Is God male or female?

Chapel at Grand View University this semester focuses on common questions students ask about the faith. This sermon was delivered September 25, 2018.

Our question we’re tackling today is this: “Is God male or female?” The easy answer is “No.” Thank you very much. Have a nice walk to your next class. And enjoy the extra ten minutes. Amen.

Of course, the answer is no because God is God and not a creature. Back in ancient Greece, Xenophanes, who lived a few hundred years before Christ, could have told you that. A couple weeks ago, my Ancient and Medieval Philosophy students learned that Xenophanes argued that it’s just wrong to think of the Greek gods as having human bodies. And thinking the sun is Apollo’s fiery chariot streaking across the sky isn’t much better. If our own God is going to be God, then we’d also be wise about assigning gender to a being who’s way more than a binary creature with either internal or external plumbing or X and Y chromosomes.

In Genesis we hear that God made human beings male and female and that they were made in God’s image. But that doesn’t mean that we’re male and female because God is multi-gendered. No, we have to look a few words later and see what God says about all that was created. When God’s divine identity was expressed out into the cosmos, God declared that it was all “tov me’od,” or “waaayy good.” God’s creation, including platypuses and pachyderms, spiny echidnas, and your high school cafeteria lady, is totes good. And so are you, no matter what body parts you have.

The hard thing about our question is that it assumes we can actually figure out something about God that God apparently isn’t interested in letting us in on. If only we knew whether God was male or female, then, depending on God’s gender, we could decide that women are manipulating she-devils or that men are full of toxically masculine demonic rage. And whichever one doesn’t match God can go back to hell where Satan’s spawn belong.

But our Bible passage this morning gives us some hope. In 1 Corinthians, St. Paul assumes we’re going to ask all kinds of questions that want to get at something about God’s essential nature. Stuff like, “Why did God let my cousin die so young?” and “If I prayed so hard for a homecoming date, why am I sitting at home with Ben and Jerry as my companions?” For Paul, no matter what our questions, when we try to get beyond the veil, all we’re going to find is ourselves. “For now, we see in a mirror dimly.” When we ask a question like ours, the only answer will be a reflection of ourselves. It’s all part of the limits of our thinking that God established in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve were told not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We ask questions, and God will answer with silence.

But there’s hope in our verse. We look into that mirror and get a faint echo of God’s being. That means that we can learn something about God from human characteristics, even the most grievously stereotypical attributes we slap on the genders. We can learn about God from muscle-bound dudes and sentimental, weepy guys. We can learn about God from care-taking women and take-charge women. And those aren’t the only places we can learn about what God’s like. The opening litany we prayed today gives us a mighty list of things God has done that open up a vision of who God is. It’s admittedly a dim vision, but they’re clues nonetheless. It’s as if God were wearing many and various masks in this creation that show just as many and varied facets of who God is.

When we get no response to our question, maybe God is silent because God wants us to look elsewhere. It’s a dangerous thing to get behind the veil and see God’s full power and might (and maybe even God’s gender). When Moses asked to see God up on Mount Sinai, he only got to see God’s rear end and, because of it, was so changed that the Israelites forced Moses to wear a veil over his face. He was just too scary. So God sends you to encounter God where you can come to know God’s fullness in a way that God wants to be known: in the person of Jesus. There you have God made flesh and bone, with all the requisite and specific body parts real human beings have. Which isn’t to say that the almighty God is male, but only that God showed up in this one, Jesus. And because he was male in that patriarchal society, he suffered humiliation and degradation on the cross in a way that it wasn’t possible to experience for a woman.

But maybe I’ve misunderstood the question today. Maybe the question is really about whether we can use language other than male terms to address God. If so, we have Jesus’ example. Certainly, he taught us to pray, “Our Father who art in heaven.” But Jesus also gave us the image of a hen bringing her chicks under her wings as a way to understand God’s great care for us. And we have the Old Testament witness of Proverbs that speaks about God as wisdom. In Hebrew, that word is “sophia.” Have you ever heard of a guy named Sophia? The point is that God doesn’t much care about our little pronouns and divisions of the creation according gender. God cares about whether you send your prayers God-ward at all.

Find a way to talk to God, all the while knowing that your words and images are a dim reflection of who God really is. If you don’t like calling God “Father” because your dad is a jerk, then know that God’s definition of father is so much greater than a fallible sperm donor. Know that a hen and her chicks is just one aspect of who God is. God is also a rooster crowing his delight at the sunrise and the rising of Jesus on Easter. The possibilities are endless. But the beginning comes only when you speak to God. And there you have an entire Bible to use as your source.

You can address God by pointing to what God has done. “Almighty God, who answered King David’s confession of adultery and murder with mercy, grant me forgiveness as well.” “Gracious Lord God who stayed faithful to the Israelites in exile, even when they thought you’d forgotten them, help me to trust that you remember me.” “Holy Spirit who drove Jesus to be tempted in the wilderness, I’m out of control and ask you to take the wheel and drive me, too.” “Divine One, who came to Moses in the burning bush, my life is pretty dark, and I need you to burn a little brighter for me, so I can hang on.” “Good Shepherd, I’m a stupid sheep who’s gotten lost. Please find me.”

