God Talk

This is the sermon that I wrote for Sunday, May 22, 2016. However, I ended up giving only about the first page and a half of it. The rest I made up on the fly. The recording of the sermon I actually gave should be online at malbtychurch.org.  Pastor Tom

God Talk

A Trinity Sunday Meditation

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

May 22, 2016

            Scripture: Psalm 8; Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

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.

Today is Trinity Sunday. I’m not quite sure why we have a specific Trinity Sunday. After all, for Christians (or at least most of them) God is always Trinity, so isn’t every Sunday Trinity Sunday? Oh well. The church calendar says that today is Trinity Sunday, so Trinity Sunday it is. Let me ask you something. How many of you think you understand the Trinity? Anyone? Well, if anyone thinks that they understand the Trinity, they’re wrong. No one understands the Trinity. Now, that might sound like a bad thing. After all, we say God is Trinity, is Three in One. How can we say that if we don’t understand Trinity? Well, the Trinity, that is, speaking of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, doesn’t really explain God. It doesn’t actually define God. Rather, it preserves the mystery of God by positing things about God that are simply impossible. God is Three in One, we say. Well, is God three? Yes, we say. Is God one? Yes we say. But of course nothing can be both three and one. I either have three cookies or I have one cookie, but I can’t have three cookies that are really one cookie or one cookie that is really three cookies. Yet in Trinitarian thought was have three divine Persons who are one God and one God who is three divine Persons. I have long thought of the Trinity as functioning like a Zen koan. You know, impossible questions like what is the sound of one hand clapping? The Trinity asks What are three when they are one, and what is one when it is three? There’s no adequate answer. There isn’t supposed to be an answer. Almost every answer people have tried to give to the question of the Trinity has been found to be a heresy. The great virtue of the Trinity is that it makes no sense. Because it makes no sense, it preserves the mystery of God, and that is a very good thing. Whatever is not mystery cannot be God because God must be beyond our understanding. Ask me later if you want that explained more. I don’t have time to do it now.

I have spoken to you many times recently about transformation and how I am convinced that the Christian church in all of its manifold manifestations must be transformed if it is not to die. This morning I want to suggest to you one way that I think the church must be transformed. It has to do with our language for God, and the language of the Trinity is Christianity’s classic language for God. Now, please understand. I am not suggesting that we all become Unitarians. Unitarians were originally Congregationalist heretics. They were Congregationalists, and they were heretics because they couldn’t accept the Trinitarian understanding of God. They are Unitarians because they aren’t Trinitarians. We believe in individual freedom of conscience, of course, and if someone wants to be Unitarian they are free to be it. I, however, am not a Unitarian. I don’t think Christianity should or ever could give up the Trinity.

What I want to transform is not the Trinitarian understanding of God. I really value the way the Trinity preserves the ultimate mystery of God. What I suggest we think about isn’t the Trinity itself but the language we use for the Trinity. I suggest that we think about his issue in particular: The language of the Trinity uses male images for two of the three Persons of the Trinity, the Father and the Son. That gender specific language bothers a lot of people today. Yes, I know. It doesn’t bother most of you, including most of you women. That’s OK, but the fact remains that it bothers me and a lot of other people today. The terms Father and Son are gender specific; and that specificity creates a problem.  Now, we all know, of course, that God is not really male. God isn’t female either of course, for God is beyond human categories like gender; but the language we use for the Trinity includes specifically male images. I think we need to consider how our insisting on using gender specific language for two of the Persons of the Trinity and for God in general conflicts with the Trinity’s great virtue of  preserving the mystery of God.

Using only male specific language for two of the Persons of the Trinity limits the mystery of God because it makes God sound too human. It makes God sound too much like one specific variety of us humans, namely, the male variety. Always saying only Father and Son for the first two Persons of the Trinity limits God by excluding feminine images of God from our most basic God talk. If the great virtue of the Trinity is that it preserves the mystery of God, and I think that that is its primary virtue though not its only one, then shouldn’t we be a bit wary about using only language that has a specific human meaning when we talk about God? I am convinced that we should. I am convinced that we need to broaden our God talk. If we would sometimes use male language and sometimes use female language (which for the most part we never do), we would do better at preserving the mystery of God because we would use two mutually exclusive images for the same God. Our quest should not be to pin God down the way we do when we always use only male God language. Our quest should be to preserve the mystery of God the way the Trinity does when we use it the way it is meant to be used, as a riddle, as a koan, not as an explanation.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that imaging God as Father is always and necessarily wrong. It isn’t. God as Father can bring great comfort to a great many people. God as Father has done that in the past, it does it today, and it will continue to do it in the future. It’s not God as Father that’s the problem. It’s God only as Father that’s the problem. It’s God never being Mother that’s the problem. It’s not Jesus having been a man that’s the problem. It’s our insisting that the risen Christ is still in some meaningful way male that’s the problem. It’s not calling God He that’s the problem. It’s always calling God He and never calling God She that’s the problem.

Now, it’s not going to surprise me if you say you’ve never heard a pastor preaching like this before. The male exclusivity of our God talk is deeply driven into our consciousness and our experience. It wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t. But here’s the truth. The Christian faith is going through a time of profound transformation. One of the things that is being transformed is our God talk. The postmodern culture that is emerging among us will not accept exclusive male language for God. It just won’t. That culture is moving beyond sexism in its personal and social relationships, and it is moving beyond sexism in its God talk too. We need to pay attention. Not of course give up the core values of our faith because the culture doesn’t like them. Never that. But is our exclusively male God talk a core value of our faith? I don’t think so. God as ultimate mystery is a core value of our faith. God as male isn’t. God as only male we can give up, and I am convinced that we really need to do it.

There are biblical precedents for feminine images of God, you know. Deuteronomy 32:11-12 images God as a mother eagle. At Deuteronomy 32:18b God is the One who gave the people birth. Isaiah 66:13 images God as a mother comforting a child. Matthew 23:37 images God as a mother hen. At Luke 15:8-10 God is like a woman searching for a lost coin. Yes, the God of the Bible is mostly imagined in masculine terms, but there are a few places like these when feminine images get a toehold in our scared text. We’re not being unbiblical when we think of God as a woman rather than a man.

So let me ask you to do something. For the rest of this service pay attention to the words we use for God. Pay attention to the Lord’s prayer. Pay attention to the language of the two hymns we have yet to sing. I think you will notice how male exclusive some of it is. Then do one other thing. To yourself, in silence, substitute Mother for Father. Substitute She for He. See how it makes you feel. Does it make you feel differently about God? I bet it will, if you’ll let it. Doing that sure makes me feel differently about God.

I’m not proposing changing all of the language of our worship right away. Transformation takes preparation, and it takes time. Really all I’m asking right now is this much: Be aware of the exclusively male language we use for God. Maybe try substituting if not feminine language then at least gender neutral language for God. Try calling God just God, not He. See how it feels. Keep doing it for a while. See if you get used to it. Today is Trinity Sunday, and it is a particularly appropriate time for us to think about the words we use for God. Those words really do matter. May we listen for the calling of the Holy Spirit in this and in so many others things as we move forward together in this church. Amen.