A prompting at First Presbyterian Church on More Light Sunday
Based on Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

In Billy Wilder's 1950 classic movie "Sunset Boulevard", a down and out screenwriter named Joe Gillis recognizes an aging Norma Desmond as a former silent movie actress, and exclaims, "You used to be big!" Gloria Swanson in the role of Norma Desmond delivers her now famous reply, "I am big. It is the pictures that got small!" Today as I hear some people blame much that is wrong with our world and country on our immorality and lack of faith and obedience to God, I likewise hear a similar dialog echo from our faith tradition: "God, you used to be big, what happened?" And God's reply, "I am big. It's your picture of me that has gotten small!"

Ultimately, it seems ironic that just one week after Pentecost when we celebrate the diversity of God's voice through God's people in a multitude of languages, in dance, in music, and other expression, we come upon Trinity Sunday where traditionally God language is almost painfully constrained and structured - Father, Son, Holy Ghost (period)

But fortunately for us, it's also National More Light Sunday, a time for us to remember the diversity of God's creation - particularly people of diverse sexual orientation - but others as well and looking forward to the day of being able to truly celebrate the spiritual gifts of all who are currently excluded from the Church.

This month also marks the 10th anniversary of a particularly heated General Assembly of the national Presbyterian Church that explosively denounced an interdenominational Re-imagining God conference which had taken place the November before. The PCUSA still quivers a bit whenever it hears the name, Sophia - a Greek female name given to an Old Testament representation of God as Wisdom as exemplified by our reading from Proverbs. If all of this doesn't provide us with much to examine, challenge, and perhaps expand the confining picture frame through which we view God, I can't imagine what would.

My intent with this prompting is not to foment a religious war or argument although I acknowledge that my own chosen provocative title of today's prompting has all the makings of fighting words for the Church. If you've ever heard George Carlin's routine of the "Seven dirty words you can never say on TV", I've probably hit three of the seven that you should never say in the Presbyterian Church. And there's not a four-letter word among them! So, if I'm not trying to create a fight, what am I trying to say today? Let me answer by going back in history a little bit (1700 years).

The Nicene Creed and its Trinitarian language was created in a particular time and particular place (around 300 AD) to stop fierce and bloody religious battles over the nature of God. For many, belief in a God distant and up in the heavens was just fine and a much safer God to believe in but it didn't explain people's experience of God-among-us in human form in Jesus Christ and the Church, the body of Christ. A distant God in heaven though very safely separated from us, would in fact have been rendered irrelevant and powerless were it not for the intimate spirit or breath of God that could be felt at work among the children of God. So, with God in heaven, God among us, and God as a spiritual breath or fire within us, how could we explain God taking such radically different forms among believers who all claimed belief in one God? How could we maintain a belief in one God when God appeared with such diversity? The battle over the nature of God was compounded by a belief that if Christ was created out of God (in essence, a part of God's creation) that would somehow lessen who Christ was. The conflict that led to the Nicene Creed was ultimately a fight over one Greek letter, the letter iota. It was a fight over whether Jesus Christ was God or formed from the substance of God, the difference between them being that one letter iota. The judgment of history or at least the judgment of a historian named Gibbon, is that it didn't make one iota of difference… an expression that remains with us today.

What we have forgotten in our own religious battles of contemporary times is that the Nicene Creed started not as a way to confine the language that we use to describe God but in fact to open that language up. The language of the Trinity was intended to validate a diversity of ways by which God was evident in our lives. As Jack Rogers notes in his book on the Presbyterian Creeds, "The purpose of studying the Nicene Creed is not to force everyone to use the ancient philosophical language… We should use whatever contemporary language will best express to people the central truth. In simplest terms, the Nicene Creed says: Whatever God is, Jesus is that; and whatever humanity is, Jesus is that too, in one whole person."

That our God is known to us in a variety of ways, that God can have many names with many attributes should not be scary but rather expected. That we believe in a transgender God, capable of displaying both male and female attributes isn't new age theology. It permeates through our religious texts. Mother, father, child, womb, rock, redeemer, friend. God is all of these. God can be an old woman sage and God can be a male baby child. God can be our Rainbow of Promise, our Ark of Salvation, and our Dove of Peace all at the same time. And God does this so that in every way possible, God can become more comprehendible and relevant to us, and God can encourage us to become more relevant to each other. There are those that will say, OK I can be comfortable with these depictions of God because they can be found, after all, in scripture. But isn't it possible, just possible, that the point of all this isn't for scripture to be an exhaustive laundry list of all the ways God can appear to us but instead to drill home the point that God simply loves diversity?