See how it works?  You have resources for prayer and an utterly human brain with all its limitations. But God delights in hearing you. If neither heights nor depths, nor principalities, nor angels can separate you from God’s love in Christ Jesus, then your human language is a mighty small hurdle for God. However you speak, it’s enough. Give it a go. Just connect. Amen. And A-women.

The Office of Preaching and the Church Today

This is a link to the lecture I presented to the Augustana District of Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC) at its annual convention on May 5, 2018, in Hutchinson, Minnesota. It follows up on LCMC's discussion of qualifications for ministry at its gathering last fall.

Click on this link

A Beloved Aunt, a Grave, and the Two-Lazy-J Ranch,

My Uncle Arlen Rounds asked me to speak at my dear Aunt Ida Mae's funeral today. 

This afternoon Aunt Ida will take one last trip in this world, to Red Owl of all the little ignominious places in this big wide world. There she'll be laid down near my grandpa Buster and grandma Luberta in a fenced off section of West River pasture land on a day as wintery cold as the one twenty-odd years ago when we committed Grandpa to the earth — ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Come spring (yes, that's almost a prayer right now), come spring the snow will be a dim memory, and you'll be able to cast your eyes west and see thunderheads growing over the Hills to stretch over the vast blue sky. And around that fenced-in plot, for as far as you can see the yellow and white clover, the alfalfa, and the purple coneflowers will delight with color and wafting sweetness.

It's fitting for Aunt Ida to come full circle and await the resurrection in the land of central Meade County that so shaped her, as it did to so many of us. When you drive north and a little west of Red Owl, past Cammack's place and the intersection with the Stoneville school and what was the store and post office, you'll head around the curve at Stoneville Hill, and finally see the specific little ranch that shaped Ida, the 2-Lazy J Ranch nestled down on a creek bed. A ranch house that began as a pioneer dugout in the side of a hill. The garage. A couple granaries. The cabin, bum lamb shed, outhouse, barn. And north of all the buildings, the prairie dog mounds and bone pile.

In my college office in Iowa, up on the top shelf of too many books, I have a calf skull that came from that boneyard. Every time I glance its way, it nearly nods back, as if to say, "You, old man, come from the dirt and manure of the Jones ranch. You come from the warm morning stove in the ranch house. You come from summers baling hay and winters breaking ice in cattle troughs. Your epigenetic processes are shaped by opening gates so Uncle Bobby can drive the pickup through and by the struggle to get that blamed thing closed again. Your intestinal biome is fed by home canning and milk straight from an actual cow. Your sleep patterns were established up those steep steps in an antiques bed with a chamber pot under it at the ready. You may think you're at home in the world, but you won't be until you drive up that lane, get out of your car, and stand there just above the rusting cans and junk of the trash dump, next to the sandstone face Grandpa carved, creek in front of you and windbreak behind. You will breath in air as it should be and settle in to who you really are." I think you all need your own office skull to remind you of these things.

None of us ever understands how deeply we're shaped by place. When you take in the ranch you can see what made Aunt Ida. Joneses have always had to ride low to the ground. Ranch life ain't easy. So Aunt Ida became practical and resilient, happy with small pleasures. You don't survive for long in ranch country without the bonds created with those around you, like the Lees, the Vigs, the Orths, Youngs, and more from Red Owl to Fairpoint and Union Center to Opal. Ida knew the importance of those bonds of family and friendship. She carried it out everywhere she lived, in her college days at BH, in Custer, Ogden, Elko, Sitka, and Laramie. You could see her deep dependence on and joy in others in her connections in Does and Eastern Star and her love of the folks at that little congregation in Medicine Bow.

Last night as so many of us gathered under Dee's gracious roof, I recognized these same grounded, landed, and practical qualities of character around the room. Uncle Bobby's doesn't have much strength for story-telling, and since my dad died, I've depended on Ida Mae's storehouse of prairie family lore. This is, perhaps the one of the last times we'll gather all of us as the product of that land. But Aunt Ida will have been one of the homely channels that made us these people.

There's another cemetery up Boulder Canyon on a hill above Deadwood, and there's another gravestone marked with the name Ida. She was my Aunt Ida's grandmother, grandpa's mother Ida Cale. This is our other family plot, for baby Jimmy is buried there, too. Today we stand with arms stretched from plot to plot Ida to Ida. Thankful, yes. Sorrowful, certainly. But for me I'm mostly eager to see once again my beloved aunt. She, one of the last who had known me my whole life. Aunt Ida with the ready grin. Ida with Buster's twinkly eye. Ida who knew my parents' feet of clay and showed me how to loved them. Ida on whom the shadow of Grandma's own darkness and that of a passel of alcoholic blue-talking uncles sometimes descended. Ida of the embroidery, the bookkeeping, the following of a tall Forest Service man with eyes twinklier than her dad's, of the scrolling handwriting. Ida of the strong love for her children and now grandchildren, who could only speak that love with a squeeze of a hand, even when she couldn't move the fingers that once played Great Grandma Mamie's Price & Teeple upright piano in the living room at the ranch.

