Thursday, February 5, 2015

Some Thoughts About My Language



A Reflection for V Epiphany                                     All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC February 8, 2015                                                  Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
Some Thoughts About My Language
There are two names for this Sunday: one is the 5th Sunday after the Epiphany, and the older name is Sexagesima Sunday, which is an old term meaning that the numbers of days before Easter are now in the 60’s. When I was growing up in the Episcopal Church, we always used words like “Septuagesima”, seventy days, which was last week, and Quinquagesima, fifty days, which is next week. When I was much younger, I remembered the words because they were so old and seemed to be extra special, but as I grew up, the words seemed like a quaint anachronism and no longer meant anything real. Words have power for us Episcopalians. In most cases, Episcopal churches have dropped these designations, but we do love holding on to the old words.

I have two Bible Studies each week, one on Sunday mornings between the two services and one at 11:30 on Monday mornings. In the Sunday morning study, we go slowly through books of the Bible; this last week we were crawling through Ephesians. In the brown bag lunch Bible study on Mondays, we look through the lessons for the coming week. I enjoy both of the studies because I learn from lay people about how they see things. We were looking at the lesson from the Gospel where Jesus has just healed Simon’s mother-in-law and she immediately gets out of her sick bed and starts to serve them dinner. One on the members of the class - I am not going to tell you her name because that would embarrass her - this unnamed woman piped up, “Well, I would not do that!” I replied to this unnamed woman who is more than 20 years older than me, “Why, Mary English, what do you mean?” This unnamed woman said, “When I am sick, I don’t want to get out of bed and even after I get well after being sick, I like to milk it a bit more and stay in bed.” I told her that, in the time of the writing of the Gospel, an older woman’s job was to serve the men, and when Jesus healed her miraculously, she went back to work “immediately.” I also told her that I was not about to preach that a woman of a certain age gets her worth by taking care of the men who show up at the house – not in this place and not with my wife in attendance. I am not that stupid to be public about my own latent misogynistic tendencies. Words have power and I should careful in the words I use.

This then brought me to Paul’s letter to the Corinthians for today where the NRSV translates Paul saying, “I have become all things to all people that I might by all means save some.” That is how the Greek reads, but as I looked at other versions, it gets translated, “I have become all things to all men.” German existential philosopher Martin Heidegger said “Language is the House of Being.” Words have power, and by the use of that simple word “men”, it is so easy for us to slip into patriarchal gratuitous misogyny.

If the spirit of Paul is hijacked by the patriarchal structure in the letter of Biblical language, how then can I live into that spirit of becoming all to all? I try to do it. For instance, some of you know that my politics are extremely left-wing; yet my job is to be here for all people, so I work with people who have right-wing beliefs, not because I want convert them to my way of thinking, but because they are my sisters and brothers in Christ.   Last week I watched some of the Super Bowl.  Now that was rough for me because when I tried to play football in high school, I spent the season sitting on the bench because I just was not good enough. Sitting and watching a game is a reliving of my own feelings of humiliation and inadequacy. However I am no longer 15 and we are talking 53 years ago, so I don’t really have to relive those times.  And I needed to be there because it said that I thought that God was present, whenever two, three, or more are gathered together in love. It was wonderful, and the game was much less important than the space between the people.  Of course I was called upon to give the blessing, but it was the space between the words that spoke loudest, for as St. Francis says, “Preach the Gospel and if necessary use words.”

I am proud of how this church has opened up its doors to all sorts and conditions of people; being all to all as we work to start a place for day care for children who are not Episcopalians. I am proud of how we are gracious in welcoming and hosting homeless people in the Room in the Inn program. I love the idea of openness we give to the community as we do the All Saints’ After Dark programs. I am proud of how welcoming this church has been for the Lutheran congregation to share sacred space and in negotiation with the Orthodox Church. There is one God and all of us are God’s children; we are called to be all to all. We do well at the space between the words as we preach the Gospel.

