(Given at "What shall we say?" at St Peter's Church Walworth - 9th February 2009)

A Search in a bookshop for books on inclusive language found three. One book by a Roman Catholic exploring the issues (1996), one book subtitled "a plea for realism” and another inclusive language psalter published in 1993.

There are now of course a couple of books by authors who are here today - for which all church communities can be very grateful.

What is Inclusive Language? It's a subject that in my experience in church life generates much more heat than light. Its proponents are passionate, committed. Their danger is that they turn into pedants and nit pickers and are cross all the time. Its opponents are passionate, committed. Their danger is that they turn tradition and poetry into idols in the name of beauty.

When should we, if ever, change the words of a hymn, or a prayer we learned as a child or re-translate the text of Scripture? Why is it important at all? Does it really matter what we say - it's what we do that's important?

WHAT IS INCLUSIVE LANGUAGE?

In threes, discuss your definition of inclusive language

WORKING DEFINITION ON BOARD

Inclusive liturgy?

One of my favourite definitions of Liturgy is that it is purpose free rejoicing in God. (Tim Gorringe Furthering Humanity p 75). Worship is not utilitarian - not there to "recharge our batteries” or make us feel better, although it will from time to time perform those functions. Liturgy is simply our response to our creation and redemption. In exploring our orientation towards each other, we are reminded of our own identity before God.

Psychologists tell us there are three ways in which we define ourselves. Understand ourselves.

First, we are like every other human on the planet: we are born, we will all die, we need water and air to live, we love, we hope we dream of the future.

Second, we are like some other people on the planet: we are female, Chinese, vegetarian, allergic to pollen, our shades of skin colour can closely resemble a group.

In some other ways we are like no other person on the planet - our eye colour, our fingerprint, the unique set of experiences, memories motives and desires that make us different from everyone else.

Language that is truly inclusive will draw us out, will build unity, and will find ways of reaching the first of those truths; we have so much in common as human beings in the world. The process of inclusion and exclusion takes place in the second of those truths - we are like some other people, our gender, our ethnicity, our sexuality, our physical or mental impairments and so on. It is in this area that the debate is most live. And the way we react depends heavily on the third of those truths - our own experience of fathering will determine how we react to the concept of a Father God for example. And even if our experience has been similar - say for example, a bad experience, for one it will be redemptive to learn that God fathers us, for another it will render the name so painful it is not possible to say. Liturgy takes place metaphorically and actually in the Holy of Holies - the place outside time and space but our language is intimately connected to the experience of life orientated towards God in Jesus Christ.

Liturgy, as one recent commentator puts it, is a de-tox from the sickness of consumerism

Liturgy is not of itself counter cultural, but a repetitive and prayerful encounter with the texts will often make it so. Liturgy is not designed as a protest but it is nonetheless a protest, a counter education in a different set of values. (See Furthering Humanity Tim Gorringe Ashgate 2004 p 75ff). The language of worship is that of God's gift and grace, not the language of contract and exchange.

Liturgy is a vehicle for the cultivation of wisdom. It is a place where the truth is told; the story of the earth, the story of human endeavour and the proclamation of hope in Jesus Christ. Liturgical language is an expression of hope: which imagines its future and then acts as if that future is irresistible. (Walter Wink The Powers That Be, back cover)

Liturgy is a foretaste of the heavenly banquet; it is therefore a place where right relationships are rehearsed.

Biblical justice is not a recognition of individual rights (for example to attend a service or receive the bread and wine) but a making right of an unjust society.

There are two women of justice. One with a scale and her eyes blinded, and the other, who proclaims "God has shown strength with his arm, he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has put down the mighty from their seat and has exalted the humble and meek. He has filled the hungry with good things but the rich he has sent empty away”.

In a liturgy that rehearses justice, leaders are servants, all have fallen short, all are children of God and just relationships are rehearsed and modelled in the ritual. (John Donahue What does the Lord Require? p 28)

Liturgy is a rehearsal of just relationships in eternity. This is why our language is so important and why our language should be just.

What is language?

Language is our attempt to give voice to the truth we can't touch or see. Language is our attempt to communicate with God and with each other> In Christianity, this is especially important as we have a God who speaks. We have a speaking God.

God the Creator: In the beginning was the word.

God our Redeemer: Jesus spoke from the Cross;

God-breathed Scripture - (Paul to Timothy) - we have a "talkative Bible” - that tells stories and makes us laugh, that moves us to tears, that contradicts and discusses its interpretation of events.

Language is malleable, powerful, is spoken and heard and written and read. It is not there for us to indulge our pedantry - or our perfectionism. Perfectionism - high anxiety unless everything is just right - is rarely energising; and can be as a writer put it; "perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway, and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it” (Anne Lamott Bird by Bird p 28)

That doesn't mean that we don't take our concerns about language seriously - language is powerful. But in the end, we can't see the reality behind the words we use about God - to take a silly example of literalism; if we say that God sees us, does that mean that God actually has eyebrows?

