The Feast of Pentecost, 2004
Deacon Richard Buhrer
I’d like to speak for a while about the issue of gender and inclusive language in the Church. I admit that this starts off quite a distance from the feast of Pentecost, but please bear with me.
There was a movie in the late 70’s called, appropriately enough, “Outrageous.” It was the story of a Canadian gay man who was a female impersonator, which is to say, a drag queen. His best friend and roommate was a schizophrenic woman. In the course of the story the woman becomes pregnant and the man leaves for his big break, which is to say a drag bar in the West Village in New York City (all things are relative). When she gives birth, the man speaks to her on the phone and asks after the child: “Is it a boy, girl or won’t say?”
That question sums up for me the approach to gender and God in the Church today. We recognize that it is oppressive to impose an entirely male God on the women of the Church, but we haven’t yet had sufficient courage to start to discuss, or openly pray to, the presence of the feminine in the Godhead.
We know that there is a feminine principle in God from one of the creation narratives in the book of Genesis: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them” Genesis 1:27. So the fullness of God is male and female, masculine and feminine.
But ages on ages of patriarchy have conspired to withhold from us the feminine images of God (we have to scour the scriptures to find but only a few) and we never refer to God is our prayers as She and Her, always as He or Him, or coyly as God no gender specified.
Jesus himself was feminist. Several incidents from the Gospel illustrate this. My favorite is the story of Mary and Martha (used for so long to keep women in the kitchen). Martha complains that Mary is sitting at Jesus’ feet instead of helping with the food preparation. Jesus expresses gratitude for Martha’s service but is firm that “Mary has chosen the better part and it shall not be taken from her.” “Sitting” in the Hebrew of the time was equivalent to being enrolled in a rabbinical academy. Mary of Bethany was enrolled in the same school as the disciples and Jesus was not going to expel her to do “women’s work.” There are of course other examples of this throughout the Gospels and echoes of it even in the writings of Paul, notably in Galatians (3:28) where Paul quotes an early Christian hymn: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” All of the ethnic, economic and gender distinctions of the early Christian world are obliterated in Christ.
There was a feminist party in the early Church. For good or ill, though, they lost. We call them the Gnostics in our time and their writings are just now being rediscovered in our time. From the Secret Book of John (a Gnostic writing seen as a sequel to the Gospel of John: “John, John, why are you astonished and why are you afraid? I am the one who is with you always. I am the Father; I am the Mother; I am the Son.”
I struggled with this for a long time personally. There was a time in my life when I was completely alienated from God as He, angry with the Father and angry with Jesus and angry with the Church for its cruelty and indifference to my kind and me. For some reason (or grace) during this time I never lost a sense of connection with the Virgin Mary and was comfortable with the notion of a Goddess as my mother.
When I returned to the Church I kept wondering where to find the Goddess who had been so important to me. And then it seemed clear. We have such a limited understanding of the Holy Spirit. She is seen (it appears to me) as a theological coda on the discussion of the nature of Christ and enjoys relatively limited mention in the creeds. But it makes sense to me that the Holy Spirit should be feminine. In overshadowing the Virgin Mary and rendering her fecund with the Son of God, the Holy Spirit intensified her femaleness and rendered her miraculously fertile, full of life.
Now I would like to move that we start to consider the word “Lord” in English as a gender-neutral term. When the Celtic Britains met the Romans there was the need to translate the Latin word “dominus” into the Celtic language of the Britains. “Dominus” in Latin comes from the Latin word for house, “domus.” It means essentially the male head of household and “domina” meant the female head of household. The word comes into English as dominate, domination and is an expression of coercive power over. The words that were chosen in that early British form are equivalent to loaf warden: guardian of the bread of the house, “lady” means “loaf doer” or loaf maker. These are for me gentler terms and foreshadow the presence of Christ in bread. In Hebrew the word for “Lord” is “Adonai” and this was used as a euphemism for the sacred four-letter name of God. When we confess that Jesus and the Holy Spirit are Lord, we are acknowledging that they are rightly called by this Holy Name.
So the descent of the Holy Spirit on the gathered Church in Jerusalem is reverberant with the echoes of the images of the Holy Spirit and the feminine principle of God mentioned ion the Old and New Testament. The spirit that brooded over the formless void and brought forth order; the wisdom that lived with God before the creation of the universe, that came to Solomon in his youth and enabled him to govern rightly, the spirit that motivated the prophets to speak out against the sins of the people of God and to announce the coming restoration, the spirit that overshadowed the virgin Mary and transformed her into the Mother of God, the spirit that descended on the Lord Jesus in the River Jordan and then drove him out into the desert to be tempted, the spirit that came upon the Church in Jerusalem and undid the division rendered at the tower of Babel, the spirit that enabled St. Stephen to pray for his executors as he died, the spirit that transformed Saul the persecutor into Paul the apostle.
She is present with us even now, teaching us new lessons of justice and peace, encouraging the ordination of women and inclusion of all peoples into the Church of God. As we learn to reverence her, we will be healed of the sins of patriarchy that have taught us to devalue women and feminine power. In the Eastern Church, the Virgin Mary is seen as almost an icon of the Spirit because Mary was “overshadowed” by the Holy Spirit not only in the act of conception but throughout her whole life. Now in the West, we have all these hymns praising the virgin mother meek and mild, but there is not much meek and mile about the Virgin’s song, the Magnificat. There she speaks with great power and with doom for the powerful. On the icon screen in an orthodox church we find Christ the Pantocrator on one side of the screen and the Virgin on the other. May God help us find this balance in our lives and in the Church, valuing all for their gifts and devaluing none for there uniqueness, embracing the gentleness of men and the power of women, welcoming he Kingdom of God into our midst. AMEN.