However, I decided that I need to be more consistent in the kind of language I use. I so easily slip into God as “Father” and “He”. Yes, I know that there is a long history in our patriarchal religious establishment where clergy like me are called “Father”. The Episcopal Church has had a mixed record in how it deals with women. When I was growing up, Vestries were all male preserves. Women had their ECW, Episcopal Church Women, which ran a shadow organization in the church with its own budget and power. There were separate conventions for the Men of the Church and for the Episcopal Church Women. In 1946 the Diocese of Missouri elected a woman as a lay delegate to the national General Convention. There was a tizzy because the language did say “men”, but the church had always used the word “men” in the worship services to refer to all people. She was seated, but it was ruled that this was a one-time thing. At the next general Convention in 1949, four women were elected from different diocese, but they were not seated because, in the meantime, the rules had been clarified so that the word “men” meant “men”. The people who ran the organization said the word “men” meant males,  and then they would use “men” when they said it meant all people. In other words, “men” meant “men” except when they said it didn’t. It was not until 1970 before women were again allowed to be delegates or members of the Vestry, and another six years, 1976, before women were allowed by General Convention to be Priests, and 1988 before the first woman was elected as a Suffragan Bishop, which is an assistant Bishop, 1994 before the first woman was elected as a Diocesan Bishop, and 2005 before a woman was elected as Presiding Bishop. 

When All Saints’ Church was being organized in 1996, they decided that it did not really need a separate organization for women, and the first Rector was a woman. The space between the words is powerful, but we are still finding that language is less than helpful in freeing ourselves from the patriarchy that is built up around the Divine that cannot really be known or named. All we can be is in relationship with the Divine and too often that relationship is diverted when we see an image of our own earthly fathers. 

The word for father has changed over the years. In the world of Jesus, fathers did not go off to work at offices. In the science of their time, the father was the one who gave life to his children - the mother was just the field in which the seed was planted, and the worth of a woman was seen in her fertility. The father was there every step of the way as the male children would work beside and for his benefit. Father became a metaphor for God – the one who gives us life and who is with us every moment of every day. With modern life, our science suggests that life is the product of a union of love, not just the will of the father and the fertility of the mother. We now consider a woman as having more worth than being a field of fertility.  I would suggest that the metaphor for “father” now has come to mean someone who is busy and far away. I cannot tell you how often people come to me and start to apologize for interrupting me, saying “Father, I know you are so busy , but. . . ” Is that the image that comes to mind for us when we start to pray “Our Father” in Heaven?  Do we feel like we are intruding on God - which might keep us from understanding that God’s energy and love is flowing all around, in and through us at every second of every day? 

We limit God so much and so it has always been. In the Hebrew Testament lesson from Isaiah, the writer of that song is telling the people that God is really much bigger than our imaginations and suggests that we are like “grasshoppers” before the Divine. Yet, even in that reading which tells us to be aware of the creative force, the language uses the male pronoun as if God were A Being instead of the Ground of all Being. We see this in the Psalm as well as they celebrate the God who created all things and is able to count the countless stars and give them all names, and yet as I read the song with its beautiful language, I kept stumbling over the number of times the word “He” is used. 

Lent is coming and, so far, my Lenten Discipline will be to use better and more inclusive language when in reference to the Divine. I will go through the Liturgy and make some changes and see if we can update some of our metaphors in the hymns. This will trip us up a bit, but I think it may be a good discipline to help us to be all for all.


Let me try to sum this up in a poem.
Some Thoughts About My Language
“To be all things to all men”,
questions what about women?
Was God’s womb only male?
Or, was it fully a hopeful tale
that we might things all to be
for all, when we could soon see
the Divine SHE kissing of breath
molding new creation, not death
held in stasis. Now in joy re-alive
of fertile birthing life full to thrive
being open to  that soft gentle kiss
in divine touch for love not to miss.

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