Sunday 01 • 06 • 19

Hey. Scripture today comes from Genesis chapter one verses one through five and verses 26 to 31.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, let there be light, and there was light. And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. Then God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth. And God said, behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth and every tree with seed and its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food and it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning, the sixth day. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Would you join me in prayer? Father, I pray that the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts would be pleasing and acceptable in your sight, where you are our rock and our fortress and our redeemer. And we pray these things in the name of Your Son, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Gender in the Gospel

So today, we're launching a new sermon series that will take us through January and most of February on gender in the gospel. And you may be asking, why would we do this? A couple reasons. One is that this is a universal issue. This is something that every person has to navigate through and ask the questions, how do I fit? This hits every person at some point in their life whether or not you like or don't like the gender norms of twenty first century American culture. It's something everybody navigates.

The second is that it's such a difficult issue. There are so many questions going on right now in this cultural moment in our country. And let me just kind of give you a peppering of some of these that we're going to address over the next several weeks. But I want you to just get a scope of how big this is.

So what about the new terms? What is cisgender? What's gender fluid? What's gender non-binary? What's intersex mean? What does the title MX mean? Why is it so hard to say that men and women are different? What does that mean? What do I do when my child says they don't feel like the sex that's on their birth certificate? What is gender dysphoria? And even more importantly, can the church handle my gender dysphoria? What's wrong with cross dressing? Is gender just a social construct? What about intersex? What is unique about being a man anymore or a woman anymore? If I feel like a man in a woman's body or a woman in a man's body, should I transition? Why do I feel embarrassed to say that women are different from men or men are different from women? How do I respond to a woman pastor? Is that sinful? Is that progress? Is God wild at heart? We're going ask all these questions and more.

Gender is all over the news. It's such a hot topic, but I find it's such a difficult topic. And sadly, one of the places we are last to talk about this is in the church. This is one of the last places we talk about it, and that's why we're doing this series.

A couple of caveats about this. First is, hang in for the entire series. Hang in. One of the problems of our current cultural moment is that nobody listens to anybody else that they disagree with. This is one of the most rampant things we've received from being a social media saturated culture right now—people get on social media and shout at each other. There's no space for discourse, for conversation. There's no place for people to disagree.

And you may disagree strongly even with things that I say. That's okay. That's okay. You can be a member of Christ the King Presbyterian Church and disagree with things that come out of this pulpit. In fact, one of my hopes—what I really hope for out of this—is that we become more and more a community that knows how to agree to disagree and also knows how to disagree in ways that are agreeable. Does that make sense? That we actually learn peaceful ways of discussing hard things.

Second kind of caveat qualification for this: the things I'm about to talk about over the next seven weeks are third tier issues in the Christian world. So if you're not a Christian here this morning, and we always expect and know there are people among us who would not say, "Yes, I am one of the team"—I just want to tell you, this is not central to Christianity. This is actually third tier.

First tier is, and this is what you need to be thinking about: Is Jesus who He says He is? Is He the real person who lived, died, resurrected from the dead, and is the savior of sinners? That's central. That's what it's all about. Second tier issues are things like, what is the authority of Scripture, and how do we understand what that means? Third tier are these kinds of things that Christians debate and in many cases disagree on, and yet this is not the central point.

So if you're here and you're like, "I'm not a Christian," don't evaluate Christianity based on gender. Now, that may feel really central in this cultural moment, but it really isn't. If Jesus wasn't who He said He was, then who cares what Christians think about gender? It doesn't matter because that's the central point.

You may still be asking, "This is potentially divisive. Somebody here is going to be upset, so why are we talking about this?" That's a good question, and I know you're not alone if you worry about that.

Goals for This Series

Here are the goals for this series:

Number one: grace. Every person in this room has to navigate gender in this culture, and it's hard. It's not just hard for middle schoolers. We need to be a community that knows how to love people who are struggling with gender, inside our church, outside our church.

Second: truth. We need to be thoughtful about how we understand this issue, how we understand what the Bible teaches, how we understand our culture, how we live these things out as a community together. We want to be informed by God's word. We want that to be central and submissive to it.

And finally: unity. I hope that there grows out of this series not a uniformity, but a gracious unity that characterizes our church. That's the purpose of this.

Where Do We Start?

