great again and the threat from Islam. The other Republican front runner, Ted Cruz,  knows his Bible well—well enough to apply it rigidly to reinforce his conservative social agenda. And that speaks volumes about what sort of faith it is that most Republican believers actually believe in. Little wonder, as Professor of Ethics, Stanley Hauerwas, commented, that America doesn’t produce interesting atheists: they don’t have a God interesting enough to deny.

America would never nominate or elect a president with no religious faith, preferably Protestant. America itself has long been its own civil religion. Often I wonder if we worship America first, God second, or not at all.

Giles Fraser, writing in The Guardian (3/30/16) wrote: “When the Pilgrim Fathers got in their little boats and sailed to the new world, they took with them a narrative that had begun to build in England, that the protestant English were actually the chosen people. America, then, was to be the new Israel. The pilgrims had landed safe on Canaan’s side, the promised land.

“In other words, America became its own church and eventually its own god. Which is why the only real atheism in America is to call into question the American dream – a dream often indistinguishable from capitalism and the celebration of winners.”

I am, by this definition, an a-theist again, this time of the American dream deified. I do think America has become its own church, its own god. Maybe that’s why fewer people attend traditional church—even when the American flag hangs in most Christian churches. Is that patriotism or blasphemy? Do we worship the God of ultimate unconditional compassion we see in Jesus the Christ? Do we worship the God-made-masculine-only? Or do we worship the God of our own national idolatry? Some selfie addicts, I imagine, worship their own divinity. There are many brands of atheism.

Which deity is worthy of your atheism?

It doesn’t matter to me what you choose, really, because I know that you have lived and loved well; you have kept faith in yourself through many shattered expectations and crushing disappointments. Some atheists wonder how Jesus, a mere human being, could be so divine, so worthy of deification. Maybe Jesus is not the only christ?  Here’s a poem written into someone’s soul. It reminds me of you, dear atheist friend.

I don’t tell you how much it matters to me that you are my friend.
I’ll never tell you, bluntly and face to face. I can’t summon words
That way. They only come to my fingers occasionally if I’m silent
And just quit thinking. Our fingers are a lot smarter than we know.
Like today when my fingers want to say something like: your gifts
To me have been ears and humor. We speak some strange language
That few other people speak. I don’t know why that’s so. It’s surely
An accident. It’s not like we set out to find each other in the tumult
Of this sweet wilderness. But we did somehow. You can put names
On the finding if you want. The names all mean the same thing. An
Old name is Providence, which is another way to say God, which is
A way to say We Have No Idea How, But We Are Aware of Grace.
There are more names for God than we’ll ever know, and one is you.
                   Brian Doyle, A Shimmer of Something, published with permission