GOD_HAS MANY NAMES:
Tit. FATHER —- MOTHER

NOVEMRER 25, 1990
JOHN M. BUCHANAN
FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, CHICAGO

Scripture
Isaiah 49:13-19
Luke 15:11-24

“Can a woman forget her nursing child?...yet I will not forget you."
--Isaiah 49:15 (NRSV)

"...while he was still far off, his father saw him...he ran and put his
arms around his....” --Luke 15:20 (NRSV)

Whe is God? The question is posed, of all places, not in a lecture
hall at McCormick Theological Seminary, or a Philosophy classroom at the
University of Chicago, or even an adult education seminar at Fourth
Presbyterian Church, but on the cover of Life Magazine, December 1990. The
cover article is a series of personal stands by a wide variety of people;
Bishop Tutu, Orel Hershiser, film writers, farmers. It_is an urgent,
personal question and their answers are not at all academic.

In addition, on the first page of the New York Times Book Review,
there is a review of The Spiritual Life of Children, by Robert Coles, who
asked many children:

“What do you think God is like?"
It is, I believe, an issue about which we are very much concerned.

Who is God? In some way, perhaps so deep in your sou) you don't even
know it's there, that question is what got you out of bed and in spite of
some very attractive alternatives, coffee, newspaper, good TV Sunday morning
and the Bears at noon, brought you to this place.

We have in recent weeks been thinking about it under the general
rubic, God Has Many Names.

Twe of those names are Creator and Provider... This morning Father —
Mother...

Is God male? If God is a male, exactly what male characteristic
describes God? Is God a virile, strong, aggressive warrior; or a quiet,
sensitive artist? Or is God the bearded grandfather imagined by so many in

our culture? Is God female? If God is female - which female
characteristics?... fertile earth mother, homemaker, Celtic warrior or Prime
Minister?

The topic this morning makes us uncomfortable. It has made some
people angry. Our church, on occasion, circulates a questionnaire among a
professionally selected sample of Presbyterians to find aut what people are
thinking about things. On the topic of gender inclusive or exclusive
janguage about God: 7% think it is an issue of the highest priority to
alter God-language so that it is inclusive; 8% are adamantly opposed to
any change. 85% don't care much one way or the other. For some - about 15% -
it is a hot issue. For most it is "Ho-hum."

What exactly is the issue? What actually is wrong with calling God
"Father" and using masculine pronouns — “he, him, his," to refer to God?
After all, the Bible does. Jesus did. What's the problem?

The problem is that the first and most important thing the Bible says
about God is that God is not male or female. God includes both human
maleness and human femaleness. The second part of the problem is that
janguage is powerful. What you call a thing or a person inevitably shapes
how you think and how you act. We know that if the one thing you say to a
child over and over is “you're stupid; you're no good; you're lazy;" not
only will that child begin to believe it, that child in a mysterious
way will become what you have named him. Worse yet, you will relate to
that child ‘on the basis of the names you use.

( No one was ever more aware of that than the propagandists of the

Third Reich whose job was to persuade the German people that the. ultimate
solution to the "Jewish Problem" was acceptable: They began, simply, with
language: “Jewish Problem," and then "Swine — pig" linked linguistically
with filth and with slaughter. A particular favorite designation was
“bacilius" which everybody knows must be stamped out, eradicated. Racism
begins not with laws but with nouns, not with ghettoes but with adjectives.
And when a whole culture becomes convinced that a minority is greedy,
dirty, subversive, or lazy, slow, stupid, the results are often sequential
generations of majority and minority who believe it and begin to act it
out. We know - or should know - that descriptive language is not neutral:
that it not only reflects the reality we are trying to describe, it often
shapes that reality, or our relationship to it.

So what you call God does more than describe or image the Almighty -
it shapes your own spirituality.