Now, what happens normally if you open up a conversation about gender at all? We start with ourselves. We start with the place we know best. We start with my experience of what it's like to be a gendered person in this body. We start with what it's like to be a person who experiences discomfort with the gender on my birth certificate in the body that you have. We start with me. And that's not a bad place to start, but if we start there, we actually end up missing some things.

I want to start at a completely different spot. I want to start with God. Why start there? Because biblically speaking, we need a theology of gender. Theology means study of God, word from God, word about God, and right now we could really use a word from God in this area.

Here's what I find about me, and I think it's true about you: I'm pretty fickle. I'm a pretty changeable person. We as a culture are pretty fickle and changeable, and so in this place we need a word from the God who is unchanging, who's creator and sustainer and savior and designer, who's not changing, and who can speak into what it is that He's given us in these bodies and how we experience that.

Here's what we're going to learn from God in this chapter about gender today. Three things, really briefly:

First, gender is real.

Second, it's not just biology.

And third, it's important, but it's not the most important.

Gender Is Real

Now, here's what I want you to see: there is gender at creation before there are people. There's gender at creation before people. There's already language in Genesis one that's gendered language before the creation of the first man and the first woman. Already in verse five, you see this—God's gendered language to describe God.

Verse five, "His." Verse 27, "He, His."

This language already begins with God using gendered language for God. What do we do with that? I know that this is hard. Gendered language for God has been confusing and problematic to lots of people, and so we could, as many people have done before us, go, "Well, okay. This is patriarchal language. The Bible was written in a patriarchal time by men, for men. It's probably these people visualizing a God who is male, and that's where this comes from." And I suppose that if you're Jewish, you could do that. But here's the thing: you stepped into a Christian church this morning.

In a Christian church, we have a harder time with this because not only do we have gendered language in the beginning, in the first chapter, but we have Jesus who comes in the flesh with a male body, with male parts. And that's a challenge. There's no conspiracy theories around Jesus' gender. Nobody thinks Jesus wasn't really a guy. That's not been ever debated.

Let me push this a couple steps further. One of the most missed doctrines in the modern Protestant church is the ascension of Jesus after His resurrection. After His resurrection, Jesus was ascended to heaven. This is why, if you ever say language like "where is Jesus?"—Jesus is right here. Or you ask Jesus into your heart. Now, I'm not going to correct somebody on that, but that's not technically true. Where is Jesus right now? Jesus is up in heaven at the right hand of God the Father interceding on behalf of his people. His spirit is right here. You're inviting the spirit of God into your life, into your heart. Those words can be interchangeable.

— 1 Corinthians 15

But technically, that's where Jesus is. And why does that matter for our sermon today? What's salient about that is that there is a human being that is male with a male body in heaven. That's weird, but that's true.

Third, we also see that in the New Testament over and over, the Holy Spirit goes by not "it," but by "He." This is what we see over and over.

Gender as Design

So what's the point of this? Before the fall, before there's misogyny and sexist jokes and the battle of the sexes and all of that—before any of that, gender existed. Gender is part of something that God reveals, that reveals something about what He wants to show us about God. And that tells us something: that gender is real. It's not just a sociological construct. It's not something that we just made up over time. This goes back to the very blueprints and design of the universe. Gender goes that deep.

And so if it's that important that God would even use this language for God, we have to understand why.

Now, of course, there are all kinds of ways that gender is a sociological construct. In our culture right now, if you have a baby girl, what color balloons do you put out front? Pink. If you have a baby boy, what color balloons do you put out front? Blue. You know how long that's been a cultural practice? Since the nineteen fifties. Pink for girls, blue for boys—that only goes back a few generations, and it goes back to American marketing in the nineteen fifties. Let's create industries so we can sell twice as many clothes and not have them all be the same color.

What about this one: women stay home, men go outside the house. How long has that one been around? Just since the industrial revolution. Before that, everybody worked on the farm together all the time. Everybody was at home and out in the fields. There was no distinction. So yes, there are sociological constructs around lots of things that we experience as gender in our culture, and yet that doesn't undo the fact that this exists in the early pages of Scripture and is defined as the way God designed the universe.

So this is what I'm going to say over and over again: gender is part of the design code of the universe. This is why you can go to ancient history museums in New York and DC and all over the world and find cultures widely divergent who never had any interaction with each other, and there's gender that's represented in their cultural practices.