Oh, we've been loved by her. We give her back, hardly wanting to release our grip. Thank God we can do it by placing her back in the bosom of that land that, even now, holds us all and waits to unfold what has belonged to it all along. Goodbye, Aunt Ida Mae. We'll see you on the Youngest Day, when this good gumbo earth bears its final fruit. 

Gine's flamingo feather

It's been a couple weeks now since my sister Gine's funeral. I hadn't wanted to speak at it, but my brother-in-law Joe demanded it. This is what I came up with in our hotel room that morning.

In my sister Gine and Joe's magnificent teal and turquoise bathroom, there's a picture frame hanging on the wall. What it contains she found on a trip to visit Mary and me and has deep meaning for me.

Gine had twisted Joe's arm enough that he consented to take time away from his other marriage to RCS and drive the 12 hours across the state through Sioux Falls, where months later she would be gifted with a competent, listening oncologist, an incomparable nurse navigator, and other staff who regarded her as a complete person worthy of their best efforts.

But that would be months away. On this trip they drove past the signs for Avera Health and continued down toward Omaha on I-29 and east halfway across Iowa. They came for our annual Palm Sunday shrimp boil: andouille sausages, onions, shrimp, and corn on the cob boiled together and dumped in the middle of the table. Around that table were our pastor and his wife, along with their three little girls, still another a couple recovering from addiction and expecting a baby, and, by phone, my brother Troy. Our sister Lynne arrived from Gettysburg a day later. Afterward we engaged in a little Cards Against Humanity and delighted in the laughter that arose at a pastor's wife being forced to say those things.

You'd think that would have been the utter highlight of the trip. But there's no photo of of us all enjoying ourselves in that frame a few blocks west of here in their house. It contains no family pic or vacation shot but instead holds something just as precious to my sister: one solitary sherbet orange and pink flamingo feather.

She picked up that feather from the ground at the Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines that week as she and Joe played tourist at places we never think of visiting: the botanical center (think Gine's greenhouse but way bigger), Zombie Burger + Drink Lab, the state Capitol, and Blank Park Zoo. The flamingo feather lay on the ground and her sharp eye spotted it, something she regarded as a singular thing of beauty and a rare find for a kid from happily unrefined West River country. 

That she took a feather that probably had lain there next to a gob of decidedly non-pink flamingo poop and back at home turned it into an object of art and pride and joy, and that she placed it in a frame to be honored and valued says something profound about Gine.

There were easily any number of times in her life where you could have found her down low, waiting and hoping to be picked up, revered, valued. When it didn't happen she built a space around herself with small objects of beauty or created and crafted the beauty herself. The trinkets and tchotchkes invariably connected to places she felt happy or to people who had noticed the feather she was. The crafted cards were sent to those same people.

My sister Gine loved deeply, starting with that Christmas Eve baby in Manhattan, Kansas, with such an unwieldy name: Brandon Augustus Jones. She was central operator on the line, staying connected with us siblings, Troy, Lynne and me. When her dogs Kramer and Suie died her, grief was a great as the unconditional acceptance she got from them. And when our Papa died just over a year ago, she was inconsolable. Everything around her was something that promised her love, joy, and value.

And then along came my brother-in-law Joe. He was the third of those things, and I didn't expect much out of such a misogynistic, mullet-wearing Wisconsinite. But what I'm so grateful to come to know is that Joe Mack is the most righteous upstanding husband I'd ever want for her, a man who himself spots flamingo feathers, picks them up, and places them in a frame of honor. My sister's last years with Joe were years of being valued, of Joe walking in the door and catching his breath because of the beautiful woman he saw waiting for him.

They made quite a pair of feather finders. I thank you Joe for these last months when Gine couldn't bear to look in the mirror because of the ravages of this vile disease but could take your loving gaze. Thank you for putting her in a place of honor in your heart.

And Brandon, the recipient of 36 years of love, you, too, hold a delicate feather in your palm, for she gave herself to you and lived as best she could to take you into the full, gracious, thoughtful manhood you now present to the world. You know there were lots of opportunities it could have gone crap-wise. If it had, she would have loved you even then.

We're sure going to miss her laughter, so often aimed at herself, her birthday cards, her garden, her secret place in the back yard, her piles of rock treasures found in the Hills, her retirement job as number one Rapid City Rush fan. Our dear daughter, mother, sister, aunt, cousin, friend, and quirky loyal companion. To day, hold your hand up, and imagine a flamingo feather in your palm. Our Gine. Regine. Gina. Regina. Gine Dean. And now blow gently and let her float away into the utter grace and acceptance where God collects such precious things.