God's Personal Pronoun Choices

For all of my adult life, I've been trying to use gender neutral pronouns when referring to God.  I'll use masculine pronouns for Jesus; it's hard to ignore the fact that he was male, but that's a subject for a different day.  For God the Creator and for the Holy Spirit, I've tried to avoid gender-based pronouns.

For awhile, I did try to balance the male gendered references with female:  for every God the Father, I'd use a God the Mother.  But that got to be exhausting too.  And does the Divine really have gender?  Aren't we inviting a new set of problems when we think of God's gender?

So, a gender neutral God seemed to be the solution.  Through the years, I've realized how hard it is for people to move away from the idea of a gendered God.  This week, I had another jolt as I read this article about the election of Megan Rohrer to be the first openly transgender Lutheran bishop.  The closing statement made me consider the gender of God in a different way:

"Rohrer told NPR: 'I am honored and humbled by the Synod's affirmation of my leadership skills. And, I am delighted that my election points to the unending love God has for Their fabulously diverse creation.'"

I have experimented with plural pronouns for God; after all, if we worship a God who is 3 divinities in 1, a plural pronoun should work.  But that's not what Rohrer is doing in the above quote.  I believe that Rohrer wants to point us to a broader view of God, in much the same way that any change in traditional masculine God language does.

Many of us grew up with the idea of God as a father, which can work on some level.  Of course, the idea of God as father, particularly if we only speak of God as father, is problematic in all sorts of ways.  What if our experience of fatherhood isn't positive?  How does having God as a male father privilege male experience?  Can we have a more equitable society if the Divine is male?

I'm interested in enlarging our sense of God, but I'm also interested in how an enlarged sense of God can also lead us to an enlarged sense of our communities and the possibility for greater community.  I'm interested in how seeing God as transgender might make us more compassionate to transgender communities and to all communities, particularly those who have been so marginalized.

Of course that won't happen right away.  People who have aligned against transgender communities aren't likely to even consider the idea that God might be transgender or the implications of a God who is different than we've been trained to believe.

But those changes won't happen if we don't start.  And thinking about a transgender God is a great way to shake us out of our complacency.