This is why when you learn a foreign language, if you're not learning English as a foreign language but you're learning another one, you'll find that nouns have genders to them. We think English is the cultural winner right now, like that's the most highly evolved language in the world. No, it's not. If you've ever tried to learn English and you're not coming as a native English speaker, this is the hardest language to learn because it's such a bastard language. It's all put together with weird stuff. None of it makes sense, none of it's beautiful, none of it really matches up great. It's not super evolved; it's super messy. The most evolved languages, you could argue, are the gendered ones that have such consistency, that flow over and over in all the same way.

So look, gender goes bone deep in the universe. It is real.

Second, it's not just biology. Now, I'm going to be really precise in this series to distinguish my language carefully. I'm going to use the words male and female to describe biological sex differentiation.

I'm going to use masculine and feminine for gender. And I know that's not always how everybody uses that. I just want to be really careful. What we see in the beginning, in Genesis chapter one, is creation of male and female. Now, that's implied and implicit in chapter one. It's made explicit in Genesis chapter two, which we're going to look at next week. But I want to show you this. Go back to God for a second. Let's talk about God.

God uses gendered pronouns here to self-identify, and let's think about that. In Genesis chapter one, are we introduced to a God who has a body? This is not a trick question. Come on, folks, you all are with me this morning? No. Thank you. Right. No, you're not. Our confessional document says this: God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable. He doesn't have a body like us. That's what we're introduced to. So when God uses these pronouns, He's not talking about body parts. Now, that's obvious to a lot of folks, but it needs to be said. He's not saying something about his parts. He's not talking about sexual distinction. He's talking about something else that's real, and yet is not bodily, not sex distinction.

So here's the question: Should we keep it? What do we do with God's gendered language for Himself? In 1973, the feminist Mary Daly famously said, "If God is male, then male is God." Have you heard that before? Now, that's not the best logic—it's not always if A is B, then B is A—but you know exactly what she's talking about, and she has a good point.

Because we should be, as Christians, the first people to speak against this. That many times, the idea that God is expressed here with masculine pronouns has led to a lot of abuses in the church. And we Christians should be the first people who stand up and raise a fist against sexism, misogyny, sexist jokes. We should be the first people who are against discrimination. We should be like, "No. Uh-uh." We'll come to that later because we're made in God's image.

And yet, this has led a lot of people—like Mary Daly's quote here—to jettison gendered language for God. And that makes sense, doesn't it? Doesn't it make sense like, "Hey, so this isn't about God's body parts, so why do we need this?" Especially since the sexual revolution, there's been this trend to get rid of gendered language for God. If God's a spirit, if it doesn't have body parts, why should we use it?

So in many churches and institutions—the first seminary I went to, I was taught all this stuff—you begin to change the language. You can read gender-neutral translations of the Bible: the NRSV, the TNIV, the New Living Translation, and they just replace the word "He" in every place with "God." So you replace "Himself" with "God's self." Or maybe you read The Shack, the 2007 bestseller from William Paul Young, in which he imagines God as a woman. What's the big deal? Why should we do that?

The Analogical Nature of God Language

Of course, all language for God—and let's put on our thinking caps. I'm going to make you think a lot in this sermon series. All language for God, every bit of it is analogical. It is an analogy. Here's what I mean: Anytime you talk about God's attributes or God's character, God's personhood, you always have to add this little qualifier in the sentence.

Let me give you an example. God's good. It's like, but sort of unlike what we think of as good. It's so beyond what you can understand as good. But he's good, right? Or we say God is strong, but that's the most gigantic understatement I can make. Or God gets angry, but it's not like human anger. See? It's like but unlike. All language that we use for God is "like but unlike."

Does this mean we can't know anything or say anything about God? No. It doesn't mean we can't know anything or say anything. God picks out these human analogies to condescend to our point of view, especially in the scriptures, to tell us something about ourselves. But it does mean we have to be careful to use the analogies in the way that God does, to follow Him in how we think about this and how we talk about this.

So, for instance—and this is like last week's sermon—we say God is a father, but you have to be careful that you don't start with your dad as the reference point. We say God is a father, but think first about the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Think of the one who sends his son. That's where we start, not with your dad. See? It's analogical. We have to say "like, but not like."

So here's the big deal about gendered language for God. In an effort to avoid patriarchy, we could actually end up missing something big. We can end up missing something big, removing something from how God reveals Himself that actually really, really matters. And that is this: the personhood of God.

