COMMUNITY CHURCH OF THE MONTEREY PENINSULA
P. O. BOX 222811
CARMEL CA 93922
(831) 624-8595
www.ccmp.org
Rev. Paul Wrightman, Pastor
Independent and United Church of Christ
November 8, 2020
Dear Friends,
Hopefully now that the election is over we can begin building bridges to those who see things differently than we do. Ultimately, this is only possible through God’s Spirit, so let us pray for an extra strong dose of the Spirit of God’s reconciling love to bring healing to a land that is passionately divided. Let us pray that that passion be redirected at reconciliation, not division.
Please continue to keep Jon Close and Elizabeth Ashby in your prayers – that they may find a livable and affordable local home to rent.
Stephen Hauk, who often comes to church with Lisa and Erika Ledin, has organized the writing of a substantive obituary for Solomon Yoo. I think it would be great to print this obituary in the Monterey Herald and also kept in a perpetual online file, which anyone would be able to access at any time. I know this would mean a lot to Sol’s family, both in South Korea and here in California. There is still $500 in the pastor’s discretionary fund, which I will earmark for this purpose. We will need approximately another $500 to complete this project. If you would like to make a donation, please drop a check by the church office (Tuesday – Friday), or mail a check to the church, with “Remembering Sol” on the memo line. Thanks!
And Always Remember that Jesus IS Emmanuel – God WITH Us! Paul
WORSHIP SERVICE FOR NOVEMBER 8, 2020
INTRODUCTORY READING Sojourner Truth, 1797-1883
Ain’t I a woman?
Look at me
Look at my arm!
I have plowed and planted
and gathered into barns
and no man could head me . . .
And ain’t I a woman?
I could work as much
And eat as much as a man –
When I could get it –
And bear the lash as well
and ain’t I a woman?
I have born thirteen children
and seen most all sold into slavery
and when I cried out a mother’s grief
none but Jesus hear me . . .
and ain’t I a woman?
If the first woman God ever made
was strong enough to turn the world
upside down, all alone
together women ought to be able to turn it
rightside up again.
SUGGESTED MUSIC Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee SESamonte You Tube
OPENING PRAYER Angela Ashwin, Contemporary
Thank you, God,
that you are tender as a mother
as well as strong as a father.
You give us life,
and care for us
like a mother who will not forsake her children.
We pray for our mothers today,
putting them in your hands
for time and for eternity.
And we ask your blessing on all our relationships:
in the families of our homes,
our churches,
and our communities.
Amen.
LORD’S PRAYER
Our Father,
who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever.
Amen.
SCRIPTURE READINGS
Genesis I:27
So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
Isaiah 49:15-16a
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.
See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands.
Matthew 23:37
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”
SERMON: GOD IS BIGGER THAN GENDER
Rev. Paul Wrightman
(The underlining simply indicates what I would emphasize if delivered orally.)
Many of us have wondered if the traditional Jewish-Christian view that God is male holds water anymore. What does the Bible itself have to say? And if organized religion has missed the boat on this one, how can it reconnect with a more inclusive understanding of God? How can we get beyond the deadly notion that God is limited by gender in our own spiritual lives?
We continue our sermon series on the most important texts in the Bible from Genesis through Revelation. We are nearing the end of our study of crucial texts from the Hebrew Scriptures. Our last pivotal text from the book of the prophet Isaiah concerns God using feminine imagery to describe divine love. Jesus himself alludes to this text and makes it uniquely his own.
One thing that we need to remember as we consider Jesus’ use of the Hebrew Scriptures is that, unlike us, who are very much a part of a visual culture, with our books and newspapers and screens of all sorts, Jesus was immersed in an oral culture, a culture that relied on accurate remembering, and encouraged the practice of memorization.
I still remember how startled I was to learn that many followers of the prophet Mohammed have taken it upon themselves to memorize the entirety of their holy book, the Qur’an. This is because many who follow the Islamic tradition live in cultures that are still largely oral in nature, and where prodigious feats of memory are highly regarded.
In a similar way, the culture in which Jesus lived was an oral culture, and in our historical records we have many instances of Jewish persons who memorized the entirety of the Hebrew Scriptures, or Old Testament. We don’t know whether or not Jesus himself was one of these people.
We can assume, however, that not only was Jesus literate, like most of the Jewish people of the time, but that he was, at the minimum, highly conversant with the Hebrew Scriptures as a whole. This means that he would have had the entirety of his Scriptures at his fingertips, so to speak, and would have been able to choose certain texts as having theological priority over others.
Given Jesus’ radically egalitarian stance toward women, a stance that would have singled him out in his day, and provoked much controversy, we need to ask about the origin of Jesus’ basically being two thousand years ahead of his time with respect to women.
The answer, I think, lies in Jesus’ profound knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures.
1:27, which states unequivocally “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.”