But you could then ask, even should ask: How do we answer those who claim that we are simply falling into moral relativism… an anything goes philosophy? The answer is that there's a consistent thread that underlies the many forms and depictions that God takes on. It is of course a rule of love. For us in the Christian Church, that rule of love is particularly modeled in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I claim that a rule of love that underlies God can hold together all faithful believers in God more completely and more powerfully than any legalistic or literal interpretation of scripture ever could or ever should. As to why, despite this common tie, that we seem to have such diversity in our experiences and encounters with God is simply that however God appears to us isn't up to us. It is up to God and God chooses to reveal God's self in all of the colors of the rainbow and in all of creation. And I would claim that we still have room and need for God in new ways and diversity of form. After all, we do not currently have sufficient understanding or adequate prophecy to heal our divisions and we have yet to learn to see God in a way that can bring peace to our violent world.

But we still have our barriers and fears in encountering God particularly in forms and in believers foreign to us. Dr. Johanna Bos, Professor of Old Testament Theology at Louisville Seminary, grew up in Holland under nazi occupation and witnessed the treatment of Jews under that occupation. Dr. Bos can speak with an authority of experience about our creating and exiling "the other" even in the guise of "love the sinner, hate the sin" when she spoke during a lecture at Union Theological in 2001, saying the following:

We may sometimes forget that within the context of the nazi ideology, destruction of the Jews was advocated as a "moral good." Discrimination thus became a moral task of a "good citizen." (And here comes a key point…) Perceptions of women and non-white races as the "other" easily move into perceptions of them as monsters and that from monster-making comes monster slaying (Relevant to today)… [Women] begin to be seen as monstrous simply when depicted as "other" to a God who is conceived in male terms only. How much the "othering" dynamic plays a role in discrimination against gays and lesbians and anyone not heterosexual is clear both in the culture and the church. To hear over and over again the comparison of gays to child molesters in the context of the church, to use the reference "homosexual lifestyle" as pointing to a self-evident reality, to refer to people as "self-avowed unrepentant" human beings makes clear to a greater or lesser degree that these folk do not measure up [and therefore can be discriminated against.] - Johanna Bos, March 2001 at UTS.

Theologian Paul Tillich in The Shaking of the Foundations adds a disturbing observation about our encounter with God. Making his words into my own: We are compelled to destroy the Divine whenever we encounter it. For in the Divine, we see our own selves reflected so completely, so honestly, so absolutely that we are unable to bear what we see and therefore must destroy it. The ones who executed Jesus don't fit our comfortable profile of evil. They were those we would have called "good people" who react with anger and violence at seeing their own horrible reflection in Jesus and Jesus' words. So, are we possibly too quick to call another believer's encounter with God wrong or heretical? Are we too quick to declare a Holy War? Is our own discomfort with another believer's encounter with God possibly a reflection of something uncomfortable within ourselves? Why is the depiction of God as a black woman or Jesus Christ as a poor farm worker, a hungry homeless man, an orphan, or a widow disturbing to some even as these depictions are a comfort to others? Why is a white Jesus in a white robe comforting to some while disturbing to others?

Writer Audre Lorde introduces herself in one of her essays with these words: "Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am Black, because I am a lesbian, because I am myself - a Black woman warrior poet doing my work - come to ask you, are you doing yours?"

Does God ever speak to us as the woman that Audre Lorde has just described? How would we handle such an encounter?

These are questions we must consider because God is big and our picture of God can no longer afford to be so small. In the diverse ways that God becomes known to us, God becomes more comprehendible and relevant to us; and God, in this way, encourages us to become more relevant to each other. And, it all comes down to this simple principle that is at the basis of our belief. Ultimately, God loves Creation and yearns for us to love God and to love and care for each other.

Yet another self-identified warrior poet, Alice Walker, was asked at a recent speaking event, "You're a black woman in a world which both subjugates and in violence speaks out against all that you are. How do you face this real adverse world and how do you stay calm, or do you?" Her answer was simple and beautiful, "I actually feel very loved by the universe, I feel very loved by the Earth. I feel that the Earth is delighted that I'm here… you know, just tickled! And so, you know there are racists and horrible people and oppression and there's suffering and there's this and there's that but you know, there are also... oranges. And if there's any message that I would want to transmit to anyone who feels in any way unwanted and unwelcome, it would be the sense that the universe is delighted with everything it has made and definitely delighted with us."

For all frustrated and disillusioned believers to hear, the God of our faith, a transgender God who crosses male and female, gives a very similar answer, proclaiming in her female voice in Proverbs chapter 8, "To you, oh People, I call and my cry is to all that live! I was beside the Creator, like a master worker (or little child), and I was daily the Creator's delight, rejoicing always, rejoicing in creation, and delighting in the human race."

This gives us much to celebrate at this table of communion set for you and me. Hallelujah, Amen.