Now that may sound really weird, but here's what I mean by that. Gender language for God using "he" captures this radical idea that God exhibits Himself, reveals Himself as a person—three persons. It's not the same thing to use the word "it" for God. You use the word "it" and you lose something of God's character and the way He reveals Himself as personal, as a being that relates to us in a very personal way. A God who thinks and loves and intervenes in the lives of people and hates things and loves things and has character to Him and speaks into the lives of individuals.

See, take that and turn it into an "it," and what do you get? You get the Force from Star Wars. This impersonal kind of force that doesn't really do anything. There's not a relationship. So this may be uncomfortable, but God using personal pronouns is really important to communicate His personhood.

And of course, the inverse of that statement is even more true. God seems like a person and how He relates to us. The inverse of that's even more true, and it's what we find here in verse 26. That's because God makes people in His image, in His likeness. We're patterned off of Him. The reason we think of God as so personal—that's how He is, and He divinely designs us to be.

God contains all the attributes of masculine and feminine in His being. He does. And yet, for some reason, God uses masculine imagery over and over again. Father, king, he—to tell us about who He is. C.S. Lewis has said this, and I don't know if this is helpful, but I'll throw this out there. He said, you know, one of the things that we need to understand is that God is in some ways so much that it's hard for us to understand this. But God, for example, is so very masculine in that way that all the universe by definition is feminine in response. That's why we call the body of Christ the bride of Christ.

And there are those who like to blur that emphasis, and I get why, but it's dangerous to tamper with the way God reveals Himself. We don't want to remove parts of God's character and remove essential elements, nor is it our place to do so. It's really important that He remains Father, not Mother, and even in the Incarnation chose to come as a man, Jesus Christ.

Gender: Like but Not Like Ours

So let's go back to the main point. How is God's gendered language for Himself like but not like ours? Like but not like. Remember, God, of course, doesn't have a body, and it tells us something about what gender is. This tells us something really important about the nature of gender. Yes, it's creational. Yes, it's good, but it's not the same thing as sexual distinction or biology.

How many of you guys work with computers or design in some form? Yes, lots of our congregation. So you know this word "platform." You all use that word in ways that I never understood before. But you say things like, "Hey, our company is coming out with this new platform that all these different applications will be built on." You familiar with this language? So you understand this.

See, gender is built on the platform of biology, but is not the same thing. This is what we learn from this distinction. And that may seem like, really? That's all you have for me? No. That's a big deal. Gender is built on the platform of biology, but is not entirely the same thing as it.

See, biology—genes, chromosomes, DNA—are what determine sex differentiation. Gender is another thing that's built on that. It is an added gift from the Lord God. It's an added gift that helps reveal parts of His character and helps define parts of our character in response to Him.

Summary

So let me summarize just to make sure we're all in the same place right now. Is gender real? Yes. Yes. Gender is a real thing. It's not just a sociological construct. It's part of the design plans of the universe, and it goes very, very deep. So much so that God would reveal Himself using that language to condescend, to help us understand that this matters. It matters.

It's also not the same thing as biology. This is why God can use gendered language to describe Himself even though He has no biology attached to it, and yet He gives us biology and builds gender on top of it. And those things are related and there's overlap, but they're not the same thing.

In other words—and this may jar, but I want to lay this out there—you are masculine or feminine to your very soul. Not just with your parts, but to your very soul.

So finally, third part, and this is the part I've been running toward. This is where we've been getting to.

Hang in with me if you're already checking out. Don't check out. Come back.

So look, gender is important, but it's not the most important. That is obvious if you read Genesis chapter one. But let me point this out. Even as God reveals part of who He is and what He makes, there's something bigger than he, she. There's something much bigger than he, she, and it's just whispered at. It's just hinted at in this passage, and it's beautiful, and mysterious, and compelling. I just want to point this out. Gender is not the main point of Genesis one. Even as God reveals language that's personal and masculine pronouns, He goes into something else.

Let us make man in our own image. — Genesis 1:26-27

See, the most important thing we've learned about gender from Genesis one is not he or she, it's we. It's we. Gender is designed for relationship. I'm going to hit this one hard over and over again. Gender is designed for relationship.

The Inner Life of the Trinity

Let's think briefly about the inner relationships of the Trinity. This is high altitude climbing. You may need a little oxygen for this. We don't usually go here.