If we address God as our father, yes, we are following Jesus' example - but this Jesus also told a beautiful story about God searching for us and rejoicing when we are found - a woman sweeping a house looking for a lost coin. Who is that searching woman if not God?

God is a woman who searches for us and she finds us, she calls her friends and is utterly delighted.

Even though we can't see the images except in our minds eye, I want to suggest that our experience of language in church is that it is as solid as a statue. Far from being the supple, mutable nuanced substance of our voices, we get stuck so that it becomes ossified, just like a stone statue. Just as a potter repeats movements over clay - over and over, to mould it and shape it and fire it in the oven, religious language, by its repetition, fired by our own caring about it so much - ossifies until we are afraid to say out loud anything different.

We can pretend that God is beyond gender - that God is not actually masculine in essence - but try calling God she and we will see that it matters very much.

One example

How does language work?

Ruah - Spirit in Hebrew - feminine in form and usage. Not suggesting that Spirit is actually feminine as much as not saying that God is actually a male father. But throughout Hebrew Scriptures, the Spirit, the breath of God was in a feminine form. It allowed for a more nuanced description of the activity of God and lessened the risk of ossification of God into a male statue. Zechariah - "not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit saith the Lord of Hosts”.

Aramaic is closely related to Hebrew and so Jesus' everyday language referred to spirit in the feminine form.

Writing of New Testament, Greek is used. Word for Spirit pneuma (neuter) is used 375 times. As Alwyn Marriage argues in "Life Giving Spirit” p 64, the word pneuma covers a range of ideas; divine guidance, the presence of God, the promptings of personal conscience.

Marriage also shows p 65ff that although the main word used to denote spirit is pneuma, St John introduces another word which is better for one with whom we might be in relationship: parakletos (comforter). The word is itself masculine, although our translation is more often the neutral Comforter.

When NT translated into Latin, spiritus was chosen - masculine word - to bear the meaning of ruah and pneuma.

In this masculine form, spirit became he in English and was a reinforcing metaphor for the intrinsic and total maleness of God. Our concept of God lost the wholeness it might have had, had we remained a religion that spoke in Aramaic or Hebrew. (p 66)

It is therefore entirely appropriate, as a way of learning that language is not immutable, to call the Holy Spirit she.

Sometimes our attempts to use more inclusive language about God reinforce gender stereotypes; stereotypically feminine characteristics like gentle, nurturing God. We also focus on the mothering aspect of female humanity; essential but not exclusive. We understandably and rightly identify in Jesus' parables - for example, the explosive growth of the mustard seed buried in the earth as a parable too for the birth of a new age, nurtured in the womb of humanity, and claim that for the argument that feminine sensibilities are at the heart of Jesus' teaching about the new age.

"Classical Christian theology teaches that all names for God are analogies. The tradition of negative or apophatic theology emphasises the unlikeness between God and human words for God. That tradition corrects the tendency to take verbal images literally; God is like but also unlike any verbal analogy.” Rosemary Radford Ruether Sexism and God Talk p 67

Imagery in language shapes our perceptions - and shapes our faith. Moulds our imaginations, and forms pictures in our minds eye.

Using Inclusive language is not about crossing out "all men” and putting in "people”, but that's what it's often boiled down to for those who care and those who oppose.

Religious language cannot but be metaphorical in character; that is, pointing in an imaginative way to a reality that is, in the end, unsayable. What makes metaphor a peculiarly appropriate vehicle of religious truth is that it works in two ways at once. First, it offers a vivid illuminating comparison. There is a sort of imaginative explosion, brought about by putting together two ideas unexpectedly; but simultaneously, the reader is denied the chance to identify the two things together. So it is powerful and helpful to call God a "rock” both because God is like a rock in important ways, and because it would hardly be possible to confuse God with a rock. The image can be used, and then let go, which is how we should treat all religious language.”

Janet Morely p 163 in Feminist Theology A Reader ed Anne Loades

Inclusive language, like inclusive theology, is not a "churchy version of political correctness” (Giles Fraser commenting on The Inclusive God Steven Shakespeare and Hugh Rayment-Pickard).

Where are we now in the Church of England?

In the authorised liturgy of the Church of England, Common Worship, the issue of gender inclusive language was addressed for the first time in the early 80s. In 1988 "Making Women Visible” was published and in crafting Common Worship, the principles were established that a) to provide gender inclusive terms where the ASB had exclusive ones b) to advocate that all new texts were should be written with sensitivity to gender, c) to provide a number of additional texts that affirm the feminine - for example, St Anselm's canticle "Jesus as a mother you gather your people to you”.

CW uses these principles, but does prefer to leave historic BCP texts unamended alongside the new inclusive material. This is the decision made by the Church's official liturgists (Liturgical Commission) along with the decision that while all new texts should reflect inclusive descriptions of people, this was not to be extended to God; who would be referred to as he.

