A Sermon on God’s Voice

(Preached at Christ Episcopal Church Dayton on 1/14/23. The readings are available online here. A video of the service is online here.)

Blessed be God,
Who spoke creation into being,
Who spoke truth to the disciples,
Who speaks in us today. Amen.

“The voice of God shakes the wilderness.”

Today, all of our readings have to do with God speaking, from God speaking light into existence at the beginning of time, to the voice of God coming from heaven to bless Jesus.

But I want to start today with a story of a much more mundane conversation: a conversation between a precocious seventeen year old me and an ordained woman. I was a freshman in college, interested in religion, so one day, I visited the open hours for one of the campus ministers: a Lutheran pastor named Beth Warpmaeker. We had the mahogany-lined chapel library to ourselves, and so we talked for a while. I liked Beth; she was kind and thoughtful. But I was seventeen, and I had grown up in a conservative Evangelical tradition, and I had never encountered a female priest before. I was fascinated by her gender. Didn’t the Bible forbid ordaining women?, I asked. Sure, I conceded, women were just as capable as men, but how could she justify not submitting to the biblical command?

(Oh, to have the self-righteous confidence of a teenager.)

But if Beth was bothered by my blunt questions, she gave me no indication. She didn’t try to get into an active debate with me about how to interpret the biblical passages. Instead, she did something much more wise: she treated me with patience and respect and generosity. She modeled for me that God’s voice did speak through female clergy, because I could hear God’s voice speaking through her.

I am not, myself, ordained. I pursued an academic route, as a professor and scholar of the Hebrew Bible, or the Christian Old Testament. So when Peter offered me the chance to preach, I was immediately struck by today’s Hebrew Bible readings, which contain not one but two of my favorite passages.

I’ll start with the psalm, Psalm 29. Much like me, it glorifies the God of Israel, but it’s also just a little bit pagan. You can see this from the very first verse, which calls on the “heavenly beings” — literally the b’nei elim, the “children of gods.” This is an allusion to the ancient image of the divine court, ruled by a king and populated by many courtiers. And we return to that image in the last verses, which speak of God being “enthroned above the flood.” This image has parallels in the Epic of Baal, a three thousand year old story cycle discovered in modern Syria. In that story, the storm-god Baal defeats the sea-god Yam, holding the forces of watery destruction at bay. After his victory, Baal establishes his temple and throne. So this psalm is drawing from the imagery of its ancient Canaanite surroundings. But it’s using those images for a singular purpose: establishing the voice of God as supreme over the cosmos.

“YHWH sits enthroned over the flood;
YHWH sits enthroned as king forever.”

We see very similar imagery in Genesis, which may be why the Lectionary pairs these passages. Once again, God reigns above the eternal waters; once again, God’s voice alone has the power to transform. Yet even in this primeval chaos, God is not alone. Genesis speaks of a “wind of God,” a “breath of God,” fluttering over the deep waters like an eagle flutters over her nest. This word for breath or wind, ruach, is feminine — so even from the beginning of the Bible and the beginning of time, God is not portrayed solely as male.

Indeed, I think that the voice of God in these passages is a powerful and genderless force. God may be like a king, but kingship is not the only mode in which God acts.

This is absolutely vital to observe, because as the theologian Mary Daly famously said, if God is male, then the male is God. When we use the Bible to perpetrate patriarchal and binary models of gender, whether in our Bible translations or our church hierarchy, we widen the chasm of inequity that still subordinates women and non-binary people. We make God in our image, instead of letting God’s voice speak for itself.

And that lesson also shapes my understanding of today’s reading in Acts. When Paul encounters a group of disciples in Ephesus, he introduces them to the Holy Spirit. We don’t know the gender of these disciples from the Greek; a grammatically masculine group could contain any proportion of men and women, as long as it included just one man. And we do know that, according to Acts 9, Paul referred to women as disciples, and according to Acts 21, women could have the gift of prophecy.

It’s only in the last line of the reading that the Greek mentions gender. The Greek says, “by the way, the total [number of] men was around twelve.” This statement may sound familiar. It’s almost exactly the same wording as Matthew’s statement in his stories of Jesus feeding the crowds: “by the way, the [number of] men who ate were around five thousand — not including the women and children.”

So I’ll admit I’m reading between the lines here, but I’m inclined to read Acts 19 the same way: Paul converted 12 men in Ephesus, alongside some uncounted number of women. This was a group diverse in gender. And through the gift of the Holy Spirit, these fledgling Christians prophesied and spoke in tongues, channeling the voice of God: the same gift given to you and me.

When we turn to today’s Gospel, on the other hand, we see something marvelous. Jesus, has been baptised publicly, and something extraordinary happens. The heavens tear apart. The Holy Spirit descends like a dove. God’s voice resounds, audible, declaring Jesus to be Son and Beloved. This is as clear as divine revelation gets: a supernatural voice, imparting absolute truth to those who witness it. Jesus is God’s beloved child.

But what happens next? In the very next verse, which isn’t part of our reading, it says that this dove-like Spirit “immediately drove [Jesus] out into the wilderness,” where he was tempted and tested by Satan for forty days, lacking in human companionship. Jesus doesn’t get to use his divine commission to impart wisdom right away. He follows up his majestic epiphany by hiding from humanity and wrestling with his own temptations.

And I think that says something crucial about the God that we worship. Yes, sometimes God speaks in big bold letters. Sometimes God parts the heavens and strips the forests bare with awe-inspiring clarity. Many of us may have had moments like that, when God’s message to us is undeniable and crystal-clear.

But that isn’t most days for most of us. Most days, we muddle through the business of being human. Most days, we’re too busy balancing the budget to gaze at the skies and wait for an epiphany — an epiphany that our experience tells us probably won’t come.

In my own work, researching and teaching the Bible, there are moments when I can feel a pure resonance with ancient scripture, when the wisdom of those Hebrew words feels profoundly vital to how we live today. But those moments don’t happen every minute, or even every day. When I’m wrangling copyedits or laboring through a pile of student emails, God’s voice can feel very far away indeed.

But this is where I am comforted by a vital detail in the psalm we read today. Even though this psalm is all about God’s voice, it only has a single instance of the Hebrew verb amar, “to speak.” And that verb isn’t used for God speaking. It’s used for us. “In God’s temple, all say ‘Glory!’”

In other words, it may be God’s voice that shakes the cosmos and subdues the forces of destructive chaos… but it’s our voices that speak. Our lips that channel God’s wisdom. Our breaths that bring comfort and conviction.

In that mahogany-lined library, over twenty years ago, I heard God speaking: not as a white-bearded old man in the sky, but as the gentle patience of a fellow woman. God spoke through her, just as God speaks through me, when I open myself to that timeless Voice.

So now it’s your turn. How has God spoken through the people around you? Through whom has God spoken, whether it was easy to hear or hard to accept? And, most important of all — regardless of your gender, or your age, or your training — when have you allowed God to speak through you? When and how have your God-given gifts enabled you to voice God’s abundant and compassionate love?

Many of you know that I’m part of the choir here. And Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we celebrate tomorrow, had a quote that really appeals to me as a singer. “There are no gradations in the image of God. Every person from a treble white to a bass black is significant on God’s keyboard, precisely because every person is made in the image of God.”

You are made in God’s image, and you are empowered with God’s voice. May that Voice that shakes the wilderness shake us free of self-doubt. May it empower us to speak God’s love, today and always. Amen.