And if the only language you have for God is masculine language; if
the only thing you ever call God is father; if the only images of the
divine which pop into your head are male or an authority figure; or a
judge, or a monarch... your spirituality is not being shaped and formed by
the Bible, but by the culture and the language it uses. In fact, if the
only names you have for God are masculine names, you are missing an
important and wonderful part of Biblical truth which is that God, being
God, is unknowable and unnameable but that in terms of. our relationship
with God, God has many names. ,

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The genius af our Jewish forebears, back at the beginning of the
story, is that they know God is the Holy One, the mysterious one, the ane
Jike none ether, the ane whose holiness and otherness is invaded when
you start to construct images - little statues, far instance, or verhat
statues, names. Israel's God is unnameable... for a reason, and that is
that names limit and shape. When Moses is addressed by the vaice of God in
the desert and told to go back to Egypt and lead the slaves to the freedom
of the promised land, he asks a very understandable question: “What's your
name? When the people ask me who sent me, what shall I say?" And the only
answer he gets is not a name at all, but a curious combination of
consonants that sounds like YAHWEH and is actually a verb. God is a verb!
“IT am who I am" is God's name. "fell them 'I am' sent you," God says

So when the late Paul Tillich caused everybody to scratch their heads
and rell their eyes at his Germanic obscurity by teaching that we ought to
have a moratorium on talk about God... and that the only way to do it was
to call God "the Ground of Being," he really was quite faithful to the
first and most important thing the Bible says about God.

Harvard professor, Harvey Cox, writing in The Christian Century this
month, points out that when people become too certain about the reality of
God, unfortunately things start to happen:

“We should learn from the ancient

Jewish tradition of not pronouncing

the name of the Holy One, live through

a period of reverent reticence in religious
language, and wait for the spirit to make
known a new vocabulary that is not tarnished
by trivialization and misuse."

[Christian Century, 11/7/90,

“The Secular City 25 Years Later."]

You see, the trouble with gender exclusive Janguage is that it misses
the reality and therefore, because it is only a portion of the truth, it
becomes an idol. Idols, like heresy, are not so much wrong as incomplete.
In religion, idols prevent people from encountering the wholeness, the
mystery, the unspeakable beauty, the indescribable lave of God.

The God of the Bible is above gender. The Holy One is unlike the
other gods. The earliest story is very Clear actually on the topic. If
you are going to dare to image this God - to create a mental picture - you
have to have a man and a woman. “Let us make humankind in our image," God
Says in the first chapter of Genesis... "So God created humankind in his
image...male and female."

Vanderbilt theologian, Sallie McFague, asks simply “Because the point
is self-evident, one wonders what all the fuss is about when the suggestion
is made that God be ‘imaged' in female terms or addressed as ‘she’."
[Models of God, p. 97]

11/95 /9N

Part of the fuss, J suppose, is innocent enough. The Bible itself
uses masculine images and masculine pronouns, "Male and female, he created
them."

Israel knew God was unmameable. iIsraci alsa knew that many of the
deities in the region were female: Goddesses. Judaism's early masculine
tilt has to do with the need to distinguish its Holy One and itself from
the Babylonians and Persians and particularly the Canaanites, who
worshipped fertility and for wham prolific, sexually active female figures
were theologically suggestive.

And, in addition, it was a patriarchal society. Most were. ‘The men
had the power, owned the property, made the decisions, wrote the history
and got to decide on the pronouns. There are no gender-free personal
pronouns, so the Bible calls God he and him, rather than she and her or it.

But the tradition and the Bible is not exclusively male. In Psalm 22
God is a midwife. In Psalm 123 a mistress. In Isaiah 42 God is a woman in
labor, giving birth. “As one whom he comforts, so will I comfort you, says
the Lord" in Isaiah 66. And one of the loveliest of all, in Hosea 71:

“When Israel was a child, I loved hin...
i taught them to walk...

I took them up in my arms...

I bent down to them and fed them."

Those are ciearly maternal images. The one who bends down to feed children
is a nursing mother. There are two things you can't do for your children,
men, no matter how profoundly you share the joys and duties of parenting,
and that is bear them in your body and nurse then.

Feminist theology suggests that God's exclusively masculine
nomenclature is neither Biblical nor authentically historical. Our own
history is actually very interesting. The early Christian community, unlike
the cuiture around it, welcomed women, gave women positions of authority
and prestige. Clearly Jesus was a revolutionary in including women in the
family of disciples, elevating the position of women, honoring their
humanity and integrity and strength. Women are there at the beginning and
at the end. Women are there at the cross after all the men have fled for
their lives. Women are the only ones who trust the promise of resurrection
and women are the first ones to believe it when it happens.