In many ways, Jesus’ own radically egalitarian stance toward women can be understood as his thinking through the implications of this revolutionary text.
Genesis 1:27 suggests that an approach to God that embodies both masculine and feminine qualities would actually be truer to the nature of God than either masculine or feminine qualities alone.
Jungian psychologist John Sanford writes that Jesus lived the perfect balance between introversion and extroversion, feeling and rationality, the concrete and the intuitive, the masculine and the feminine.
If Jesus embodies the paradox which Christian tradition calls the incarnation – the mystery of one person being at the same time fully human and fully divine – then by looking at Jesus we get the clearest and deepest revelation of who God is and of what it means to be a truly balanced and whole human being.
What we see in Jesus is a rabbi who does not hesitate to accept women as disciples, a man who does not hesitate to express his feelings, a teacher who does not hesitate to use a woman as a metaphor for God (see the parable of the lost coin in Luke 15), and a son who does not hesitate to describe his father and his father’s kingdom in the most tender of terms.
What we see in Jesus is a person who does not hesitate to speak for God, and in speaking for God, to show us the deepest yearnings of God’s own heart: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing (Matthew 23:37)!
This image is especially poignant because it reflects a number of stories from the Israel of Jesus’ day in which a mother hen allowed herself to be burned to death in the act of protecting her children from a raging fire. The fact that Jesus says this just before his arrest and crucifixion demonstrates the length to which he is prepared to go to express God’s love for us.
Many contemporary theologians consider it a basic axiom that we become like the God we worship.
They consider it nothing less than a tragedy that the Christian tradition so early on chose to reject the balanced picture of God and the human person embodied in Jesus, and to substitute in Jesus’ place a hyper-masculine God who favored men over women, who approved of so-called “holy” wars, and who authorized crusades and inquisitions.
There is strong evidence that the earliest church lived out the reality of the “priesthood of all believers.” We have textual and archaeological evidence, for example, that in the earliest church all the adults who comprised a particular local house-church, both men and women, took turns presiding at the celebration of communion. There was as yet no priestly caste because everyone was a priest.
Sadly, within a generation or so an official priesthood was established, some being considered more “worthy” to bless the bread and wine than others. Significantly, some early mosaics in Rome show women blessing the bread and wine. Within two generations, however, this role was taken away from women, and only male priests were allowed to officiate at communion.
We see a movement here away from the equalitarian movement that Jesus founded, to the creation of a special class of priests, both men and women, and then to the role of priest being restricted to males only.
If we become like the God we worship, we see that the real Jesus was early-on abandoned for a hyper-masculine God who was into power and might much more than love and compassion.
What we see happening in our contemporary culture over the past fifty years or so is an attempt, at least in the western world, to reset the balance between the masculine and the feminine that was essentially lost for nearly two thousand years. The attempt of mainstream and some evangelical Christians to use gender-neutral, or inclusive, language for God is part of this wider movement to correct the cultural distortion of an all-male God.
Judaism and Christianity have always taught that God is beyond gender, but they have not always lived out this insight in their liturgy and theology.
Of course using gender-neutral, or inclusive, language for God can veer off in the direction of politically correct absurdity, such as always referring to Jesus as “child” instead of “son.” And using inclusive language for God can get rather awkward at times, with ungainly permutations like “Godself,” or “Father/Mother God.”
But this awkwardness, I suggest, is actually much more positive than the days when the masculine pronoun “he” referred to both men and women, and the capitalized pronoun “He” was always used to refer to God.
The NRSV (New Revised Standard Version) translation of Genesis 1:27 nicely captures the outlandishness of using the masculine pronoun for God. The crucial theological point that this verse is making is that men and women are both created in the image of God, who, by implication, transcends gender.
But notice how the language is weighted in favor of the masculine. Although the word “humankind” appears in this translation instead of “mankind,” immediately after this gender-neutral reference we are told that we are created in his image, and are told twice that he created us.
Personally, I feel that theological intent should be factored in when translating. A better translation – better in the sense of better reflecting the actual theological intent of this verse, would read: “So God created humankind in God’s image, in the image of God God created them, male and female God created them.”
A while back I read an article in Time magazine that reported on studies that showed that when the board of directors of a corporation, or the cabinet members of a government, reached the threshold of thirty per cent women, there was a measurable increase in decisions being made in a nonviolent and inclusive way.
A few years ago multiple news outlets reported on the highly sexist environment created by the founder of Uber, the alternative to taxis. That founder was placed on an extended leave-of-absence.
Sexism was so much a part of the environment at Uber that at one of their board meetings, when it was mentioned that there should be more women present, one of the board members responded without thinking: “But women want to talk more; having them on board would make our meetings much longer.”
And what, it might be asked, is wrong with more conversation? The world would definitely be a more caring place with more of it.
I can’t help but think that the history of western civilization since the advent of Christianity would have been a remarkably better history if the full participation of women which marked the earliest church had been maintained – in other words, if the church had remained true to the teaching and practice of its founder, Jesus.