There is a word called parachoresis that theologians use. You don't need the word, but here's what it means. It means that in the inner relationships of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, there is such mutual enjoyment, mutual savoring and delight and promotion that are part of the inner workings of the relationships between the Trinity that we can scarcely get our brains around it. God just delights in being themselves together. God delights in this in such a profound way.

If you go through all the passages in the Bible that describe the inner workings of how the Father relates to the Son, how the Father relates to the Spirit, let me give you a summary of what this will look like. I'm going to use first, second, third. The first delights in the second. The second honors and submits to the will of the first. The third casts light, the spotlight, on the second. The third proceeds from the first and the second. The third rests on the second. The second only does what he sees the first doing. The first delights daily in the second, and the second rejoices even to be in the presence of the first. The second desires to leave the world in order to be with the first. The third applies the work of the second to the lives of believers.

This is what God experiences within Himself, within themself. We stumble over all this language. Mutual delight of an order that we can barely fathom. And this will take your breath away if you allow this to get in. This is more exhilarating.

Gender, differentiation, personhood, and unity—it's for relationships. This is where we're going, coming back over and over again.

Sometimes people say it this way: God's not a he, but a we. That's not exactly true, biblically. The unity and mutuality of the Trinity doesn't ever diminish the he, or the he, or the he, and yet there's something even greater in the we. So it's not that God's not a he but a we. God is a he, but even way more so a we.

This is important for us because it shows us something that we don't experience very often, and you surely don't hear it right now—that differences and distinctions don't necessarily have to diminish people. Differences and distinctions can enrich. Differences and distinctions don't have to subjugate, or manipulate, or put people in their place. They don't have to be battles. Differences don't have to be flattened out. Differences are for intimacy.

Gender's True Purpose

Here's what's missing from this view, this high God-sized view of who God reveals Himself to be, is that gender is for relationships. Right now, if you listen really closely to what is coming through the airwaves, all the talking heads, you would think gender is for me. Gender is for me and my self expression. Gender is for me and what I want. Gender is for me and my desires.

See, this is what we're missing. God never intends selfishness to be on the throne of the universe. God always intends mutuality, unity, other-centered self-emptying. That's what God's about for His people. That's what we see in His very relationships.

In Scripture we meet a God who is not just He, but we. And it's not about me, me, me, it's about we, we, we. It's about us together.

Now, I know that gender is one of like a Christmas present. I said, hey, gender is a gift that God adds on to biology. As a culture, to hear somebody say that is ridiculous.

As a culture, we're like, if gender is a gift, it's like one I didn't want for Christmas, and I'd like to return. Thanks very much. That's what's going on right now.

And if that's you today, and if you feel missed by the sermon, I have one last thought for you, and it's really simple. It's just really, really simple.

I think at root in a lot of the gender discussions that are going on in our culture, below the surface, deep below the surface, is a deep longing—a desire to know I'm okay, and I'm wanted, and I'm not a weirdo, and somebody will accept me. I think so much of gender dysphoria that I've experienced in my life, and you've probably experienced in your life, maybe you are right now, comes from this place of fear: I'm going to be rejected, I'm going to be unloved, I'm going to be misunderstood, I'm going to be unwanted. And I can understand that.

Maybe it's as simple as you're a guy who doesn't care about cars or football, or you're a woman who doesn't like shopping or cooking or whatever the stupid gender stereotypes in our culture right now. Maybe it's just that level, or maybe it's a full blown situation where I deeply feel disconnected from what's printed on my birth certificate, and I want to know what to do about it.

I understand. I just want to name as significant those fears and those feelings. But I want to point you beyond this, and I'm not trying to be simplistic, and I'm not trying to be glib, I'm not trying to put a Jesus band aid over a gaping wound.

The Invitation of the Trinity

But what you long for is what we see in the Trinity. What's drawn for us in the Trinity is not a closed circle, but an open one. And this is profound. This is profound beyond a level I think we can even understand.

The God of the universe, as much as they delight in each other, as much as there's so much mutual enjoyment, was not just absolutely satisfied in that. Instead, God desired to create human beings, male and female, masculine and feminine, in his own image. To invite in. To welcome. To say: you, you are wanted. You're not weird. You, you matter. Come in. Come in.

Can you hear the invitation of this? I know this is hard material, but this stuff, if we'll listen carefully, it's not a hand to our face, it's a welcoming.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.