It is only when Western civilization, around the fourth century,
decided that women were inferior — physically, spiritually and emotionally -
and male dominance became complete, that women drop out of all positions
of power and authority. It is no coincidence that it is precisely at the
time that a church hierarchy emerges, exclusively male, exclusively
celibate.

. The names of God and the exclusion of women from full participation
in the church are not unrelated. The Mystics have known it for centuries.
Julian of Norwich knew that clergy power and dominance was threatened by
her referring to God as our mother.

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Beneath this dispute, the rea) question is the nature of our
relationship with God. The fundamental theological question is not "Does
God Exist?" but Who is God? My favorite Paul Tillich story is about the
time he delivered a public lecture which defined religious faith as
“ultimate concern.” Afterward he was accosted by an elderly gentieman who
said, "Dr. Tillich, I think } understand what you were saying - that
whatever is our ultimate concern is our religious faith - but my ultimate
concern is whether the ultimate is concerned about me.'

That's the question, isn't it? That's the question behind al}
questions. That's what is behind the poets stretching for language, the art
and music of the race, the question still on the cover of our national
magazines and our most sophisticated "Book Reviews." It is the question
about which writers write novels and it is the only uitimate question of
philosophy... Is the ultimate concerned about me? Is there a God who
knows I'm here? Is there “being" that knows my name? It's a question we
ask academically but also existentially.

It's the question we ask at the beginning of life when we witness the
mystery of creation in the birth of a child and at the end of life when we
experience the end of life too soon, still incomplete, still loved and
treasured and valued, and every day in between when we are filled with
indescribable joy and ecstacy and when things come unravelled and life no
longer makes sense. Is there anyone who cares? , _

In their crue] exile 2,500 years ago, the children of Israel asked
that question. Violently captured and taken from land and home to live for
a generation in a foreign country, facing the extinction of their race,
religion, family -— they had little reason to trust a God who promised to care
for them.

“Zion said, 'The Lord has forsaken me
My Lord has forgotten me.'"

And the prophet Isaiah gave them this stunning picture as an answer:

"Can a woman forget her nursing child, or
show no compassion for the child of her womb?
Even these may forget, yet I will. not forget you,"

in the worst of times it was a picture they all understood: a
picture of a nursing mother... that communicated what they needed and knew
about God.

The highest, holiest, fiercest love we know — is not enough to
describe God's love for us.

And Jesus answer that same question - this time asked by the young
man living in a far country, separated from security, love and home,
drifting aimlessly; he knows no one cares about him or for him; no one
even knows he exists. This young man returns, in guilt and repentence to a
job as a slave. Jesus’ answer is that magnificent, unforgettable picture
of a father running down the road, tears of joy streaming down his
cheeks, embracing the son before the son is able even to make his speech...

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Jesus broke through centuries of tradition and used intimate language
for the Holy One, parental] Janguage: "Abba, father” he said: the only
English equivalent for which is "Daddy." And the startling, redeeming
point is not gender but closeness, accessibility, responsiveness,
passion... of a father or a mother for a child.

And when he died, his own life ebbing out of him and he reached inta

his memory and recited a portion of Scripture: “into thy hands I commit my
spirit..." [Psalm 31] He could have said “Mother, into thy hands..."

God has many names: “I am what I am." JT am what } will be... I will
be with you. Iam your creator... I am your provider... I am your

father... I am your mother. It is helpful - it is freeing - it is
expanding and deepening - to try new ones in our praying. And if it is
still awkward for us publically and if we simply can't say the pronouns
differently, try it in your private, personal relationship with your
God, the one who says to you: I will be — to you and for you — what you
need.

So we come to table and it is suggestive, is it not, that the one who
prepared the food for us most of the time was a mother. If we are
fortunate, we had a father who cooked also and whose provision for us
included the always sacramental experience of setting the table and
preparing the food and feeding the young.

But the one experience common to every one of us is that we were
nurtured in a mother's body and nursed or fed by the one who bore us.

And it is suggestive, is it not, that our spiritual nurture and
nourishment is nowhere more profoundly expressed than at table - the table
of the Supper of our Lord — prepared by God - who is our father, God our
mother... Amen.

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