With a thirty percent representation of women priests, bishops, cardinals, and even popes, I suspect that the church blessing wars, crusades, and inquisitions would never have happened.
And on the Protestant side, if the reformers had allowed women to be ordained to the ministry as well as men – something that has happened only within the last fifty years, and that only in the Protestant mainstream – the history of the Protestant churches would have been a lot less violent as well.
Of course we can’t rewrite history, but we can influence the shape that history takes in the present and the future.
That is why Christian feminism as part of the theology of liberation is so crucially important. Christian feminist liberation theology is not, at its core, about political correctness, but about issues of basic justice.
For Christians, the first organization that needs to be liberated is the church itself. Then, when we have our own house in order, when we have returned to the teaching and practice of Jesus, then, and only then, will the rest of the world take the church seriously when we speak about equality, justice, and peace.
Let us celebrate some of the wonderful texts that we have in the Bible that reveal the feminine side of God.
Deuteronomy 32:18 contains the challenge: “You forgot the God who gave you birth.”
The root of the Hebrew word for compassion, rahamim, is rehem, which means “womb.”
God expresses God’s womb-like, motherly love through the prophet Isaiah: “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 (Isaiah 49:15).”
God promises, also through Isaiah: “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you (Isaiah 66:13).”
I would like to close this sermon with a quotation from the book Good Goats. Concerning his struggle to embrace a God who was like a mother as well as like a father, Dennis Linn writes:
“At first I thought that my resistance was to changing my theology. But I discovered that my real resistance was to changing my personality . . .
I needed to rely less on my ability to think and more on my underdeveloped feeling side.
[I needed to learn to] appreciate how God loves the unrepentant sinner, how grace is not earned but given as a free gift.
I had to become more at home with receiving from others rather than always compulsively doing things for them.
In summary, I needed to integrate feminine values into my deeply skewed male value system.
I grew up with a male skew. I was good at efficiency, building things in the outer world, competing, and dominating my environment.
I believed that external authorities had all the answers.
Heaven and hell were places “out there.” Like many men, I was oriented toward outer space.
I was not so good at the feminine values of caring for things as they are, mutuality, or experiencing my own feelings and body wisdom.
I didn’t know that truth is also found within, and that heaven and hell have an inner meaning, as measures of my own connectedness or disconnectedness to God, myself, others, and the entire universe. I was out of touch with the feminine dimension of inner space.
In order to become a more balanced person, I needed to develop my feminine side, and in order to develop my feminine side I needed to know God the mother.
All language for God is metaphorical; God is not literally a father. But if God is like a father, then God is also like a mother. Male and female, loving mothers and fathers, reflect for us equally the image of God (Genesis 1:27).
Why is this so important? Just as we become like our human parents, we also become like the God whom we adore . . .
As long as we have an all-male God, what happened to me will also happen to our culture and to our church. Their values too will be those of domination and competition, in which we devalue women, do not develop our feminine side, and do not trust or cherish the inner life of ourselves or others. And so long as we believe our culture when it tells us that it is good to dominate or be in control, we will reinforce our exclusively male image of God.”
One way for us to break the stranglehold of an image of God that tends to reflect the worst aspects of masculinity is to get back in touch with some of the great mystics of the Christian tradition.
It would be good to meditate on Meister Eckhart’s words: “All language has taken an oath to fail to describe God; any attempt to do so is the height of arrogance and will always declare some kind of war: the inner wars that undermine our strength, and the outer wars that maim red.”
It would do us good to meditate on Teresa of Avila’s terse statement: “All concepts of God are like a jar we break.”
Amen.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
What intellectual insights do we gain from considering the metaphor of God as mother?
How have you experienced maternal care from God?
For women only: If a man were to ask you how to develop his “feminine” side more, what would you say to him?
For men only: How can men be strong and at the same time deeply in touch with their “feminine” sides?
CLOSING PRAYER Catherine Hooper, Contemporary
How can I tell of such love to me?
You made me in your image
and held me in the palm of your hand,
your cords of love, strong and fragile as silk
bind me and hold me.
Rich cords, to family and friends,
music and laughter echoing in memories,
light dancing on the water, hills rejoicing.
Cords that found me hiding behind carefully built walls and led me out,
love that heard my heart break and despair and rescued me,
love that overcame my fears and doubts and released me.
The questions and burdens I carry you take,
to leave my hands free – to hold yours, and others,
free to follow your Spirit moving, swirling in the breeze,
free to be caught up in the dance of your love,
finding myself in giving myself to you.
How can I tell of such love? How can I give to such love?
I am, here I am.
SUGGESTED MUSIC Bring Many Names
First-Plymouth Church Lincoln Nebraska You Tube
BENEDICTION
Patiently and persistently, God loves.
Relentlessly and unconditionally, God loves.
Now and forever, God loves.
AMEN.