Gender-bending God

 

John 14: 15-31
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
May 10, 2026

Work of art by Ruth Schreiber. Adaptation of Michelangelo's "The Creation of Adam" from the Sistine Chapel in which God is portrayed as a woman.

Just when it seems that God is moving further away from us, God is getting closer and closer to us. Jesus is with his disciples for the last time. He talks about going to prepare a place, a house in which there are many rooms, and the disciples know the way but they don’t know the way. They think the way is far, but it’s as close as the distance between our heads and our hearts, which is the longest journey many of us will ever travel.



And so Jesus puts the way, the directions in plain language, “I give you a new commandment: Love one another as I have loved you.” “I am in God and God is in me.” Then Jesus says that he will ask God to give the disciples another advocate, the Helper, the Comforter, “the one who stands beside”, to be with them always. This is John’s Pentecostal moment, when the gift of the Holy Spirit is given, the Spirit which is known in truth and in love.



Strangely enough, in the NSRVUE the author of John refers to the Spirit as “he”. I say strangely enough because the Hebrew word for spirit is ruach, a feminine noun for breath, wind, the spirit of life, the creation power of God. From Genesis: “The Spirit of God, the Ruach Elohim, was moving over the face of the waters…”. The Greek word for spirit is pneuma, a neutral noun, neither masculine nor feminine, for wind, spirit, breath, soul.



In 1973, feminist theologian Mary Daly wrote, “If God is male, then the male is god.” Whoever is named as the authority has the authority to name what structures we live by, what is dominant and what is subordinate. It makes a difference who and what we call “father” or “mother”. But in our rush to be inclusive in our language, we went directly from one dominant gender to gender neutral and skipped over God the Mother, God the Daughter, and the Ruach Elohim. Maiden, Mother, and Crone. We thought we were liberating God from gender when we actually had left part of her locked up.



It’s weird because Jesus had a human mother who gave birth to him. How else would God incarnate enter this world? But for patriarchy to continue, all sorts of shenanigans had to fall into place for that to happen. She had to be conceived without sin—the Immaculate Conception. Jesus had to be conceived without human intercourse. All so Jesus could be human, even declared fully human, but without the stain of original sin. Hierarchy maintained. Sex still bad. And even though Mary is elevated, she is not liberated, and so women still bear the brunt of patriarchy.



Funny how it didn’t seem to make us terribly uncomfortable that Jesus had both God and Joseph for fathers but it does possibly make us squirm that Jesus could’ve had two mothers. “But I will ask my Mother and she will give you another Advocate, the Helper, the Comforter, one who will stand beside you always.” There are those who will say it’s not biblical, that’s not what scripture says, but there are verses in Hebrew scriptures where God is a mother hen who protects her chicks. God is a nursing mother who cannot forget us. God is a mother eagle who teaches her young to fly and carries them on her wings.



All God talk is metaphorical. (Metaphors be with you.) It is when we forget that all these images are metaphors or we censor which ones can be used, that we limit not only our understanding of God but also we limit the power of God, God’s love, to heal us.



But there are some who will do anything to not heal, because healing means facing one’s pain, and facing one’s pain can feel like failure. Like shame. Like admitting they got it wrong, and the cycle starts all over again with pain, failure, shame. So the fix is more power, more authority, more control, what some are calling the last gasp of patriarchy, White supremacy, Christian Nationalism.



There are some conservative pastors in the evangelical church with large…platforms, podcasts, social media presence, who are advocating to repeal the 19th amendment to the Constitution that gives women the right to vote. One of those pastors, Dale Partridge of Prescott, AZ, who thinks women are too emotional to vote, said, “Nearly every legalized moral atrocity of the last 100 years was made possible by the female vote.” Moral atrocities such as legalized abortion, marriage equality, immigrant rights, transgender rights, welfare support of those living in poverty, election of the first Black president, the first female vice president, and the first Muslim mayor of New York City. He’s so close to getting it.



If Dale really wanted to set things back, he’d have to rewrite the Christian scriptures. Because it’s really all Mary Magdalene’s fault. If she hadn’t proclaimed the resurrection in all four gospels, none of this would have happened. Women were empowered by her witness and the women who supported the ministry of Jesus and the disciples. Women were integral to the work of Paul and had leadership roles in their own right. Well, okay, it’s really all Jesus’ fault for including women in the first place.



Recent scholarship of the early Jesus movement, the wide and varied witness of these Jesus groups and clubs, shows us the diversity of these Jesus peoples. Which is around the time the gospels were being written. One main focus was resisting the Roman Empire by eschewing violence and keeping people safe. One way this was embodied was practicing gender bending, taking seriously Paul’s words that there is neither male nor female, slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile, for all are one in Christ Jesus. They rejected typical gender roles such as male dominance and female passivity. They lived in chosen families, outside of marriage and blood relationships. They experimented with what it meant to really live and love because they knew for the first time what it meant to be truly safe, and living this way kept them safe because it messed with patriarchy and empire.



And so it makes sense to me that we have not gone far enough with calling God “Mother” or Jesus our sister or the Holy Spirit our wise crone truthteller. But we also can’t stop there. God’s original pronouns were “us” and “our”. "Let us make humankind in our image." Gender identity is a construct, a way to make meaning, much like a metaphor. And so gender identity does not have to be limited to sex or sexuality. There are gender expansive nonconforming people whose gender identity changes daily. Because who’s making the rules? There are social media accounts named “Today’s gender is…” and the imagery is stunning.


Today’s gender is the sunrise after a storm.

Today’s gender is joyously crying over your body.

Today’s gender is middle school art teacher.

Today’s gender is the space between stars.

Today’s gender is hot mess—as in hot, but also a mess.

Today’s gender is Schrödinger’s gender: not knowing your current gender until observing yourself in the mirror.

Today’s gender is a process.

Today’s gender is all of the above.



I wish I could read all of them to you.



When we open the door for Mother God, we open the way for creation, for expansiveness, for multitudes, which means power shared, community, justice, equity, balance. We open the way for healing, for liberation, for transformation. Part of being a parent is allowing our children to change us. How else will we help them build the world they want to live in? And when I say “our children” I mean what James Baldwin said: “All the children are ours. Every single one of them.”



Happy Mother’s Day, Church. Amen.

Benediction – enfleshed.com (adapted)


Go forth—into our sacred and aching planet home—
Go with Mother, with Father, with the Child of Wisdom in all of us,
cultivating the ways of hope
that our young people might flourish
now & always.
Go with the Creating God.