Religion in Daily Life By the Rev. Edward Chinn, D.Min. Rector, All Saints’ Church 9601 Frankford Ave. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19114 (215) 637-5225 Written 16 August 2000

“Is God Jewish?” asked a little boy. His father and grandparents are members of All Saints’ and the grandfather told me about the question. I wrote to the boy’s father. I pointed to the metaphors drawn from daily life that Bible writers used to picture God. In those scriptures, authors compared God to the sun (Psalm 84:11); the wind (Acts 2:1-4); a father (Psalm 103:13); a mother (Isaiah 66:13); a shepherd (Psalm 23). Ask yourself, “Is the sun Jewish?” Maybe it’s natural for nations to claim elements of nature as their own. A Jew might say, “That’s our sun,” but does that make the sun Jewish? In a similar way, any inhabitant of planet Earth might refer to the sun as “our” sun, but does that make the sun earthly? Isn’t the sun above those distinctions of race and nation or planet that we are accustomed to use? Or ask yourself, “Is the wind Jewish?” In the Bible, Jewish and Christian writers use the image of the wind (or breath) for God. God’s presence is as invisible, yet powerful as the wind. Our word “Spirit” is the word for “wind” and “breath” in Hebrew and Greek. It is a metaphor for God’s unseen presence. Though the wind blows through Israel and other nations, is it really national or racial? Isn’t it above those distinctions?

As the sun and the wind, which God made, are above our human distinctions, isn’t God, too, above and beyond our human categories? As Gregory of Nazianzus, the 4th century Bishop of Constantinople, said: “It is difficult to conceive of God, but to define Him in words is an impossibility. . . .”

Some people think of God in masculine terms. “After all,” they say, “don’t we pray to Him as our ‘Father?'” And when God the Son took human nature on himself, he was not born a woman, but a man. In this matter, the bishops of the worldwide Anglican Communion said at the 1968 Lambeth Conference: “We acknowledge God as father and we worship the incarnate Lord as man. No theologian has ever understood this to mean that God is male . . ..”

When I call God “He,” I do not take this as the opposite of “She,” but as the opposite of “It.” When I call God “He,” I am choosing to refer to Him as personal instead of using a word that would portray God as impersonal-the word “It.” I do not believe that God is Jewish or Christian or Islamic or masculine . . .or that He “buys into” our forms of exclusiveness!