In Common Worship Daily Prayer, the tradition is used; some examples of canticles using wider images of God:

Song of Moses and Miriam

Song of Hannah

Song of Solomon (many waters cannot quench love)

Song of the Bride (from Isaiah 61)

Song of Jerusalem our mother

Song of Judith

Benedicite

Magnificat

Song of Anselm

Song of Ephrem the Syrian

Song of Julian of Norwich

EXERCISE: in threes, tell a story of when you were energised by liturgy, and one story of your frustration or anger. Observer - see what happens. Each tell 2 stories.

What was the energy like?

How to make our liturgy more inclusive?

Develop our own faithful imagination.

a) Truth telling: Name shameful parts of Scripture - eg GENDER; Jephthah's daughter (Kings) Phyllis Trible Texts of Terror

b) Watch your images ETHNICITY; - eg Do not go to default - darkness is bad, light is good. Darkness and light are both alike to you, under the shadow of your wings, Daniel - the one who had hair like wool, and remember significant figures - Queen of Sheba (Ethiopia).

c) Mention and acknowledge as normative heroes of the faith who were physically impaired. DISABILITY: Moses who stammered, Jacob who limped, Paul whose conversion happened not in the light but in the darkness of blindness, Jesus pinned - made dis-abled. Disability is at the heart of the story of human salvation. Eg story of Bartimaeus, in the early church - it is not the healing that is the most important thing in this story, it is that Bartimaeus is shown to be a model follower of Jesus -- he calls out - it is his persistence and clarity and faith - similar to the parable of the persistent widow.

Penitence

Releasing Jesus from the hierarchical "Lord”.

Kyrie, in Greek, is an ancient prayer of the Church - kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, kyrie eleison.

It is more inclusive to pray in Greek?

But for many, "Lord” certainly in English, has masculine connotations: so use other names for Jesus: Redeemer, Saviour, Rock and Redeemer, Friend. "Lord” is of course part of the tradition and to be used, but not in a "default” way where other descriptions could be learned and repeated.

Use the Trisagion - Holy God, Holy and Strong, Holy and immortal, have mercy upon us

Intercessions

Inclusive responses God of life and love hear our prayer. God of peace; hear our prayer. God of mercy and truth, hear our prayer.

Use female saints, female spiritual writers as normative; In Lavinia Byrne's The Hidden Tradition, she sets out for us the words of 92 women spiritual writers, of theology, spiritual encouragement and prayers. The Shaker eldress Rebecca Jackson reminds us that the divine call is all about revelation - of the nature of God as well as one's own personal vocation. In a moment of despair she records: I was all alone, had nobody to tell my troubles to except the Lord.... I throwed myself on God. I saw that night, for the first time, a Mother in the Deity. Teresa of Avila notes God "converted the aridity of my soul into deepest tenderness”. Elsie Chamberlain wrote of an "exciting driving sense of vocation”. As Charlotte Eliot proclaims in song: "Just as I am”.

Rebecca Jackson: a black 19th century preacher in Philadelphia

Teresa of Avila - 16th century Italian mystic

Elsie Chamberlain UK 20th century congregational minister

Charlotte Eliot 19th century UK composed over 100 hymns

Sermon/talk illustrations

Who are the illustrations in your talks or sermons? Are there any women and if so what are they doing? Do they speak with authority? Is everyone you have quoted with authority white? How many people have you quoted who have an impairment - and have you referred to that person solely or even primarily with reference to their disability?

Black authorities - not stereotyped - singers, sportspeople, even freedom fighters - although the stories of Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Bessie Smith, Rosa Parkes are inspirational for all people - men and women, black and brown and white - but explorers - eg Matthew Henson (went to North Pole 1907), scientists, eg Elsie Owusu, architect, Samantha Tross orthopaedic surgeon.

Talk about as absolutely normative Tabitha the disciple, Junia the apostle, Lydia the businesswoman, Martha the theologian, Mary Magdalene, the bearer of the news of salvation.

It doesn't just happen - many anthologies are full of male white leadership class quotations. We learn to use Feminist writers, theologians, Biblical studies each time we pray or preach, it is absolutely normative if we make it so: not just on a special occasion like Women's World Day of Prayer.

Religious rites, worship services, liturgies are to be banquets of joy and peace. Eating is a moral act, and sometimes a religious act. Yet the gratitude for holy food and the salvation it brings is fully expressed only when we remember that unleaveaned bread was first eaten by slaves on the run and the cup of wine is a cup of suffering. Just as I believe bread and wine are transformed, so we are transformed…… into people of compassion, people who see what others overlook, people who can begin to trace the vague outlines of the prophetic vision of the reign of God where justice and mercy embrace and a grand table is set. Where bankers sit next to farmers, border guards converse with the undocumented and ranchers share toasts with environmentalists. Where work gloves lie next to linen napkins, hands are scrubbed, feet are washed, thirst is quenched, hunger satisfied and there's no hint of injustice, no whisper of enslavement…… no sign of barbed wire anywhere.

James Schmitmeyer (in Liturgy and Justice ed. Anne Y. Koestner p 73)